The Omari Mosque in Gaza was largely destroyed by Israeli bombardment on Dec. 8, 2023. It was one of the most ancient mosques in the region and a beloved Gazan landmark.

The mosque was first built in the early seventh century and named after Islam’s second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, a successor to the Prophet Muhammad and leader of the early Islamic community. It was a graceful white stone structure, with repeating vistas of pointed arches and a tall octagonal minaret encircled by a carved wooden balcony and crowned with a crescent.

The lower half of the minaret and a few exterior walls are reported to be the only parts of the mosque still standing.

Gaza is rich in cultural treasures, with some 325 formally registered heritage sites within just 141 square miles, including three designated for UNESCO’s World Heritage tentative list. The Omari Mosque is one of over 200 ancient sites damaged or destroyed in Israeli raids since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.

As a scholar of Islamic architecture and archaeology, I know the Omari Mosque as a building that embodies the history of Gaza itself – as a site of frequent destruction, but also of resilience and renewal. While narratives about Gaza often center on war and conflict, Gaza’s rich history and pluralistic identity as expressed through its cultural heritage equally deserve to be known.

Layered histories

The sun-soaked coastal enclave of Gaza, with the tidy stone buildings of its old city and its verdant olive and orange groves, has been a trade hub that connected the Mediterranean with Africa, Asia and Europe for millennia. It was famed in particular as a transit point for incense, one of the ancient world’s most precious commodities. Given its abundant agricultural and maritime riches, Gaza has known conquest by nearly every powerful empire, including the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the early Islamic caliphs, the Crusaders and the Mongols.

Gaza’s history of repeated conquest meant that buildings were often destroyed, reimagined and rededicated to accommodate changing political and religious practices. New sacred structures were continually built over old ones, and they frequently incorporated “spolia,” or stones reused from prior buildings. The Omari Mosque, too, was such an architectural palimpsest: a building embodying the layered, living material history of the city.

In the second millennium B.C., the site of the mosque is believed to have been a temple for Dagon, the Philistine god of the land and good fortune. The temple is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as the one whose walls were felled by the warrior Samson, who is locally believed to be buried in its foundations.

In 323 B.C., Gaza fiercely resisted the conquest of Alexander the Great, and the city endured devastating destruction when it was finally subdued. Yet after Gaza was conquered by the Romans in 50 B.C. it entered a period of renewed wealth and prosperity. A concentric domed temple was built for Marnas, a god of storms and the protector of the city, on the site of the future mosque. He was venerated there until just before 400 A.D., when the Byzantine Empress Eudoxia imposed the new faith of Christianity and ordered the destruction of the temple.

The priests of the temple barricaded themselves inside and hid the statues and ritual objects in an underground room. But the temple was destroyed and a Greek Orthodox church rose in its place. The stones, however, preserved the tale: in 1879 a monumental, 10-foot-high statue of Marnas, portrayed in the guise of Zeus, was excavated and its discovery made international media headlines. The statue is now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums.

The Byzantine church, too, was destined to be transformed. In the early seventh century, the Muslim general Amr ibn al-As conquered Gaza, and the church was converted into the Omari Mosque. Yet the continued presence of Gazan churches and synagogues attested to pluralistic norms that characterized the region under various Islamic dynasties until the modern era.

Gaza under Islamic rule

Gaza thrived under Islamic rule: Medieval travelers described it as a remarkably fertile, creative and beautiful city, with prominent Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities. It was still a flourishing urban center when the European Crusaders arrived. When the city fell to the Crusader King of Jerusalem, Baldwin III, in 1100, the Omari Mosque was converted once again – this time into a Catholic cathedral dedicated to St. John the Baptist.

The Muslim general Saladin defeated the Crusaders in 1187, and Gaza returned to Islamic rule. The church was transformed back into a mosque, and in the 13th century its elegant octagonal minaret was raised. Yet the reconversion into a mosque preserved much of the Crusader church, and the majority of the nave and the western portal were still visible in modern times.

It was in this period that the mosque became famed for its extraordinary library containing thousands of books, the earliest dating to the 13th century. After the library of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the Omari Mosque’s collection was one of the richest in Palestine.

In the 13th century, the mosque endured destruction by the Mongols as well as major earthquakes that would repeatedly topple the minaret. Its rebuilding after each of these disasters speaks to the ongoing centrality of the mosque in the communal life of the people of Gaza.

The stones tell the tale

Later, Gaza continued to flourish as a coastal port city, where Muslims, Christians, Jews and others lived in the vast, cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire.

In the late 19th century, as scholars explored Gaza’s heritage, an eloquent reminder of the building’s layered history emerged: a relief on a mosque pillar depicting a seven-branched menorah and Jewish ritual objects, including a shofar, or horn, surrounded by a wreath. The name Hanania, son of Jacob, was engraved in Hebrew and Greek.

Its date is uncertain, but it seems likely to have been a column from a synagogue reused during the building of the Byzantine church, which was used again in the building of the mosque: yet another layer in the architectural palimpsest that was the Omari Mosque.

A few decades later, during World War I, the mosque was severely damaged when a nearby Ottoman arms depot was targeted by British artillery fire. In the 1920s, the stones were once again gathered and the mosque was rebuilt.

After the 1948 creation of the state of Israel, Gaza became the sanctuary of tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The area was primarily administered by Egypt until it was captured by Israel in 1967.

It was at some point after the 1967 war, when Jewish symbols had come to be associated with the state of Israel and its occupation of Gaza, that the menorah relief was effaced from the column in the mosque.

A future for the Omari Mosque

On Dec. 8, 2023, Israel became the most recent military force to target the mosque. The library, too, may have been ruined, a treasure house of knowledge that will not so easily be rebuilt. A digitization project completed in 2022 preserves an imprint of the library’s riches. Still, digital files can’t replace the material significance of the original manuscripts.

