By John G. Jackson (1939)
"It is pretty well settled that the city
is the Negro's great contribution to civilization, for it was in Africa
where the first cities grew up." E. Haldeman-Julius
"Those piles of ruins which you see in that narrow valley watered by the Nile, are the remains of opulent cities, the pride of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia. … There a people, now forgotten, discovered while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe." Count Volney
"The accident of the predominance of white men in modern times should not give us supercilious ideas about color or persuade us to listen to superficial theories about the innate superiority of the white-skinned man. Four thousand years ago, when civilization was already one or two thousand years old, white men were just a bunch of semi-savages on the outskirts of the civilized world. If there had been anthropologists in Crete, Egypt, and Babylonia, they would have pronounced the white race obviously inferior, and might have discoursed learnedly on the superior germ-plasm or glands of colored folk." Joseph McCabe
"Those piles of ruins which you see in that narrow valley watered by the Nile, are the remains of opulent cities, the pride of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia. … There a people, now forgotten, discovered while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe." Count Volney
"The accident of the predominance of white men in modern times should not give us supercilious ideas about color or persuade us to listen to superficial theories about the innate superiority of the white-skinned man. Four thousand years ago, when civilization was already one or two thousand years old, white men were just a bunch of semi-savages on the outskirts of the civilized world. If there had been anthropologists in Crete, Egypt, and Babylonia, they would have pronounced the white race obviously inferior, and might have discoursed learnedly on the superior germ-plasm or glands of colored folk." Joseph McCabe
The late Professor George A. Dorsey noted that "H. G. Wells' heart beats faster in nearly every chapter of his Outline of History, because he cannot forget that he is Nordic, Aryan, English British, white, civilized." (Why We Behave Like Human Beings,
p. 40.) This patriotic zeal of Mr. Wells' has, in truth, caused him to
suppress certain facts that do not fit into his pet theories. In the
latest edition of his Outline of History, Mr. Wells ends his
chapter on The Early Empires with the following remarks: "No less an
authority than Sir Flinders Petrie gives countenance to the idea that
there was some very early connection between Colchis (the country to the
south of the Caucasus) and prehistoric Egypt. Herodotus remarked upon a
series of resemblances between the Colchians and the Egyptians."
(Wells' New and Revised Outline of History, p. 184, Garden City,
1931.) It would have been proper for Wells to have quoted the remarks of
Herodotus, so as to give us precise information on the series of
resemblances between the Cholchians and the Egyptians. Why he did not do
so we shall now see. In Book II, Section-104, of his celebrated History,
Herodotus states: "For my part I believe the Colchi to be a colony of
Egyptians, because like them they have black skins and frizzled hair."
(See any English translation of The History of Herodotus. The translation by Professor George Rawlinson is the best. See also W.E.B. DuBois, The Negro, p. 31, and Count Volney's Travels in Egypt and Syria,
Vol. I. pp. 80–81.) After discussing the civilizations of Egypt,
Babylonia and India, Wells had already referred to them as a "triple
system of white man civilizations." (Outline of History, Chap.
XIII, Sect. 5, p. 175) On concluding that the civilization of Egypt was a
white man civilization, he naturally would be careful not to quote the
above passage from Herodotus.
Most history texts, especially the ones on ancient history, start off
by telling us that there are either three, four or five races of man,
but that of those races only one has been responsible for civilization,
culture, progress and all other good things. The one race is of course
the white race, and particularly that branch of said race known as the
Nordic or Aryan. The reason for this is obvious; the writers of these
textbooks are as a rule Nordics, or so consider themselves. However,
prejudice alone will not account for this sort of thing.
There is a
confusion among historians and anthropologists concerning the proper
classification of races, and this confusion is used by biased writers to
bolster up their preconceptions. It is therefore necessary that we
discuss the subject of race classification in a rational manner before
proceeding further.
The early scientific classifications of the varieties of the human
species were geographical in nature. The celebrated naturalist, Linneaus
(1708–1778), for instance, listed four races, according to continent,
namely: (1) European (white), (2) African (black), (3) Asiatic (yellow),
and (4) American (red). Blumenback, in 1775, added a fifth type, the
Ocieanic or brown race. This classification is still used in some
grammar school Geographies, where the races of man are tabulated as:
Ethiopian (black), Caucasian (white), American (red), Mongolian (yellow)
and Malayan (brown). During the year 1800, the French naturalist,
Cuvier, announced the hypothesis that all ethnic types were traceable to
Ham, Chem and Japhet, the three sons of Noah. After that date race
classification developed into an amazing contest; a struggle which still
rages. By 1873, Haeckel had found no less than twelve distinct races of
mankind; and to show the indefatigable nature of his researches, he
annexed twenty-two more races a few years later, bringing the grand
total of human types up to thirty-four. Deniker, in 1900, presented to
the world a very imposing system of race classification. He conceived of
the human species existing in the form of six grand divisions,
seventeen divisions and twenty-nine races. And despite all this industry
among anthropologists, ethnologists and the like, there is yet no
agreement on the classification of races. Where one anthropologist finds
three racial types, another can spot thirty-three without the least
difficulty.
The Classifiers of race, however, regardless of how abundantly they
disagreed with each other as to the correct groupings of human types,
were of unanimous accord in the belief that the white peoples of the
world were far superior to the darker races. This opinion in still very
popular, but modern science is making it hard for intelligent people to
accept the fallacy. Many years ago the German philosopher, Schopenhauer,
remarked that, "there is no such thing as a white race, much as this is
talked of, but every white man is a faded or bleached one."
