Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
The Pyramid Inch in Egypt- Charles Piazzi Smyth
This is one theory and this particular theory is theorized and discussed as being very possible today. Charles Piazzi Smthy along with an astronomer that preceeded him Taylor through their mathematical calculations came up with the theory of the Inch that made the different in construction of the Great Pyramid.
Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1900) was a notable scholar during his time, holding the title Astronomer Royal of Scotland and Professor of Astronomy at Edinburgh University. He surveyed Khufu's Great Pyramid located at Giza in Egypt in 1865, armed with the theories of John Taylor, author of "The Great Pyramid: Why Was It Built? & Who Built It?", published in 1859.
It was Taylor who, based on the records of travelers, took a number of mathematical coincidences and declared that the Great Pyramid was built "to make a record of the measure of the Earth". Taylor, an eccentric British publisher, believed that the architect who had planned and supervised the building of the Great Pyramid was not an Egyptian at all, but none other than the biblical Noah.
One of Taylor's claims was that the Egyptians knew the value of Pi several centuries prior to anyone having calculated an accurate value in Europe's scientific community, and that they used an inch close to the British inch to form their cubit of 25 Pyramid inches. With this in mind, Taylor searched for other related properties. Notably, he found that ten million pyramid cubits approximated the length of the radius of the earth on its polar axis fairly closely. These and a series of similar calculations, which were sometimes manipulated to gain an expected result, provided what Taylor considered to be adequate evidence that the Great Pyramid had been built as a model of the earth. However, when Taylor presented a paper on the topic to the Royal Academy, it was rejected by them. Where it not for Piazzi Smyth, his ideas would probably never have received much attention.
Smyth corresponded with Taylor and was heavily influenced by him. Piazzi Smyth set out for Egypt, having been refused a grant to defray his expenses, in order to measure accurately every surface and aspect of the Great Pyramid. He brought equipment to measure the dimensions of the stones, the price angle of sections such as the Descending Passage, and a specially designed camera to photograph both the Pyramid's interior and exterior. Other instruments enabled him to make astronomical calculations and determine the pyramid's latitude.
Also influenced by his own religion, Smyth too had come to believe that the Great Pyramid of Khufu was built with just enough "pyramid inches" to make it a scale model of the circumference of the Earth, and that its perimeter measurements corresponded exactly to the number of days in the solar year. However, Smyth's theories about the Great Pyramid exceeded those of John Taylor. The Great Pyramid, Smyth maintained, was not an Egyptian monument, but rather the oldest man-made structure in the world. The other Egyptian pyramids were only filthy, pagan imitations. Although the Egyptians might have furnished the physical labor necessary to erect the Great Pyramid, the architectural genius who designed it must have been someone from the Old Testament. The pyramid was a perfect structure, a product of divine inspiration, which embodied in its measurements a perfect system of weights and measures, among them the sacred cubit of the Israelites, the pyramid inch, and a system of prophecy.
These ideas were closely tied to his belief that the British inch was derived from an ancient "pyramid inch", and that the cubit used to build both Noah's Ark and the tabernacle of Moses was also based on this inch. Piazzi Smyth further believed that the British were descended fro the lost tribe of Israel, and that the chambers and passages of the pyramid were a god inspired record, a prophecy in stone of the great events in world history, made by scientifically advanced ancestors of the British.
Smyth spent considerable time in collecting vast quantities of data relating to the Great Pyramid, as well as other pyramids in Egypt. As a result, he not only convinced himself of the validity of Taylor's claims, but discovered many more facts demonstrating, as he thought, the special nature of the pyramid. The number and variety of geometric, mathematical, physical, geographical and astronomical measurements made by Smyth is truly amazing.
The architecture of both the exterior and the interior of the pyramid supplied Smyth with the majority of the "proofs" he required for his conjectures. He verified the existence of the Pi ratio by simple trigonometry and a careful measurement of the ascending angle of one of the few remaining casing stones which had originally covered the exterior of the pyramid. He also went to great trouble to measure accurately the length of a side of the base of the pyramid. Using this length, he satisfied himself that the "pyramid inch" had indeed been the unit of length used in building the Great Pyramid, and that this and other pyramid dimensions were closely related to the length of the year in days also supposed by Taylor.
Smyth derived a complex set of numerical interrelationships between such things as the number of stones used in the construction of the inner chambers of the pyramid, the volume and shape of the stone coffer found in the King's Chamber of the pyramid, the number of faces and angles of the pyramid, and the number of courses of masonry between various chambers within the pyramid, among many other measurements. For some reason, Smyth considered relationships combining numbers such as 25, 50, 10, 366, and 9 as particularly significant. He felt that these numbers were included in the pyramid's dimensions as a record of the "perfect" standards of measurement that God intended man to use.
Besides linear measurements, Smyth spent much time investigating other physical properties of the pyramid such as the temperature and barometric pressure in the inner chambers and the weight and density of the stone coffer in the King's Chamber. Again, he derived supposedly important relationships between these measurements, and he concluded that perfect units of weight and temperature were embodied in these dimensions.
The pyramid was found to have interesting geographical and astronomical properties. For example, it is oriented so that its sides point almost precisely due north and south. Smyth believed that it was so constructed by intention (as it indeed was), and that this proved that the earth's crust had not shifted significantly since the time that the pyramid was built. He also maintained that the parallel of latitude and the meridian which intersect at the Great Pyramid traverse more land area (as opposed to water) than any other parallels or meridians. Taylor's thesis that the pyramid was a model of the earth was reinforced in Smyth's mind by his verification of the fact that the distance of the earth from the sun is approximately ten raised to the ninth power multiplied by the height of the Great Pyramid. He regarded these numbers as significant, for some unknown reason. These are but a few of the hundreds of measurements and calculations that he put produced as evidence of the pyramid's special nature.
Many of Smyth's calculations and the inferences he based upon them seem artificial and arbitrary. What, for example, is the significance of the number 109 as used in relating the height of the pyramid to the distance of the earth from the sun? What meaning does the number ten million have, other than the fact that there are approximately ten million pyramid inches in the polar radium of the earth? The pyramid is a rich source of the kind of data Smyth worked with, and it would be surprising if he had been unable to come up with some interesting number combinations after manipulating such data.
Many scholars published what should have been devastating criticisms of these theories. They showed, for example, that when deriving his formulas Smyth simply juggled facts and figures until he came up with a seeming correspondence and that many of the data upon which he based his theorizing, such as the average size of the casing stones that had once covered the Great Pyramid, were wrong. Even contemporary Egyptologists knew that the Great Pyramid was not the earliest of the monuments, but one of the latest.
Yet, John Taylor and Piazzi Smyth were utterly convinced that nearly every detail of the architecture of the Great Pyramid was included intentionally, that is, designed. On the other hand most scientists, historians, and even interested laymen are immediately convinced, upon reading Smyth's claims, that he inferred far too much from the data he gathered.
Smyth was hardly a dispassionate, objective scientist when dealing with the pyramid. His writings show that he certainly had a deep emotional commitment to demonstrating "scientifically" that the Christian religion is true, and that he saw his work with the pyramid as a means by which he could do so. Smyth also had a great antipathy towards the metric system, which he regarded as the flawed produce of the minds of atheistic French radicals. Smyth heaps ridicule and scorn upon the metric system and its inventors for using an "unnatural" standard of measurement. Smyth's conviction in this matter was related to his belief that the British system reflected God's will because of the units of measure he "discovered" in the pyramid.
Smyth's work resulted in many drawings and calculations, which were soon incorporated into "Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid" published in 1864,the three-volume "Life and Work at the Great Pyramid", published in 1867 and "On the Antiquity of Intellectual Man" in 1868. For this, he was awarded a gold metal by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, but in 1874, the Royal Society rejected his paper on the design of Khufu's pyramid, as they had Taylor's, resulting in Piazzi Symth's resignation from his post as Royal Astronomer.
It should be noted that, despite his strange ideas and misconceptions, Smyth performed much valuable work at Giza. He made the most accurate measurements of the Great Pyramid that any explorer had made up to that time, and he photographed the interior passages, using a magnesium light, for the first time.
Smyth popularized the theories originally postulated by Taylor, spreading them throughout Britain, other European countries and the US. A number of Christian religious leaders accepted the theories of Taylor and Smyth. Many Englishmen believed in them, and in France the abbé F. Moigno, the cannon of St. Denis at Paris, became its foremost advocate.
It was in America, however, that Smyth found his greatest support. In June 1876 he published an article in the "Bible Examiner", a journal owned by George Storrs of Brooklyn, New York. Thus Smyth made known the "Glory of the Great Pyramid" to the American Second Advent community. Also a book first published in 1877 by Joseph Seiss entitled "Miracle in Stone" expanding on Taylor and Smyth's theories and ran through fourteen editions. Pyramidology, as it came to be known, received its primary acceptance among the heirs of the Millerites or the followers of William Miller.
It is not surprising, then, that a few years later George Storrs published a series of major articles on the Great Pyramid and its prophetic significance in the "Herald of Life and the Coming Kingdom", the official organ of a small Adventist movement, the Life and advent Union which Storrs had helped to found. Obviously, the Union was influenced directly by Smyth's "Bible Examiner" article. Pyramidology was taken up by the leader of what was to become a fairly large, better-known religious group, Charles Taze Russell, the first president of what is now the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society and the founder of the International Bible Students and their spiritual descendants, Jehovah's Witnesses.
It is quite probable that Russell came to accept pyramidology because of the influence on him of such men as Dr. Joseph Seiss and George Storrs. Following their lead, he announced that God had placed the Great Pyramid as a sign in Egypt on page three of the September, 1883 issue of "Zion's Watch Tower". Yet he did not stress the importance of pyramidology until 1897 when he published Volume III of his famous Studies in the Scriptures entitled "Thy Kingdom Come". With a full chapter devoted to the Great Pyramid in this work, Russell, went beyond Taylor, Smyth, Seiss, Storrs and others. He began to teach that the Great Pyramid was the "divine plan of the ages in stone." Interestingly, he submitted his ideas to Smyth for examination and received the latter's approval for them.
