Cool event

I just identified a guy's home town and religion based on his looks.

He looked familiar but I knew that there was no way I’d seen him before.

Then it hit me.

I had seen him in the Metropolitan Museum on a 1900 year old tomb painting from the Nile Delta.

I went back to his shop in this literal middle of nowhere (products include and are limited to water, pepsi, chips, shisha and cleaning products) and said:

“I assume you're Muslim because you don't have the wrist tattoo, but I can tell you that your ancestors were Christian from the North Nile region.”

He blinked a few times and I repeated it in my elementary Arabic and simple English then, stunned, he removed his thin wrist band and showed me the faded Coptic cross tattoo he’d once had and told me that his parents were indeed born in that region.

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The most interesting thing about race (and most other things) is that when you aren't emotionally or ideologically attached to some “preferred truth”, the actual truth is nearly always what common sense would suggest it is.

That's why you're more likely to be mislead by modern “discoveries” than by the writings of people dead for hundreds of years.

The biases of the long dead no longer frighten anyone into emotional or sociological submission (even when they come in the form of portraits painted on mummies) but the biases of moderns - even when presented in Scientific American or by The Harvard Faculty or by The Law, or even by “Everybody” - contain biases with teeth.

Obviously “common sense” needs some knowledge behind it. Had I have known nothing about the religious history of the region I’d have no way to know that this fellow was descended from the aboriginal Egyptian Community of Roman/Christian Egypt.

But with even a small amount of information it's incredibly easy to outsmart any ideology-based theories.

A word to the wise: Don't trust anyone who pooh poohs the ancients. All it means is that they didn't understand them.

EDIT: Though I’m publishing this after the “second day” of Passover is ended, I am located where the Hebrews were said to be located when they kept Passover their 2nd through 40th Passovers when they were told to only keep ONE day (entirely free from all sorts of permanent activity) of Passover, so I only kept one as well.