Schopenhauer possessed keen and sagacious foresight on this point. For
example, the English scholar, Joseph McCabe, expresses the following
view as the consensus of opinion among modern anthropologists: "There is
strong reason to think that man was at first very dark of skin,
woolly-haired and flat-nosed, and, as he wandered into different
climates, the branches of the race diverged and developed their
characteristics." (Key to Culture, No. 11, p. 10.)
Professor Franz Boas, the nestor of American anthropologists, has
divided the whole human race into only two divisions. This
classification of Boas' is admirably explained by Professor George A.
Dorsey:
Now look at the Pacific Ocean: on one side, the two Americas; on the other, Asia. (Geographically, Europe is a tail to the Asiatic kite.) The aboriginal population of the Americas and of Asia north of its southern peninsula was a light-skinned people with straight hair, relatively short arms, and a face without prominent jaws. Call that the Pacific Ocean or Mongoloid division. (Why We Behave Like Human Beings, pp. 44–45.)
Professors A. L. Kroeber and Fay-Cooper Cole are of the opinion that
the peoples of Europe have (been) bleached out enough to merit
classification as a distinct race. This would add a European or
Caucasoid division to the Negroid and Mongoloid races of the
classification proposed by Professor Boas. If we accept this three-fold
division of the human species, our classification ought to read as
follows: the races of man are three in number; (1) the Negroid, or
Ethiopian or black race; (2) the Mongoloid, or Mongolian or yellow race;
and (3) the Caucasoid or European or white race. This is the very
latest scheme of race classification.
Now that we have straightened out ourselves on the issue of the
classification of races, we may property turn to the main subject matter
of this essay, i.e., the ancient Ethiopians and their widespread
influence on the early history of civilization. In discussing the origin
of civilization in the ancient Near East, Professor Charles Seignobos
in his History of Ancient Civilization, notes that the first
civilized inhabitants of the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates valleys, were a
dark-skinned people with short hair and prominent lips; and that they
are referred to by some scholars as Cushites (Ethiopians), and as
Hamites by others. This ancient civilization of the Cushites, out of
which the earliest cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia grew, was not
confined to the Near East. Traces of it have been found all over the
world. Dr. W. J. Perry refers to it as the Archaic Civilization. Sir
Grafton Elliot Smith terms it the Neolithic Heliolithic Culture of the
Brunet-Browns. Mr. Wells alludes to this early civilization in his Outline of History,
and dates its beginnings as far back as 15,000 years B.C. "This
peculiar development of the Neolithic culture," says Mr. Wells, "which
Elliot Smith called the Heliolithic (sun-stone) culture, included many
or all of the following odd practices: (1) Circumcision, (2) the queer
custom of sending the father to bed when a child is born, known as
Couvade, (3) the practice of Massage, (4) the making of Mummies, (5)
Megalithic monuments (i.e. Stonehenge), (6) artificial deformation of
the heads of the young by bandages, (7) Tattooing, (8) religious
association of the Sun and the Serpent, and (9) the use of the symbol
known as the Swastika for good luck. … Elliot Smith traces these
associated practices in a sort of constellation all over this great
Mediterranean / Indian Ocean-Pacific area. Where one occurs, most of the
others occur. They link Brittany with Borneo and Peru. But this
constellation of practices does not crop up in the primitive home of
Nordic or Mongolian peoples, nor does it extend southward much beyond
equatorial Africa. … The first civilizations in Egypt and the
Euphrates-Tigris valley probably developed directly out of this
widespread culture." (Outline of History, pp. 141–143).
This ancient civilization is called NEOLITHIC
by Wells. This is a mistake; for we have overwhelming evidence that
these ancient peoples had long passed out of the New Stone Age stage of
culture, and were erecting edifices which could only have been
constructed by means of hard metal tools. Iron is the very backbone of
civilization, and the Iron Age began very anciently in Africa. The
researches of scholars like Boas, Torday and DuBois would lead us to
believe that the art of mining iron was first developed in the interior
of Africa, and that the knowledge of it passed through Egypt to the rest
of the world. (See W.E.B. DuBois, The Negro, pp. 114–116, Home University Library, New York and London, 1915.)
In modern geography the name Ethiopia is confined to the country
known as Abyssinia, an extensive territory in East Africa. In ancient
times Ethiopia extended over vast domains in both Africa and Asia. "It
seems certain," declares Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, "that classical
historians and geographers called the whole region from India to Egypt,
both countries inclusive, by the name of Ethiopia, and in consequence
they regarded all the dark-skinned and black peoples who inhabited it as
Ethiopians. Mention is made of Eastern and Western Ethiopians and it is
probable that the Easterners were Asiatics and the Westerners
Africans." (History of Ethiopia, Vol. I., Preface, by Sir E. A.