John and Morton Edgar, two Scottish brothers, became faithful members of Russell's Bible Students and pursued pyramidology with a passion. John, a professor of gynecology at Glasgow, published a number of works on the Great Pyramid until his death in 1912. Morton, who had collaborated with him, continued his studies and published several books on the subject during the following decades. Only after Charles T. Russell's successor, Judge Joseph F. Rutherford denounced pyramidology as unscriptural and of the devil in 1928, did Bible Students connected with the Watch Tower Society abandon it. Hence their spiritual heirs today, Jehovah's Witnesses, are hardly aware of its existence.
Smyth began a tradition of Pyramidology that lives on today, as similar theorists such as Robert Bauval, Graham Hancock and others continue to produce theories and drawings linking the pyramids with the stars or the Bible, among hundreds of other theories.
An interesting tidbit:
The Father of William Flinders Petrie (the Father of Modern Egyptology) was a frequent quest at the home of Piazzi Smyth, and may have even come close to marrying Smyth's daughter. He did in fact meet and apparently court the woman he would marry in their home. Furthermore, Petrie wrote in his "Seventy years in Archaeology" (1932):
… A new stir arose when one day I brought back from Smith's bookstall, in 1866, a volume by Piazzi Smyth, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. The views, in conjunction with his old friendship for the author, strongly attracted my father, and for some years I was urged on in what seemed so enticing a field of coincidence. I little thought how, fifteen years later, I should reach the "ugly little fact which killed the beautiful theory"; but it was this interest which led my father to encourage me to go out and do the survey of the Great Pyramid; of that, later on.
By this, what Petrie means is that he was influenced by Smyth's work, but latter scientifically disproved some of his theories. It was actually Petrie who first coined the term, "pyramidiot" to describe what he saw as a quasi-religious cult.
Archives
Egypt before the Pharaohs
By Gamal Nkrumah
Dynastic Egypt, the classical "Two Lands" of the Pharaohs, did not miraculously spring fully ordered in all its fabled splendour. It took some five millennia before 3,500 BC for the inhabitants of the Nile Valley and Delta of Egypt to reach the cultural attainments now instantly and universally recognisable as unique to dynastic Egypt. There is abundant archaeological evidence of several predynastic kingdoms in Upper Egypt. It is commonly acknowledged that at least rudimentary political structures existed in Upper Egypt about 7,000 years ago. Because of the rise in the water table, it is rather more difficult to ascertain whether similar kingdoms existed in the Delta.
So, who were the people whose culture laid the seeds of the very first nation-state in recorded history? There is scarce, but categorical, evidence of very ancient human presence in Nubia and Upper Egypt. Early Paleolithic -- Stone Age -- hand axes believed to be over 70,000 years old were found in the vicinity of Abu Simbel, Nubia. But skeletal remains dating to that very distant past are yet to be discovered. How and why did the Nile Valley's Neolithic, or late Stone Age, hunter-gatherers who had started experimenting with agriculture and animal husbandry, so rapidly progress to urbanisation and state formation at a time when the rest of humanity slumbered in prehistory? A precise answer is still a matter of conjecture.
However, Egyptologists all agree that the bounty of the lush Nile Valley was instrumental to the luxuriant flowering of Ancient Egypt. The Sahara was not always a desolate wasteland. Some 10,000 years ago, the Sahara received considerably more rain than it does today, permitting a savanna-like vegetation of open grasslands peppered with shrubs and trees, much like the East African plains of today. And, like their modern counterpart in East Africa, the Sahara was teaming with game and nomadic people who herded cattle -- perhaps the first to do so in all of Africa -- and roamed the savanna in search of grazing land. For watering cattle, they congregated along the banks of lakes. One such former lake is Nabta Playa -- a mere 45 kilometres west of Ramses II's temple of Abu Simbel. Today the site where these people performed their religious rituals is marked by a circle of small upright stone slabs only four metres in diameter. The curious circle looks like a miniature replica of England's Stonehenge except that it was set up some 2,000 years earlier. Perhaps, these nomadic Saharan people were the ancestors of the early Nile Valley inhabitants?
There is evidence to suggest that around 6,000 years ago, these nomadic desert-dwellers left the Sahara Desert as it turned into the barren waste it now is and journeyed towards the life-giving waters of the River Nile and the lush Valley where first they practised hunting and gathering and gradually with the annual inundation that occurred every summer, year after year, they turned to settled agriculture. It seems that they journeyed along the tributaries of the Nile or wadi, today's dried-up watercourses, until they reached the banks of the great river itself. The cultural remains of these prehistoric people can be traced in places like Wadi Es-Sebua, Abu Simbel and Toshka, 160 kilometres south of Aswan.
Nevertheless, the earliest human skeletal remains in Egypt's Nile Valley were found in Jabal Sahaba, Nubia, and is some 12,000 years old. An excellent venue, therefore, in which to kick-start an exploration of predynastic cultural remains is the Nubian Museum of Aswan. The impetus for early predynastic cultural advancement in all probability came from the Khartoum Mesolithic people around 6,000 BC. These were the first people to domesticate cattle and cultivate cereal crops in the Nile Valley. In the Nubian Museum, Aswan, you can sample some of the ceramics, decorated ostrich-eggs and rock-carvings of these predynastic people. The principal material remains of these people are their stone tools, jewellery and numerous rock paintings, showing the animals they hunted. (See exhibition zones C, D and E, which display an interesting array of tools, utensils and handicrafts of the earliest inhabitants of the Nile Valley.)
The cultural influences of the Khartoum Mesolithic people appear to have drifted northwards, along the banks of the River Nile, into Lower Nubia and Upper Egypt over the next millennium. In the process, the Mesolithic cultures evolved into more advanced Neolithic culture. Between 5,500 BC and 3,100 BC, a number of successive Neolithic cultures in both Lower Egypt and, especially, Upper Egypt evolved into large, hierarchical and well organised communities. They excelled in the crafts of basketry, weaving, the tanning of animal hides and their pottery in particular was of outstanding quality. These cultures were the forerunners of dynastic Egypt. Many of the cultural features that later came to characterise dynastic Egypt originated first in predynastic Egypt. In the last stages of predynastic Egypt, sometimes referred to in literature as protodynastic Egypt, predynastic culture resembled dynastic, especially Old Kingdom, culture in more ways than one. Predynastic culture was fast acquiring those specificities that we today instantly recognise as characteristic of dynastic Egypt: an obsession with tombs and the afterlife, a preponderance of animal deities, a centralised government and the appurtenances of statehood, the first etchings of hieroglyphics, royal symbols and religious iconography. The provincial administrative divisions in dynastic times, which the Greeks called nomes, perhaps even represented the clan totems or fetishes of predynastic Egypt. Against this backdrop emerged the earliest urbanised societies in the world.
In the late Paleolithic period, from 25,000 BC, Egypt was inhabited by egalitarian nomadic bands who lived in small temporary camps close to the Nile and depended for their survival on hunting and fishing. Their material means of existence differed little from similar groups of Stone Age hunter-gatherers the world over. Beginning in 5,500 BC, Egypt's nomadic bands began to build permanent settlements focused around agriculture, particularly the growing of cereal grains like wheat and barley. By the Neolithic period, the trend towards the establishment of more settled societies accelerated to such an extent that these people began to boldly experiment with stone, mud, metals, wood and leather to produce useful household utensils and artifacts.
The first nomadic tribesmen dwelt in temporary camps of reed or grass huts and moved with the seasons. They appeared to be acutely aware of the ebbing and subsiding of the Nile and sensibly built settlements that avoided the inundation. The mound, so prominent a feature in the creation myths and legends of dynastic Egypt, must have assumed special importance in predynastic times. The people, however, came in close proximity to the river in spite of the annual flood because it was a rich source of food. Later, they discovered that it was not only their lifeline, but a convenient highway as well. Most of their settlements were located at the edge of the floodplain. Rock-shelters were also used, and towards the end of the fourth millennium BC permanent settlements, on mounds, had become the norm. Very occasionally, the settlements even had one or two stone houses.
By 4,000 BC Neolithic communities ceased being organised into hunting bands, discarded the nomadic way of life and became settled agriculturists, artisans and traders. By this time, as their graves so graphically suggest, they were clearly divided into rulers and ruled, rich and poor. While hunting was no longer the only way of life, the early inhabitants of the Nile Valley held tenaciously to their animal totems -- the falcon, the vulture, the ibis, the frog, the snake, the crocodile, the lioness, the hound and the hippopotamus. These were to emerge as gods in dynastic times. With urbanisation and settled agriculture came social organisation and a rigidly hierarchical society. The seeds of the hierarchical Pharaonic civilisation, with god-king or Pharaoh at the apex and commoners making up the base, were sown.
No study of predynastic Egypt can be complete without a reference to the work of the Father of Pots, William Matthew Flinders Petrie, a British archaeologist who meticulously unearthed the pots and grave goods of the predynastic period. Even though Petrie's work was not confined to the predynastic, he was perhaps the first Egyptologist to scrupulously jot down notes about the predynastic objects he excavated.
Around 4,000 BC some of the finest and most elegant pottery were being produced in Upper Egypt. They were of a far superior quality to the pots produced in the Delta. At first the predynastic people of the Delta tried to imitate Upper Egyptian pottery but differences were eventually blurred when during the protodynastic period -- the two or three centuries immediately preceding dynastic Egypt, Upper Egyptian kings overran the Delta and ultimately united the Two Lands. The Delta people then adopted the ways of the culturally dominant Upper Egyptian people. Indigenous pottery from the Delta ceased to exist and was replaced by pottery from Upper Egypt. Even the Delta houses ceased to be made of the traditional bundled papyrus and mats. The vanquished Lower Egyptians began to build their houses with mud bricks like those of the conquerors from the South, a style widely regarded as the prototype for dynastic houses. Several clay models of houses discovered in Hieraconpolis graves closely resembled future Old Kingdom dwellings. Other Upper Egyptian customs and traditions, like placing valuable grave goods with the deceased, were adopted by the people of the Delta. This particular custom emerged as an essential feature of dynastic Egyptian culture. Once set in place, the Egyptian civilisation was to prevail in all the splendour of its cardinal characteristics for the next 4,000 years.
