Download Chapter 3 - aumedia .info

EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
Chapter 3: The First Horseman takes over Africans’
Frontier Empires
The rise and fall of black African geopolitical prominence and dissemination
of African culture from the Negro delta 10,000 BC to 500 BC
Africans with the L3 haplogroup migrated from the Horn of Africa into
Yemen/Arabia, settling on the coast along the way into present day Iran,
Pakistan, India, until they got into Southern China and Taiwan, in what is
called The Great Coastal Migration.
Initially, due to ice caps covering most of Eurasia, they didn’t settle in
the interior but migrated along the coast. The ice caps meant that sea levels
were low so there were still land bridges between the Horn of Africa and
Arabia, as well as Arabia and the Near Asia. Also, the low sea levels
enabled crossing into Indonesia and Philipines onto Australia easier due to
land bridges or low sea levels that made island hopping possible for ancient
canoes.
The Eurasian migrants took their African culture along; while some
continued to be hunter-gatherers, others settled to farm African crops like
millet and other grains, as well as Yams in India. Since they populated land
all the way to Australia by 40,000 years ago, over time they began to form
societies and cities. Detailed information of ancient African civilizations in
Asia is scant due to the long time frame and the global racist agenda to wipe
off all traces of ancient African civilizations across the world. Obvious
African influences in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China are
vehemently denied.
Thanks to contemporary historians like the Senegalese historian Anta
Diop, African-American scholar Runoko Rashidi, Nigerian Professor
Catherine Acholonu and a few others, the new information trickling in on
African frontier empires would not be accessed. Also, the new advances in
genetics have countered mainstream claims that Africans only stepped out
of Africa as slaves. New genetic evidence has confirmed that Africans were
the first modern human settlers in Eurasia. Out of all continental ancestral
clades, it has been proven that the Oceania clade, composed of Asian
Africans called Negroids, is the closest clade to the African clade, especially
the East African sub-clade, their last stopover in Africa.
63
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
They gradually settled in small settlements that became villages and
towns by 5000BC, and then around 4000 BC became known as civilizations
and major trade centers that traded afar. Ancient Egypt, Sumer, Elam,
Harappan Indus Valley and the Far East all had African civilizations, based
on African culture and trade. Like in ancient Egypt, Eurasian academia
claims that the ancient Eurasia civilizations wrote in what is now regarded
as lost languages, but this is because the languages were African originated.
Otherwise if they had been Eurasian languages, they would have been
deciphered by one of the Indo-European or Asiatic languages.
The dark-skinned African civilizations laid the foundations of global
trade and human civilisation, while Europeans were in the central Asia
plains and mountains until they came south to overrun the African
civilizations from around 2000BC in what is known as the Era of the First
Horseman. With climate change in the central Asian freezing plains, where
they domesticated horses and designed the war chariot, Eurasians migrated
south to destroy the civilizations, brutally suppressed the survivors and tried
to erase traces of Africa and blackness.
On the coast migration route from Ethiopia into Arabia and around the
peninsula, Sumer were various settlements that coalesced into citystates in
Mesopotamian Euphrates-Tigris Delta, on the shores of the Persian Gulf,
southern modern day Iraq. It was reputed to be one of the earliest
civilisations that brought about writing, plough agriculture and astronomy.
Its growth can mainly be attributed to being on the trade route of African
goods to Asia that begins in Egypt and ended in the Indus Valley and China.
Akkadian Afro-Asian Semitic kings were to overthrow the original kings
and takeover the culture. Though the people called themselves ‘ug sag giga
ga’ meaning the ‘Black headed people’1, they were named Sumer by the
Akkadians that took up their culture and told the history from their own
perspective.
Elam, also on the Persian Gulf, suffered the same fate being one of the
Black empires in the region that was destroyed and erased by the Eurasians
and their Afro-Asiatic offspring, the Akkadians. Sumer and Elam were
midpoints between the two great population and trade centers, Ancient
Egypt and the Harappan Indus Valley Black civilizations, and enjoyed the
benefits of trade and synergies that arose from being in the centre. However
while it was possible to completely erase their physical legacies and dilute
1
W. Hallo, W. Simpson (1971). The Ancient Near East. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
p. 28.
64
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
their African gene pool because of the nearby Eurasian homeland in the
Caucasius mountains, the Harappan Indus Valley and ancient Egypt with
much bigger populations were a bit more resistant.
The Harappan Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was based in the Indus
basin in present-day Pakistan, northwest India and Afghanistan. From about
60,000yrs ago African Indians, Dravidians, filled up the Indian sub-region
all the way to South China and as expected small settlements coalesced over
time to form a civilization and trade center of cities by 3,350BC. The main
Dravidian cities of the IVC were Harappa and Mohenjo Daro and were well
laid out with street drainage. The 1900BC arrival of barbarian IndoEuropean groups from Andronovo Cultural complex of Western Siberia
(Kazakhatan) that destroyed the IVC towns by 1800BC, compressed black
Indians, Dravidian Indians, into South and Eastern India and Sri Lanka,
where they currently number nearly two hundred million.
