Some notes from my reading of Cheikh Anta Diop's book, The African Origin of Civilization:
Our investigations have convinced us that the West has not been calm enough and objective enough to teach us our history correctly, without crude falsifications. Today, what interests me most is to see the formation of teams, not of passive readers, but of honest, bold research workers, allergic to complacency and busy substantiating and exploring ideas expressed in our work.-pg xiiv
Herodotus-“The Father of History”
Undoubtedly the basic reason for this is that Herodotus, after relating his eyewitness account informing us that Egyptians were Blacks, he demonstrated, with rare honesty (for a Greek), that Greece borrowed from Egypt all the elements of her civilization, even the cult of the gods, and that Egypt was the cradle of civilization. Moreover, archeological discoveries continually justify Herodotus against his detractors.-pg 4
For all the reasons cited above, technical development was less stressed than in Europe. Although the Negro had been the first to discover iron, he had built no cannon; the secret of gunpowder was known only to the Egyptian priests, who used it solely for religious purposes at rites such as the Mysteries of Osiris. –pg 24
Pg-54 where are the Negro mummies cited by Herodotus and Fontanes?
Osiris, Isis, and Horus-ancestors of the Egyptians. This primitive Trinity moved from the scale of the universe to that of man later in Christianity.-pg 109
The history of humanity will remain confused as long as we fail to distinguish between the two early cradles in which Nature fashioned the instincts, temperament, habits, and ethical concepts of the two subdivisions before they met each other after a long separation dating back to prehistoric times. The first of those cradles, as we shall see in the chapter on Egypt’s contribution, is the valley of the Nile, from the Great Lakes to the Delta, across the so-called “Anglo-Egyptian “ Sudan. The abundance of vital resources, its sedentary, agricultural character, the specific conditions of the valley, will engender in man, that is, in the Negro, a gentle, idealistic, peaceful nature, endowed with a spirit of justice and gaiety. All these virtues were more or less indispensable for daily coexistence.
Because of the requirements of agricultural life, concepts such as matriarchy and totemism, the most perfect social organization, and monotheistic religion were born. These engendered others: thus, circumcision resulted from monotheism; in fact, it was really the notion of a god, Amon, uncreated creator of all that exists, that led to the androgynous concept. Since Amon was not created and since he is the origin of all creation, there was a time when he was alone. To the archaic mentality, he must have contained within himself all the male and female principles necessary for procreation. That is why Amon, the Negro god par excellence of the “Anglo-Egyptian” Sudan (Nubia) and all the rest of Black Africa, was to appear in Sudanese mythology as androgynous. Belief in this hermanphroditixc ontology would produce circumcision and excision in the Black world. One could go on to explain all the basic traits of the Negro soul and civilization by using the material conditions of the Nile Valley as the point of departure.
By contrast, the ferocity of nature in the Eurasian steppes, the barrenness of those regions, the overall circumstances of material conditions, were to create instincts necessary for survival in such an environment. Here, Nature left no illusion of kindliness: it was implacable and permitted no negligence; man must obtain his bread by the sweat of his brow. Above all, in the course of a long, painful existence, he must learn to rely on himself alone, on his own possibilities. He could not indulge in the luxury of believing in a beneficent God who would shower down abundant means of gaining a livelihood; instead, he would conjure up deities maleficent and cruel, jealous and spiteful: Zeus, Yahweh, among others.
In the unrewarding activity that the physical environment imposed on man, there was already implied materialism, anthropomorphism (which is but one of its aspects), and the secular spirit. This is how the environment gradually molded these instincts in the men of that region, the Indo-Europeans in particular. All the peoples of the area, whether white or yellow, were instinctively to love conquest, because of a desire to escape from those hostile surroundings. The milieu chased them away; they had to leave it or succumb, try to conquer a place in the sun in a more clement nature. Invasions would not cease, once an initial contact with the Black world to the south had taught them that the existence of a land where the living was easy, riches abundant, technique flourishing. Thus, from 1450 B.C. until Hitler, from the Barbarians of the fourth and fifth centuries to Genghis Khan and the Turks, those invasions from east to west or from north to south continued uninterrupted.