The hundreds of other heritage sites damaged or destroyed include Gaza’s ancient harbor and the fifth century Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, one of the oldest churches in the world.

From today’s vantage point, it seems extraordinary that the menorah relief had endured for over 1,000 years: a Jewish symbol unremarkably cohabiting inside a Muslim prayer hall. In truth, both the relief and its removal embody the story of Gaza itself, a fitting reminder of the many centuries of destruction, coexistence and resilience embodied in the mosque’s very stones.

And if the Omari Mosque’s richly layered history is any indication, the people of Gaza will raise those stones again.

Stephennie Mulder, Associate Professor of Art History, The University of Texas at Austin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

And they can hardly be blamed. On 3 November, the UN Development Programme and the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) announced that 45 per cent of Gaza’s housing units have been destroyed or damaged since the beginning of the latest Israeli aggression on Gaza.

But the history of Gaza is also a history of great civilisations, as well as a history of revival, rebirth.

Shortly before the war, specifically 23 September, archaeologists in Gaza announced that four Roman-era tombs had been unearthed in Gaza City. They include “two lead coffins, one delicately carved with harvest motifs and the other with dolphins gliding through water,” ARTNews reported.

According to Palestinian and French archaeologists, these are Roman-era tombs dating back 2,000 years.

The finding was preceded, two months earlier, in July, by something even more astonishing: a major archaeological discovery, of at least 125 tombs, most with skeletons still largely intact, along with two extremely rare lead sarcophaguses.

In case you assume that the great archaeological finds were isolated events, think again.

“Byzantine-era mosaic discovered by farmer on Gaza Strip | USA TODAY”

Indeed, Gaza has existed not only hundreds of years, but even thousands of years before the destruction of the modern Palestinian homeland during the Nakba, the subsequent wars and all the headline news that associate Gaza with nothing but violence.

I grew up in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp located in central Gaza. As a child, I knew that something great had taken place in Nuseirat without fully appreciating its grandeur and deep historical roots.

For years, I climbed the Tell el-Ajjul – The Calves Hill – located to the north-east of Nuseirat, tucked between the beach and the Gaza Valley – to look for Sahatit, a term we used in reference to any ancient currency.

We would collect the rusty and often scratched pieces of metal and take them home, knowing little about the value of these peculiar finds. I always gifted my treasures to my Mom, who kept them in a small wooden drawer built within her Singer sewing machine.

I still think about that treasure that must have been tossed away following my mother’s untimely death. Only now do I realise that they were Hyksos, Roman and Byzantine currencies.

Once Mom would diligently scrub the Sahatit with lemon juice and vinegar, the mysterious Latin and other writings and symbols would appear, along with the crowned heads of the great kings of the past. I knew that these old pieces were used by our people who dwelled upon this land since time immemorial.

The region upon which Nuseirat was built was inhabited by ancient Canaanites, whose presence can be felt through the numerous archaeological discoveries throughout historic Palestine.

What made Nuseirat particularly unique was its geographical centrality in the Gaza region, its strategic position by the Gaza coast, and its unique topography. The relatively hilly areas west of Nuseirat and the fact that it encompasses the Gaza Valley have made Nuseirat inhabitable since ancient times to the present.

Evidence of Hyksos, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and other civilisations which dwelled in that region for thousands of years is a testimony to the historical significance of the area.

When the Hyksos ruled over Palestine during the Middle Bronze Age II period (ca. 2000-1500 BC), they built a great civilisation, which extended from Egypt to Syria.

So powerful was the Hyksos Dynasty that they extended their jurisdiction into Ancient Egypt, remaining there until they were driven out by the Sea Peoples. Though the Hyksos were eventually defeated, they left behind palaces, temples, defence trenches and various monuments, the largest of which can be found in the central Gaza region, specifically at the starting point of the Gaza Valley.

Like the Calves Hill, Tell Umm el-’Amr – or Umm el-’Amr’s Hill – was the location of an ancient Christian town, with a large monastery complex, containing five churches, homes, baths, geometric mosaics, a large crypt and more.

The discoveries of Tell Umm el-’Amr were recent. According to the World’s Monuments Fund (WMF), this Christian town was abandoned after a major earthquake struck the region sometime in the seventh century. The excavation process began in 1999, and a more serious preservation campaign began in earnest in 2010.

In 2018, the restoration of the monastery itself started. The discovery of the St. Hilarion Monastery is one of the most precious archaeological finds, not only in Gaza’s southern coastal region, but in the entire Middle East in recent years.

There is also the Shobani Graveyard, tucked by the sea and located near the western entrance of Nuseirat, the Tell Abu-Hussein in the north-west part of the Camp, also close to the sea, along with other sites, which are of great significance to Nuseirat’s past.

A Gaza historian told me that it is almost certain that Tell Abu Hussein was of some connection to Sultan Salah Ad-Din Al-Ayyubi’s military campaign in Palestine, which ultimately defeated and expelled the Crusaders from the region in 1187.

The history of my old Refugee Camp is essentially the history of all of Gaza, a place that played a significant role in shaping ancient and modern history, its geopolitics as well as its tragic and triumphant moments.

What is taking place in Gaza now is but an episode, a traumatic and a defining one, but nonetheless, a mere chapter in the history of a people who proved to be as durable and resilient as history itself.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

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Modern humans originated in southern Africa roughly 150,000 years ago.

Most of northern Europe was under miles of ice during the last ice age, from 110,000 years ago to 11,500 years ago. There were some habitable areas on its fringes, especially what is now southern France and northern Spain, to which modern homo sapiens migrated from Africa around 42,000 years ago. Yes, the oldest modern human Europeans were Africans. During the harsh Ice Age these Afro-European ancestors dwindled in number and their gene pool became thin because of heavy intermarriage within clans.