The Indo-Europeans destroyed the northwest India civilisation and built
a new empire using the Black Indian culture and practices, which include
ancestor worship, the African Information Retrieval System like Ifa that
they transformed into Buddhism and Hinduism. Since the Indo-Europeans
couldn’t completely kill off the African civilisers or dilute their gene pool
beyond recognition, they subjected them to brutal racial caste systems as
they engaged in cultural genocide that persists till date in India.
It wasn’t until the 1920s that the Eurasian falsehood, of Dravidians
being primitive Black people, was exposed by archaeological excravations
in British India Punjab district that brought to view over 1050 lost and
forgotten cities. The white Eurasian mainstream was to deny that it was a
black Indian civilization, but the evidence was overwhelmingly. The
cultural and linguistic similiarities of Dravidian and IVC has been cited by
researchers like Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola.
Sir Mortimer Wheeler, director of the Archaeological Survey of India in
1944 and Archaeological Adviser to Pakistan in 1949, who directed the
digging of IVC, proposed that the decline of IVC was caused by the
invasion of an Indo-European tribe called Aryans from Central Asia and
cited evidence of a group of 37 skeletons found in Mohenjo Daro and
passages in the Vedas referring to battles and forts.
The Indus Valley Civilisation, with no large monuments and palaces,
was an egalitarian society with planned cities filled with traders and artisans
and no single ruler. It mainly depended on trade with Sumer and especially
65
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
Elam that was quite geographically close. Many scholars have proposed that
there was an Elamo-Dravidian linguistic family1 and cultural linkage2,
especially David McAlpin3 that found that they had over 30% similar
cognates.
The Mature Harappan Phase is contemporary to the Old Elamite Period,
Early Dynastic to UR111 Mesopotamia and Old kingdom to Ist
Intermediate Ancient Egypt, and they all began to witness decline with the
2000BC advent of Indo-European barbarians – the First Horsemen with the
composite bow and horse-drawn chariots.
It is noteworthy to mention some writers have propounded an African
Indian, Dravidian, origin to some South China civilizations and dynasties
like Yangshao (5000 to 3000BC) and Dawenkou (4100 to 2600BC)
civilisations, as well as Xia (2100 to 1600BC) and early Shang(1700 to
1046BC) dynasties. It is logical that with the spread of Dravidan and Pgymy
Africans across South Asia and Oceania there would have come a time,
probably around the Yangshao and Dawenkou eras, when they would
coalesce into civilizations in South China to the Yellow River.
The red and black pottery from the Yangshao era are similar to those
found in Harappan IVC and it is claimed that that the fish and bird totems
belonged to Africans from Africa, Mesopotamia and especially the
Dravidian religion, which formed the based of Hinudism and Buddism later
practiced in China. However, unless the attacks of the First Horseman came
at a much later date than those of Egypt and Western Asia, the African
claim of Shang and Xia dynasty needs more evidence.
Mainstream Chinese history starts with Xia (2100BC to 1600BC) and
Shang dynasties (1700BC to 1050BC), but provides no significant evidence
of the existence or ethnic identity of the early dynastic era, and until
recently were actually taken as mere myths. There are also cultural myths of
ancient Black people in Korea, Japan and Taiwan that were tied to
1
Lockard, Craig (2010). Societies, Networks, and Transitions, Volume 1: To 1500 (2nd ed.). India:
Cengage Learning. p. 40. ISBN 1439085358.
2
Ratnagar, Shereen (2006). Trading Encounters: From the Euphrates to the Indus in the Bronze Age.
Oxford University Press, India. ISBN 0-19-568088-X.
3
David McAlpin, "Toward Proto-Elamo-Dravidian", Language vol. 50 no. 1 (1974); David
McAlpin: "Elamite and Dravidian, Further Evidence of Relationships", Current Anthropology vol. 16
no. 1 (1975); David McAlpin: "Linguistic prehistory: the Dravidian situation", in Madhav M.
Deshpande and Peter Edwin Hook: Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, Center for South and Southeast
Asian Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1979); David McAlpin, "Proto-Elamo-Dravidian:
The Evidence and its Implications", Transactions of the American Philosophical Society vol. 71 pt. 3,
(1981)
66
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
prosperity and revered in particular festivals. Some African scholars have
claimed that the Zhou dynasty, representing modern Chinese known as Hua,
defeated the black Shang dynasty and pushed them to the Pacific coast,
where they were forced to move to the Philipines and Oceania. But, we need
more evidence to ask more questions and form an historical construct of
what happened to the Dravidian and Pgymy peoples that migrated to the
area.
With most Eurasians unwilling to divulge information on the African
input into their latter Eurasian civilisations, it would be difficult if not
impossible to get more information, knowing what Africans had to go
through to lay claim to Ancient Egypt on African soil. An argument only
put to rest recently with the advent of genetic anthropology.
In prehistoric Africa, nomadic hunter-gatherers had spread to the Nile
Valley and Northeast Africa by 120,000 years ago. The proto-sedentary
farmers slowly accumulated in the Niger delta and as the forests along the
complex waterways were filled, new sites were settled along the riverbanks
in the grasslands, which eventually included the Blue and White Nile.