Unconventional pottery: some with elaborate decoration, and an extraordinary ivory comb are among the finds in the new Nubia Museum in Aswan Ivory Comb, Egyptian Jar,
Archaeologists divide the predynastic period into separate stages of development. The first relatively sophisticated Neolithic culture in Egypt proper, as opposed to Nubia, was of a people today commonly described as Badarians, in reference to the site at the village of Al-Badari, to the immediate south of Assiut, Upper Egypt, where many of their cultural remains were found. Next came the Amratian and Gerzean civilisations, also referred to as Naqada I and Naqada II -- a site a few kilometres north of Luxor, where an impressive array of their cultural remains was located. The Amratians and especially the Gerzeans displayed an even more sophisticated cultural distinction than the Badarians. The Gerzean Civilisation can be regarded as the immediate forerunner of dynastic Egypt.
beautiful handicrafts at various museums abroad: The British Museum, London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College, London, the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford, the Musée du Louvre, Paris, are among the best-stocked. In Egypt, the Nubian Museum, Aswan, the Egyptian Museum, Cairo; and hopefully the Maadi predynastic Museum, Cairo, which will open its doors to the public soon.
In Egypt, the Chalcolithic Period, sometimes also called Primitive predynastic, saw the emergence of Badarian agrarians. The Badarian culture also witnessed the first beginnings of stonemasonry in Egypt, which differed qualitatively from the primitive art of Stone Age toolmaking that had existed for millennia. The Badarians appear to have lived in shelters made of animal skins and dressed also in animal skins. They were skilled artisans who, while not entirely giving up hunting, bartered trade goods, had began to experiment with agriculture, and domesticated many animals. The Badarians obviously were a gregarious people who, judging from the artifacts they left behind, were fond of dance. The preponderance of female figurines in Badarian tombs hint at a more matrilineal political system or female-oriented religion than that which prevailed in Egypt in dynastic times, when male-gods predominated. Dancer figurines, mostly female, with upraised arms were common in graves. Perhaps these figurines represented the original belly dancers. Such figures are now scattered in museums all over the world. One especially expressive and mirthful figurine is deposited at the Musée de Lyon, France. Other figures are to be found in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo; the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; the University of Chicago Oriental Institute Museum; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; and several museums in London including the Victoria and Albert; the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology; and the British Museum.
The Badarians' wardrobe must have been essentially a collection of animal skins. But strong evidence suggests that the Badarians discovered the loom and were, therefore, producing textiles as well. A pottery dish depicting a horizontal ground-loom was found at a tomb at Al-Badari. The earliest known Egyptian flax and Neolithic linen goes back to the Badarian period.
The Badarians also cleverly crafted combs of ivory, bone and wood which are remarkably reminiscent of traditional African combs. But perhaps the most impressive feature of Badarian culture was their highly distinctive pottery. Of superlative quality, the Badarians' pottery was of a reddish brown finish and the tops were burned black, by being inverted in the ashes of the kiln. The walls of the Badarian ceramics were fired to something of a metallic hardness even though they were often eggshell-thin.
But the handiwork of the Badarians pale into relative insignificance when compared with those of its two successor civilisations -- the Amratian and the Gerzean. The first is named for the site at Al Amra (or Naqada I) in the vicinity of modern Luxor. Naqada, 30 kilometres north of Luxor, is one of the most important predynastic sites in Egypt. Carpentry and furniture-making began in earnest during the Amratian period. In time, objects began to be made not just with function in mind, but with aesthetic value as well. The beautiful black-topped pottery so characteristic of the time was produced in abundance.
Around 4,500 BC this new, dynamic and relatively sophisticated culture known today as Naqada I or the Amratian Period, produced veritable works of art. There was a distinct change in pottery decorations. Previously ceramics were decorated by simple geometric designs and bold bands of paint. But, in the Amratian period, the ever more complex designs that were not just purely functional came into vogue. Among the grave goods the Amratians left behind were solemn-looking cloaked and bearded male figures in ivory and clay. These figures are instantly recognisable as the antecedent of Osiris Lord of the Dead, Resurrection and Rebirth. Such figures are also reminiscent of the tightly-fitted Hed-Seb ceremonial dress of dynastic Pharaohs.
The Amratians grew Emmer wheat and baked bread. Food production gradually became a more sophisticated process and the domestication of cattle was firmly established by the fourth millennium. The Amratians traded with the peoples of Nubia, the Red Sea, the Delta and the Levant, perhaps even further afield.
One of the most important predynastic trading settlements was in the southern Cairo suburb of Maadi. A distinctly Maadi feature was the burial of dogs and gazelles. There is evidence of the extensive use of copper in the Maadi predynastic settlement. Copper was hammered cold and shaped into pins and harpoon heads. Such objects are found in the Maadi predynastic Museum, Cairo. Trade with the people of Sinai and Palestine was crucial to the economic well-being of the Maadi settlement. Donkeys were used as draft animals. Palestinian pottery and other artifacts from the Levant were found in abundance in Maadi. Jewellery and artifacts for personal adornment show a marked level of artistry. Moreover, the strong and astonishingly intact samples of teeth reveal that the people of predynastic Maadi had an exceptionally healthy and varied diet of grain, fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy products.
Other important and distinct predynastic cultures in Lower Egypt were found in Fayoum and Merimda in the Delta. A notable feature of Lower Egyptian predynastic sites like Maadi, Fayoum and Merimda is that they were once living quarters or trading settlements as opposed to the primarily grave sites of Upper Egypt.
The third stage of predynastic cultural development began at around 4,000 BC and is referred to as the Gerzean Period or Naqada III, in reference to the village of Gerzah halfway between Saqqara and Fayoum, on the western bank of the Nile. But the Gerzean predynastic culture spanned a long stretch of the Nile in Lower, Middle and Upper Egypt. In Hemamiya, just south of Assiut, Badarian artifacts were found beneath Amratian and Gerzean levels, suggesting a strong sense of continuity of predynastic cultures.
Artifacts from the Gerzean Period, however, are decidedly different from those produced in the earlier Amratian and Badarian periods. The difference between the Gerzean and the two other cultures is perhaps most marked in ceramics. Gerzean pottery was produced along not merely functional lines. The aesthetic or decorative aspect of ceramics became the hallmark of Gerzean culture. Geometric motifs on ceramics dating to the Gerzean period could be interpreted as a form of early writing. Gerzean exquisitely painted desert-hunting scenes and animals such as the ostrich and the inex abound. Another favourite object depicted on Gerzean ceramics was the boat.
The art of dyeing, using natural colours of local origin, was known in Egypt as early as the Gerzean period, with the textile fibres spun and then dyed. Spinning and weaving were practised in ancient Egypt from the Neolithic period, technical evidence being afforded by depiction, models and the surviving artifacts. But it is beginning of the Gerzean times that the art of dressmaking approached the excellence of dynastic times. Spare clothing for the afterlife was an archaic Egyptian custom, and dates back to the Gerzean Period when hanks of yarn were traditionally placed with the body of the deceased. Copper and silver needles and pins with loop heads are some of the surviving objects that were in everyday usage during the Gerzean period.
The Hierakonpolis Expedition uncovered a brewery, perhaps what is Egypt's earliest temple destined to become the prototype for dynastic Egyptian temples. The predynastic rulers of Hierakonpolis were in all probability the kings who eventually united all Egypt: Delta and Nile Valley. Surviving dwellings from the predynastic periods are uncommon and a rare exception, however, is the house and workshop of a potter who signed his pots in one of Egypt's earliest urban settlements -- Hierakonpolis, the Falcon city. Hierakonpolis was a sprawling settlement of over 11 acres on the desert's edge. The potter's subterranean rectangular house was burnt down after what appears to be a devastating fire. The potter wisely rebuilt his house in stone. Because of the fossilised remains of the potter's house, we are able to glimpse something of the architectural creativity of the late predynastic period.
Among the most important items left behind by these predynastic people were palettes of slate for grinding cosmetics -- many in the shape of animals, birds and fish. Boats were the dominant theme of the pottery of the late predynastic, or protodynastic times. Naval battles were also depicted as on the handle of a knife discovered at Jabal Al-Arak. The names of certain predynastic kings such as Scorpion were depicted in a serekh, or cartouche, like their dynastic counterparts. By this time, of course, it is not entirely clear whether we are still talking of predynastic times. For it is at that historical moment that the predynastic, or protodynastic, metamorphosed into the far more familiar dynastic Egypt.
Dynastic Egypt, the classical "Two Lands" of the Pharaohs, did not miraculously spring fully ordered in all its fabled splendour. It took some five millennia before 3,500 BC for the inhabitants of the Nile Valley and Delta of Egypt to reach the cultural attainments now instantly and universally recognisable as unique to dynastic Egypt. There is abundant archaeological evidence of several predynastic kingdoms in Upper Egypt. It is commonly acknowledged that at least rudimentary political structures existed in Upper Egypt about 7,000 years ago. Because of the rise in the water table, it is rather more difficult to ascertain whether similar kingdoms existed in the Delta.