After the ice age ended, other groups immigrated into the subcontinent These were pastoralists from the Eurasian steppe who came through Ukraine, farmers from Anatolia in what is now Turkey, and hunter-gatherers from the the Caucasus. They intermarried with the remnants of the old Afro-European population of hunter-gatherers, who could now spread from the west to the east since the ice cover had retreated.

So was Ötzi a mixture of these four groups? A new study of his genome has appeared in Cell Genomics, “High-coverage genome of the Tyrolean Iceman reveals unusually high Anatolian farmer ancestry,” by Ke Wang et al.

An earlier attempt at such research was undertaken in 2012, but the sample appears to have been tainted with the DNA of modern persons, and the new researchers felt that contemporary DNA techniques are in any case better. So they took a new sample from his hip.

Remember those farmers from Anatolia? Those were Ötzi’s people. They had started coming into Europe probably around 8,000 years ago, 3,000 years before our iceman lived. Since they knew how to farm but the other groups didn’t, they seem to have been able to establish relatively isolated, self-sufficient villages up there in the Tyrolean area (today the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland). So they did not mix much with outsiders. They had never intermarried with the Steppe Nomads, the ones who may have brought in Indo-European languages. They did establish marriage ties with a few of the old Afro-Europeans who preceded them, but they were still 92% Anatolian. Farmers have bigger families than pastoralists or hunters and gatherers, so the Anatolians became a a force to reckon with.

Ötzi’s people were dark-skinned, as most Europeans were until fairly recently.

Research on DNA of 7,000-year-old remains in Spain shows people with dark skin and blue eyes.

Dark skin is functional in equatorial Africa because it protects people from strong ultra-violet rays, and in sunny places like that there is no danger of not producing enough vitamin D.

Ötzi’s descendants gradually acquired lighter skin because, as farmers, they lived on grain. Unlike the diets of the hunters and gatherers, this grain diet was low in vitamin D. We need vitamin D for healthy bone and nerve growth and functioning, and its absence causes brittle bones and hair loss, and can contribute to multiple sclerosis. Dark pigmentation in low ultra-violet radiation areas like northern Europe interferes with vitamin D production. So over thousands of years, those Europeans with a low-vitamin-D grain diet, i.e. the farmers, were subject to natural selection. Parents with slightly lighter skin had children more likely to survive and to mate and breed successfully, so eventually people turned white. It would have taken a few thousand years.

Ötzi was bald and had little hair on his body, and that may have been genetic, but I’m wondering if it was also a result of a vitamin D deficiency.

So, to recap: There were no indigenous Europeans. The oldest population immigrated from Africa around 42,000 years ago and barely survived the harsh Ice Age. As of 11,500 when the Ice Age was over, three other groups migrated in, the Steppe Nomads, the hunter-gatherers from what is now Georgia and Armenia, and the Anatolian farmers. Ötzi was from an insular community of the latter.

So when you see Turkish Döner Kebab restaurants in Germany or the UK, you’re seeing a modern-day immigration from Anatolia that mirrors what was happening thousands of years ago. The “white” people complaining about the immigrants are themselves descendants of dark-skinned Anatolians.

As someone who researches slavery in the ancient Mediterranean world, especially in the Bible, I often hear remarks like, “Slavery was totally different back then, right?” “Well, it couldn’t have been that bad.” “Couldn’t slaves buy their freedom?”

Most people in the United States or Europe in the 21st century are more knowledgeable about the transatlantic slave trade, and live in societies deeply shaped by it. People can see the effects of modern enslavement everywhere from mass incarceration and housing segregation to voting habits.

The effects of ancient slavery, on the other hand, aren’t as tangible today – and most Americans have only a vague idea of what it looked like. Some people might think of biblical stories, such as Joseph’s jealous brothers selling him into slavery. Others might picture movies like “Spartacus,” or the myth that enslaved people built the Egyptian pyramids.

Because these kinds of slavery took place so long ago and weren’t based on modern racism, some people have the impression that they weren’t as harsh or violent. That impression makes room for public figures like Christian theologian and analytic philosopher William Lane Craig to argue that ancient slavery was actually beneficial for enslaved people.

Modern factors like capitalism and racist pseudoscience did shape the transatlantic slave trade in uniquely harrowing and enduring ways. Enslaved labor, for example, shaped economists’ theories about the “free market” and global trade.

But to understand slavery from that era – or to combat slavery today – we also need to understand the longer history of involuntary labor. As a scholar of ancient slavery and early Christian history, I often encounter three myths that stand in the way of understanding ancient slavery and how systems of enslavement have evolved over time.

Myth #1: There is one kind of ‘biblical slavery’

The collection of texts that ended up in the Bible represent centuries of different writers from across the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, often in very different circumstances, making it hard to generalize about how slavery worked in “biblical” societies. Most importantly, the Hebrew Bible – what Christians call “the Old Testament” – emerged primarily in the ancient Near East, while the New Testament emerged in the early Roman Empire.

Forms of enslavement and involuntary labor in the ancient Near East, for example – areas such as Egypt, Syria and Iran – were not always chattel slavery, in which enslaved people were considered property. Rather, some people were temporarily enslaved to pay off their debts.

Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay

However, this was not the case for all people enslaved in the ancient Near East, and certainly not under the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, where millions were trafficked and forced to labor in domestic, urban and agricultural settings.

Because of the range of periods and cultures involved in the production of biblical literature, there is no such thing as a single “biblical slavery.”

Nor is there a single “biblical perspective” on slavery. The most anyone can say is that no biblical texts or writers explicitly condemn the institution of enslavement or the practice of chattel slavery. More robust challenges to slavery by Christians started to emerge in the fourth century C.E., in the writings of figures like St. Gregory of Nyssa, a theologian who lived in Cappadocia, in present-day Turkey.

Myth #2: Ancient slavery was not as cruel

Like Myth #1, this myth often comes from conflating some Near Eastern and Egyptian practices of involuntary labor, such as debt slavery, with Greek and Roman chattel slavery. By focusing on other forms of involuntary labor in specific ancient cultures, it is easy to overlook the widespread practice of chattel slavery and its harshness.