Wallis Budge.) In addition Budge notes that, "Homer and Herodotus call
all the peoples of the Sudan, Egypt, Arabia, Palestine and Western Asia
and India Ethiopians." (Ibid., p. 2.) Herodotus wrote in his celebrated History
that both the Western Ethiopians, who lived in Africa, and the Eastern
Ethiopians who dwelled in India, were black in complexion, but that the
Africans had curly hair, while the Indians were straight-haired. (The
aboriginal black inhabitants of India are generally referred to as the
Dravidians, of whom more will be said as we proceed.) Another classical
historian who wrote about the Ethiopians was Strabo, from whom we quote
the following: "I assert that the ancient Greeks, in the same way as
they classed all the northern nations with which they were familiar as
Scythians, etc., so, I affirm, they designated as Ethiopia the whole of
the southern countries toward the ocean." Strabo adds that "if the
moderns have confined the appellation Ethiopians to those only who dwell
near Egypt, this must not be allowed to interfere with the meaning of
the ancients." Ephorus says that: "The Ethiopians were considered as
occupying all the south coasts of both Asia and Africa," and adds that
"this is an ancient opinion of the of the Greeks." Then we have the view
of Stephanus of Byzantium, that: "Ethiopia was the first established
country on earth; and the Ethiopians were the first who introduced the
worship of the gods, and who established laws." The vestiges of this
early civilization have been found in Nubia, the Egyptian Sudan, West
Africa, Egypt, Mashonaland, India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Arabia, South
America, Central America, Mexico, and the United States. Any student who
doubts this will find ample evidence in such works as The Voice of Africa, by Dr. Leo Froebenius; Prehistoric Nations, and Ancient America, by John D. Baldwin; Rivers of Life, by Major-General J. G. R. Forlong; A Book of the Beginnings by Gerald Massey; Children of the Sun and The Growth of Civilization, by W. J. Perry; The Negro by Professor W.E.B. DuBois; The Anacalypsis, by Sir Godfrey Higgins; Isis Unveiled by Madam H. P. Blavatsky; The Diffusion of Culture, by Sir Grafton Elliot Smith; The Mediterranean Race, by Professor Sergi; The Ruins of Empires, by Count Volney; The Races of Europe, by Professor William Z. Ripley; and last but not least, the brilliant monographs of Mr. Maynard Shipley: New Light on Prehistoric Cultures and Americans of a Million Years Age. (See also Shipley's Sex and the Garden of Eden Myth, a collection of essays, the best of the lot being one entitled: Christian Doctrines In Pre-Christian America.)
These productions of Mr. Shipley, have been issued in pamphlet form in
the Little Blue Book Series, published by Mr. E. Haldeman-Julius, of
Girard, Kansas.
The efforts of certain historians to classify these ancient Cushites
as Caucasoids does not deceive honest historical students any longer.
This may well be illustrated by a passage from the pen of our scholarly
friend Bishop William Montgomery Brown: "For the first two or three
thousand years of civilization, there was not a civilized white man on
the earth. Civilization was founded and developed by the swarthy races
of Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt, and the white race remained so barbaric
that in those days an Egyptian or a Babylonian priest would have said
that the riffraff of white tribes a few hundred miles to the north of
their civilization were hopelessly incapable of acquiring the knowledge
requisite to progress. It was southern colored peoples everywhere, in
China, in Central America, in India, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt and Crete
who gave the northern white peoples civilization." (The Bankruptcy of Christian Supernaturalism, Vol., p. 192.)
Quite a few Egyptologists have defended the idea that the ancient
Egyptians originally came from Asia. There never was any evidence to
back up this view; and the only reason it was adopted, was because it
was fashionable to believe that no African people was capable of
developing a great civilization. Geoffrey Parsons refers to Egyptian
civilization in his Stream of History, p. 154, New York &
London, 1932, as "genuinely African in its origin and development."
Herodotus came to the same conclusion over 2,000 years ago, but he is
not taken seriously by the majority of modern historians, except where
his facts agree with certain theories of said historians. Theories are
more precious to some scholars than facts, even when the facts flatly
contradict their theories. Dr. Froebenious, the great German
anthropologist, has examined the ruins of ancient cultures in southern,
eastern and western Africa, of an antiquity rivaling those of Egypt and
Sumer. Sir John Marshall and Dr. E. Mackay have uncovered the remains of
a great Dravidian civilization in India, which rose to its peak over
5,000 years ago. The newspaper generally report these discoveries as
startling and unexpected. They tell us that nobody ever dreamed that
these ancient nations ever existed. This novelty, however, does not
exist for real students. Anyone familiar with the works of G. Elliot
Smith, W. J. Perry, Sir Godfrey Higgins, Dr. H.R. Hall, Sir Henry
Rawlinson, John D. Baldwin, Gerald Massey and General Forlong, will not
be surprised at the very novel archaeological discoveries announced by
the press. Since we are dealing with historical sources and authorities,
a study of the researches of Sir Henry Rawlinson, the Father of
Assyriology, on the Ethiopians in the ancient East, is in order. The
following extract is condensed from an essay entitled: On the Early
History of Babylonia:
- The system of writing which they brought with them has the closest affinity with that of Egypt—in many cases indeed, there is an absolute identity between the two alphabets.
- In the Biblical genealogies, Cush (Ethiopia) and Mizraim (Egypt) are brothers, while from the former sprang Nimrod (Babylonia.)
- In regard to the language of the primitive Babylonians, the vocabulary is undoubtedly Cushite or Ethiopian, belonging to that stock of tongues which in the sequel were everywhere more or less mixed up with the Semitic languages, but of which we have probably the purest modern specimens in the Mahra of Southern Arabia and the Galla of Abyssinia.
- All the traditions of Babylonia and Assyria point to a connection in very early times between Ethiopia, Southern Arabia and the cities on the lower Euphrates.
- In further proof of the connection between Ethiopia and Chaldea, we must remember the Greek tradition both of Cepheus and Memnon, which sometimes applied to Africa, and sometimes to the countries at the mouth of the Euphrates; and we must also consider the geographical names of Cush and Phut, which, although of African origin, are applied to races bordering on Chaldea, both in the Bible and in the Inscriptions of Darius. (Essay-VI, Appendix, Book-I, History of Herodotus, translated by Professor George Rawlinson, with essays and notes by Sir Henry Rawlinson and Sir J. G. Wilkinson.)