So, who were the people whose culture laid the seeds of the very first nation-state in recorded history? There is scarce, but categorical, evidence of very ancient human presence in Nubia and Upper Egypt. Early Paleolithic -- Stone Age -- hand axes believed to be over 70,000 years old were found in the vicinity of Abu Simbel, Nubia. But skeletal remains dating to that very distant past are yet to be discovered. How and why did the Nile Valley's Neolithic, or late Stone Age, hunter-gatherers who had started experimenting with agriculture and animal husbandry, so rapidly progress to urbanisation and state formation at a time when the rest of humanity slumbered in prehistory? A precise answer is still a matter of conjecture.
However, Egyptologists all agree that the bounty of the lush Nile Valley was instrumental to the luxuriant flowering of Ancient Egypt. The Sahara was not always a desolate wasteland. Some 10,000 years ago, the Sahara received considerably more rain than it does today, permitting a savanna-like vegetation of open grasslands peppered with shrubs and trees, much like the East African plains of today. And, like their modern counterpart in East Africa, the Sahara was teaming with game and nomadic people who herded cattle -- perhaps the first to do so in all of Africa -- and roamed the savanna in search of grazing land. For watering cattle, they congregated along the banks of lakes. One such former lake is Nabta Playa -- a mere 45 kilometres west of Ramses II's temple of Abu Simbel. Today the site where these people performed their religious rituals is marked by a circle of small upright stone slabs only four metres in diameter. The curious circle looks like a miniature replica of England's Stonehenge except that it was set up some 2,000 years earlier. Perhaps, these nomadic Saharan people were the ancestors of the early Nile Valley inhabitants?
There is evidence to suggest that around 6,000 years ago, these nomadic desert-dwellers left the Sahara Desert as it turned into the barren waste it now is and journeyed towards the life-giving waters of the River Nile and the lush Valley where first they practised hunting and gathering and gradually with the annual inundation that occurred every summer, year after year, they turned to settled agriculture. It seems that they journeyed along the tributaries of the Nile or wadi, today's dried-up watercourses, until they reached the banks of the great river itself. The cultural remains of these prehistoric people can be traced in places like Wadi Es-Sebua, Abu Simbel and Toshka, 160 kilometres south of Aswan.
Nevertheless, the earliest human skeletal remains in Egypt's Nile Valley were found in Jabal Sahaba, Nubia, and is some 12,000 years old. An excellent venue, therefore, in which to kick-start an exploration of predynastic cultural remains is the Nubian Museum of Aswan. The impetus for early predynastic cultural advancement in all probability came from the Khartoum Mesolithic people around 6,000 BC. These were the first people to domesticate cattle and cultivate cereal crops in the Nile Valley. In the Nubian Museum, Aswan, you can sample some of the ceramics, decorated ostrich-eggs and rock-carvings of these predynastic people. The principal material remains of these people are their stone tools, jewellery and numerous rock paintings, showing the animals they hunted. (See exhibition zones C, D and E, which display an interesting array of tools, utensils and handicrafts of the earliest inhabitants of the Nile Valley.)
The cultural influences of the Khartoum Mesolithic people appear to have drifted northwards, along the banks of the River Nile, into Lower Nubia and Upper Egypt over the next millennium. In the process, the Mesolithic cultures evolved into more advanced Neolithic culture. Between 5,500 BC and 3,100 BC, a number of successive Neolithic cultures in both Lower Egypt and, especially, Upper Egypt evolved into large, hierarchical and well organised communities. They excelled in the crafts of basketry, weaving, the tanning of animal hides and their pottery in particular was of outstanding quality. These cultures were the forerunners of dynastic Egypt. Many of the cultural features that later came to characterise dynastic Egypt originated first in predynastic Egypt. In the last stages of predynastic Egypt, sometimes referred to in literature as protodynastic Egypt, predynastic culture resembled dynastic, especially Old Kingdom, culture in more ways than one. Predynastic culture was fast acquiring those specificities that we today instantly recognise as characteristic of dynastic Egypt: an obsession with tombs and the afterlife, a preponderance of animal deities, a centralised government and the appurtenances of statehood, the first etchings of hieroglyphics, royal symbols and religious iconography. The provincial administrative divisions in dynastic times, which the Greeks called nomes, perhaps even represented the clan totems or fetishes of predynastic Egypt. Against this backdrop emerged the earliest urbanised societies in the world.
In the late Paleolithic period, from 25,000 BC, Egypt was inhabited by egalitarian nomadic bands who lived in small temporary camps close to the Nile and depended for their survival on hunting and fishing. Their material means of existence differed little from similar groups of Stone Age hunter-gatherers the world over. Beginning in 5,500 BC, Egypt's nomadic bands began to build permanent settlements focused around agriculture, particularly the growing of cereal grains like wheat and barley. By the Neolithic period, the trend towards the establishment of more settled societies accelerated to such an extent that these people began to boldly experiment with stone, mud, metals, wood and leather to produce useful household utensils and artifacts.
The first nomadic tribesmen dwelt in temporary camps of reed or grass huts and moved with the seasons. They appeared to be acutely aware of the ebbing and subsiding of the Nile and sensibly built settlements that avoided the inundation. The mound, so prominent a feature in the creation myths and legends of dynastic Egypt, must have assumed special importance in predynastic times. The people, however, came in close proximity to the river in spite of the annual flood because it was a rich source of food. Later, they discovered that it was not only their lifeline, but a convenient highway as well. Most of their settlements were located at the edge of the floodplain. Rock-shelters were also used, and towards the end of the fourth millennium BC permanent settlements, on mounds, had become the norm. Very occasionally, the settlements even had one or two stone houses.
By 4,000 BC Neolithic communities ceased being organised into hunting bands, discarded the nomadic way of life and became settled agriculturists, artisans and traders. By this time, as their graves so graphically suggest, they were clearly divided into rulers and ruled, rich and poor. While hunting was no longer the only way of life, the early inhabitants of the Nile Valley held tenaciously to their animal totems -- the falcon, the vulture, the ibis, the frog, the snake, the crocodile, the lioness, the hound and the hippopotamus. These were to emerge as gods in dynastic times. With urbanisation and settled agriculture came social organisation and a rigidly hierarchical society. The seeds of the hierarchical Pharaonic civilisation, with god-king or Pharaoh at the apex and commoners making up the base, were sown.
No study of predynastic Egypt can be complete without a reference to the work of the Father of Pots, William Matthew Flinders Petrie, a British archaeologist who meticulously unearthed the pots and grave goods of the predynastic period. Even though Petrie's work was not confined to the predynastic, he was perhaps the first Egyptologist to scrupulously jot down notes about the predynastic objects he excavated.
Around 4,000 BC some of the finest and most elegant pottery were being produced in Upper Egypt. They were of a far superior quality to the pots produced in the Delta. At first the predynastic people of the Delta tried to imitate Upper Egyptian pottery but differences were eventually blurred when during the protodynastic period -- the two or three centuries immediately preceding dynastic Egypt, Upper Egyptian kings overran the Delta and ultimately united the Two Lands. The Delta people then adopted the ways of the culturally dominant Upper Egyptian people. Indigenous pottery from the Delta ceased to exist and was replaced by pottery from Upper Egypt. Even the Delta houses ceased to be made of the traditional bundled papyrus and mats. The vanquished Lower Egyptians began to build their houses with mud bricks like those of the conquerors from the South, a style widely regarded as the prototype for dynastic houses. Several clay models of houses discovered in Hieraconpolis graves closely resembled future Old Kingdom dwellings. Other Upper Egyptian customs and traditions, like placing valuable grave goods with the deceased, were adopted by the people of the Delta. This particular custom emerged as an essential feature of dynastic Egyptian culture. Once set in place, the Egyptian civilisation was to prevail in all the splendour of its cardinal characteristics for the next 4,000 years.
Unconventional pottery: some with elaborate decoration, and an extraordinary ivory comb are among the finds in the new Nubia Museum in Aswan Ivory Comb, Egyptian Jar,
Archaeologists divide the predynastic period into separate stages of development. The first relatively sophisticated Neolithic culture in Egypt proper, as opposed to Nubia, was of a people today commonly described as Badarians, in reference to the site at the village of Al-Badari, to the immediate south of Assiut, Upper Egypt, where many of their cultural remains were found. Next came the Amratian and Gerzean civilisations, also referred to as Naqada I and Naqada II -- a site a few kilometres north of Luxor, where an impressive array of their cultural remains was located. The Amratians and especially the Gerzeans displayed an even more sophisticated cultural distinction than the Badarians. The Gerzean Civilisation can be regarded as the immediate forerunner of dynastic Egypt.
beautiful handicrafts at various museums abroad: The British Museum, London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College, London, the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford, the Musée du Louvre, Paris, are among the best-stocked. In Egypt, the Nubian Museum, Aswan, the Egyptian Museum, Cairo; and hopefully the Maadi predynastic Museum, Cairo, which will open its doors to the public soon.
In Egypt, the Chalcolithic Period, sometimes also called Primitive predynastic, saw the emergence of Badarian agrarians. The Badarian culture also witnessed the first beginnings of stonemasonry in Egypt, which differed qualitatively from the primitive art of Stone Age toolmaking that had existed for millennia. The Badarians appear to have lived in shelters made of animal skins and dressed also in animal skins. They were skilled artisans who, while not entirely giving up hunting, bartered trade goods, had began to experiment with agriculture, and domesticated many animals. The Badarians obviously were a gregarious people who, judging from the artifacts they left behind, were fond of dance. The preponderance of female figurines in Badarian tombs hint at a more matrilineal political system or female-oriented religion than that which prevailed in Egypt in dynastic times, when male-gods predominated. Dancer figurines, mostly female, with upraised arms were common in graves. Perhaps these figurines represented the original belly dancers. Such figures are now scattered in museums all over the world. One especially expressive and mirthful figurine is deposited at the Musée de Lyon, France. Other figures are to be found in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo; the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; the University of Chicago Oriental Institute Museum; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; and several museums in London including the Victoria and Albert; the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology; and the British Museum.