However, across the ancient Mediterranean, there is evidence of a variety of horrific practices: branding, whipping, bodily disfiguration, sexual assault, torture during legal trials, incarceration, crucifixion and more. In fact, a Latin inscription from Puteoli, an ancient city near Naples, Italy, recounts what enslavers could pay undertakers to whip or crucify enslaved people.

Christians were not exempt from participating in this cruelty. Archaeologists have found collars from Italy and North Africa that enslavers placed upon their enslaved people, offering a price for their return if they fled. Some of these collars bear Christian symbols like the chi-rho (☧), which combines the first two letters of Jesus’ name in Greek. One collar mentions that the enslaved person needs to be returned to their enslaver, “Felix the archdeacon.”

It’s difficult to apply contemporary moral standards to earlier eras, not least societies thousands of years ago. But even in an ancient world in which slavery was ever present, it is clear not everyone bought into the ideology of the elite enslavers. There are records of multiple slave rebellions in Greece and Italy – most famously, that of the escaped gladiator Spartacus.

Myth #3: Ancient slavery wasn’t discriminatory

Slavery in the ancient Mediterranean wasn’t based on race or skin color in the same way as the transatlantic slave trade, but this doesn’t mean ancient systems of enslavement weren’t discriminatory.

Much of the history of Greek and Roman slavery involves enslaving people from other groups: Athenians enslaving non-Athenians, Spartans enslaving non-Spartans, Romans enslaving non-Romans. Often captured or defeated through warfare, such enslaved people were either forcibly migrated to a new area or were kept on their ancestral land and compelled to do farmwork or be domestic workers for their conquerors. Roman law required a slave’s “natio,” or place of origin, to be announced during auctions.

Ancient Mediterranean enslavers prioritized the purchase of people from different parts of the world on account of stereotypes about their various characteristics. Varro, a scholar who wrote about the management of agriculture, argued that an enslaver shouldn’t have too many enslaved people who were from the same nation or who could speak the same language, because they might organize and rebel.

Ancient slavery still depended on categorizing some groups of people as “others,” treating them as though they were wholly different from those who enslaved them.

The picture of slavery that most Americans are familiar with was deeply shaped by its time, particularly modern racism and capitalism. But other forms of slavery throughout human history were no less “real.” Understanding them and their causes may help challenge slavery today and in the future – especially at a time when some politicians are again claiming transatlantic slavery actually benefited enslaved people.

Chance Bonar, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Humanities, Tufts University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

One of the things that is wrong with this way of looking at the issue is the white nationalist assumption that white slavers were repositories of useful knowledge that they sometimes deigned to pass on to the poor benighted enslaved from the backward Dark Continent. I will come back to this point below.

Governor Ron DeSantis, who ordered the new standards, defended this point before an all-white audience on Friday, saying, ”They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed being a blacksmith into doing things later in life. But the reality is: All of that is rooted in whatever is factual.”

Uh, just so you know, West Africa had a long tradition of producing blacksmiths and likely some enslaved artisans came already knowing all about it.

When challenged to give supporting details, the Florida Board of Education gave a list of 16 persons. On investigation, it was found that more than half of them weren’t enslaved, the rest didn’t learn any useful skills while enslaved, and one of them appears actually to have been white.

The curriculum puts an emphasis on those slaves who worked as tradesmen and artisans (for no salary) as opposed to the vast majority, who toiled as field hands and often were worked to death, as Josh Marshall discusses. He sees a distortion of the record coming from such odd over-focusing on some things and neglect of others.

DeSantis’s sort of discourse ignores that the enslaved were strictly forbidden to learn to read and write English, and the few who did so had to resort to dangerous subterfuges. Not sure how many “useful skills” the illiterate could learn.

Being someone’s property, having him rape you at will, and his ability to sell off your spouse and children whenever he liked, seem to me to outweigh any minor skills an enslaved person picked up. There is not good evidence that very many of them picked up very many marketable skills, and mind you that if the southern slaver states had had their way no enslaved Africans would ever have been able to try to put any of his or her skills on the private market, what with being owned and all.

But let us examine the real direction of useful knowledge, which was often from the enslaved to the ignorant and often unlettered whites who happened to own them.

Sylviane A. Diouf in her Servants of Allah explores issues in the enslavement of West African Muslims in the New World. She argues that because they traveled from town to town seeking knowledge and teaching it, the West African Sufi masters and Muslim clerics were disproportionately at risk of being captured and enslaved, since they were so much on the road. We don’t know what proportion of enslaved Africans were Muslims, but it likely was between 10% and 20%. Because of the large number of Muslim clerics among them, the Muslim enslaved were disproportionately literate in Arabic and in other languages written in the Arabic script in West Africa, such as Wolof, Mandinka and Hausa. She says that many slave-owners prized these literate Muslims, who often also had good book-keeping abilities, and depended on them in that regard, since many white slave-owners were not very literate or well schooled.

Some of the enslaved West Africans were highly educated royalty or scions of old clerical families schooled in Timbuktu, who were well versed in Greek sciences adopted into Islam. Many could have debated Aristotle with any white intellectual if the white person learned Arabic (Thomas Jefferson studied it a bit but remained blithely unaware that some of his own slaves may have been able to read it). Many white slave owners and proprietors of smaller farms wouldn’t have had similar knowledge. Some of the enslaved left behind autobiographies and other documents in Arabic, as with Omar ibn Said.

Judith Carney in “The African Origins of Carolina Rice Culture” discusses how historians have shown that rice cultivation in South Carolina depended on West Africans’ knowledge of the crop and their discovery of a distinctive strain. Wetland rice farming is much more productive that upland rainfall-based farming of the crop. Not only did enslaved West Africans know much more about rice growing than Scottish immigrants to the Carolinas but African women in particular possessed specialized knowledge of growing this crop.