The opinions of Sir Henry Rawlinson are reinforced by the researches
of his equally distinguished brother, Professor George Rawlinson, in his
essay On the Ethnic Affinities of the Races of Western Asia, which
directs our attention to: "the uniform voice of primitive antiquity,
which spoke of the Ethiopians as a single race, dwelling along the
shores of the Southern Ocean from India to the Pillars of Hercules." (Herodotus,
Vol. I., Book. I., Appendix, Essay XI., Section-5.) Rawlinson adds an
explanatory note to this section of his essay, which we here reproduce:
"Recent linguistic discovery tends to show that a Cushite or Ethiopian
race did in the earliest times extend itself along the shores of the
Southern Ocean from Abyssinia to India. The whole peninsula of India was
peopled by a race of their character before the influx of the Aryans;
it extended from the Indus along the seacoast through the modern
Beluchistan and Kerman, which was the proper country of the Asiatic
Ethiopians; the cities on the northern shores of the Persian Gulf are
shown by the brick inscriptions found among their ruins to have belonged
to this race; it was dominant in Susiana and Babylonia, until
overpowered in the one country by Aryan, in the other by Semitic
intrusion; it can be traced both by dialect and tradition throughout the
whole south coast of the Arabian peninsula."
In the study of ancient affairs, folklore and tradition throw an
invaluable light on historical records. In Greek mythology we read of
the great Ethiopian king, Cepheus, whose fame was so great that he and
his family were immortalized in the stars. The wife of King Cepheus was
Queen Cassiopeia, and his daughter, Princess Andromeda. The star groups
of the celestial sphere, which are named after them are called the ROYAL FAMILY—(the constellations: CEPHEUS, CASSIOPEIA and ANDROMEDA.)
It may seem strange that legendary rulers of ancient Ethiopia should
still have their names graven on our star maps, but the voice of history
gives us a clue. A book on astrology attributed to Lucian declares
that: "The Ethiopians were the first who invented the science of stars,
and gave names to the planets, not at random and without meaning, but
descriptive of the qualities which they conceived them to possess; and
it was from them that this art passed, still in an imperfect state, to
the Egyptians." The Ethiopian origin of astronomy is beautifully
explained by Count Volney in a passage in his Ruins of Empires,
which is one of the glories of modern literature, and his argument is
not based on guesses. He invokes the weighty authority of Charles F.
Dupuis, whose three monumental works, The Origin of Constellations, The Origin of Worship and The Chronological Zodiac,
are marvels of meticulous research. Dupuis placed the origin of the
zodiac as far back as 15,000 B.C., which would give the world's oldest
picture book an antiquity of 17,000 years. (This estimate is not as
excessive as it might at first appear, since the American ast5ronomer
and mathematician, Professor Arthur M. Harding, traces back the origin
of the zodiac to about 26,000 B.C) In discussing star worship and
idolatry, Volney gives the following glowing description of the
scientific achievements of the ancient Ethiopians, and of how they
mapped out the signs of the zodiac on the star-spangled dome of the
heavens:
It was, then, on the borders of the upper Nile, among a black race of men, that was organized the complicated system of the worship of the stars, considered in relation to the productions of the earth and the labors of agriculture. … Thus the Ethiopian of Thebes named stars of inundation, or Aquarius, those stars under which the Nile began to overflow; stars of the ox or bull, those under which they began to plow, stars of the lion, those under which that animal, driven from the desert by thirst, appeared on the banks of the Nile; stars of the sheaf, or of the harvest virgin, those of the reaping season; stars of the lamb, stars of the two kids, those under which these precious animals were brought forth. … Thus the same Ethiopian having observed that the return of the inundation always corresponded with the rising of a beautiful star which appeared towards the source of the Nile, and seemed to warn the husbandman against the coming waters, he compared this action to that of the animal who, by his barking, gives notice of danger, and he called this star the dog, the barker (Sirius). In the same manner he named the stars of the crab, those where the sun, having arrived at the tropic, retreated by a slow retrograde motion like the crab of Cancer. He named stars of the wild goat, or Capricorn, those where the sun, having reached the highest point in his annuary tract, … imitates the goat, who delights to climb to the summit of the rocks. He named stars of the balance, or Libra, those where the days and nights being equal, seemed in equilibrium, like that instrument; and stars of the scorpion, those where certain periodical winds bring vapors, burning like the venom of the scorpion. (Volney's Ruins of Empires, pp. 120–122, New York, 1926)
The traditions concerning Memnon are interesting as well as
instructive. He was claimed as a king by the Ethiopians, and identified
with the Pharaoh Amunoph or Amenhotep, by the Egyptians. A fine statue
of him is located in the British Museum, in London. Charles Darwin makes
a reference to this statue on his Descent of Man which is well
worth reproducing: "When I looked at the statue of Amunoph III, I agreed
with two officers of the establishment, both competent judges, that he
had a strongly marked Negro type of features." The features of Akhnaton
(Amennhotep IV), are even more Negroid than those of his illustrious
predecessor. That the earliest Egyptians were African Ethiopians
(Nilotic Negroes), is obvious to all unbiased students of oriental
history. Breasted's claim that the early civilized inhabitants of the
Nile Valley and Western Asia were members of a Great White Race, is
utterly false, and is supported by no facts whatsoever. A similar racial
bias is shown by Elliot Smith in his work, The Ancient Egyptians and Their Influence Upon the Civilization of Europe, p. 30, New York & London, 1911. "Not a few writers," says he, "like the traveler Volney in the 18th
century, have expressed the belief that the ancient Egyptians were
Negroes, or at any rate strongly Negroid. In recent times even a writer
so discriminating as Ripley usually is has given his adhesion to this
view." (The writers referred to here, are Count Volney, the French
Orientalist and Professor William Z. Ripley, of Harvard University, an
eminent American Anthropologist.) Professor Smith is convinced that
these men are wrong, because he holds that there is a "profound gap that
separates the Negro from the rest of mankind, including the Egyptian." (Ancient Egyptians, p. 74.) Another English scholar, Philip Smith, is far more rational in discussing this point:
We read of Memnon, King of Ethiopia, in Greek mythology, to be exact in Homer's Iliad, where
he leads an army of Elamites and Ethiopians to the assistance of King
Priam in the Trojan War. His expedition is said to have started from the
African Ethiopia and to have passed through Egypt on the way to Troy.