Man in those regions long remained a nomad. He was cruel. The cold climate would engender the worship of fire, to remain burning from the fire of Mithras to the flame on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arch of Triumph and the torches of the ancient and modern Olympics. Nomadism was responsible for cremation: thus the ashes of ancestors could be transported in small urns. This custom was perpetuated by the Greeks; the Aryans introduced it to India after 1450, and that explains the cremation of Caesar and of Gandhi in our own epoch.
Obviously, man was the pillar of that kind of life. Woman’s economic role was much less significant than in Black agricultural societies. Consequently, the nomadic patriarchal family was the only embryo of social organization. The patriarchal principle would rule the whole life of the Indo-Europeans, from the Greeks and Romans to the Napoleonic Code, to our day. This is why woman’s participation in public life would arrive later in European than in Negro societies.pgs-111-113
Consequently, if one wished, the history of humanity could be quite lucid. Despite the repeated acts of vandalism from the days of Cambyses, through the Romans, the Christians of the 6th century in Egypt, the Vadals, etc., we still have enough documents left to write a clear history of man. The West today is fully aware of this, but it lacks the intellectual and moral courage required, and this is why textbooks are deliberately muddled. It then devolves on us Africans to rewrite the entire history of mankind for our own edification and that of others. Pg-115
Lokman, the mythical representative of Adite wisdom, resembles Aesop, whose name seems to Mr. Welcker to indicate an Ethiopian origin. In India also, the literature of tales and fables appears to come from the Sudra [lowest-class Hindus]. Perhaps this type of fiction, characterized by the role played by animals, is a literary genre peculiar to the Kushites. –pg 126
The Jectanides religion was of Kushite origin and seemed to emanate directly from the Babylonian cult. It would remain the same until the advent of Islam. The Sabaean gods were just about the same as the Babylonian gods and all belonged to the same Kushite family of Egyptian and Phoenician deities…The only Triad revered was: Venus-Sun-Moon, as in Babylon. The cult had a pronounced sidereal character, especially solar: they prayed to the sun at different phases of its course. There was neither idolatry, nor images, nor priesthood.
They addressed a direct invocation to the seven planets. The 30-day fasting period already existed, as in Egypt. They prayed seven times each day, with their faces turned toward the north. These prayers to the sun at different hours somewhat resemble Muslim prayers which take place during the same phases, but which have been reduced by the Prophet to five compulsory prayers “to relieve humanity”; the other two prayers are optional. Pg-126
There were also sacred springs and stones, as in Muslim times: Zenzen, a sacred spring; Kaaba, a sacred stone. The pilgrimage to Mecca already existed. The Kaaba was reputed to have been constructed by Ishmael, son of Abraham and Hagar the Egyptian (a Negro woman), historical ancestor of Muhammad, according to all Arab historians. As in Egypt, belief in a future life was already prevalent. Thus, all the elements necessary for the blossoming of Islam were in place more than 1,000 years before the birth of Muhammad. Islam would appear as a purification of Sabaeanism by the “Messenger of God.”
So we have seen that the entire Arab people, including the Prophet, is mixed with Negro blood. All educated Arabs are conscious of this fact. The fabulous hero of Arabia, Antar, is himself a mixed-breed…pg-127
The oneness of Egyptian and Black culture could not be stated more clearly. Because of this essential identity of genius, culture, and race, today all Negroes can legitimately trace their culture to ancient Egypt and build a modern culture on that foundation. A dynamic, modern contact with Egyptian Antiquity would enable Blacks to discover increasingly each day the intimate relationship between all Blacks of the continent and the mother Nile Valley. By this dynamic contact, the Negro will be convinced that these temples, these forests of columns, these pyramids, these colossi, these bas-reliefs, mathematics, medicine, and all this science, are indeed the work of his ancestors and that he has a right and a duty to claim this heritage.
