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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