According to Herodotus, Memnon was the founder of Susa, the chief city
of the Elamites. "There were places called Memnonia," asserts Professor
Rawlinson, "supposed to have been built by him both in Egypt and at
Susa; and there was a tribe called Memnones at Moroe. Memnon thus unites
the eastern with the western Ethiopians, and the less we regard him as
an historical personage the more must we view him as personifying the
ethnic identity of the two races." (Ancient Monarchies, Vol. I,
Chap. 3.) The ancient peoples of Mesopotamia are sometimes called the
Chaldeans, but this is inaccurate and confusing. Before the Chaldean
rule in Mesopotamia, there were the empires of the Sumerians, Akkadians,
Babylonians and Assyrians. The earliest civilization of Mesopotamia was
that of the Sumerians. They are designated in the Assyrio-Babylonian
inscriptions as the black-heads or black-faced people, and they are
shown on the monuments as beardless and with shaven heads. This easily
distinguishes them from the Semitic Babylonians, who are shown with
beards and long hair. From the myths and traditions of the Babylonians
we learn that their culture came originally from the south. Sir Henry
Rawlinson concluded from this and other evidence that the first
civilized inhabitants of Sumer and Akkad were immigrants from the
African Ethiopia. John D. Baldwin, the American Orientalist, on the
other hand, claims that since ancient Arabia was also known as Ethiopia,
they could have just as well come from that country. These theories are
rejected by Dr. II. R. Hall, of the Dept. Of Egyptian & Assyrian
Antiquities of the British Museum, who contends that Mesopotamia was
civilized by a migration from India. "The ethnic type of the Sumerians,
so strongly marked in their statues and reliefs," says Dr. Hall, "was as
different from those of the races which surrounded them as was their
language from those of the Semites, Aryans, or others; they were
decidedly Indian in type. The face-type of the average Indian of today
is no doubt much the same as that of his Dravidian race ancestors
thousands of years ago. … And it is to this Dravidian ethnic type of
India that the ancient Sumerian bears most resemblance, so far as we can
judge from his monuments. … And it is by no means improbable that the
Sumerians were an Indian race which passed, certainly by land, perhaps
also by sea, through Persia to the valley of the Two Rivers. It was in
the Indian home (perhaps the Indus valley) that we suppose for them that
their culture developed. … On the way they left the seeds of their
culture in Elam. … There is little doubt that India must have been one
of the earliest centers of human civilization, and it seems natural to
suppose that the strange un-Semitic, un-Aryan people who came from the
East to civilize the West were of Indian origin, especially when we see
with our own eyes how very Indian the Sumerians were in type." (The Ancient History of the Near East,
pp. 173–174, London, 1916.) Hall is opposed in his theory of Sumerian
origins by Dr. W. J. Perry, the great anthropologist, of the University
of London. "The Sumerian stories or origins themselves tell a very
different tale," Perry points out, "for from their beginnings the
Sumerians seem to have been in touch with Egypt. Some of their early
texts mention Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha. … Dilmun was the first
settlement that was made by the god Enki, who was the founder of
Sumerian civilization. … Magan was famous among the Sumerians as a place
whence they got diorite and copper, Meluhha as a place whence they got
gold. Dilmun has been identified with some place or other in the Persian
Gulf, perhaps the Bahrein Islands, perhaps a land on the eastern shore
of the Gulf. … In a late inscription of the Assyrians it is said that
Magan and Meluhha were the archaic names for Egypt and Ethiopia, the
latter being the south-western part of Somaliand that lay opposite." (The Growth of Civilization, pp. 60–61, 2nd Edition, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1937, Published by Penguin Books, Ltd.)
Another great nation of Ethiopian origin was Elam, a country which
stretched from the Tigris River to the Zagros Mountains of Persia. Its
capital was the famous city of Susa, which was founded about 4,000 B.C.,
and flourished from that date to its destruction by Moslem invaders
about the year 650 C.E. (Christian Era). In speaking of the Elamites, H.
G. Wells H. H. Johnston, to have been Negroid in type. There is a
strong Negroid strain in the modern people of Elam." (Outline of History,
p. 166.) Archaeological evidence favors this view. Reginald S. Poole,
the English Egyptologist noted that: "There is one portrait of an
Elamite (Cushite) king on a vase found at Susa; he is painted black and
thus belongs to the Cushite race." (Quoted by Professor Alfred C.
Haddon, in his History of Anthropology, p. 6, London, 1934.
Thinker's Library Edition, published by Watts & Co., 5 & 6
Johnson's Court, Fleet St., London, E. c.-4, England.)