She observes, “In 1453, decades before ships would reach India and Asian rice systems, the Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Azurara visited the mouth of the Gambia River and recorded the first European mention of West African rice cultivation: “They arrived sixty leagues beyond Cape Verde [Senegal], where they met with a river which was of good width, and into which they entered with their caravels. . .they found much of the land sown, and many. . . fields sown with rice. . .And. . .all that land seemed. . .like marshes.”

Senegambia was a region from which many enslaved kidnap victims were brought to North America.

She adds, “Wherever rice cultivation occurs in West Africa, women are involved. Rice is either a female crop or onecultivated with a sharply demarcated gender division of labour, men preparing the land for cultivation and women in charge of sowing, weeding and hoeing.”

It is therefore no surprise that in colonial South Carolina, too, “female slaves constituted the majority of ‘prime hands’ on Carolina and Georgia rice plantations.Women were especially involved in the tasks of sowing the seeds, weeding and hoeing, their group labour with long-handled hoes described by one observer of an ante-bellum rice plantation as a ‘human hoeing machine’.”

Leland Ferguson in Uncommon ground: archaeology and early African America, 1650-1800 shows that slaver farm owners often depended on the “pioneering” skills of Africans in clearing wilderness, and their knowledge of how to use adobe in making walled houses, woodworking knowledge of how to carve wood into water buckets and how carve a canoe out of cypress trunks, make baskets, recognize and use useful herbs for seasoning and healing, and their knowledge of pottery. West Africans were often used as coopers because of their woodworking skill in making staves and hoops for barrels. He sees African architectural techniques everywhere he looks in the archeology of the colonial Carolinas.

My colleague Jason Young has done amazing work on the Black potters of South Carolina and the African techniques they brought to bear, which can be seen if pottery in the Carolinas in the 1850s and 1860s is compared to that being produced in Africa itself.

So Florida and Ron DeSantis should put all that in their pipes and smoke it. They should be grateful to generations of enslaved Africans for having provided to their white owners an encyclopedia of useful skills whereby the pampered whites could go on to provide for themselves after the end of slavery.

Maybe they should even think about finally paying the arrears owed to the families of those kidnapped Africans for all their contributions to the building of America.

About 400,000 years ago, large parts of Greenland were ice-free. Scrubby tundra basked in the Sun’s rays on the island’s northwest highlands. Evidence suggests that a forest of spruce trees, buzzing with insects, covered the southern part of Greenland. Global sea level was much higher then, between 20 and 40 feet above today’s levels. Around the world, land that today is home to hundreds of millions of people was under water.

Scientists have known for awhile that the Greenland ice sheet had mostly disappeared at some point in the past million years, but not precisely when.

In a new study in the journal Science,
we determined the date, using frozen soil extracted during the Cold War from beneath a nearly mile-thick section of the Greenland ice sheet.

NSF UVM Community “Greenland’s ice is vulnerable: a mile of ice vanished from northwest Greenland 400,000 years ago”

The timing – about 416,000 years ago, with largely ice-free conditions lasting for as much as 14,000 years – is important. At that time, Earth and its early humans were going through one of the longest interglacial periods since ice sheets first covered the high latitudes 2.5 million years ago.

The length, magnitude and effects of that natural warming can help us understand the Earth that modern humans are now creating for the future.

A world preserved under the ice

In July 1966, American scientists and U.S. Army engineers completed a six-year effort to drill through the Greenland ice sheet. The drilling took place at Camp Century, one of the military’s most unusual bases – it was nuclear powered and made up of a series of tunnels dug into the Greenland ice sheet.

The drill site in northwest Greenland was 138 miles from the coast and underlain by 4,560 feet of ice. Once they reached the bottom of the ice, the team kept drilling 12 more feet into the frozen, rocky soil below.

In 1969, geophysicist Willi Dansgaard’s analysis of the ice core from Camp Century revealed for the first time the details of how Earth’s climate had changed dramatically over the last 125,000 years. Extended cold glacial periods when the ice expanded quickly gave way to warm interglacial periods when the ice melted and sea level rose, flooding coastal areas around the world.

For nearly 30 years, scientists paid little attention to the 12 feet of frozen soil from Camp Century. One study analyzed the pebbles to understand the bedrock beneath the ice sheet. Another suggested intriguingly that the frozen soil preserved evidence of a time warmer than today. But with no way to date the material, few people paid attention to these studies. By the 1990s, the frozen soil core had vanished.

Several years ago, our Danish colleagues found the lost soil buried deep in a Copenhagen freezer, and we formed an international team to analyze this unique frozen climate archive.

In the uppermost sample, we found perfectly preserved fossil plants – proof positive that the land far below Camp Century had been ice-free some time in the past – but when?

Dating ancient rock, twigs and dirt

Using samples cut from the center of the sediment core and prepared and analyzed in the dark so that the material retained an accurate memory of its last exposure to sunlight, we now know that the ice sheet covering northwest Greenland – nearly a mile thick today – vanished during the extended natural warm period known to climate scientists as MIS 11, between 424,000 and 374,000 years ago.

To determine more precisely when the ice sheet melted away, one of us, Tammy Rittenour, used a technique known as luminescence dating.

Over time, minerals accumulate energy as radioactive elements like uranium, thorium, and potassium decay and release radiation. The longer the sediment is buried, the more radiation accumulates as trapped electrons.

In the lab, specialized instruments measure tiny bits of energy, released as light from those minerals. That signal can be used to calculate how long the grains were buried, since the last exposure to sunlight would have released the trapped energy.

Paul Bierman’s laboratory at the University of Vermont dated the sample’s last time near the surface in a different way, using rare radioactive isotopes of aluminum and beryllium.

These isotopes form when cosmic rays, originating far from our solar system, slam into the rocks on Earth. Each isotope has a different half-life, meaning it decays at a different rate when buried.