Western Africa was blessed with abundant water through heavy rains
that culminated in river basins like the Niger, Benue, Volta, Pra, and
Senegambia. Due to the rains from the Atlantic that approached West Africa
at an angle, Nigeria was always the most fertile. The Jos Plateau was a great
water catchment area that gave rise to rivers like the Sokoto and Kaduna
that watered modern northwest and central Nigerian grasslands. The Yobe
and others watered northeast Nigeria and Lake Chad area.
The western boundary of the West Africa population was between the
source of the Niger and the Atlantic mouth of the Senegal, while the center
of the grassland population was between the middle Niger, the Chad river
system, and the source of the Benue in Cameroon. The lands between the
source of the Benue and the Nile (present-day Central Africa Republic and
Sudan Republic) were wooded grasslands that were often threatened by the
Sahara Desert and vulnerable to long, dry periods. They were intermittently
inhabited by Africans who moved farther east to the White Nile and the
Ethiopian highlands.
Probably due to climatic changes between 18000 and 8000BC, the sea
levels rose to submerge the land bridge connecting the Horn of Africa to
Arabia (Mesopotamia), therefore making Ethiopia a dead end for land
67
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
migrations. Although the populations around Ethiopia coalesced into
communities, they were not substantial and were surpassed by other areas
due to its relative aridity and lack of land routes to Arabia for trade.
The immediate Nile (in present-day southern Sudan) could not sustain
large agricultural communities due to its narrow floodplains, but the
foundations of Meroe and Kush were laid as blacks moved north to the
wider, fertile floodplains called Upper Egypt.
Due to climatic changes brought about by the end of the Ice Age, the
pressures of pastoralism and grain cultivation on the grasslands, Western
Sahara and Sudan became more arid, and the desert reached Kano in northcentral Nigeria. As water became the most important resource in western
Sudan, the grasslands were unable to sustain the population from about
8000 BC, and famine made survivors relocate closer to riverbanks that
hadn’t dried up.
Africans from the surrounding dry grasslands were attracted to Upper
Egypt, which attests to successive African settlements from about 8000 BC.
Upper Egypt was a fertile area about 700 kilometers long and 10 to 20
kilometers wide that was fertilised by the rich, seasonal, equatorial silt
deposited on the Nile banks. By about 5500BC, small African tribes living
in the Nile Valley had developed an advanced culture with firm control of
agriculture, animal husbandry and cottage industries. They produced
distinctive pottery and personal items like combs and beads.
The largest of the early Nile cultures was known as the Badari, which
originated from the Western Sahara towards Nigeria, and were known for
quality ceramics, stone tools and copper1. They traded with other Africans
in the area and from afar – they imported obdsidian from Ethiopia used to
shape blades and other objects from flakes2. The Badari were followed by
the Amratian and Gerzeh along the valley3. The Nile tribes slowly
developed and traded with Mesopotamia as they coalesced into bigger
settlements. They were believed to be culturally and economically united
before the political union of ancient Egypt. It must be noted that most
1
Hayes, W. C. (October 1964). "Most Ancient Egypt: Chapter III. The Neolithic and Chalcolithic
Communities of Northern Egypt".JNES (No. 4 ed.) 23: pg220.
2
Barbara G. Aston, James A. Harrell, Ian Shaw (2000). Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw editors.
"Stone," in Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, Cambridge, 5–77, pp. 46–47. Also note:
Barbara G. Aston (1994). "Ancient Egyptian Stone Vessels," Studien zur Archäologie und Geschichte
Altägyptens 5, Heidelberg, pp. 23–26
3
Childe, V. Gordon (1953), "New light on the most ancient Near East" (Praeger Publications)
68
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
ancient Egyptian names were identified and spelt by Greek invaders that
wrote the history thousands of years after the occurence.
Probably due to population pressures caused by the savannah’s aridity,
and the need to control trade coming in from Mesopotamia, a significant
change occurred under Menes (Narmer), the black pharaoh of Upper Egypt
that united it with Lower Nile and the Nile Delta in what became known as
Kemit/Kemi and later Egypt. However, the title pharaoh was not used until
1500BC, two thousand years later.
Menes took over the Nile delta between 4000 BC and 3300 BC, and he
made improvements to the Lower Nile River by diverting it at Inbu-Hedj
(Memphis in Greek) with technology that could have originated only from
the land of a thousand rivers, the Niger delta.
Menes
Figure 10
69
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
The Nile diversion resulted in rapid growth with more reclaimed land
for agriculture, settlement, and foreign trade. By opening the delta, Egypt
became the first frontier black African empire to the world that others were
to emulate and build upon. A ship with planks sewn together, 75 feet long
(23m), dated to 3000BC was among the 14 ships found in Abdju and is
believed to belong to the second king, Pharaoh Aha1.
Its long civilisation is divided into various stages: the pre-dynastic
period (7000 to 3100BC); Old Kingdom (3100-2181BC); First Intermediate
period (2181-2055BC); Middle Kingdom (2055-1650BC); Second
Intermediate period (1650-1550BC); New Kingdom (1550-1069BC); Third
Intermediate period (1069-664BC) and the Late period (664-30BC).