From now on, in this type of research so invaluable for the investigation of thought, we are beginning to perceive that a great part of the Black continent, instead of being unpolished and savage as was previously supposed, has cast its influence in many directions across the immense isolation of desert or forest, an influence which came from the Nile and passed through Libya, Nubia, and Ethiopia.pg-140
According to the unanimous testimony of the Ancients, first the Ethiopians and then the Egyptians created and raised to an extraordinary stage of development all the elements of civilization, while other peoples especially the Eurasians, were still deep in barbarism. The explanation of this must be sought in the material conditions in which the accident of geography had placed them at the beginning of time. For man to adapt, these conditions required the invention of sciences complemented by the creation of arts and religion.
It is impossible to stress all that the world, particularly the Hellenistic world, owed to the Egyptians. The Greeks merely continued and developed, sometimes partially, what the Egyptians had invented. By virtue of their materialistic tendencies, the Greeks stripped those inventions of the religious, idealistic shell in which the Egyptians had enveloped them. On the one hand, the rugged life on the Eurasian plains apparently intensified the materialistic instinct of the peoples living there; on the other hand, it forged moral values diametrically opposite to Egyptian moral values, which stemmed from a collective, sedentary, relatively easy, peaceful life, once it had been regulated by a few social laws.
To the extent that the Egyptians were horrified by theft, nomadism, and war, to the same extent these practices were deemed highly moral on the Eurasian plains. Only a warrior killed on the battlefield could enter Valhalla, the Germanic paradise. Among the Egyptians, no felicity was possible except for the deceased who could prove, at the Tribunal of Osiris, that he had been charitable to the poor and had never sinned. This was antithesis of the spirit of rapine and conquest that generally characterized the peoples of the north, driven, in a sense, away from a country unfavored by Nature. In contrast, existence was so easy in the Valley of the Nile, a veritable Garden of Eden, between two deserts, that Egyptians tended to believe that Nature’s benefits poured down from the sky. The finally adored it in the form of an Omnipotent Being, Creator of All that Exists and Dispenser of Blessings.
On the contrary, the horizons of the Greek were never to pass beyond material, visible man, the conqueror of hostile Nature. On the earth, everything gravitated around him; the supreme objective of art was to reproduce his exact likeness. In the “heavens”, paradoxically, he alone was to be found, with his earthly faults and weaknesses, beneath the shell of gods distinguished from ordinary mortals only by physical strength. Thus, when the Greek borrowed the Egyptian god, a real god in the full sense of the word, provided with all the moral perfections that stem from sedentary life, he could understand that deity only by reducing him to the level of man. Consequently, the adoptive Pantheon of the Greek was merely another humanity…
The typically Negro—or Kushite, as Lenormant writes—kind of fable, with animals as characters, was introduced into Greece by the Egyptian Negro, Aesop, who was to inspire the fables of the Frenchman La Fontaine. Edgar Allen Poe, in “Some Words with a Mummy”, presents a symbolic idea of the scope of scientific and technical knowledge in ancient Egypt.pg 230-233
Astronomers have noted in the Great Pyramid indications of the sidereal year, the anomalistic year, the precessions of the equinoxes “for 6,000 years, whereas modern astronomy knows them for only about 400 years.” Mathematicians have detected in it the exact value of “pi”, the exact average distance between the sun and the earth, the polar diameter of the earth, and so on…pg 233
The ancestors of the Blacks, who today live mainly in Black Africa, were the first to invent mathematics, astronomy, the calendar, sciences in general, arts, religion, agriculture, social organization, medicine, writing, technique, architecture; that they were the first to erect buildings out of 6 million tons of stone (The Great Pyramid) as architects and engineers--not simply as unskilled laborers; that they built the immense temple of Karnak...