By measuring both isotopes in the same sample, glacial geologist Drew Christ was able to determine that melting ice had exposed the sediment at the land surface for less than 14,000 years.

Ice sheet models run by Benjamin Keisling, now incorporating our new knowledge that Camp Century was ice-free 416,000 years ago, show that Greenland’s ice sheet must have shrunk significantly then.

At minimum, the edge of the ice retreated tens to hundreds of miles around much of the island during that period. Water from that melting ice raised global sea level at least 5 feet and perhaps as much as 20 feet compared to today.

Warnings for the future

The ancient frozen soil from beneath Greenland’s ice sheet warns of trouble ahead.

During the MIS 11 interglacial, Earth was warm and ice sheets were restricted to the high latitudes, a lot like today. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere remained between 265 and 280 parts per million for about 30,000 years. MIS 11 lasted longer than most interglacials because of the impact of the shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun on solar radiation reaching the Arctic. Over these 30 millennia, that level of carbon dioxide triggered enough warming to melt much of the Greenland’s ice.

Today, our atmosphere contains 1.5 times more carbon dioxide than it did at MIS 11, around 420 parts per million, a concentration that has risen each year. Carbon dioxide traps heat, warming the planet. Too much of it in the atmosphere raises the global temperature, as the world is seeing now.

Over the past decade, as greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise, humans experienced the eight warmest years on record. July 2023 saw the hottest week on record, based on preliminary data. Such heat melts ice sheets, and the loss of ice further warms the planet as dark rock soaks up sunlight that bright white ice and snow once reflected.

Even if everyone stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would remain elevated for thousands to tens of thousands of years. That’s because it takes a long time for carbon dioxide to move into soils, plants, the ocean and rocks. We are creating conditions conducive to a very long period of warmth, just like MIS 11.

Unless people dramatically lower the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, evidence we found of Greenland’s past suggests a largely ice-free future for the island.

Everything we can do to reduce carbon emissions and sequester carbon that is already in the atmosphere will increase the chances that more of Greenland’s ice survives.

The alternative is a world that could look a lot like MIS 11 – or even more extreme: a warm Earth, shrinking ice sheets, rising sea level, and waves rolling over Miami, Mumbai, India and Venice, Italy.

Paul Bierman, Fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment, Professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Science, University of Vermont and Tammy Rittenour, Professor of Geosciences and Director of Luminescence Lab, Utah State University

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The dean of the Egyptian archeological establishment, Zahi Hawass, spoke out against what he characterized as the appropriation of Egyptian history by American Afro-centrism, in which African-Americans attempt to claim Pharaonic Egypt as a key part of their heritage. An Egyptian lawyer sued Netflix, apparently for libeling the Egyptian nation, and for a while change.org carried a petition against the series that garnered tens of thousands of signatures before it was dropped. There have been social media wars over the issue.

The problems with this controversy are myriad, but they derive in large part from the unsatisfactory category of “race,” and from imposing contemporary understandings of race on ancients.

There are no biological races in the sense that most people understand the phrase nowadays. Homo Sapiens is only about 200,000 or 300,000 years old and has not had time to diversify very much. Moreover, there has been constant gene exchange and intermarriage across groups. A German essayist in the early 19th century said that Germans were fortunate to be a “pure” race. but there are no such things, and that guy was a jerk. Archeologists working among bones in a quarry of ancient Rome found a skeleton belonging to a Chinese or other East Asian man. If he married locally and had children, I guarantee you all Italians are now descended from him. Outward appearance or phenotype is often focused on for describing race, but that is determined by a very small number of genes and it reflects adaptations to climate and UV ray exposure, and can change in as little as 13,000 years when people move to a new place.

As I have pointed out, Ben Franklin in the 18th century did not consider Germans white.

In the early 20th century there were all kinds of disputes over “whiteness.” Some officials saw Lebanese as “Asiatic” and as part of a “yellow peril,” though the courts ultimately accepted Arabs as “white.” An Indian man sued to be allowed to marry a white woman because he was an Aryan and was turned down by the judge. Some people from Appalachia are from a mixed-race group called Melungeons. I may have a bit of Melungeon in my family tree.

In the United States and Britain there is an unfortunate binary of black and white, which is not true in Brazil, where a spectrum of racial appearances is recognized. People with any African heritage at all, no matter how small, are called Black in the U.S. (Except that at least 5% of self-described “whites” in the Deep South actually have some recent African ancestry.)

In Britain things are even more complex. I was living in London in the 1980s and was shocked when an Indian or Pakistani man on television said, “we Blacks.” In the US South Asians nowadays are typically grouped with East Asians as “Asians” and wouldn’t be called Black.

Zahi Hawass argues that Cleopatra, being a descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s generals (Ptolemy) was a Macedonian Greek.

Well, she certainly was. But one of her maternal ancestors was Persian and for all we know her grandmother or mother was Egyptian. She was reported to be the only Ptolemy who spoke the Egyptian language, which may well point to an Egyptian mother.

Mustafa Amin laments that Jada Pinkett Smith has made her “black” rather than “white,” and says that since she was Greek she would have been “blonde.” In other words, he has adopted into Egyptian Arabic American racial categories.

Even if Cleopatra’s mother was Egyptian, of course, it would not make her Black.

A recent genetic study of Egyptians in the ancient period in middle Egypt found that in the 2,000 years before Christ, these Egyptians were closely related to Levantines and Anatolians and Europeans and had much less sub-Saharan ancestry than is common in today’s Egypt. The authors admit, though, that things may have been different in Upper Egypt where there was known to be intermarriage with Nubians.

Ironically, during the past 1300 years Egyptians have come to have more sub-Saharan heritage, about 20 percent. My guess is that this is a result of Islam, since West Africans came through Cairo for pilgrimage to Mecca and settled in Cairo for trade and study. There was also household slavery, with some slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, but it was only one factor among many.