We cannot devote much space to the early inhabitants of India,
though they were beyond all doubt an Ethiopic ethnic type. They are
described by Professor Lynn Thorndike as "short black men with almost
Negro noses." (Short History of Civilization, p. 227, New York,
1936.) Dr. Will Durant pictures these early Hindus as "a dark-skinned,
broad-nosed people whom, without knowing the origin or the word, we call
Dravidians." (Short History of Civilization, Part I, p. 396, New York, 1935.) The student is advised to consult pp. 650–666, of the new edition of Sir John A. Hammerton's Wonders of the Past, in which there is an instructive article, with fine illustrations, by S. G. Blaxland Stubbs, entitled: Wonder Cities of Most Ancient India. That Mr. Stubbs is a candid writer may be seen from the following excerpt:
These Asiatic black men were not confined to the mainland, for we are
informed by no less an authority than Sir Harry H. Johnston, that:
Most readers of history know about the Celts, ancient inhabitants of
Europe, whose priests were known as the Druids. It is generally thought
that these Celts were Caucasoids, but Sir Godfrey Higgins, after much
study came to the conclusion that they were a Negroid people. Higgins
wrote a ponderous volume entitled The Celtic Druids. In the following passage from his Anacalypsis
he modestly refers to it as an essay: "In my essay on the Celtic
Druids, I have shown that a great nation called Celtae, of whom the
Druids were the priests, spread themselves almost over the whole earth,
and are to be traced in their rude gigantic monuments from India to the
extremity of Britain. The religion of Buddha of India is well known to
have been very ancient." (Higgins is here referring to the first Buddha,
who is supposed to have lived between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, and
not to Gautama Buddha who lived about 600 years B.C. There were at least
ten Buddhas mentioned in the sacred books of India.) "Who these can
have been but the early individuals of the black nation of whom
we have been treating I know not, and in this opinion I am not singular.
The learned Maurice says Cuthies (Cushites), i.e. Celts, built the
great temples in India and Britain, and excavated the caves of the
former; and the learned mathematician, Reuben Burrow, has no hesitation
in pronouncing Stonehenge to be a temple of the black curly-headed
Buddha." (Anacalypsis, Vol. I, Book I, Chap. IV, New York, 1927.)
Though it is generally believed that Columbus discovered America, it
is now definitely known to students of American archaeology that
Columbus came late. Professor Leo Weiner has written a three volume
work, Africa and the Discovery of America, in which he argues
that the New World was discovered by Africans long before the time of
Columbus. Professor Weiner was led to this conclusion partly from the
following evidence:
- African works in American Indian languages.
- Vases and pipe-bowls found in the ruins of the Mound-Builders, showing Negro faces on their surfaces.
- The presence of African foods in America, such the peanut and the yam.
- The totemic organization of the Amerindians tribes, very similar to African totemism. (Totemism is a sort of primitive theory of evolution. For instance, certain tribes are divided into clans, and each clan is, as a rule named after some species of animal. Let us suppose a tribe is divided into four clans, bearing the following names: (1) eagle, (2) Bear, (3) Crow and (4) Wolf. A member of the Bear Clan will consider himself as descended from bears, a member of the Wolf Clan will tell you that he is a wolf and that all of his ancestors were wolves, and so on; this clan ancestor being known as the Totem. There are numerous definitions of totemism, the best I have come across being the following one by Professor A. VB. Haddon: "Totemism, as Dr. Frazer and I understand it in its fully developed condition, implies the division of a people into several totem kins, or as they are usually termed, totem clans, each of which has one or sometimes more that one totem. The totem is usually a species of animal, sometimes a species of plant, occasionally a natural object or phenomenon, very rarely a manufactured article. … The totems are regarded as kinsfolk or protectors of the kinsmen, who respect them and refrain from killing and eating them. There is thus a recognition of mutual rights and obligations between the members of the kin and their totem. The totem is the crest of symbol of the Kin." We see vestiges of totemism in our political organizations; for example, the Democratic DONKEY and the republican ELEPHANT. Baseball clubs present an even better example of totemistic atavism; for instance, who has not heard of baseball teams bearing such names as: TIGERS, CARDINALS, BEARS, BEES, BISONS, etc.) Weiner's theories have not been kindly received by his colleagues. Professor H. J. Spinden sneers sarcastically in the following condensed extract from Culture, the Diffusion Controversy, pp. 53–54, New York, 1927:
The Indian was not the original American. Professor Ales Hrdlicka of
the Smithsonian Institution, as authority on the Amerinds, contends that
the ancestors of the Indians came from Asia via Bering Strait 10,000
years ago. American civilization is older than that. The ruins of
Tiahuanaco, in Bolivia, according to Dr. Rudolph Muller, a noted German
astronomer, are between 10,000 and 14,000 years old. The remains of this
ancient city show that it was inhabited by a highly civilized people.
(See an article entitled "The Oldest City in the World," by A. H.
Verrill, in the N. Y. Herald-Tribune Magazine, July 31, 1932.)
Excavations in Mexico have produced equally startling results. Dr.
Maximus Neumayer, a distinguished Brazilian archaeologist, in
cooperation with a group of Mexican archaeologists, has made a very
thorough study of the pyramids and monuments in the vicinity of Mexico
City. He estimates the monument of Cuicuilco to be about 13,000 years
old. An interesting feature of this structure is that it resembles the
Assyrio-Babylonian type of architecture, bearing a striking resemblance
to the Tower of Babel as it has been restored by the Assyriologists. Dr.
Neumayer also examined the pyramids of Teotihuacan, which he estimates
to be 4,500 years of age. He thinks that these pyramids were built by a
people akin to the Egyptians; and from their arrangement, suggests that
they form a sort of model of the solar system, with a pedestal in the
center, representing the sun. We must also mention the discoveries of
Professor Ramon Mena, Curator of the Department of Archaeology of the
Mexican Government. This scientist explored the ruins of the great city
of Palenque, and concluded that the ancient metropolis was built over
10,000 years ago. He also found that the inhabitants of the city were
familiar with the manufacture and use of Stucco. The celebrated French
archaeologist, Desiree Charnay, unearthed statues around Mexico City,
more than fifty years ago, with faces showing Negroid features. Pictures
of some of them may be seen in Ignatius Donelley's Atlantis, pp.
