Black Hannibal?

[sumskilz]

The Berbers are the indigenous people of North Africa; i.e. they were there before the Turks, before the Arabs, and before the Carthaginians, too. Kenza is Berber. She is a native North African. She does not have "foreign blood" as you put it. Within Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia it's very known that Berbers are pale. There are some tribes that are known for red hair and green eyes.

A lot of people have assumed that is from the Vandals or trade in European slaves. They share a genetic component with Europeans that can be up to 25%, but it is definitely not Northern European and it is not accompanied by any similar frequency of the European haplogroups that have been predominate since the Bronze Age, which is evidence that suggests prehistoric origin (for the most part anyway). This genetic component also happens to be nearly identical to Neolithic Anatolians. Now take a look at the spread of Neolithic culture:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Menelik_I]

Well, History (Channel) has released another terrible program called Barbarians Rising. An otherwise forgettable docudrama except for the controversy stirred up by the depiction of Hannibal as black, and it's not the first program to do so either. Is Black Hannibal getting mainstream acceptance? Is there any validity to this depiction, and how important is race in history?

https://youtu.be/hfIe9P13X8s

This is stupid, to say the least. If he was half-cast it would make sense, but full black is ridiculous.

[ArmoredCore]

You have claimed that the native North African people I posted are not "true" North Africans, because they aren't black and therefore must have "foreign blood". Unfortunately for you, the facts do not support this. Kenza Morsli recently gave an interview, where she said her ancestry is 100% Berber. To recap, Kenza is the girl in the middle of my original post:



The Berbers are the indigenous people of North Africa; i.e. they were there before the Turks, before the Arabs, and before the Carthaginians, too. Kenza is Berber. She is a native North African. She does not have "foreign blood" as you put it. Within Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia it's very known that Berbers are pale. There are some tribes that are known for red hair and green eyes.

Again. Berber is not a race. Berber is a language and culture and there are many different types of "Berbers". All Berbers are not white. Berber languages are not more than 10,000 years old. Therefore, the history of Berber languages is not the history of people in North Africa. North African history spans hundreds of thousands of years. And finally, Berber languages started in East Africa and crossed the Sahara as a result of migrations of black Africans. Once they got to the coasts there was mixture with Eurasian migrants producing the resulting Berber populations you see today. And if you follow the logic of folks on the thread they will say point blank that the Berbers are basically non African migrants to Africa. But here is the problem, that would contradict the point of Berber being an African language if NON Africans brought it to Africa. And it also contradicts the point of these people being Africans if they were "migrants who replaced the indigenous black folks". Which actually agrees with my point that North Africa was always populated by "indigenous" black Africans, meaning white skin is not "indigenous" to North Africa.

The point being that people here are trying their best to claim that North Africa was not populated by black folks when Hannibal lived, which contradicts the facts and logic. Berbers are not the "ancient original exclusively white" people of North Africa. That is false no matter how you say it or how many times you repeat it. There is more than enough evidence from the time of Hannibal and prior to show that black Africans were indeed present in North Africa and that there is no reason to suggest that Hannibal could NOT have been black because "there were no blacks" in North Africa.

That is absurd, nonsensical, non factual, ethnocentric bull crap.

[TWWolfe]

The point being that people here are trying their best to claim that North Africa was not populated by black folks when Hannibal lived, which contradicts the facts and logic. Berbers are not the "ancient original exclusively white" people of North Africa. That is false no matter how you say it or how many times you repeat it. There is more than enough evidence from the time of Hannibal and prior to show that black Africans were indeed present in North Africa and that there is no reason to suggest that Hannibal could NOT have been black because "there were no blacks" in North Africa.

That is absurd, nonsensical, non factual, ethnocentric bull crap.

please point out where people have said hannibal could not be black because there were no Blacks in North africa. And unless everyone is Black in the Levant and we've just been colorblind this whole time, the Phoenicians would have been brown skinned at best, since they were a Semetic people who migrated to North Africa with the foundation of trade colonies. whereas you seem to be saying that everyone in north africa had to be black, because North Africa is only home to black people and therefore anyone who lived there at any point was black.

to quote you again, this sounds like "absurd, nonsensical, non factual, ethnocentric bull crap".
"

[sumskilz]

Again. Berber is not a race. Berber is a language and culture and there are many different types of "Berbers". All Berbers are not white. Berber languages are not more than 10,000 years old. Therefore, the history of Berber languages is not the history of people in North Africa. North African history spans hundreds of thousands of years.