It should be noted that the dates are not written in stone and have been
challenged by African scholars that alleged that the times have been greatly
reduced by Eurocentric scholars. The intermediate and late periods were
times of internal strife, anarchy and structural changes, which by the New
Kingdom Ancient Egypt had lost its true essence of Original African
cultures.
The first capital was Abdju (Abydos in Greek) but was moved to
Memphis during the Old Kingdom, probably under King Djoser, the first
king of the third dynasty (2691-2625). Djoser is reputed to have started the
first step pyramids in Saqqara. The kings like Yoruba kings were living
kings (igba keji Orisha- second in command to the gods), and were able to
centralize power, collect taxes and push collective projects. During the 3rd
dynasty of the Old Kingdom formerly independent ancient Egyptian states
became Nomes and their rulers Nomarchs that were subservient to the king.
The Old Kingdom reached its zenith under the 4th dynasty (26132494BC) which began with King Sneferu that built three pyramids. He was
succeeded by his son, Khufu (Cheops), who built the great Giza pyramid
and in conjuction with his sons built the Sphinx. The 5th dynasty turned
away from pyramid building to temple building for the Sun god Ra as its
religious importance grew. The Old Kingdom began to wane as the nomes
grew more independent, especially in the Nile Delta. The break occurred
1
Schuster, Angela M.H. "This Old Boat", 11 December 2000. Archaeological Institute of America.
70
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
after 8th dynasty under the rule of King Ibi that is believed to have built a
small pyramid in Saqqara1.
With the increase in foreign trade into the delta area, the nomes interests
became divergent to those of the king up the river, because of their
economic and cultural association with nomads and traders they relied on
for trade. Therefore with widespread famine, they broke away from the
main body of Ancient Egypt to form a Lower Niger kingdom with a capital
at Nen-nesu (Heracleopolis in Greek). This made the original Egyptian
rulers move down south to Waset, ‘city of spectre’, renamed Thebes in
Greek.
Waset (Thebes) had been an original African town established before
Memphis and the unification, and was the second largest city in the world
with 40,000 people by 2000BC, second only to Memphis with 60,000
people. It was often viewed as the ancestral home of Egyptian rulers, the
gateway to Sudan and Africa as a whole, as well as the key religious centre
being the seat of Amun, Mut and Khonsu.
Throughout ancient Egypt, whenever the kings got overwhelmed in the
Lower Egypt, it was Thebes that they fell back on to give them black
African power to regain their power in Lower Egypt. Therefore, Kings were
to regroup in Thebes to recapture Abdju and later the whole Nile under
Mentuhotep, who reunified Egypt in 2033BC to start the 11th dynasty under
the middle kingdom. Mentuhotep and his 11th dynasty successors continued
to rule from Thebes.
Under the 12th dynasty, efforts were made to strengthen the political and
economic security of Egypt with the construction of huge land reclamation
to boost agricultural produce, while the military secured the borders with
walls. The reunified kingdom was to enjoy an increase in arts and quality of
living, as democratization of spiritual rights increased and access to God
was not restricted to the elites only. However, with the push to increase
agricultural productivity, white Hyskos Canaanites were allowed into the
Nile Delta, where they were to forment trouble that eventually led to the
collapse of the Old Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period.
The Hyksos (shepherd foreign rulers), between 1730 BC and 1580 BC,
were the First Horseman era tied to the global attack of Eurasians on
African civilizations with the effective use of composite bows and horse
drawn chariots. The influx of the Hyksos has been linked to the biblical
1
Kathryn A. Bard, An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt (Malden: Blackwell
Publishing, 2008), 163
71
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
immigration of Joseph and his brothers into Egypt. The rapidly growing
population of migrant Eurasians in the eastern half of the delta, especially
Avaris, was augmented by their cousins, who eventually invaded with the
new, fast war technology of horses and chariots1.
They seized control of Egypt and forced the central government to
retreat to Thebes, where the Pharaoh was treated as a vassal and expected to
pay tribute2. The First Horsemen, the Hyksos, retained Egyptian models of
government and took the role of pharaohs as they integrated African
Egyptian cultural traits into their own culture. Apart from the problem of the
enemies within the territory, Africans were at a disadvantage; horses
couldn’t survive the insect life of the African continent, and breeding them
en mass was an expensive exercise.
The African dynasties had to again take refuge in Thebes, Upper Nile in
1730 BC. The few centuries of Hyskos domination permanently affected the
cultural makeup of Egypt and the Northeast region due to intermarrying that
bred a large mulatto Afro-Asiatic race, proto-Arabs. The Jews were initially
the largest group of Afro-Asians. They adapted the social structure of Egypt
and transformed it into a world religion that mimicked the African religion,
making it acceptable to Eurasians, who were ascribed an elevated role in the
evolution of human civilisation.
