Why does Ramesses speak in Arabic?

[N35t0r]

Do the Arab Egyptians claim ancestry from the Ancient Egyptians? I'm not aware that they do, so that wouldn't be an issue, as far as I know. What would be an issue is that Coptic Christianity, despite Egypt's supposed religious tolerance, is a bit oppressed.

I wouldn't really know, but there's probably more arab egyptians descended from ancient egyptians than copt egyptians descended from arab egyptians. I'd wager that the vast majority of arab egyptians are descended from the native population, and converted when arab became the governing religion.

[Brael]

Or, they can re purpose some Boris and Natasha cartoon graphics. That should work.

Russia declares war on moose and squirrel.

[onodera]

Shouldn't she speak Russian with a German accent?

No, she spoke perfect Russian, according to the contemporaries.

[campm@jor]

Hm, I dont see what the advantage is if they are speaking their true language. Does Civ V pretend to teach you different languages? But maybe it is done to create an atmosphere, so you feel you are abroad. Only thing I can think of.

Personally, I dont care. In Hollywood WWII movies "Dutch" people are talking German!
Then they'd better let them speak English please....

[jkp1187]

Hm, I dont see what the advantage is if they are speaking their true language. Does Civ V pretend to teach you different languages? But maybe it is done to create an atmosphere, so you feel you are abroad. Only thing I can think of.

Personally, I dont care. In Hollywood WWII movies "Dutch" people are talking German!
Then they'd better let them speak English please....

Yeah...I was kind of hoping that the Sid Meier's Civilization franchise would hold itself to a higher standard than Jerry Bruckheimer.

[Wyrda Edocsil]

I wouldn't really know, but there's probably more arab egyptians descended from ancient egyptians than copt egyptians descended from arab egyptians. I'd wager that the vast majority of arab egyptians are descended from the native population, and converted when arab became the governing religion.

I'm assuming that by "copt egyptians descended from arab egyptians" you mean Coptic Egyptians descended from Ancient Egyptians, so that your argument makes some sense. In any case, it doesn't matter who the Arab and Coptic Egyptians were descended from. What matters is whether the Coptic language or the Arabic language is more closely related to the Ancient Egyptian language. Race and religion do not always correspond with language. Also, Arabic is is a race and language, but not a religion. You're probably thinking of Islam.

[Al B. Sure!]

n35tor's whole sentence doesn't make any sense.

[Taharqa]

I too am upset at Rameses II speaking Arabic. If they couldn't reconstruct the ancient Egyptian language, Coptic would have sufficed.

Also, it's odd that while everyone is complaining about Rameses speaking Arabic, almost no one has commented on the fact that his skin is depicted as white. The ancient Egyptians would have been darker-skinned in reality.

[Al B. Sure!]

I too am upset at Rameses II speaking Arabic. If they couldn't reconstruct the ancient Egyptian language, Coptic would have sufficed.

Also, it's odd that while everyone is complaining about Rameses speaking Arabic, almost no one has commented on the fact that his skin is depicted as white. The ancient Egyptians would have been darker-skinned in reality.

Oh GOD! Not this!

Taharqa (your namesake was Black, as much as Sudanese are Black [A lot of Sudanese and Ethiopians, modern day Nubians, are fairly light-skinned actually]), real talk, no...

This is Tut's chest...

http://www.nilemuse.com/muse/TutBoxB.lg.html#chestFront

Go to the URL to see the enlarged picture:



It depicts King Tut on a chariot with his Egyptian army behind him fighting the Nubians.

What strikes out? The Egyptians are swarthy while the Nubians are depicted completely black. Why the difference if the Egyptians were not Mediterranean?

[Taharqa]

If you insist on taking Egyptian art's color schemes at face value, those Egyptians are still darker than the white Rameses Firaxis gave us, and I've seen many African-Americans with that kind of medium brown complexion.

Even if the ancient Egyptians weren't the exact same skin color as the Nubians, they were still tropically adapted and therefore would have been dark-skinned enough to be considered "black" by Americans today.

[Al B. Sure!]

If you insist on taking Egyptian art's color schemes at face value, those Egyptians are still darker than the white Rameses Firaxis gave us, and I've seen many African-Americans with that kind of medium brown complexion.

Even if the ancient Egyptians weren't the exact same skin color as the Nubians, they were still tropically adapted and therefore would have been dark-skinned enough to be considered "black" by Americans today.

African-Americans are mixed. And who cares about what is considered Black by a society in which being 1/8th Black meant you were 3/5ths of a person!

I'm not getting in this debate with you. You are just wrong and I wish you would either go to Egypt, talk to an actual Egyptian, or just take me at face value and believe me when I say you're wrong.

[Taharqa]

Whether you like it or not, osteological analyses of ancient Egyptian remains have shown that they were tropically adapted like "black" Africans.


---Trinkaus, E. "Neanderthal limb proportions and cold adaptation." In Aspects of Human Evolution. Edited by C. B. Stringer., 187-224. London: Taylor & Francis, 1981. (circles and colored text mine)

Notice how the limb proportions of the ancient Egyptians are more similar to tropical, dark-skinned populations such as Melanesians and Central African pygmies than even subtropical desert populations like the Bushmen and Southwest Native Americans, never mind Mediterranean peoples like the Yugoslavs.

A quote from another study:

The raw values in Table 6 suggest that Egyptians had the “super-Negroid” [i.e. tropically adapted] body plan described by Robins (1983). The values for the brachial and crural indices show that the distal segments of each limb are longer relative to the proximal segments than in many “African” populations (data from Aiello and Dean, 1990). This pattern is supported by Figure 7 (a plot of population mean femoral and tibial lengths; data from Ruff, 1994), which indicates that the Egyptians generally have tropical body plans.

---Zakrzewski, Sonia R. "Variation in Ancient Egyptian Stature and Body Proportions." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 121 (2003): 219-29.

These limb proportion studies are significant because they show that the ancestors of the ancient Egyptians would have originated from a tropical region (e.g. Sudan or the Horn of Africa) before migrating northward to Egypt relatively recently. We can infer from this that they would have been dark-skinned as an adaptation to tropical levels of ultraviolet radiation. Therefore, they would have been what we would call "black".

As for modern Egyptians, Egypt has received many waves of immigrants from Europe and Southwest Asia over the last three millennia, beginning with the Hyksos in the Second Intermediate Period, so lighter-skinned people in Egypt today no more represent the ancient population than Mexican mestizos represent the Aztecs or other pre-Columbian Mesoamericans. They are even more mixed than African-Americans.

[Al B. Sure!]

Yugoslavs?! Why don't you compare it to Arabs?

[Al B. Sure!]

I'm not having this argument... because you won't listen because you're too caught up in Afrocentric Racism... Stealing MY PEOPLE'S CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION!

[Al B. Sure!]

To see what the poster Taharqa really looks like

I'll just say this, he's definitely not Black