If the question is skin color though, if ancient Egyptians were close to Levantines they would have been olive-skinned. The genetic study said they had dark eyes. Moreover, that they had less sub-Saharan African ancestry than was common in the past two millennia does not mean they had none. Would they really have looked very different from Adele James?

So, people should chill out. Egypt is proud of being African and is a major force in the African Union. Egyptians shouldn’t give in to the kind of racism that is now plaguing Tunisia.

In the ancient world, no one looked at Cleopatra through a racial lens. No one cared what race she was, nor did they have a concept exacly like ours. (Ours are anyway mostly wrong.) She was a powerful sovereign over a country that served as the breadbasket of the Mediterranean. Julius Caesar loved her and had a child with her. Marc Antony also wooed her. They were mesmerized by this powerful woman, who they hoped could help them prove victorious in Roman power struggles. Her femininity, her power, her magnetism made her a significant figure in history. She was likely neither black nor white in contemporary American terms. But she was African, and the African continent celebrates here. Why is it so bad if the African diaspora also celebrates her?

Pre-colonial African history is alive with tales of civilisations rising and falling and of different cultures intermingling across the continent. We have now shed more light on some of these societies using the science of genetics.

In a study published in Science Advances, my co-authors and I used DNA information from people from the present-day continent to shed light on important civilisations that existed before colonialism. Genetic information from cheek swabs was extracted by machines. Once the sequence of “letters” in the DNA code had been read, or sequenced, we could use computers to compare genetic differences and similarities between the populations in the study.

One striking result concerned two ethnic groups in the north of present-day Cameroon, in west-central Africa, the Kanuri and Kotoko peoples. We found that these two groups were descended from three ancestral populations.

These ancestral groups most resembled people now living in coastal regions of west Africa as well as in parts of east Africa such as Ethiopia and populations living today in north Africa and the Levant. The populations intermixed – had children together – roughly 600 years ago. But what caused them to migrate thousands of kilometres across a desert into northern Cameroon?

We think the answer is the Kanem-Bornu empire, a civilisation that existed for over 1,000 years – beginning around 700 AD. At its height, the empire spanned what is now northern Cameroon, northern Nigeria, Chad, Niger and southern Libya. It operated vast trade networks across the Sahara and attracted populations from every direction.

This example highlights how our genomes hold information about major events of the past. Merchants travelling along trade routes or the formation of empires from smaller political units can leave footprints in our DNA. Previous work shows that the Roman empire, the Mongol empire, and Silk Road trade probably all left lasting legacies in the genomes of modern-day people across Eurasia.

Hidden in the genome

We analysed 1,300 newly collected genomes of people from across Africa. They came from 150 ethnic groups within five countries. We collaborated with anthropologists, archaeologists and linguists from Africa and elsewhere. They helped us understand the historical context of these events.

African genome data is underrepresented compared with that from other world regions. This means that lots of genetic diversity – or variety – in the DNA of populations is probably being missed by scientists.

Studying genetic diversity has many potential uses – such as understanding risks to health and developing new treatments for disease. Our group was concerned with genetic diversity as a window into the past.

Dating events

We modelled a person’s genome as a mixture of segments of DNA inherited from their ancestors. If a person had DNA segments closely matching two groups of people – for example, Europeans and west Africans – it suggested that this person descended from mixing between those two groups.

Present-day human groups that were formed from a recent mixture of Europeans and west Africans should have long sections of DNA from both populations. Those ancestral DNA segments get shorter as the genetic material of their descendants is shuffled with each new generation.

This provides a way of dating when mixture events took place. The longer the DNA segments matching, for example, west Africans or Europeans, the more recent the mixture event was.

Peace treaty

Another historical event we found evidence for was the Arab expansion in Africa. This began in the seventh century, when separate Arab armies travelling south along the Levantine coast and north from Medina in today’s Saudi Arabia crossed the Sinai desert and conquered Egypt.

In Sudan at this time, the Kingdom of Makuria ruled along the Nile river. Makuria signed a peace treaty with the Egyptian Arabs in the middle of the seventh century that lasted almost 700 years.

The majority of mixing between these two ancestral groups, one closely related to Arabs and the other to Sudanese, dates to after the peace treaty began breaking down. This in turn coincided with the decline and eventual collapse of Makuria itself, which would have allowed Arab groups to continue down the Nile into Sudan.

Aksum. Via Unsplash.

But we also found evidence of earlier migrations into Africa from the Arabian peninsula, which occurred by sea. This intermixing coincided in time with the Kingdom of Aksum, located in northeast Africa and southern Arabia, during the first millennium AD.

Aksum was once considered one of the world’s four great powers, alongside contemporary empires in China, Persia and Rome.

The expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples

Genetic studies have also found evidence of a continent-wide migration known as the expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples. “Bantu” is a language group, now spoken by around one-quarter of Africans.

There has been debate about whether the Bantu languages spread largely as a transmission of culture, or whether large-scale migration was involved. The latest research shows that the latter explanation is the likeliest. This migration started in a small area of western Cameroon roughly 4,000 years ago, before rapidly spreading south and east. It covered more than 4,000 kilometres in less than 2,000 years.

Bantu speakers mixed with local groups, changing patterns of genetic diversity in Africa forever. We showed that migrations not only occurred to the south and east of Cameroon, but also to the west. Why so much movement took place at this time is unknown, but climate change may have played a role.

It’s vital that scientists analyse more DNA from genomes of African people. As we do so, it will undoubtedly reveal an intricate picture of the continent’s rich past.

Nancy Bird, Postdoctoral research associate, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The legacy of the medieval Swahili civilization is a source of extraordinary pride in East Africa, as reflected in its language being the official tongue of Kenya, Tanzania and even inland countries like Uganda and Rwanda, far from the Indian Ocean shore where the culture developed nearly two millennia ago.