Berbers are an ethnolinguistic group who share a common ancestry. Though different Berber groups have different levels of admixture from various ancestries, their common ancestry is from Eurasian back-migrants. There are many Berbers that have no sub-Saharan ancestry, whereas the southernmost Berbers have up to 50% (mostly female mediated) sub-Saharan ancestry. When I use the term sub-Saharan, I'm referring to the predominate ancestry in modern sub-Saharan Africans which diverged from out-of-Africa populations. The sub-Saharan ancestry that does exit in modern North African Berbers is relatively recent. If they have any sub-Saharan ancestry from prior to that, it is not significant enough to detect. These ancestries and the percentage to which they appear in a population or individual can be identified empirically to within a relatively small margin of error. The results of multiple methodologies are tested against each other to check for errors.

And if you follow the logic of folks on the thread they will say point blank that the Berbers are basically non African migrants to Africa.

What matters is empirical evidence, more so than logic. For example, the numerous studies I've cited employ Bayesian and philologenetic analysis of full genome sequences of both modern populations and ancient samples. Any proposed interpretation has to fall within the limits defined by the empirical evidence. The majority of your assertions do not, or they employ loose undefined terms which appear to change from post to post.

[Charerg]

Personally I found Rome II: HatG version of Hannibal quite "historically accurate". I guess it says something about the History Channel if Creative Assembly manages to outdo them in historical accuracy.

[Basil II the B.S]

And I didn't get my answer. Ok.

[LinusLinothorax]

What was your question?

[ArmoredCore]

Berbers are an ethnolinguistic group who share a common ancestry. Though different Berber groups have different levels of admixture from various ancestries, their common ancestry is from Eurasian back-migrants. There are many Berbers that have no sub-Saharan ancestry, whereas the southernmost Berbers have up to 50% (mostly female mediated) sub-Saharan ancestry. When I use the term sub-Saharan, I'm referring to the predominate ancestry in modern sub-Saharan Africans which diverged from out-of-Africa populations. The sub-Saharan ancestry that does exit in modern North African Berbers is relatively recent. If they have any sub-Saharan ancestry from prior to that, it is not significant enough to detect. These ancestries and the percentage to which they appear in a population or individual can be identified empirically to within a relatively small margin of error. The results of multiple methodologies are tested against each other to check for errors.

What matters is empirical evidence, more so than logic. For example, the numerous studies I've cited employ Bayesian and philologenetic analysis of full genome sequences of both modern populations and ancient samples. Any proposed interpretation has to fall within the limits defined by the empirical evidence. The majority of your assertions do not, or they employ loose undefined terms which appear to change from post to post.

Again, black Africans have never been limited to "Sub Saharan" Africa. ALL of Africa has been populated by black Africans since the origin of humanity itself.
If Berber languages originated in the Eastern Sahara near the Fezzan and Upper Nile, how on earth are black Africans "recent" arrivals? Again, this makes no sense.

The record of the Middle Stone Age/Middle Palaeolithic in North Africa and the Sahara is extremely rich, although the almost complete absence of dated sites makes its interpretation difficult. In sub-Saharan Africa, the MSA first appears between ~350,000 - 300,000 years ago, disappearing in the last 50,000 years. This 300,000 year period encompasses major climatic shifts that would have made the Central Sahara at certain times uninhabitable and at others part of a rich ecosystem interconnected by rivers and lakes, deeply affecting the biogeographic distribution of hominin populations. The period also encompasses major evolutionary events, in particular the first evidence of modern humans in East Africa around 200,000 years ago, as well as of their first dispersal out of Africa in the subsequent wet interglacial phase 130,000-100,000 years ago. The beginning of this dispersal is archaeologically difficult to identify, as the stone tools manufactured by early humans did not differ substantially from those produced by other hominins since ~ 300,000 years ago (including the Neanderthals). However, once established in North Africa, these early humans developed a new cultural identity, the Aterian, which contains distinctive stone tools. The Aterian has been dated in Morocco to from 110,000 to at least 80,000 years ago (Barton 2009). However, the extremely arid conditions that prevailed in the Central Sahara between 70,000-14,000 years ago probably restricted the temporal extent of the Aterian occupation in the region.