The Badarians' wardrobe must have been essentially a collection of animal skins. But strong evidence suggests that the Badarians discovered the loom and were, therefore, producing textiles as well. A pottery dish depicting a horizontal ground-loom was found at a tomb at Al-Badari. The earliest known Egyptian flax and Neolithic linen goes back to the Badarian period.
The Badarians also cleverly crafted combs of ivory, bone and wood which are remarkably reminiscent of traditional African combs. But perhaps the most impressive feature of Badarian culture was their highly distinctive pottery. Of superlative quality, the Badarians' pottery was of a reddish brown finish and the tops were burned black, by being inverted in the ashes of the kiln. The walls of the Badarian ceramics were fired to something of a metallic hardness even though they were often eggshell-thin.
But the handiwork of the Badarians pale into relative insignificance when compared with those of its two successor civilisations -- the Amratian and the Gerzean. The first is named for the site at Al Amra (or Naqada I) in the vicinity of modern Luxor. Naqada, 30 kilometres north of Luxor, is one of the most important predynastic sites in Egypt. Carpentry and furniture-making began in earnest during the Amratian period. In time, objects began to be made not just with function in mind, but with aesthetic value as well. The beautiful black-topped pottery so characteristic of the time was produced in abundance.
Around 4,500 BC this new, dynamic and relatively sophisticated culture known today as Naqada I or the Amratian Period, produced veritable works of art. There was a distinct change in pottery decorations. Previously ceramics were decorated by simple geometric designs and bold bands of paint. But, in the Amratian period, the ever more complex designs that were not just purely functional came into vogue. Among the grave goods the Amratians left behind were solemn-looking cloaked and bearded male figures in ivory and clay. These figures are instantly recognisable as the antecedent of Osiris Lord of the Dead, Resurrection and Rebirth. Such figures are also reminiscent of the tightly-fitted Hed-Seb ceremonial dress of dynastic Pharaohs.
The Amratians grew Emmer wheat and baked bread. Food production gradually became a more sophisticated process and the domestication of cattle was firmly established by the fourth millennium. The Amratians traded with the peoples of Nubia, the Red Sea, the Delta and the Levant, perhaps even further afield.
One of the most important predynastic trading settlements was in the southern Cairo suburb of Maadi. A distinctly Maadi feature was the burial of dogs and gazelles. There is evidence of the extensive use of copper in the Maadi predynastic settlement. Copper was hammered cold and shaped into pins and harpoon heads. Such objects are found in the Maadi predynastic Museum, Cairo. Trade with the people of Sinai and Palestine was crucial to the economic well-being of the Maadi settlement. Donkeys were used as draft animals. Palestinian pottery and other artifacts from the Levant were found in abundance in Maadi. Jewellery and artifacts for personal adornment show a marked level of artistry. Moreover, the strong and astonishingly intact samples of teeth reveal that the people of predynastic Maadi had an exceptionally healthy and varied diet of grain, fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy products.
Other important and distinct predynastic cultures in Lower Egypt were found in Fayoum and Merimda in the Delta. A notable feature of Lower Egyptian predynastic sites like Maadi, Fayoum and Merimda is that they were once living quarters or trading settlements as opposed to the primarily grave sites of Upper Egypt.
The third stage of predynastic cultural development began at around 4,000 BC and is referred to as the Gerzean Period or Naqada III, in reference to the village of Gerzah halfway between Saqqara and Fayoum, on the western bank of the Nile. But the Gerzean predynastic culture spanned a long stretch of the Nile in Lower, Middle and Upper Egypt. In Hemamiya, just south of Assiut, Badarian artifacts were found beneath Amratian and Gerzean levels, suggesting a strong sense of continuity of predynastic cultures.
Artifacts from the Gerzean Period, however, are decidedly different from those produced in the earlier Amratian and Badarian periods. The difference between the Gerzean and the two other cultures is perhaps most marked in ceramics. Gerzean pottery was produced along not merely functional lines. The aesthetic or decorative aspect of ceramics became the hallmark of Gerzean culture. Geometric motifs on ceramics dating to the Gerzean period could be interpreted as a form of early writing. Gerzean exquisitely painted desert-hunting scenes and animals such as the ostrich and the inex abound. Another favourite object depicted on Gerzean ceramics was the boat.
The art of dyeing, using natural colours of local origin, was known in Egypt as early as the Gerzean period, with the textile fibres spun and then dyed. Spinning and weaving were practised in ancient Egypt from the Neolithic period, technical evidence being afforded by depiction, models and the surviving artifacts. But it is beginning of the Gerzean times that the art of dressmaking approached the excellence of dynastic times. Spare clothing for the afterlife was an archaic Egyptian custom, and dates back to the Gerzean Period when hanks of yarn were traditionally placed with the body of the deceased. Copper and silver needles and pins with loop heads are some of the surviving objects that were in everyday usage during the Gerzean period.
The Hierakonpolis Expedition uncovered a brewery, perhaps what is Egypt's earliest temple destined to become the prototype for dynastic Egyptian temples. The predynastic rulers of Hierakonpolis were in all probability the kings who eventually united all Egypt: Delta and Nile Valley. Surviving dwellings from the predynastic periods are uncommon and a rare exception, however, is the house and workshop of a potter who signed his pots in one of Egypt's earliest urban settlements -- Hierakonpolis, the Falcon city. Hierakonpolis was a sprawling settlement of over 11 acres on the desert's edge. The potter's subterranean rectangular house was burnt down after what appears to be a devastating fire. The potter wisely rebuilt his house in stone. Because of the fossilised remains of the potter's house, we are able to glimpse something of the architectural creativity of the late predynastic period.
Among the most important items left behind by these predynastic people were palettes of slate for grinding cosmetics -- many in the shape of animals, birds and fish. Boats were the dominant theme of the pottery of the late predynastic, or protodynastic times. Naval battles were also depicted as on the handle of a knife discovered at Jabal Al-Arak. The names of certain predynastic kings such as Scorpion were depicted in a serekh, or cartouche, like their dynastic counterparts. By this time, of course, it is not entirely clear whether we are still talking of predynastic times. For it is at that historical moment that the predynastic, or protodynastic, metamorphosed into the far more familiar dynastic Egypt.
The Nile Valley Civilization --Spread of African Culture
A lecture delivered for the Minority Ethnic Unit of the Greater London Council, London, England, March 6–8, 1986. It was addressed mainly to the African community in London consisting of African people from the Caribbean and African people from Africa.
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When we speak of the Nile Valley, of course we are talking about 4,100 miles of civilization, or the beginning of the birth of what is today called civilization. I can go to one case of literature in particular which will identify the Africans as the beginners of the civilization to which I refer. And since I am not foreign to the works of Africans in Egypt, otherwise called Egyptians, I think that should be satisfactory proof. This proof is housed in the London Museum that is holding artifacts of Egypt. In that museum you will find a document called the Papyrus of Hunifer. At least you should find it there. It was there when Sir E. A. Wallace Budge used it in his translation as part of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Papyrus of Hunifer.
It was there at that time, a copy of which is in the library of Syracuse University in New York, and I quote from the hieratic writing, "We came from the beginning of the Nile where God Hapi dwells, at the foothills of The Mountains of the Moon." "We," meaning the Egyptians, as stated, came from the beginning of the Nile. Where is "the beginning of the Nile?" The farthest point of the beginning of the Nile is in Uganda; this is the White Nile. Another point is in Ethiopia. The Blue Nile and White Nile meet in Khartoum; and the other side of Khartoum is the Omdurman Republic of Sudan. From there it flows from the south down north. And there it meets with the Atbara River in Atbara, Sudan. Then it flows completely through Sudan (Ta-Nehisi, Ta-Zeti or Ta-Seti, as it was called), part of that ancient empire which was one time adjacent to the nation called Meroe or Merowe. From that, into the southern part of what the Romans called "Nubia," and parallel on the Nile, part of which the Greeks called "Egypticus"; the English called it "Egypt" and the Jews in their mythology called it "Mizrain" which the current Arabs called Mizr/Mizrair. Thus it ends in the Sea of Sais, also called the Great Sea, today's Mediterranean Sea. When we say thus, we want to make certain that Hapi is still God of the Nile, shown as a hermaphrodite having the breasts of a woman and the penis of a man. God Hapi is always shown tying two symbols of the "Two Lands," Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, during Dynastic Periods, or from the beginning of the Dynastic Periods. The lotus flower is the symbol of the south, and the papyrus plant, the symbol of the north.
But we need to go back beyond Egypt. I used "Egypt" as a starting point, in that of all the ancient civilizations in the world, Egypt has more ancient documents and other artifacts than any other civilization one could speak of. So when you hear them talking about "Sumer" and "Babylon," and all those other places, theoretically, they can't show you the artifacts. Thus my position is, first hand information is the best proof; and I can show you the bones and other remains of Zinjanthropus Boisei about 1.8 million years ago. But no one can show me the bones and remains of Adam and Eve, et al.
So I have the proof and you have the belief. If you want to see it you can go to the Croydon National Museum in Nairobi, Kenya; there, you'll see the Bones Zinjanthropus Boisei. If you want to see the remains of "Lucy," you can go to the national Museum associated with the University of Addis Ababa. Of course, there are a host of other human fossils that existed thousands of years ago all over Africa; but you can't find one "Adam" or one "Eve" in any part of Asia.
But we have to go beyond that. We can look at the artifacts before writing came into being. We will then be in archaeological finds along the Nile. Also you would find that there were two groups of Africans; one called "Hutu," and one called "Twa." The Twa and Hutu take us back into at least 400,000 B.C.E. (Before the Common "Christian" Era) in terms of artifacts. The most ancient of these artifacts, one of the most important in Egypt, is called the "Ankh," which the Christians adopted and called the "Crux Ansata" or "Ansata Cross." The Ankh was there amongst these people, equally the "Crook" and "Flail." All of these symbols came down to us from the Twa and Hutu. You know the Twa by British anthropologists who called them "pygmies." There is no such thing in Africa known as a "pygmy," much less "pygmies." But the people call themselves Twa and Hutu, so that's what they are.