174-175. Donnelly also has illustrations of two similar statues, one
from Palenque and the other from Vera Cruz. Finding that the Indians
show both Mongoloid and Negroid ethnic traces, Charnay justly concluded
that the Amerinds were a mixed race of both Asiatic and African
ancestry. (See The Ancient Cities of the New World, by Desiree
Charnay.) We have perfectly reliable proof of the presence of men of the
Ethiopian race in pre-Columbian America. Father Roman, one of he first
Catholic missionaries to arrive in the New World, records that a tribe
of black men came from the south and landed in Haiti, and that they were
armed with darts of guanin (a composition of gold, silver and copper),
and were known as the black Guaninis. "These might have been the Negroes
of Quareca, mentioned by Peter Martyr d'Angleria, or some other
American Negro nation," asserts De Roo, "the like of which there were
many, as we may see in Rafinesque's Account of the Ancient Black Nations of America.
Such are the Charruas of Brazil, the black Carabees of St. Vincent in
the Gulf of Mexico, the Jamassi of Florida, the dark complexioned
Californians who are perhaps the dark men mentioned in the Quiche
traditions and by some old Spanish adventures. Such, again, is the tribe
of which Balboa saw some representatives in his passage of the Isthmus
of Darien in the year 1513. It would seem from the expressions made use
of by Gomara, that these were Negroes." (History of America Before Columbus,
pp.306–307, by P. De Roo, Philadelphia and London, 1900.) Spanish and
Portugese explorers found colonies of black men on the eastern coasts of
South and Central America, and in Yucatan and Nicaragua. De Roo quotes
John T. Short, author of The North Americans of Antiquity, New
York, 1880, on the similarity of African and American languages, as
follows—"It is worthy of note that several eminent scholars have
observed the remarkable similarity of grammatical structure between the
Central American and certain transatlantic languages, especially the
Basque and some of the languages of Western Africa." (History of America Before Columbus, pp. 164–165.)
Most of us are familiar with the Mayan civilization of Yucatan and
Central America, since American archaeologists have devoted many years
of intensive research to these territories. Among the speculations
concerning the origin of this culture, those of LePlongeon and Raquena
are the most valuable. Professor Rafael Requena, a Venezuelan
archaeologist, holds that there was once an island in the Atlantic
Ocean, of continental dimensions, known to the ancients as Atlantis,
that this island was settled by Egyptians, who in turn established
colonies in America before the submergence of Atlantis. The findings of
Professor Augustus LePlongeon are of great interest. This
Franco-American archaeologist discovered the ruins of a palace in
Chichen Itza in 1874. He found in this structure, known as Prince Coh's
Palace, pictographs and inscriptions which he was able to decipher. The
story, as unraveled by LePlongeon, may be read by the student in Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx,
where the professor gives his interpretation of the inscriptions and
reproductions of the pictographs. Mrs. LePlongeon's work, Queen Moo's Talisman, might also be consulted. The story runs roughly as follows:
The foregoing story sounds like a fable, but there is probably a core
of fact in it. If the Sphinx, with its Ethiopian face, is a memorial to
an ancient Mayan prince, it shows that the Mayas were of African
origin.
That Atlantis was connected with the history of ancient Ethiopia
there can be little doubt. The Greek philosopher, Proclus, stated in his
works that he could present evidence that Atlantis at one time actually
existed. He cited as his authority The Ethiopian History of Marcellus.
In referring to Ethiopian history to prove the existence of Atlantis,
Proclus plainly infers that Atlantis was a part of Ethiopia. (See Cory's
Ancient Fragments of the Phoenician, Carthaginian, Babylonian, Egyptian and Other Authors, London, 1876. See also, Maynard Shipley's New Light on Prehistoric Cultures and Bramwell's Lost Atlantis.)
Although there is scientific evidence that an island of continental
dimensions once existed in what is now the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,
many students of the problem of Atlantis have located it in other parts
of the globe, particularly in Central America and Africa. Count
deProrok ways that Atlantis, in the dimness of antiquity, covered the
region now occupied by the Sahara Desert. Kirchmaier placed it in South
Africa and Froebenius in West Africa. In reviewing James Bramwell's Lost Atlantis,
Mr. Lewis Gannett states that: "The German anthropologist Frobenius
definitely locates it in Nigeria, whose ancient civilization he relates
to that of the Etruscans and the Assyrians." (New York Herald-Tribune,
Mar. 3, 1938.) Doctor Froebenius found ruins of palaces, terra cotta
fragments and beautiful statuary in Jorubaland, a district in Nigeria
between the Niger River and the Atlantic Ocean; and he heard among the
Jorubians legends of an ancient royal city and its palace with walls of
gold, which in the long ago had sunk beneath the waves. The German
scholar, Eugen Georg, is a keen student of the Atlantis question, and
the following remarks of his are worthy of our attention:
So far we have given little or no attention to the evidence of
comparative religion. The study of ancient religious history is
important, for religion, like philosophy, changes but slowly.
