Most people believe that the ancient Egyptians were dark-skinned and black-haired. Oddly enough, this opinion is shared by many Egyptologists.
If you ask armchair scientists about the hair color of representatives of the civilization whose life they are studying, they will answer you: "Black or dark brown." But it is not so. Blondes and even redheads are often found among mummies. Egyptologist and forensic scientist Janet Davey from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Australia decided to prove such a thesis.
To do this, she tried to recreate the process of mummification and see with her own eyes whether this is true or not. Of course, her experiment did not require undersized, dead Egyptians, similar to the pharaohs. The researcher used 16 hair samples kindly provided by Egyptian colleagues. Most of the hair was dark, some were gray, some were light, and some were henna-dyed red.
Samples were taken from men and women between the ages of 4 and 92 years. Davey covered her hair with a synthetic version of baking soda - a mixture of sodium carbonate decahydrate, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride and sulfate. It was soda that the ancient Egyptians used to dry up human remains. To simulate the mummification process, Janet left her hair in this solution for 40 days.
After 40 days, the researcher found that none of the samples had brightened. To confirm her findings, she asked a colleague to examine these hair samples under a microscope, and he also noted that there was no color change.
On the basis of her experiment, Davey concluded that among the ancient Egyptians there were fair-haired and blue-eyed people. Where did they come from, these mysterious light-skinned foreigners? Janet claims that such people appeared in Egypt during the so-called "Greco-Roman period", which lasted from 332 BC. until 395 AD
Fair-haired soldiers, merchants and slaves (Davey believes they were of Scandinavian origin) diluted the Egyptian gene pool with their genes, their children had families, and white skin was passed down from generation to generation. Rich descendants mummified their ancestors, and therefore modern scientists got the opportunity to study mummies with blonde and red hair, unusual for the average Egyptians.
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But how did the slaves manage to get rich so quickly? And how to explain the fact that representatives of the ancient Egyptian aristocracy were very often fair-haired people? For example, the daughter of Pharaoh Cheops was blonde, Pharaoh Ramesses II had red hair, and his father and son were blonde with pronounced Caucasian features. Unfortunately, the Australian study does not answer this question.
Now let's move to another country. In 1988, the famous American scientist Victor Mayer, in search of rare ancient texts, went to the provincial Chinese museum. What he was able to find turned all modern ideas about the history of ancient China upside down. In one of the halls lay mummies (now they are known as the Cherchensky man and the Loulan beauty), which were several thousand years old. Fair-haired mummies of tall people with European features.
Where did people come from in the East Asian kingdom that were completely different from the indigenous population? The artifacts found next to them indicated that this unknown people had technologies unknown in China at that time. Woolen braids, wheel, bronze. Where did the foreigners come from?
They were buried, apparently in strict observance of tradition: the jaws were neatly tied, the hair was combed, the clothes were chosen in accordance with the season, even traces of makeup were preserved on the face of the woman from Loulan. Scientists have compared artifacts found next to mummies with other archaeological finds from different parts of the world. And they found out the undoubted similarity with the Pazyryk culture that existed in Western Siberia. By the way, the Hermitage contains the mummy of a Pazyryk man, whose face had very similar features during his lifetime.
A DNA examination conducted by Dr. Hui Zhou of Jilin University showed the following: “Experts have found Y chromosomes, which are now characteristic of the inhabitants of Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, but very rare in China. The mitochondrial DNA that is passed down the female line also points to Siberia and Europe.”
This is how the theory of the migration of peoples to the Tarim Basin around 2500 BC arose, which, among other things, received linguistic confirmation: in the Chinese language, the words denoting a cow, horse, cart contain Indo-European (primordially Russian!) Roots. In local folklore, there are legends about blue-eyed fair-haired people who were the first rulers of the Celestial Empire.
In the historical records of Pliny the Elder (Western scholars often call them fantastic and fictional), a portrait of the inhabitants of Western China who visited the imperial palace is given. These people were "above average height, with flaxen hair and blue eyes." But if earlier it was believed that the Chinese civilization was formed autonomously, then archaeological finds put this fact in great doubt.
Along the Great Silk Road, there was a city built by white-skinned people, representatives of a civilization no less developed and powerful than the Sumerian or Ancient Egyptian. Perhaps the same fair-haired people were involved in the construction of stepped pyramids, of which there are a lot in China.
For some extremely strange coincidence, when it comes to fair-haired people, foreign scientists always remember the Scandinavians and Atlanteans, completely "forgetting" about the representatives of Ancient Russia. Let's not now think about the reasons for this phenomenon, when the history of the ancient Rus was burned out, erased, rewritten and altered by thousands of years of painstaking work as if with a red-hot iron.
There is an obvious fact: foreign scientists are still in the holy confidence that in the days of the legendary Vikings, ancient Roman legionaries, ancient Greek glorious achievements in the field of science and art, etc. (this list is huge, there is no need to list) Ancient Russia was a wild land inhabited by almost monkeys, which did not leave any significant trace in history.
It is simply incredible: for millennia, states and civilizations have arisen, developed, reached their heyday and died, and only one territory, not conquered by terra incognita, stood apart, completely unchanged, as if bewitched for many centuries.
However, history, even carefully falsified, always reminds of itself, and sooner or later everything secret becomes clear.
Elena Muravyova, for neveroyatno.info