Consequently, the Black man must be able to restore the continuity of his national historic past, to draw from it the moral advantage needed to reconquer his place in the modern world, without falling into excesses of a Nazism in reverse for, insofar as one can speak of race, the civilization that is his might have been created by any other human race placed in so favorable and unique a setting.-pg 234-235
Our investigations have convinced us that the West has not been calm enough and objective enough to teach us our history correctly, without crude falsifications. Today, what interests me most is to see the formation of teams, not of passive readers, but of honest, bold research workers, allergic to complacency and busy substantiating and exploring ideas expressed in our work.-pg xiiv
Herodotus-“The Father of History”
Undoubtedly the basic reason for this is that Herodotus, after relating his eyewitness account informing us that Egyptians were Blacks, he demonstrated, with rare honesty (for a Greek), that Greece borrowed from Egypt all the elements of her civilization, even the cult of the gods, and that Egypt was the cradle of civilization. Moreover, archeological discoveries continually justify Herodotus against his detractors.-pg 4
For all the reasons cited above, technical development was less stressed than in Europe. Although the Negro had been the first to discover iron, he had built no cannon; the secret of gunpowder was known only to the Egyptian priests, who used it solely for religious purposes at rites such as the Mysteries of Osiris. –pg 24
Pg-54 where are the Negro mummies cited by Herodotus and Fontanes?
Osiris, Isis, and Horus-ancestors of the Egyptians. This primitive Trinity moved from the scale of the universe to that of man later in Christianity.-pg 109
The history of humanity will remain confused as long as we fail to distinguish between the two early cradles in which Nature fashioned the instincts, temperament, habits, and ethical concepts of the two subdivisions before they met each other after a long separation dating back to prehistoric times. The first of those cradles, as we shall see in the chapter on Egypt’s contribution, is the valley of the Nile, from the Great Lakes to the Delta, across the so-called “Anglo-Egyptian “ Sudan. The abundance of vital resources, its sedentary, agricultural character, the specific conditions of the valley, will engender in man, that is, in the Negro, a gentle, idealistic, peaceful nature, endowed with a spirit of justice and gaiety. All these virtues were more or less indispensable for daily coexistence.
Because of the requirements of agricultural life, concepts such as matriarchy and totemism, the most perfect social organization, and monotheistic religion were born. These engendered others: thus, circumcision resulted from monotheism; in fact, it was really the notion of a god, Amon, uncreated creator of all that exists, that led to the androgynous concept. Since Amon was not created and since he is the origin of all creation, there was a time when he was alone. To the archaic mentality, he must have contained within himself all the male and female principles necessary for procreation. That is why Amon, the Negro god par excellence of the “Anglo-Egyptian” Sudan (Nubia) and all the rest of Black Africa, was to appear in Sudanese mythology as androgynous. Belief in this hermanphroditixc ontology would produce circumcision and excision in the Black world. One could go on to explain all the basic traits of the Negro soul and civilization by using the material conditions of the Nile Valley as the point of departure.
By contrast, the ferocity of nature in the Eurasian steppes, the barrenness of those regions, the overall circumstances of material conditions, were to create instincts necessary for survival in such an environment. Here, Nature left no illusion of kindliness: it was implacable and permitted no negligence; man must obtain his bread by the sweat of his brow. Above all, in the course of a long, painful existence, he must learn to rely on himself alone, on his own possibilities. He could not indulge in the luxury of believing in a beneficent God who would shower down abundant means of gaining a livelihood; instead, he would conjure up deities maleficent and cruel, jealous and spiteful: Zeus, Yahweh, among others.
In the unrewarding activity that the physical environment imposed on man, there was already implied materialism, anthropomorphism (which is but one of its aspects), and the secular spirit. This is how the environment gradually molded these instincts in the men of that region, the Indo-Europeans in particular. All the peoples of the area, whether white or yellow, were instinctively to love conquest, because of a desire to escape from those hostile surroundings. The milieu chased them away; they had to leave it or succumb, try to conquer a place in the sun in a more clement nature. Invasions would not cease, once an initial contact with the Black world to the south had taught them that the existence of a land where the living was easy, riches abundant, technique flourishing. Thus, from 1450 B.C. until Hitler, from the Barbarians of the fourth and fifth centuries to Genghis Khan and the Turks, those invasions from east to west or from north to south continued uninterrupted.