Moses, their leader, grew up in a black Egyptian court and temple, and
he realised that the best way to foster unity among his people was through
monotheism. Just like with circumcision and Abraham, Moses copied the
Egyptian social code, because Egypt was the model state of that time
(similar to how many countries today copy the US constitution and form of
democratic government). The biblical Ten Commandments summarised
Egyptian mores as stated in the negative confessions of the Book of the
Dead.
Although refuted by many Christians, it is unrealistic to believe that a
minority people could live in a host country for four hundred years and not
reflect that country’s cultural norms. A relationship surely existed between
the similar laws, especially when Moses and his people had no strong
culture apart from that of the Egyptians. According to biblical accounts,
they started as a clan of seventy members of Joseph’s family among more
than a million African people.
1
Shaw, Ian (2003). The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford, England: Oxford University
Press. ISBN 0-19-280458-8. Pg189
2
Ryholt, Kim (January 1997). The Political Situation in Egypt During the Second Intermediate
Period. Copenhagen, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum. ISBN 87-7289-421-0. Pg310
72
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
The denial of any beneficial relationship is believed to be due to the
expulsion, which resulted in the negative portrayal of Egypt and blacks in
Jewish writings. In Genesis 9:25, Noah is said to have cursed Ham and his
son Canaan to slavery. According to Genesis 10:6, Ham was the father of
blacks to include the people of Cush, Egypt, Punt, and Canaan. This was
used as justification for the genocide and robbing of Africans in Canaan.
After a long period of subservience, Egpytians were able to get the
support of Nubia and challenge the Hyskos in a 30 year that ended in
1555BC. Ahmose 1 waged a series of campaigns against the Hyskos to rid
them from the land and established the New Kingdom.
The New Kingdom was strengthened by Tuthmosis 1, Hatshepsut and
Tuthmosis 111 through military campaigns that extended the empire to its
greatest extent. They established a period of unrivalled prosperity by
securing borders and strengthening diplomatic ties with their neighbours.
Hatshepsut was reputed to have made a trip far into Black Africa and
cemented loyalties of Nubia to open access to critical imports.
The constant presence of foreign immigrants and the large mulatto class
led to the extension of the administrative policy of centralisation to an unAfrican policy of monotheism, introduced by Amenophis. Ramses II of the
Nineteenth Dynasty succeeded in implementing it. This misdirection of the
African religious system continued to undermine Egyptian culture,
internally and externally.
Africans in Egypt remained hostile to the Eurasian men, but they
acquired a taste for white women, who were sold by their men for food and
goods, as exemplified by the story of Abraham and Sarah. This ‘jungle
fever’ pastime proved costly to the sociopolitical health of Africans for a
long time to come.
The mixed-race Egyptians exploited their middleman advantage in
wrestling for power and, in so doing, undermined the African system.
Mulatto Afro-Asians abused the system of African extended families by
enslaving their numerous African immigrant cousins. When the numbers of
black immigrants dwindled, the Afro-Asians carried out raids down south.
Administrative posts that were hereditary were filled with the corrupt
and inefficient mixed-race sons of decadent officials. In the typical African
setting of age-gender workgroups and the understanding, partnership role of
the African woman, lineage might be a necessary condition of certain posts,
but the post did go to the best person within the workgroup of inheritors
who had been groomed from birth to take its responsibilities. A foreign
mother, whose interests and background were at odds with the African
73
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
mentality, could use the female power inherent in the African system to
upset the system in favour of her unworthy, mixed-race inheritors.
Ramses II and his father, Seti I, were not the rightful heirs to the throne,
and they used the wrong orientation while trying to secure Egypt from
attack from European migrants. An attempt to confront the incessant delta
troubles resulted in the employment of foreign mercenaries in the delta and
coastlands, which subsequently destroyed the black African national
character of the army.
Under Ramesses II Egypt had to withdraw from the Near East with the
rise of the Hittites and the middle Assyrian Empire. The Libyan Berbers and
Aegean sea peoples placed the delta under constant attack that was initially
repelled by the military, but Egypt was soon to lose the area to the
Assyrians. Also beset by internal problems caused by corruption and
misrule, Egypt fell into anarchy and the end of the New Kingdom gave way
to another intermediate period.
Various ethnicities were to usurp power in Lower Nile and the Delta
ranging from Arabs, Jews, Greeks etc. It was not until 727BC that Nubia
rose again to support the Africans in their quest to regain their frontiers.
Based on millennia of trade and acculturation, the Kushite King Piye
(Piankhi) left his Nubian capital of Napata to seize back from Thebes all the
way to the Delta1. He laid the foundations of the 25th dynasty with pharaohs
like Taharqa to usher in a period of renaissance in arts, architecture and
religion2. They restored or built temples and monuments throughout the
land and the Nile valley saw the first widespread pyramid building since the
Middle Kingdom, even in Sudan3.
Shabaka, Piankhi’s brother, succeeded him in 706 BC and moved the
administrative capital closer to the delta for better control. In spite of this,
Egypt was still belabored by incessant attacks from foreigners in the delta,
which became overwhelmingly white with the arrival and settlement of
Assyrians.