If we look at the southern tip of Africa, a place called "Monomotapa," before the first Europeans came there with the Portuguese in 1486, C.E./A.D. (Christian Eera), a man called Captian Bartholomew Diaz, and subsequently another European and his group came, one called Captain Vasco da Gama, who came there ten years later in 1496; when they came to that part of Africa they met another group of people there as well, which they called "Kaffirs." Now this is a long time before the Boers came there in 1652. When the Boers came those Africans may have gone to the moon on vacation (or there they "didn't meet any natives" [Africans] so they say. But one thing is certain, that Bartholomew Diaz and Vasco da Gama had already left records showing that when they arrived there at Monomotapa the Khaffirs [Africans], including the small ones (Khoi-Khoi, and Khalaharis) (remember I didn't say "Bushmen" or "Hottentots," that's nonsense, the racist names given them by the British and Dutch Boers), were already there.
So with all of these people that were found in this area we could go back at least 35,000 to 40,000 years to another group of people who left their writings and their pictures. Those people are called Grimaldi. The Grimaldi were there in the southern tip of Africa, and traveled up the entire western coast, then came to the northwestern coast of Africa, and crossed into Spain. Not only in Spain, but all the way up to Austria; it was found that the Grimaldi had traveled and left their drawings in caves all along the way. In the Museum of Natural History, New York City, New York, you can see Grimaldi paintings going back to at least 35,000 years ago. I remind you that it is only about 31,000 years before Adam and Eve! It is very important you realize that, the next time you talk about Adam and Eve. So we are told that there is an Adam and Eve that started the world, but that is a "Jewish world" and I'm talking about before Abraham, the first Jew.
The country that I am talking about now goes back to a period called the Sibellian Period. Sibellian I brings us to a period where you will find hieratic writings, the type that no one in modern times has been able to decipher. Sibellian II existed about 25,000 years before the birth of Jesus-the Christ. Sibillian III would bring us to about 10,000 B.C.E., in which we now have the Stellar Calendar that I spoke about, and the pre-dynastic period will be considered from the same, 10,000 to 6,000 B.C.E., and that is the point when High Priest Manetho, in about 227 or 226 B.C.E., attempted to present for the Greeks, who had imposed upon him to write a kind of chronological history of the Nile Valley. Europeans, instead of saying what Manetho said in his chronology of the history of the Nile Valley, forget to say it was at the end of the Nile Valley he addressed. For example, the "First Cataract," i.e., an obstruction in the Nile River, is at a place called the City of Aswan, when in fact it is the last; the "Sixth Cataract" is in fact Aswan, Upper (or Southern) Egypt.
This is important to understand, because Egypt, which most of us deal with and forget the rest of the Nile Valley, is not at the beginning of the Nile Valley high cultures, but the end. High culture came down the Nile; but if you go on the Nile you will always hear about the "pyramids of Egypt." Yes, they are the "world's largest"; they will blow your mind, so to speak, but they are not the first pyramids of Africa; they are the last. There are thirty-two pyramids in Sudan, none in Ethiopia, and seventy-two in Egypt. What happened is that as the Africans became much more competent in engineering, etc., they increased the size of their pyramids in sophistication; thus at the end of the Nile you could see different forms and the colossal pyramids, the largest being one by Pharaoh Khufu, whom Herodotus called Cheops, and that would be one of the pyramids built in the 4th Dynasty. The first of the pyramids of Egypt being that by Imhotep, for his Pharaoh Djoser/Sertor ("Zozer"), the third pharaoh of the Third Dynasty. The architect was the multi-genus, Imhotep, who introduced to mankind the first structure ever built out of stone, and with joints without mortar of any other binding materials.
Now you could understand if I said that the pyramids in Sudan ore older than the pyramids in Egypt, and I simultaneously say that Imhotep built the first stone structure known by man, it would seem to be a contradiction. It is not a contradiction, because those in Sudan were built by two methods. There were some pyramids called silt pyramids, and the second method was mud-brick pyramids. Not the type of "bricks made of mud and straw" mentioned in the Hebrew Holy Torah, specifically the Book of Exodus. That has to be made clear. How did the silt pyramids come about? That type of pyramid came about due to the Inundation Period of the Nile River. This was the period when the Nile River overflowed its banks bringing down the silt from the highlands of Ethiopia and Uganda, and from the Mountain of the Moon, which the people of Kenya called Kilimanjaro.
It is in this perspective that we are talking about Africa as a people. Because, all of that period of time we are talking about, you can go there now and see the artifacts in museums all over Europe and the United States of America. I'm not speaking to you chronologically, because I am using my recall; let us go back to the event that took place; and as I thought about this, something about medicine came to my mind, I remember going to the double Temple of Haroeris and Sobek; Haroeris represented by the Cobra Snake and Sobek represented by the Nile Crocodile. In that temple at the rear, you will find drawings of medical instruments going back to the time of Imhotep. That will bring us to about 285 B.C.E. to the construction of the Double Temple which was during Greek rule. Most of the medical instruments you see there are the exact dimension, the exact styles and shapes still used in medical operation theaters today. You could see all kinds of symbols relating to the use of incense; you could also find the beginnings of the aspect of the calendars (the dating process for the farmers) the same the Coptic farmers still use, the 13-monts calendar, twelve months of thirty days each, and one month of five days. The same one the Ethiopian government still uses, officially; that calendar still a means of telling time to date. When we go to the Temple of the Goddess Het-Heru (Hathor) at a place called Dendara, we see the beginnings of what is called the Zodiac. The French stole the original, and in carrying it to France, in hot pursuit by the Arabs of Egypt, they dropped it in the River Nile. Yet a Frenchman said he remembered everything, and he produced a whole new one within two weeks. So if you read Revelations, like this false Zodiac, it has nothing to do with St. John, but in fact Bishop Athanasius. This is the same thing. How could the French remember the stolen Egyptian Zodiac so well? It was rectangular, but what they remembered is circular. Thus it is the French who made the Zodiac they placed in the Temple of Goddess Het-Heru for tourist these days, and the tourist guides will tell you that is the French one. So!
You can see that even in those early times we were dealing with astronomy, and Europeans have not gone one inch further than those Africans along the Nile. What you have to remember, however, is that the Papyrus of Hunefer deals with the Africans who came down the Nile, who were already using this type of thing: and we must wonder since we don't have the day-to-day, or enough artifacts to put them together to see the transition. Why is it that the Yorubas of West Africa have the same structure of the deity system as the Nile Valley? I don't remember much because the Yorubas in their own folklore speak of having come from the Nile Valley; so you can stop wondering right there, since it is from their earliest teachings in their folklores.
When we go down the Nile and look at the engineering, and our engineering goes not only to the building of the pyramids by Imhotep, this multi-genius, but equally to the time of Senwosret II, with the division of the Nile water; equally to stop the rush of water. That would put us right back to 2,200 Before the Common "Christian" Era (B.C.E.).
The use of navigation and navigational instruments by using the sun and the stars as navigational tools—we have the best record of that going back even before Pharaoh Necho II, who saw the navigation of the entire continent and had a map of Africa in almost the common shape it is; and that dates to ca 600 B.C.E. Whereas Herodotus, who came to Egypt in 457 B.C.E., and Erastosthenes, who came there between 274–194 B.C.E., used maps which were rectangular in shape. They reflected the end of Africa being where the Sahara is, the southern end of the Sahara, meaning that they had no concept of Africa from about Ethiopia south to Monomotapa, now called the Republic of South Africa. It is important to note that England played a major role in most of the distortion that we are talking about.
Then we come again to another part that we are talking about, that is, agriculture, before we even come to writing. At the gathering state, when man observes the seed germinating, and out of that came the religious conflict, which other men are to later follow, comes out of one of the most secret symbols of the religiosity of Egypt and other parts of Africa. We are now talking about the dung beetle, and the observation of the African along the Nile with respect to the dung beetle, otherwise called the Scarab. The dung beetle hibernates, goes into the manure of a donkey, horse and the cow, only animals with grass manure. And that beetle remains in there for twenty-eight days; you know that particular beetle died in your mind. And when the beetle finally comes out, what better symbol will you have than the resurrection?
The beetle played the same part in the religion of the Egyptians that spread to other parts of Africa, and subsequently into Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and so on. Thus the beetle became the symbol of resurrection. Of course the religion itself had started then. Just imagine you've got to go back 1000 years and see your woman giving birth to a baby. I hope I did not frighten most of you fellows about childbirth; because if you had some experience of seeing a baby being born, you would be less quick to abandon your child. As you are standing there and this baby comes from the woman's organ. You witness this, while the pelvic region is expanding about four or five inches in diameter for the head to pass through, and you are there. You can't perceive that you have anything to do with this 100,000 or 5,000 years ago. Witnessing the birth of that baby sets you thinking. You immediately start to transcend your mind, and you also start to attribute this to something beyond. Thus you start to believe. You start to wonder' why is it here? Where did it come from? And where is it going ? Because you are now experiencing birth! But your experience is coming from a woman. Thus you start to pray and the woman becomes your Goddess, your first deity. She becomes Goddess Nut, the goddess of the sky; and you become God Geb, the god of the earth. You suddenly see the sun in all of this and you realize that when the sun came the light came; and when the sun went, the light went; when the moon came you saw a moon in there and you don't see any light because the light is not shining on it. So you see there is a God, at least there is the major attribute of God because you realize when that doesn't happen, the crops and the vegetation don't come.
You also realize that the sun and the moon make the river rise, and the Africans regarding these factors created the science of astronomy and astrology. Astrology, having nothing to do with your love life. Astronomy is the chart of the scientific data of the movement of the planets and the sun and so forth, to the movement of each other. Astrology is a physical relationship of astronomy, the water rising at the high tide and that is what the ancients spoke about and the division of the two disciplines.