A synthesis of the Early and Middle Stone Age chronology of the Central Sahara is outlined here.
Although climatic amelioration took place soon after 14,000 years ago, re-colonisation of the Central Sahara only took place from ~12,000 years ago (Cremaschi and di Lernia 1998, di Lernia 1999). The people who migrated to the Central Sahara at this time, known locally as the ‘Acacus’ phase, were hunter-gatherers, whose origins are yet not fully known. However, in their later phases, elements of their culture, particularly pottery styles, strongly suggest they were related to a large sub-Saharan African cultural network whose subsistence was associated with the exploitation of the newly expanded river and lake systems.
Their occupation was followed by the introduction of animal herding as the main economic system in the area. This Pastoral-Neolithic period can be divided into a series of sub-phases, in part related to an increased dependence on animal husbandry, with associated changes in material culture. Around 5,000 years ago, there was another major incident of climatic change, with the onset of the hyper-arid conditions that have continued to the present.
The Late Pastoral phase represents the adaptation of the human groups in the Central Sahara to the new conditions, culminating by about 3,000 years ago with the development of irrigated agriculture. The success of oasis farming was the basis on which the Garamantian civilisation was built. Although the Garamantes represent the high point of the oasis farming society before the late 20th century, their successors have continued to farm the Wadi al-Ajal until the present. The dating framework for the Holocene period in this part of the Central Sahara is outlined here, and a synthesis of the pattern of occupation in relation to lake levels during this time is outlined here.

Earliest "Berber" scripts: Tifinagh Inscriptions in South Western Libya

The mountain ranges of the Tadrart Acacus and Messak in southwestern Libya (central Sahara) are widely known for their outstanding rock art inventory and some key prehistoric sites. This paper illustrates the preliminary outcomes of current investigations on the ‘Tifinagh’ inscriptions of the Tadrart Acacus the recording of which has recently increased thanks to the support of ‘Endangered Archives Programme’ of the British Library. Its aim is twofold: first, to outline the main steps of the project, placing these within the most relevant issues related to the phenomenon of writing in the Sahara, and second, to describe the results that have been achieved to date and to foresee possible avenues of development. In fact, although difficulties in both dating and decipherment have been repeatedly stressed through the years, we emphasise that Tifinagh texts can play an important role in the process of landscape interpretation. A proper ‘written landscape’, where humans left readable signs of their passages or their stays, can integrate other archaeological approaches pursued so far in the Tadrart Acacus and its surroundings.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/1...0X.2012.674323

These areas are not along the coast of North Africa. They are deep in the interior of the Sahara and have links to the earlier phases of human settlement in the area.
These areas have ALWAYS been populated by black Africans who have always been either in the Sahara or crossing through it.

And Tifinagh is related to other Afro Asiatic scripts like Ge'ez and Epigraphic South Arabian, which again are the domain of "Ethiopic" black Africans, which again reinforces the texts of the Greeks and Romans of the interior of North Africa being populated by "Ethiopians".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge%27ez_script

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_South_Arabian_script

Tifinagh is the script historically of the Tuareg who occupy the Central and Southern Sahara and are the link to the ancient Berbers of the Sahara, not "Eurasian" migrants to the coasts.
Ghat 1933


Ghat modern


Older Ghat video

[Condottiere 40K]

Black African mutants, who after wandering around in Asia, returned.

[Kyriakos]

Not seeing the issue here. Carthage wasn't even a civ native to north Africa; as known it was a colony from the levant, which later became its own empire. Ie even if sub-saharan africans were in the north as well, again they would have nothing to do with Carthage and would have been just displaced by it. It did (iirc, not sure) conquer at least one settlement from greeks as well, in Libya.

[Condottiere 40K]

Phoenicians imperialists, who were sockblocked by the Jews, so kickstarted off the colonization of Africa.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Phoenicians imperialists, who were sockblocked by the Jews, so kickstarted off the colonization of Africa.

Fellow Senators, Phoenicians are Semites.
Carthage is an apartheid state. The Carthaginian lobby allows Iberians and Libyans to be oppressed. Masinissa was a freedom fighter. Boycott Carthage.

[ArmoredCore]

Not seeing the issue here. Carthage wasn't even a civ native to north Africa; as known it was a colony from the levant, which later became its own empire. Ie even if sub-saharan africans were in the north as well, again they would have nothing to do with Carthage and would have been just displaced by it. It did (iirc, not sure) conquer at least one settlement from greeks as well, in Libya.