The ironclad Assyrians became the new superpower of the
Mediterranean. They took Judah, led the Jews away in chains, and came
down heavily on the Phoenicians and Egyptians scouring for iron to
1
Bonnet, Charles (2006). The Nubian Pharaohs. New York: The American University in Cairo
Press. pp. 142–154.ISBN 978-977-416-010-3.
2
Diop, Cheikh Anta (1974). The African Origin of Civilization. Chicago, Illinois: Lawrence Hill
Books. pp. 219–221. ISBN 1-55652-072-7.
3
Emberling, Geoff (2011). Nubia: Ancient Kingdoms of Africa. New York: Institute for the Study of
the Ancient World. pp. 9–11.
74
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
compete, though to no avail. In collaboration with the Nile delta Eurasian
enemies, the Assyrians, with their iron weapons, gave the black African
pharaoh, Taharqa, the youngest son of Piankhi, a fatal and resounding
defeat.
Despite black Egyptians regrouping at Thebes and briefly recapturing
Memphis in 669 BC, Assyrians relaunched an attack on Egypt, with the
backing of the delta feudal lords, and they pillaged all the way to Thebes in
661 BC. With Egypt becoming an Assyrian province under a white pharaoh,
the black pharaoh had to escape south to Napata.
Blacks lost control of Egypt forever and began the long process of
retreating into the Sub-Sahara as each successive white invader ventured
farther into Africa. In 525 BC, Egypt became a province of Persia. This
lasted until 332 BC when the Greeks, under Alexander the Great, took over.
The frontline African civilization was gradually withered down by
various Eurasian and Afro-Asian groups. Unfortunately, this was why
Eurasians could later deny any Black African input in one of Africa’s
greatest civilizations.
Ancient Egypt’s Original African cultural complex…
There has been controversy over the race of the ancient Egyptians, as
many argue that Eurasians went out of their way to site an empire at the
entrance of Africa. This is because over the last few millennia, people from
the Eurasian wildernesses migrated back into black Africa. This resulted in
the disfiguration and disorientation of a culture that Eurasians were never
able to truly represent because of the harsh freezing wilderness background
encoded in their cultural psyche that made them prone to war against Man
and environment.
At the beginning of this century, the world watched in horror as Muslim
extremists destroyed historic texts and monuments in Mali and ancient
Indian Buddha statues in Afghanistan. African history repeatedly faced such
barbarism over the last twenty-five hundred years from Jews, Persians,
Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, French, Anglo-Saxons, and others. The fact
that North African countries have been whitened and Arabised over three
thousand years should not surprise anyone, considering the change in the
more distant Americas over a mere five hundred years, where Native
American Indians are now less than 2 percent of the population.
75
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
Though the French were the first modern Europeans, in the early 1800s,
to discover and try to erase black Egyptian history, the European cover-up
was perfected in Chicago universities in the early 1900s with dubious
radioactive tests and other ‘scientific’ fallacies confusing the timing and
nature of Egyptian history.
There is much forensic evidence to prove the African-ness of the
Egyptian civilisation, which is well elaborated in Chiek Anta Diop’s The
African Origin of Civilization. Diop explained the true nature of Egyptian
history, but being a Senegalese from the grasslands, he failed to realise the
significance of the rainforest, despite alluding to the fact that the Yoruba
and other West Africans held the key to ancient Egypt.
Apart from the remaining statues that clearly portray Africans, many
other cultural and social similarities exist, ranging from mode of worship to
social organisation. African languages were not completely differentiated by
5000 BC, and older mainstream dates given for Afro-Asian languages were
derived inaccurately from glottochronology. The basic estimation is that
after a thousand years of divergence, 74 percent of the common vocabulary
will be retained1. This is based on trends exhibited by Indo-European
languages that don’t apply directly to African settings, where the attempts
of Eurasian invaders to erase the presence of a superior African grassland
culture makes the actual divergence appear older than rainforest Africans’
divergence amongst each other.
When Menes united Lower and Upper Egypt, African languages and
religion were still similar. The savannah grasslands spoke a slightly
differentiated major lingua franca from the forest regions, especially
because the spread of the Sahara caused black communities to move closer
to the riverbanks of the Nile, Benue, and Niger. Though new linguistic and
cultural traits began to appear with the opening of the Lower Nile, Africans
retained the tenets of their Ifa-like beliefs: communal feasts, naturalistic
gods, circumcision of both sexes, prohibition of homosexuality, religious
and social tolerance, and ‘democracy’.
After improving the Nile delta, black African Pharaohs built Memphis
where they worshipped in true African fashion. Although they
acknowledged Shango in some texts, they devised new gods in the African
naturalistic style. In the stormy rainforest where thunder was the most
1
Elizabeth Isichei, A History of African Societies to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 47.
76
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
prominent weather feature, Shango was one of the most prominent gods.
There in the sunny desert, Amon-Ra, the sun god, took the center stage (in
Yoruba, amon means a terrifying spirit; ara is ‘thunder’, and i-ra-wo is ‘a
shining star’).