It was the Greeks like Plato, Aristotle and others who came and learned. In those days the students would come and read for their education. There were no books to take home, there were no publishing houses like now. You had only one book and most of the subjects were taught orally. Certain instructions were given toe to toe, shoulder to shoulder, mouth to ear. I will go no further than that. Some of you here may know how that was done and under what conditions. The English adopted it and called it Freemasonry. Sir Albert Churchward's book, Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man, is a corner stone of Freemasonry. Churchward was a big man in England. Besides being a physician, he was also one of those who made English Freemasonry what it is today. So in another adaptation, the British took twenty-two tablets from Egypt, brought them here and set up what they called "Freemasonry." Of course, the Americans followed suit.
These Africans had moved along the entire continent. You see, we are treating the Egyptians today as if the Egyptians had a barrier that stopped them from going to other parts of Africa. So we say the Egyptians were of a special race, and they had nothing to do with the other Africans. Can you imagine the Thames River at this side stopping the people from the other side from contact with this side, especially when a man standing over there saw a woman here bathing naked; do you think that that river would stop him? Do you think that the Alps stopped a German from going to see an Italian woman? What makes you think that the little river or a little bit of sand would stop a man from seeing a woman naked over there in Africa? I'm using these common symbols so that you can appreciate what I mean. So it isn't because when you go to Egypt you will notice that the ancient Egyptians are shown by the artist as the ancient Nubians or Ethiopians or anybody else, except when you are talking about the conquerors. In most of these museums they purposely bring you the statues of the Greeks, of the Romans, of the Persians, the Assyrians, and the Hyksos. They don't bring you any of the Africans. So when they can't help it, and they need to bring you one that you call a typical African like Pharaoh Mentuhotep III, it is important to Egypt that they have to show him. What they did was to make his nose flat, so you can’t tell the difference.
Thus once in a while, but when they couldn't do it, what they did say, was: "Well, Negroes came into Egypt in the Eighteenth Dynasty." Now it couldn't be, because the Portuguese hadn't created Negroes until the seventeenth century, C.E., but how come the Negroes created by the Portuguese have a place they called Negroland, which was in fact the Songhai Empire? In the map you could see where Negroland was, and so how do you get the "Negroes and Negroland" way back in the Eighteenth Dynasty? The Eighteenth Dynasty has such figures as Akhenaton, or Amenhotep IV, and his father, whom the Greeks called Amenhotep III; in the West you would call him Amenophis III. The civilization in Africa did not spread only from along the Nile, but it spread into your own writings, documents, and belief system right here in England.
I now go back to the Etruscans, who later became the Romans; the people of Pyrrhus, who later became the Greeks, because Pyrrhus was what later became Greece. But we don't have these people until they came from the island of the Mediterranean or the Great Sea. At the time when they left, the Egyptians were the colonizers of other Africans in Egypt. Setting up the first educational system for the people of Pyrrhus, where the borders of Libus (now Libya) and Egypt meet; a little enclave which later became Africa. It is there that the educational system for the Greeks occurred, and from there the Africans moved the system to a place called the city of Elea. It is there that the Greeks would come. This is after they left the Greek peninsula, go to the Italian peninsula where they would meet others to come over to Libus, because they couldn't come the other way as they were going illegally, sneaking out! Remember, the period of time of which we are speaking, there is no writing in Greece yet. Until Homer there is no writing in Greece. No record you could deal with. Whatever they learned, came from outside, came from Egypt, came from Babylonia. The Babylonian writings are part of this origin of Greece as well as the writings from at least 4100 B.C.E., the First Dynastic period, and this is not when writing started along the Nile. This is the First Dynasty, when Egypt reorganized herself from under two men. The war between the north, headed by King Scorpion, and the south headed by King Narmer, and that will bring us to about 4100 B.C.E. when Narmer started United or Dynastic Egypt.
So the pre-dynastic period was the period of the introduction of religion, of mathematics and science, engineering, law, medicine and so forth. The period of documentation also started then to some extent in the First Dynasty. The period of belief in "One God" really did not start with Akhnaten, that is, when somebody said there must be only "One God." But the period of absorbing "One God" didn't start then, because it is that period in 4100 B.C.E., when Narmer, after defeating Scorpion, the leader of the North, decided that the deity of the North, God Amen (which you say at the end of every prayer, you are still praying to the African God Amen), be put together with his own deity of the South, God Ra. But they didn't notice that he made "One God' out of the two, God Amen-Ra. He used them in that respect. But the people fell into civil war and there was division again. From that union, God Amen-Ra became God Ptah, and the Goddess of Justice became Maat. Justice, shown as a scale which is the same symbol now used in the United States for justice, except that there is no justice in the United States, because one scale is up, the other is down, and that is not justice; that is "just this"! Justice is when both scales are on the same level, and so the African in America who asks for justice is being foolish. The symbol says you will never get it; you'll get "just this"!
Before these symbols came the laws on morality and human behavior, the Admonitions to Goddess Maat—Goddess of Justice and Law. There were forty-two Admonitions to Goddess Maat forming the foundation of justice. Then there are the teachings of Amen-em-eope one thousand years before Solomon stole them, some of which he plagiarized word for word, and others he paraphrased, which are now called the Proverbs of Solomon. And yet if we could have stopped there we would have done enough. But it wasn't the last of it, so to speak. Because we came down with jurisprudence, the basis of law attached to the deity which we are teaching now as jurisprudence. And there is a thing in the African jurisprudence that a harborer should not get away from the penalty of the thief.
During the earliest time of the Kingdom of Ethiopia, King Uri, the first King of Ethiopia had spoken about, "justice isn't based upon strength, but on morality of the condition of the event." This now interprets as "the stronger should not mistreat the weaker"; and this is supposed to be something said by Plato, just like the nonsense we hear that "the Greeks had democracy." The Greeks have never democracy. They never had one in the past and they don't have it now. When they were supposed to have had democracy in Greece no more than five percent of the people had anything you could call democracy. When you look at that, you find it was from this background going back to the time of Amen-em-eope that theses fundamental laws came from, you could see why those laws spread from North Africa and into Numidia, which is today called Tunisia.
It is at Numidia then that Augustine's family, continuing the practice of the Manichean religion, carried it into Rome later in the Christian Era. When he left his education in Khart-Haddas or Carthage, it is that same teaching from the Manicheans that Augustine carried into Rome. Ambrose, the greatest Christian scholar in all of Europe, became stunned. But when this twenty-nine-year-old boy arrived and spoke to Ambrose about his education in Carthage, Ambrose said, "Man, you're heavy." And Augustine took over. It was the same teachings that Guido the Monk, who went to Spain in the time of the Moors, had taught at the University of Salamanca which they had established. And it was the same Manichean concept that made Augustine write against the Stoics. Augustine wrote the fundamental principle that was to govern modern Christianity in its morality, when he presented them with a book called On Christian Doctrine. He had previously written the Holy City of God. If you want to check Augustine to see if he was an indigenous African read his Confessions. There he will tell you who he was.
When Islam came it was supposed to bring something new, but I ask "what did it bring new?" Because Islam was supposed to have started with an African woman by the name Hagar, according to Islamic literature. Hagar was from Egypt, and Abraham was from Asia—the City of Ur in Chaldea. At the time of Abraham's birth a group of African people, called Elamites, were ruling. Before Abraham, the sacred river of India has been named after General Ganges, an African who came from Ethiopia. The River Ganges still carries the name of General Ganges. And I notice in India they haven't given up the symbolic worship of the cow, which represents the Worship of Goddess Het-Heru, Hathor, the "Golden Calf" of the Jews. They also haven't given up the obelisk that still stays there, which the Hindus copied. Again came an Englishman by the name of Sir Geoffrey Higgins, who published a two-volume work in 1836, and in Volume One in particular, he is speaking about all the deities of the past being "black," but said: "I can't accept that they could have come from even Egypt, they must have come from India." He couldn't accept it!
Out of that religion of the Nile Valley came the Religion of Ngail in Kenya from the same river base. And as the situation changed you had the Amazulu going for it, because the Zimbabwe river is still there. The people who were originally there were kicked off their land by the British, and equally by the Germans. When the German Dr. Carl Peters came there, the struggle between the Germans and the English for Tanganyika was going strong; both sides killed off the people around that area who spoke the local Rowzi language. So when you talk about Zimbabwe, don't think about the nation alone. Zimbabwe also means a metropolis of buildings equal in design to the pyramids' cone shape. When the sunlight coming in strikes the altar, the altar shines because of the sunlight. They had a mixture of gold and silver, the exact thing as what happens when you are down at the rock-hewn Temple of Rameses II, which is on November 22nd, when the sun comes in past the doors. It also happens in February. This shows the commonality of the African culture throughout Africa.
And lastly, just remember that when you see the Ashantis, the Yorubas, and all the other African people, they were not always where they are now. Arab and European slavery made the African migrate from one part of the African world to the other; that is why you can see in Akan culture as written by the African writer Dr. J. B. Danquah, the people with the same hair-cut, and the same beads and jewelry system as Queen Nefertari (the wife of Pharaoh Rameses II in the Nineteenth Dynasty), and Queen Nefertiti (the wife of Pharaoh Akhnaton in the Eighteen Dynasty). It is too much to speak about it, really.
If you had known this when you were much younger, you too over there, you would have wanted a nation; for you too would have realized that if you have a golden toilet in another man's house (nation) you have got nothing. It is only when you have your own house (nation) that you can demand anything, because you don't even need to demand anything, you do it. It is only when you have your own nation that you can decide the value and the judgment of beauty. If I was ruling England and you came to run for a beauty contest, you could be disqualified even before you came. You're talking about racism; why not? This isn't your country. You cannot run for a beauty contest in a white man's country. You don't see any Europeans winning any beauty contest in China, Japan or India; but the funny thing is that they come and win one in Nigeria. As a matter of fact Miss Trinidad was a white girl. Miss Barbados also a white girl, and Miss Jamaica was a white girl, all of them in a Black country. And this is what I'm saying. You can call it racist, but you know I'm telling the truth.