Man in those regions long remained a nomad. He was cruel. The cold climate would engender the worship of fire, to remain burning from the fire of Mithras to the flame on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arch of Triumph and the torches of the ancient and modern Olympics. Nomadism was responsible for cremation: thus the ashes of ancestors could be transported in small urns. This custom was perpetuated by the Greeks; the Aryans introduced it to India after 1450, and that explains the cremation of Caesar and of Gandhi in our own epoch.
Obviously, man was the pillar of that kind of life. Woman’s economic role was much less significant than in Black agricultural societies. Consequently, the nomadic patriarchal family was the only embryo of social organization. The patriarchal principle would rule the whole life of the Indo-Europeans, from the Greeks and Romans to the Napoleonic Code, to our day. This is why woman’s participation in public life would arrive later in European than in Negro societies.pgs-111-113
Consequently, if one wished, the history of humanity could be quite lucid. Despite the repeated acts of vandalism from the days of Cambyses, through the Romans, the Christians of the 6th century in Egypt, the Vadals, etc., we still have enough documents left to write a clear history of man. The West today is fully aware of this, but it lacks the intellectual and moral courage required, and this is why textbooks are deliberately muddled. It then devolves on us Africans to rewrite the entire history of mankind for our own edification and that of others. Pg-115
Lokman, the mythical representative of Adite wisdom, resembles Aesop, whose name seems to Mr. Welcker to indicate an Ethiopian origin. In India also, the literature of tales and fables appears to come from the Sudra [lowest-class Hindus]. Perhaps this type of fiction, characterized by the role played by animals, is a literary genre peculiar to the Kushites. –pg 126
The Jectanides religion was of Kushite origin and seemed to emanate directly from the Babylonian cult. It would remain the same until the advent of Islam. The Sabaean gods were just about the same as the Babylonian gods and all belonged to the same Kushite family of Egyptian and Phoenician deities…The only Triad revered was: Venus-Sun-Moon, as in Babylon. The cult had a pronounced sidereal character, especially solar: they prayed to the sun at different phases of its course. There was neither idolatry, nor images, nor priesthood.
They addressed a direct invocation to the seven planets. The 30-day fasting period already existed, as in Egypt. They prayed seven times each day, with their faces turned toward the north. These prayers to the sun at different hours somewhat resemble Muslim prayers which take place during the same phases, but which have been reduced by the Prophet to five compulsory prayers “to relieve humanity”; the other two prayers are optional. Pg-126
There were also sacred springs and stones, as in Muslim times: Zenzen, a sacred spring; Kaaba, a sacred stone. The pilgrimage to Mecca already existed. The Kaaba was reputed to have been constructed by Ishmael, son of Abraham and Hagar the Egyptian (a Negro woman), historical ancestor of Muhammad, according to all Arab historians. As in Egypt, belief in a future life was already prevalent. Thus, all the elements necessary for the blossoming of Islam were in place more than 1,000 years before the birth of Muhammad. Islam would appear as a purification of Sabaeanism by the “Messenger of God.”
So we have seen that the entire Arab people, including the Prophet, is mixed with Negro blood. All educated Arabs are conscious of this fact. The fabulous hero of Arabia, Antar, is himself a mixed-breed…pg-127
The oneness of Egyptian and Black culture could not be stated more clearly. Because of this essential identity of genius, culture, and race, today all Negroes can legitimately trace their culture to ancient Egypt and build a modern culture on that foundation. A dynamic, modern contact with Egyptian Antiquity would enable Blacks to discover increasingly each day the intimate relationship between all Blacks of the continent and the mother Nile Valley. By this dynamic contact, the Negro will be convinced that these temples, these forests of columns, these pyramids, these colossi, these bas-reliefs, mathematics, medicine, and all this science, are indeed the work of his ancestors and that he has a right and a duty to claim this heritage.