The totemic symbols used in the rainforest and the Nile religions were
similar, with snake and bird symbols used to represent the most
supernaturally important beliefs, especially in Yoruba and Egyptian cultures
with snake goddesses Osunmare and Wadjet. The all-knowing eye of
Anyanwu was replicated in Egyptian mythology, while its goddess
Ma’at/Mother Earth was similar to the Igbo goddess Ala, both being central
to the belief systems.
Nsudde Pyramids in Igboland
Figure 11
77
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
Their divine kings were usually masters of tradition and knowledge, and
they respected the gods of their ancestors. In both Egyptian and Yoruba
cultures, when the king died (to become a god), essential parts had to be
removed from his body before another king could take on his divine, earthly
powers.
Figure 12
Khufu (Cheops)
(built the Sphinx and Great pyramid of Giza)
The pictures of their statues show these pharaohs were undoubtedly
black until Eurasians arrived after Egypt passed its zenith with the building
of the pyramids. The first pyramids were not built in Egypt but in western
Sudan and Sahara by black Africans who later moved east to the Nile due to
desertification. The Igbo Nsude stepped pyramids looked like the stepped
pyramids in Sudan and Western Sahara, which were much older than those
of Egypt.
78
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
The Sphinx
Figure 13
Osiris
Figure 14
79
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
Figure 15
Pharaoh Mentuhotep, 11th Dynasty, 2100 BC.
The pharaohs ensured that they kept law and order and were not
initially tyrannical, but to use the Nile and its seasonal floods in the most
optimal fashion, a tendency towards centralisation and overbearing
government arose. Socioeconomic and natural laws were codified in
religious rituals performed by black African priests who eventually departed
from the oral secrecy of Ifa traditions by writing them down in the Book of
the Dead.
The concept of death was similar in Yorubaland and Igboland, where
people endeavoured to provide themselves a comfortable afterlife. The
celebration of passing to another spiritual level was peculiar to Africans,
which made the Eurasians who came into Egypt call Africans ‘death
worshippers’ (Nekro Manteia in Greek, which became Nigro Mantia in
Latin). The mantia was lost, and Africans were called Nigro, Negro, or
Niger depending on the European tribe.
The Yoruba word for burial is sin oku (‘worshipping the dead’), and
even though the pyramids in the forest couldn’t stand the test of time, this
social trait is still present among Yoruba, who remain the world’s merriest
mourners. In present-day New York, Chicago, and most world-class cities,
the Yoruba ‘spray money’ at funeral parties. Even poor Yorubas in Nigeria
80
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
endeavour to spiritually ‘turn over’ their long-dead relatives once a while,
whereby people practically shower friends and strangers with money in a
party atmosphere. One-dollar notes are shunned, falling to the floor, while
unaffordable hundred dollar bills are ‘sprayed’ away, as they celebrate
relating the present to a time of past glory and plenty.
Cultural beliefs apart from burial social traits were passed on from the
forest and pervaded the entirety of Egyptian society. Women held similar
roles, with black Egyptian priestesses being a strong societal force behind
the pharaoh, and both sexes were circumcised at birth. Like other Yoruba
cultural traits that spread to other parts of the world, the spread of
circumcision to other peoples was documented in the Bible.
In Genesis 12, Abraham, the forerunner of the Jews, took refuge in
Egypt due to a famine in Mesopotamia. When he arrived, he came up with a
feeble excuse to pimp his wife to the pharaoh by calling her his sister in
return for food, gold, and animals. Unfortunately, Sarah gave the pharaoh
and his family sexual diseases, and they were deported. It is said that God
instructed Abraham to begin circumcision as a step towards building a great
nation. Obviously, the only great nation in their arid world was Egypt, from
whence they had just been deported. It is only logical that the circumcision
lesson was well learnt, because they realised that a strong, healthy nation
had to be protected from sexual diseases. The only problem was that
because Abraham devised the solution, he was not aware of female
circumcision and took only half of the lesson.
This partial circumcision had huge ramifications, as the Jews
disseminated the practice of male circumcision, which is still popular.
Ironically, the West now condemns the practice of circumcising girls in the
first few weeks of life. Although only a small minority still practices the
tradition, the Yoruba and other Africans have seen so-called authorities
from Western governments, in television talk shows, complaining about
depriving women of the right to enjoy sex for its own sake. In the modern
world, it is difficult to argue for ‘sex for procreation only’, despite the
HIV/AIDS epidemic raging in East and South Africa.
Apart from the social traits observed by Egyptian society, tangible
technologies and trade items were imported from the south. After the
redirection of the Nile, West Africa plants were introduced including the
bottle gourd, watermelon, and the tamarind fruit. Much later, cotton and
tobacco were passed to Egypt or sometimes ‘jumped’ to Mesopotamia and
India. Egyptian barley and wheat were a continuation of the sorghum/millet
grain culture invented in the African savannah.
81
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
Egypt did not give the Sub-Sahara new technology, either agricultural
or metallurgical. No new plants were introduced from Egypt into the
western Sudan or Niger forests, and black African metal technologies were
developed independently. Iron working got to western Sudan and Nigeria
before Egypt, and the Yoruba lost-wax method of casting metals like bronze
was one of the best in the world. Until the 1800s and the discovery of gold
in South Africa, the West Africa was also the world’s major Gold Belt.