From Roman and Greek documents on the founding of Carthage is is stated clearly that the Carthagenians were a composite of Phoenician and indigenous "Berber" tribes.
The surviving documents on Queen Dido are the most common examples. The question being what was the composition of these "Mauritani' people identified by the Romans as part of Carthage.

Virgils Aenid is one good source with phrases referencing the Mauritini in the person of the King who married Dido and founded Carthage. And there are interesting passages relating to this King as being a son of Jupiter Ammon (a combination of Jupiter and Amon of Egypt worshipped in Libya) and a Garamantian female who was raped. Most definitions of the term "Garamantis" used by the Romans define it as "African". Likewise the definition of Mauritani also say the same thing, the definition being what the Romans called North Africa between Morocco and Numidia.

https://books.google.com/books?id=eh...nympha&f=false


So there is substantial evidence to support that Carthage was made up of various local and foreign populations.

[Charerg]

Phoenicians imperialists, who were sockblocked by the Jews, so kickstarted off the colonization of Africa.

Actually I think it was rather the Assyrian conquest of Phoenicia that was the main factor driving many Phoenicians to migrate "into the colonies" (Carthage being the foremost of them).


Re: Berbers and Carthage
There definitely would have been some locals who had intermarried with the Phoenician settlers, but it's worth keeping in mind that the Berbers and other local inhabitants were "Second Class Citizen", and probably weren't seen as the equals of the Phoenicians. At least in EB (Europa Barbarorum) there are distinct units of "Half-Blooded" troops (Liby-Phoenicians). I'm not sure how historical the mod is in this regard, but it's reasonable enough to think that Phoenician blood was seen as favourable in the Carthaginian state.

In the case of Hannibal (hailing from the social elite), intermarriage with the locals was unlikely to have happened in his "clan" (to a large degree), unless it was for political purposes. At least if the Barca family had a high social standing to begin with this would be the case (I guess it's possible they might have "risen from humble beginnings", in which case this argument is not as valid).

Re: Aeneid
The Aeneid is a poem written well after the fall of Carthage, and about 800 years after the city's foundation. While it's definitely interesting, I wouldn't consider it a good source regarding Carthage.

[sumskilz]

Again, black Africans have never been limited to "Sub Saharan" Africa. ALL of Africa has been populated by black Africans since the origin of humanity itself.

You haven't defined "Black Africans" and of course your unsupported assertion doesn't really stand up against the numerous studies I've cited.

If Berber languages originated in the Eastern Sahara near the Fezzan and Upper Nile, how on earth are black Africans "recent" arrivals? Again, this makes no sense.

Modern sub-Saharan Africans are not descended from the people who inhabited North Africa before 20,000 years ago. There is no evidence that any human population is. I already posted references for this. During the Last Glacial Maximum the Sahara was much larger and much drier, no human could cross it. This isolation is one of the factors that contributed to population differentiation.

Nobody knows that precisely where Berber originated, but what matters more is where the Afroasiatic languages originated:

There are two principal competing hypotheses for the origin of Afro-Asiatic. One, based on reconstruction of early vocabulary for cultural and environmental referents, places the homeland in the Levant during the earliest Neolithic (the late Natufian culture, 9500 B.C.) (32, 70, 71), with a subsequent two-pronged spread by 5000 B.C. that is well documented archaeologically: mixed farming across the Nile into Egypt and North Africa, giving rise to the Egyptian and Berber branches of Afro-Asiatic languages, and sheep- and goat-based pastoralism from western Arabia across the Red Sea into Ethiopia and Sudan, giving rise to the Cushitic, Omotic, and Chadic branches (Semitic spread into Ethiopia much later). That Southwest Asian origin would now be masked by language replacement in the homeland, including the spread of the Semitic branch of Afro-Asiatic languages (including Akkadian or Babylonian, Aramaic, and Arabic) in historic times. The other hypothesis, reflecting Afro-Asiatic language subgrouping but with no clear archaeological support, favors a homeland in northeastern Africa (72, 73). That African origin would imply a preagricultural spread for Afro-Asiatic, perhaps with population movement into a wetter early Holocene Sahara.

Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions

Now even if the Northeastern Africa origin is correct, it relies on the Natufians having spread the Semitic branch to the Levant, but the Natufians have no genetic affinity to sub-Saharan Africans yet were quite similar morphologically to the North Africans of that time, which is because the first wave of back-migration dates to much earlier.