Institutional religion, being conservative and static in its outlook,
has preserved much ancient lore that would have otherwise been lost to
the modern student. The Greek philosopher Xenophanes (572–480 B.C.),
pointed out a profound truth when he observed that the gods men worship
very closely resemble the worshippers. In the words of this ancient
sage: "Each man represents the gods as he himself is. The Ethiopian as
black and flat-nosed the Thracian as red-haired and blue-eyed; and if
horses and oxen could paint, they would no doubt depict the gods as
horses and oxen." This being the case; when we find the great nations of
the world, both past and present, worshipping black gods, then we
logically conclude that these peoples are either members of the black
race, or that they originally received their religion in toto or in part
from black people. The proofs are abundant. The ancient gods of India
are shown with Ethiopian crowns on their heads. According to the Old
Testament, Moses first met Jehovah during his sojourn among the
Midianites, who were an Ethiopian tribe. We learn from Hellenic
tradition that Zeus, king of the Grecian gods, so cherished the
friendship of the Ethiopians that he traveled to their country twice a
year to attend banquets. "All the gods and goddesses of Greece were
black," asserts Sir Godfrey Higgins, "at least this was the case with
Jupiter, Baccus, Hercules, Apollo, Ammon. The goddesses Benum, Isis,
Hecate, Diana, Juno, Metis, Ceres, Cybele were black." (Anacalypsis,
Vol. I, Book IV, Chap. I.) Even the Romans, who received their religion
mainly from the Greeks, admitted their debt to Egypt and Ethiopia. This
may be well illustrated by the following passage from The Golden Ass or Metamorphosis,
by Apuleius. The author, as an initiate of the Isis cult is represented
as being addressed by that goddess: "I am present; I who am Nature, the
parent of things, queen of all the elements … the primitive Phrygians
called me Pressimunitica, the mother or the gods; the native Athenians,
Ceropian Minerva; the floating Cyprians, Paphian Venus … the inhabitants
of Eleusis, the ancient goddess Ceres. Some again have invoked me as
Juno, others as Bellona, others as Hecate, and others Rhamnusia; and
those who are enlightened by the emerging rays of the rising sun, the
Ethiopians, Ariians and Egyptians, powerful in ancient learning, who
reverence by divinity with ceremonies perfectly proper, call me by my
true appellation, Queen Isis." (Doane's Bible Myths, Note, p. 478.)
A study of the images of ancient deities of both the Old and New
Worlds reveal their Ethiopic origin. This is noted by Kenneth R. H.
Mackezie in T. A. Buckley's Cities of the Ancient World, p. 180:
"From the wooly texture of the hair, I am inclined to assign to the
Buddha of India, the Fuhi of China, the Sommonacom of the Siamese, the
Zaha of the Japanese, and the Quetzalcoatl of the Mexicans, the same,
and indeed an African, or rather Nubian, origin." Most of these black
gods were regarded as crucified saviors who died to save mankind by
being nailed to a cross, or tied to a tree with arms outstretched as if
on a cross, or slain violently in some other manner. Of these crucified
saviors, the most prominent were Osiris and Horus of Egypt, Krishna of
India, Mithra of Persia, Quetazlcoatl of Mexico, Adonis of Babylonia and
Attis of Phrygia. Nearly all of these slain savior-gods have the
following stories related about them: They are born of a virgin, on or
near Dec. 25th (Christmas); their births are heralded by a
star; they are born either in a cave or stable; they are slain, commonly
by crucifixion; they descend into hell, and rise from the dead at the
beginning of Spring (Easter), and finally ascend into heaven. The
parallels between the legendary lives of these pagan messiahs and the
life of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Bible are so similar that
progressive Bible scholars now admit that stories of these heathen
Christs have been woven into the life-story of Jesus. (These remarkable
parallels are discussed and interpreted in a pamphlet, Christianity Before Christ, by John G. Jackson, New York, 1938.)
The late Mr. Maynard Shipley, President of The Science League of
America, made a very scholarly study of the various mythologies and
religions of the world, and in the concluding passage of a brilliant
essay, Christian Doctrines in Pre-Christian America, he offers a
profoundly thought-provoking statement:
Where that original center of culture was is another story.
The evidence seems to show that the "original center of culture,"
referred to by Mr. Shipley, was that vast domain known to the classical
geographers and historians as Ethiopia. A study of religious images
throws much light on this early civilization. The tau (T-shaped) cross
is thought by many Christians to be a unique emblem of their faith. The
fact is that this cross is of ancient Ethiopian origin. In the words of
an outstanding student of symbolism: "The Ethiopic form of the tau is an
exact prototype of the conventional Christian cross; or, to state the
fact in its chronological relation, the Christian cross is made in the
exact image of the Ethiopian tau." (Sex Symbolism. P. 9, by
William J, Fielding, Little Blue Book No. 904.) The cross was known to
all the great ancient nations, and was sometimes shown with the image of
a man upon it. The Church Father, Minucius Felix, writing in the early
part of the third century, severely rebukes the Pagans for their
adoration of crosses: "I must tell you that we neither adore crosses nor
desire them; you it is ye Pagans … for what else are your ensigns,
flags and standards, but crosses gilt and beautiful. Your victorious
trophies not only represent a cross, but a cross with a man upon it."
Commenting on the preceding extract, the American scholar, T. W. Doane,
notes that:
The same writer also refers to "the Mexican crucified god being
sometimes represented as black," and that "crosses were also found in
Yucatan, as well as Mexico, with a man upon them." (Ibid., p. 201.)
The numerous black madonnas and infants in European cathedrals are discussed in detail by Sir Godfrey Higgins in The Anacalypsis,
Vol. I, Book IV, Chap. I, to which the interested student is referred.
However, the remarks of Mr. Shipley on this point are worthy of our
attention:
Much more could be said on this subject, but since this essay is addressed mainly to readers who have little time for the study of history, it must be made as concise as possible. The numerous citations from standard scientific and historical works, it is hoped, will be of some benefit to students who are out of reach of large public libraries, or who lack the leisure time necessary for reading and research along these lines.
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