Initially, it was mainly mined by secret cults of Yoruba. They sold it to the
savannah peoples who sold it to Asia through Egypt.
Meanwhile, the troubles in Egypt had ramifications for the Sub-Saharan
Africans who wanted to trade or migrate. New trade routes and empires
were created to bypass the trouble spots on the Nile. To the northwest of
Egypt, Phoenicians and Sub-Saharan Africans formed a trading post called
Carthage in 813 BC on the coast of present-day Tunisia. To the south of
Egypt, Meroe (slightly south of the Blue and White Nile confluence in
present-day Sudan and Ethiopia, around the Blue Nile headwaters and the
Omo Valley) continued to absorb the population influx.
Ethiopia, the Biblical land of Punt, existed as a vibrant community
before political harmonization along the Nile and the Ancient Egyptian Old
Kingdom. Due to the loss of a land route to Mesopotamia, it was
overshadowed by Egypt that became the frontier land empire in Africa.
Trade was recorded between Egypt and Ethiopia, especially in myrrh, ‘and
Egyptian ships sailed the Red Sea as far as the myrrh-country1’. In addition
to myrrh, it is believed that ivory, gold and many other products were
imported from Ethiopia, but there was a misconception by later Eurasian
historians of what really was Ethiopia.
Ethiopia, meaning Ethiop/Aithiop area, was initially used to refer to
blacks from outside Egypt. It was derived from the Greek word aithiops
from aithein, meaning ‘to burn’, while ops meant ‘face’. The Greeks around
the Egyptian coast called their African civilisers ‘Nekro Mantias’ and the
recent African migrants ‘Aithiops’. To the Greeks, Africa was like a straight
line along the Nile, with Egypt in the front and all other Africans in a
1
Agatharchides, in Wilfred Harvey Schoff (Secretary of the Commercial Museum of Philadelphia)
with a foreword by W. P. Wilson, Sc. Director, The Philadelphia Museums.Periplus of the
Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century,
Translated from the Greek and Annotated (1912). New York, New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.,
pages 50 (for attribution) and 57 (for quote
82
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
country to its south called Ethiopia. This wrong impression was fueled by
the perception that most black traders who traveled to Egypt joined the Nile
to the south of the delta region.
From recent studies, it appears Ethiopia might have engaged in foreign
trade earlier than previously thought, due to evidence of early iron-working
and mining by the Mashariki Bantus and Zimbabweans, as well as
Ethiopian shipping. The eastern half of Africa appears to have been a source
of minerals and metals that would have been traded through Ethiopia to
Asia, however they remained unknown until the trouble in Nile Delta that
made traders seek alternative African ports.
The first internationally recognized kingdom in Ethiopia was known as
D’mt in Tigray with its capital at Yeha. D’mt rose to power around 10th
century BC and was based on the socioeconomic linkage between the Horn
of Africa (Ethiopia) and Yemen (Southern Arabia/Mesopotamia)1. This and
other proto-Aksum empires2 had strong ties with Arabia and were the
nearest ports to Asia.
The accumulation of Eurasians in Mesopotamia led to the resident
blacks moving farther into the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia and
Yemen), where they were cornered into widely intermingling and
exchanging cultural traits with Eurasians, which led to a number of new
Afro-Asian groups. While many of the blacks in Canaan coexisted and
intermingled with white refugees and formed Semitic groups like the Jews,
some Canaanites relocated farther down the Arabian Peninsula or the
Egyptian delta and coast.
Phoenicians went west to the African Mediterranean coast. This was in
line with them being a seafaring people who eventually sailed to scantly
populated Spain and Britain in search of the metals needed by the Egyptian
super-state.Other North African ports were later created with the westward
expansion of whites into Europe. This led to more direct routes across the
desert in Roman times, when areas to the east of the Nile were identified as
Ethiopia and those to the west as Negritia.
Trans-Saharan trade routes were created across the desert from the
Niger and Lake Chad area that supplied Carthage with gold, an increasingly
popular item used for exchange in the Asian spice market. Without the
1
Phillipson. "The First Millennium BC in the Highlands of Northern Ethiopia and South–Central
Eritrea: A Reassessment of Cultural and Political Development". African Archaeological
Review(2009) 26:257–274
2
Uhlig, Siegbert (ed.), Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: D-Ha. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005. p.
185.
83
EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION
guidance of rivers to help the traders, travel across the desert was a daunting
task, slightly assisted by the few oases on the way and the later advent of
the compass.
On the whole, Africans were able to showcase their culture to the world
in Egypt more than they could have in the forest, especially in building
stone pyramids the likes of which could not stand the abrasive weather of
the Yam Belt. However, the population of the one-river Egyptian state was
never as high, or as prosperous, as the Lower Niger Yam Belt.
Unfortunately but not unexpectedly, the ostentatious life and culture of
Egyptian blacks living on the frontier attracted foreign thieves and usurpers,
who would not relent until it was destroyed, from the Nile all the way back
to its source in West Africa.
84