Earliest "Berber" scripts: Tifinagh Inscriptions in South Western Libya

That's a pretty silly piece of evidence to use to claim that's where Berber originated. First, proto-Berber has to be much older than that and second, that script is derived from Phoenician.

[ArmoredCore]

You haven't defined "Black Africans" and of course your unsupported assertion doesn't really stand up against the numerous studies I've cited.

Modern sub-Saharan Africans are not descended from the people who inhabited North Africa before 20,000 years ago. There is no evidence that any human population is. I already posted references for this. During the Last Glacial Maximum the Sahara was much larger and much drier, no human could cross it. This isolation is one of the factors that contributed to population differentiation.

Again, black Africans have inhabited the Sahara before, during and after the Wet Phases. Your argument that these supposed "Eurasian" migrants were the only North African settlers from 10,000 years ago is blatantly false as they did not get there before those black Africans who settled in the Sahara during the last Wet Phase, which is also in North Africa. The extreme coast of North Africa is not ALL of North Africa, while it may be relevant to the population of Carthage, that is not the full extent of the geography of North Africa and certainly the populations of those coasts did not replace the populations of black Africans in the then wet Sahara. I am saying your attempts at absolutism in trying to isolate Carthage from any black African presence, by ruling out any black Africans in ALL of North Africa is simply absurd. Notice at no time have I ruled out any Eurasians in North Africa, rather than making the argument that black Africans have always been present, even if there was mixture with Eurasian migrants along the coast.

Nobody knows that precisely where Berber originated, but what matters more is where the Afroasiatic languages originated:

Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions

Now even if the Northeastern Africa origin is correct, it relies on the Natufians having spread the Semitic branch to the Levant, but the Natufians have no genetic affinity to sub-Saharan Africans yet were quite similar morphologically to the North Africans of that time, which is because the first wave of back-migration dates to much earlier.

That's a pretty silly piece of evidence to use to claim that's where Berber originated. First, proto-Berber has to be much older than that and second, that script is derived from Phoenician.

Your assumption that these languages migrated into the Levant via the Natufians and back into Africa via some "Eurasian" migrants or other population is one theory but not the only one. Another theory is these people migrated across the Sahara and we do know for a fact that black Africans have always been in the Sahara.

[sumskilz]

Again, black Africans have inhabited the Sahara before, during and after the Wet Phases. Your argument that these supposed "Eurasian" migrants were the only North African settlers from 10,000 years ago is blatantly false as they did not get there before those black Africans who settled in the Sahara during the last Wet Phase, which is also in North Africa. The extreme coast of North Africa is not ALL of North Africa, while it may be relevant to the population of Carthage, that is not the full extent of the geography of North Africa and certainly the populations of those coasts did not replace the populations of black Africans in the then wet Sahara. I am saying your attempts at absolutism in trying to isolate Carthage from any black African presence, by ruling out any black Africans in ALL of North Africa is simply absurd. Notice at no time have I ruled out any Eurasians in North Africa, rather than making the argument that black Africans have always been present, even if there was mixture with Eurasian migrants along the coast.

Your assumption that these languages migrated into the Levant via the Natufians and back into Africa via some "Eurasian" migrants or other population is one theory but not the only one. Another theory is these people migrated across the Sahara and we do know for a fact that black Africans have always been in the Sahara.

I see repetition without evidence, I see a strawman, and evidence that you didn't read the paragraph I cited on Afroasiatic.

[Charerg]

Actually we don't know for a fact that "black Africans have alway been in the Sahara". As sumskilz mentioned, it's unlikely the desert had any significant populations during the Ice Ages. And while the Palaeolithic populations may be considered "black Africans", as sumskilz pointed out, there is no evidence that any modern populations are descended from them to a significant degree.

Also from what I understand the "Neolithic expansion" of early farmers from the Middle East into Europe and North Africa seems to precede the Sahara's "wet phase". It's hardly surprising that a culture that practiced agriculture was able to displace the thinly peopled tribes of Hunter-Gatherers that preceded them. After all, we know that the same thing happened in Europe as well.

[Roma_Victrix]

Fellow Senators, Phoenicians are Semites.
Carthage is an apartheid state. The Carthaginian lobby allows Iberians and Libyans to be oppressed. Masinissa was a freedom fighter. Boycott Carthage.

Well done, Oda.

Go ahead and close up shop everyone. The thread's done after this. Leave on a high note! It's not going to get any better than this. Abandon ship! And abandon hope all ye who entereth here.