Its ornate stone and coral towns hugged 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) of the coast, and its merchants played a linchpin role in the lucrative trade between Africa and lands across the ocean: Arabia, Persia, India, Southeast Asia and China.

By the turn of the second millennium, Swahili people embraced Islam, and some of their grand mosques still stand at the UNESCO World Heritage sites of Lamu in Kenya and Kilwa in Tanzania.

Self-governance ended following Portuguese colonization in the 1500s, with control later shifting to the Omanis (1730-1964), Germans in Tanganyika (1884-1918) and British in Kenya and Uganda (1884-1963). Following independence, coastal peoples were absorbed into the modern nation-states of Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar.

So who were the Swahili people, and where did their ancestors originally come from?

Ironically, the story of Swahili origins has been molded almost entirely by non-Swahili people, a challenge shared with many other marginalized and colonized peoples who are the modern descendants of cultures of the past with extraordinary achievements.

Working with a team of 42 colleagues, including 17 African scholars and multiple members of the Swahili community, we’ve now published the first ancient DNA sequences from peoples of the Swahili civilization. Our results do not provide simple validation for the narratives previously advanced in archaeological, historical or political circles. Instead, they contradict and complicate all of them.

Colonization affected how the story was told

Western archaeologists in the mid-20th century emphasized the connections of the medieval Swahili to Persia and Arabia, sometimes suggesting that their impressive achievements could not have been attained by Africans.

Post-colonial scholars, including one of us (Kusimba), pushed back against that view. Earlier researchers had inflated the importance of non-African influences by focusing on imported objects at Swahili sites. They minimized the vast majority of locally made materials and what they revealed about African industry and innovation.

But viewing Swahili heritage as primarily African or non-African is too simplistic; In fact, both perspectives are byproducts of colonialist biases.

The truth is that colonization of the East African coast did not end with the departure of the British in the middle of the 20th century. Many colonial institutions were inherited and perpetuated by Africans. As modern nation-states formed, with governments controlled by inland peoples, Swahili people continued to be undermined politically and economically, in some cases as much as they had been under foreign rule.

Decades of archaeological research in consultation with local people aimed to address the marginalization of communities of Swahili descent. Our team consulted oral traditions and used ethnoarchaeology and systematic surveys, along with targeted excavations of residential, industrial and cemetery locations. Working with local scholars and elders, we unearthed materials such as pottery, metal and beads; food, house and industrial remains; and imported objects such as porcelain, glass, glass beads and more. Together they revealed the complexity of Swahili everyday life and the peoples’ cosmopolitan Indian Ocean heritage.

Ancient DNA analysis was always one of the most exciting prospects. It offered the hope of using scientific methods to obtain answers to the question of how medieval people are related to earlier groups and to people today, providing a counterweight to narratives imposed from outside. Until a few years ago, this kind of analysis was a dream. But because of a technological revolution in 2010, the number of ancient humans with published genome-scale data has risen from nothing to more than 10,000 today.

Surprises in the ancient DNA

We worked with local communities to determine the best practices for treating human remains in line with traditional Muslim religious sensitivities. Cemetery excavations, sampling and reburial of human remains were carried out in one season, rather than dragging on indefinitely.

Our team generated data from more than 80 people, mostly elite individuals buried in the rich centers of the stone towns. We will need to wait for future work to understand whether their genetic inheritance differed from people without their high status.

Contradicting what we had expected, the ancestry of the people we analyzed was not largely African or Asian. Instead, these backgrounds were intertwined, each contributing about half of the DNA of the people we analyzed.

We found that Asian ancestry in the medieval individuals came largely from Persia (modern-day Iran), and that Asians and African ancestors began mixing at least 1,000 years ago. This picture is almost a perfect match to the Kilwa Chronicle, the oldest narrative told by the Swahili people themselves, and one almost all earlier scholars had dismissed as a kind of fairy tale.

Another surprise was that, mixed in with the Persians, Indians were a significant proportion of the earliest migrants. Patterns in the DNA also suggest that, after the transition to Omani control in the 18th century, Asian immigrants became increasingly Arabian. Later, there was intermarriage with people whose DNA was similar to others in Africa. As a result, some modern people who identify as Swahili have inherited relatively little DNA from medieval peoples like those we analyzed, while others have more.

One of the most revealing patterns our genetic analysis identified was that the overwhelming majority of male-line ancestors came from Asia, while female-line ancestors came from Africa. This finding must reflect a history of Persian males traveling to the coast and having children with local women.

One of us (Reich) initially hypothesized that these patterns might reflect Asian men forcibly marrying African women because similar genetic signatures in other populations are known to reflect such violent histories. But this theory does not account for what is known about the culture, and there is a more likely explanation.

Traditional Swahili society is similar to many other East African Bantu cultures in being substantially matriarchal – it places much economic and social power in the hands of women. In traditional Swahili societies even today, ownership of stone houses often passes down the female line. And there is a long recorded history of female rulers, beginning with Mwana Mkisi, ruler of Mombasa, as recorded by the Portuguese as early as the 1500s, down to Sabani binti Ngumi, ruler of Mikindani in Tanzania as late as 1886.

Our best guess is that Persian men allied with and married into elite families and adopted local customs to enable them to be more successful traders. The fact that their children passed down the language of their mothers, and that encounters with traditionally patriarchal Persians and Arabians and conversion to Islam did not change the coast’s African matriarchal traditions, confirms that this was not a simple history of African women being exploited. African women retained critical aspects of their culture and passed it down for many generations.

How do these results gleaned from ancient DNA restore heritage for the Swahili? Objective knowledge about the past has great potential to help marginalized peoples. By making it possible to challenge and overturn narratives imposed from the outside for political or economic ends, scientific research provides a meaningful and underappreciated tool for righting colonial wrongs.

Chapurukha Kusimba, Professor of Anthropology, University of South Florida and David Reich, Professor of Genetics and of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.