From now on, in this type of research so invaluable for the investigation of thought, we are beginning to perceive that a great part of the Black continent, instead of being unpolished and savage as was previously supposed, has cast its influence in many directions across the immense isolation of desert or forest, an influence which came from the Nile and passed through Libya, Nubia, and Ethiopia.pg-140
According to the unanimous testimony of the Ancients, first the Ethiopians and then the Egyptians created and raised to an extraordinary stage of development all the elements of civilization, while other peoples especially the Eurasians, were still deep in barbarism. The explanation of this must be sought in the material conditions in which the accident of geography had placed them at the beginning of time. For man to adapt, these conditions required the invention of sciences complemented by the creation of arts and religion.
It is impossible to stress all that the world, particularly the Hellenistic world, owed to the Egyptians. The Greeks merely continued and developed, sometimes partially, what the Egyptians had invented. By virtue of their materialistic tendencies, the Greeks stripped those inventions of the religious, idealistic shell in which the Egyptians had enveloped them. On the one hand, the rugged life on the Eurasian plains apparently intensified the materialistic instinct of the peoples living there; on the other hand, it forged moral values diametrically opposite to Egyptian moral values, which stemmed from a collective, sedentary, relatively easy, peaceful life, once it had been regulated by a few social laws.
To the extent that the Egyptians were horrified by theft, nomadism, and war, to the same extent these practices were deemed highly moral on the Eurasian plains. Only a warrior killed on the battlefield could enter Valhalla, the Germanic paradise. Among the Egyptians, no felicity was possible except for the deceased who could prove, at the Tribunal of Osiris, that he had been charitable to the poor and had never sinned. This was antithesis of the spirit of rapine and conquest that generally characterized the peoples of the north, driven, in a sense, away from a country unfavored by Nature. In contrast, existence was so easy in the Valley of the Nile, a veritable Garden of Eden, between two deserts, that Egyptians tended to believe that Nature’s benefits poured down from the sky. The finally adored it in the form of an Omnipotent Being, Creator of All that Exists and Dispenser of Blessings.
On the contrary, the horizons of the Greek were never to pass beyond material, visible man, the conqueror of hostile Nature. On the earth, everything gravitated around him; the supreme objective of art was to reproduce his exact likeness. In the “heavens”, paradoxically, he alone was to be found, with his earthly faults and weaknesses, beneath the shell of gods distinguished from ordinary mortals only by physical strength. Thus, when the Greek borrowed the Egyptian god, a real god in the full sense of the word, provided with all the moral perfections that stem from sedentary life, he could understand that deity only by reducing him to the level of man. Consequently, the adoptive Pantheon of the Greek was merely another humanity…
The typically Negro—or Kushite, as Lenormant writes—kind of fable, with animals as characters, was introduced into Greece by the Egyptian Negro, Aesop, who was to inspire the fables of the Frenchman La Fontaine. Edgar Allen Poe, in “Some Words with a Mummy”, presents a symbolic idea of the scope of scientific and technical knowledge in ancient Egypt.pg 230-233
Astronomers have noted in the Great Pyramid indications of the sidereal year, the anomalistic year, the precessions of the equinoxes “for 6,000 years, whereas modern astronomy knows them for only about 400 years.” Mathematicians have detected in it the exact value of “pi”, the exact average distance between the sun and the earth, the polar diameter of the earth, and so on…pg 233
The ancestors of the Blacks, who today live mainly in Black Africa, were the first to invent mathematics, astronomy, the calendar, sciences in general, arts, religion, agriculture, social organization, medicine, writing, technique, architecture; that they were the first to erect buildings out of 6 million tons of stone (The Great Pyramid) as architects and engineers--not simply as unskilled laborers; that they built the immense temple of Karnak...
Consequently, the Black man must be able to restore the continuity of his national historic past, to draw from it the moral advantage needed to reconquer his place in the modern world, without falling into excesses of a Nazism in reverse for, insofar as one can speak of race, the civilization that is his might have been created by any other human race placed in so favorable and unique a setting.-pg 234-235
Cheikh Anta Diop-African historian, anthropologist, physicist, Egyptologist and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. A true scholar.
No comments:
Post a Comment