What I hope I have done is to make you understand the necessity for further research; but more than all, the necessity to talk to your child. When your physician tells you that you are pregnant that's when you start teaching your child. Talk to the child at the time of birth. This is when his and/or her education starts, before he/she gets out of school, and before you and I die.
Watch: The True History of the Nile People* Dr. Ben Jochannan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWznEziWbyA
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When we speak of the Nile Valley, of course we are talking about 4,100 miles of civilization, or the beginning of the birth of what is today called civilization. I can go to one case of literature in particular which will identify the Africans as the beginners of the civilization to which I refer. And since I am not foreign to the works of Africans in Egypt, otherwise called Egyptians, I think that should be satisfactory proof. This proof is housed in the London Museum that is holding artifacts of Egypt. In that museum you will find a document called the Papyrus of Hunifer. At least you should find it there. It was there when Sir E. A. Wallace Budge used it in his translation as part of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Papyrus of Hunifer.
It was there at that time, a copy of which is in the library of Syracuse University in New York, and I quote from the hieratic writing, "We came from the beginning of the Nile where God Hapi dwells, at the foothills of The Mountains of the Moon." "We," meaning the Egyptians, as stated, came from the beginning of the Nile. Where is "the beginning of the Nile?" The farthest point of the beginning of the Nile is in Uganda; this is the White Nile. Another point is in Ethiopia. The Blue Nile and White Nile meet in Khartoum; and the other side of Khartoum is the Omdurman Republic of Sudan. From there it flows from the south down north. And there it meets with the Atbara River in Atbara, Sudan. Then it flows completely through Sudan (Ta-Nehisi, Ta-Zeti or Ta-Seti, as it was called), part of that ancient empire which was one time adjacent to the nation called Meroe or Merowe. From that, into the southern part of what the Romans called "Nubia," and parallel on the Nile, part of which the Greeks called "Egypticus"; the English called it "Egypt" and the Jews in their mythology called it "Mizrain" which the current Arabs called Mizr/Mizrair. Thus it ends in the Sea of Sais, also called the Great Sea, today's Mediterranean Sea. When we say thus, we want to make certain that Hapi is still God of the Nile, shown as a hermaphrodite having the breasts of a woman and the penis of a man. God Hapi is always shown tying two symbols of the "Two Lands," Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, during Dynastic Periods, or from the beginning of the Dynastic Periods. The lotus flower is the symbol of the south, and the papyrus plant, the symbol of the north.
But we need to go back beyond Egypt. I used "Egypt" as a starting point, in that of all the ancient civilizations in the world, Egypt has more ancient documents and other artifacts than any other civilization one could speak of. So when you hear them talking about "Sumer" and "Babylon," and all those other places, theoretically, they can't show you the artifacts. Thus my position is, first hand information is the best proof; and I can show you the bones and other remains of Zinjanthropus Boisei about 1.8 million years ago. But no one can show me the bones and remains of Adam and Eve, et al.
So I have the proof and you have the belief. If you want to see it you can go to the Croydon National Museum in Nairobi, Kenya; there, you'll see the Bones Zinjanthropus Boisei. If you want to see the remains of "Lucy," you can go to the national Museum associated with the University of Addis Ababa. Of course, there are a host of other human fossils that existed thousands of years ago all over Africa; but you can't find one "Adam" or one "Eve" in any part of Asia.
But we have to go beyond that. We can look at the artifacts before writing came into being. We will then be in archaeological finds along the Nile. Also you would find that there were two groups of Africans; one called "Hutu," and one called "Twa." The Twa and Hutu take us back into at least 400,000 B.C.E. (Before the Common "Christian" Era) in terms of artifacts. The most ancient of these artifacts, one of the most important in Egypt, is called the "Ankh," which the Christians adopted and called the "Crux Ansata" or "Ansata Cross." The Ankh was there amongst these people, equally the "Crook" and "Flail." All of these symbols came down to us from the Twa and Hutu. You know the Twa by British anthropologists who called them "pygmies." There is no such thing in Africa known as a "pygmy," much less "pygmies." But the people call themselves Twa and Hutu, so that's what they are.
If we look at the southern tip of Africa, a place called "Monomotapa," before the first Europeans came there with the Portuguese in 1486, C.E./A.D. (Christian Eera), a man called Captian Bartholomew Diaz, and subsequently another European and his group came, one called Captain Vasco da Gama, who came there ten years later in 1496; when they came to that part of Africa they met another group of people there as well, which they called "Kaffirs." Now this is a long time before the Boers came there in 1652. When the Boers came those Africans may have gone to the moon on vacation (or there they "didn't meet any natives" [Africans] so they say. But one thing is certain, that Bartholomew Diaz and Vasco da Gama had already left records showing that when they arrived there at Monomotapa the Khaffirs [Africans], including the small ones (Khoi-Khoi, and Khalaharis) (remember I didn't say "Bushmen" or "Hottentots," that's nonsense, the racist names given them by the British and Dutch Boers), were already there.
So with all of these people that were found in this area we could go back at least 35,000 to 40,000 years to another group of people who left their writings and their pictures. Those people are called Grimaldi. The Grimaldi were there in the southern tip of Africa, and traveled up the entire western coast, then came to the northwestern coast of Africa, and crossed into Spain. Not only in Spain, but all the way up to Austria; it was found that the Grimaldi had traveled and left their drawings in caves all along the way. In the Museum of Natural History, New York City, New York, you can see Grimaldi paintings going back to at least 35,000 years ago. I remind you that it is only about 31,000 years before Adam and Eve! It is very important you realize that, the next time you talk about Adam and Eve. So we are told that there is an Adam and Eve that started the world, but that is a "Jewish world" and I'm talking about before Abraham, the first Jew.
The country that I am talking about now goes back to a period called the Sibellian Period. Sibellian I brings us to a period where you will find hieratic writings, the type that no one in modern times has been able to decipher. Sibellian II existed about 25,000 years before the birth of Jesus-the Christ. Sibillian III would bring us to about 10,000 B.C.E., in which we now have the Stellar Calendar that I spoke about, and the pre-dynastic period will be considered from the same, 10,000 to 6,000 B.C.E., and that is the point when High Priest Manetho, in about 227 or 226 B.C.E., attempted to present for the Greeks, who had imposed upon him to write a kind of chronological history of the Nile Valley. Europeans, instead of saying what Manetho said in his chronology of the history of the Nile Valley, forget to say it was at the end of the Nile Valley he addressed. For example, the "First Cataract," i.e., an obstruction in the Nile River, is at a place called the City of Aswan, when in fact it is the last; the "Sixth Cataract" is in fact Aswan, Upper (or Southern) Egypt.
This is important to understand, because Egypt, which most of us deal with and forget the rest of the Nile Valley, is not at the beginning of the Nile Valley high cultures, but the end. High culture came down the Nile; but if you go on the Nile you will always hear about the "pyramids of Egypt." Yes, they are the "world's largest"; they will blow your mind, so to speak, but they are not the first pyramids of Africa; they are the last. There are thirty-two pyramids in Sudan, none in Ethiopia, and seventy-two in Egypt. What happened is that as the Africans became much more competent in engineering, etc., they increased the size of their pyramids in sophistication; thus at the end of the Nile you could see different forms and the colossal pyramids, the largest being one by Pharaoh Khufu, whom Herodotus called Cheops, and that would be one of the pyramids built in the 4th Dynasty. The first of the pyramids of Egypt being that by Imhotep, for his Pharaoh Djoser/Sertor ("Zozer"), the third pharaoh of the Third Dynasty. The architect was the multi-genus, Imhotep, who introduced to mankind the first structure ever built out of stone, and with joints without mortar of any other binding materials.
Now you could understand if I said that the pyramids in Sudan ore older than the pyramids in Egypt, and I simultaneously say that Imhotep built the first stone structure known by man, it would seem to be a contradiction. It is not a contradiction, because those in Sudan were built by two methods. There were some pyramids called silt pyramids, and the second method was mud-brick pyramids. Not the type of "bricks made of mud and straw" mentioned in the Hebrew Holy Torah, specifically the Book of Exodus. That has to be made clear. How did the silt pyramids come about? That type of pyramid came about due to the Inundation Period of the Nile River. This was the period when the Nile River overflowed its banks bringing down the silt from the highlands of Ethiopia and Uganda, and from the Mountain of the Moon, which the people of Kenya called Kilimanjaro.
It is in this perspective that we are talking about Africa as a people. Because, all of that period of time we are talking about, you can go there now and see the artifacts in museums all over Europe and the United States of America. I'm not speaking to you chronologically, because I am using my recall; let us go back to the event that took place; and as I thought about this, something about medicine came to my mind, I remember going to the double Temple of Haroeris and Sobek; Haroeris represented by the Cobra Snake and Sobek represented by the Nile Crocodile. In that temple at the rear, you will find drawings of medical instruments going back to the time of Imhotep. That will bring us to about 285 B.C.E. to the construction of the Double Temple which was during Greek rule. Most of the medical instruments you see there are the exact dimension, the exact styles and shapes still used in medical operation theaters today. You could see all kinds of symbols relating to the use of incense; you could also find the beginnings of the aspect of the calendars (the dating process for the farmers) the same the Coptic farmers still use, the 13-monts calendar, twelve months of thirty days each, and one month of five days. The same one the Ethiopian government still uses, officially; that calendar still a means of telling time to date. When we go to the Temple of the Goddess Het-Heru (Hathor) at a place called Dendara, we see the beginnings of what is called the Zodiac. The French stole the original, and in carrying it to France, in hot pursuit by the Arabs of Egypt, they dropped it in the River Nile. Yet a Frenchman said he remembered everything, and he produced a whole new one within two weeks. So if you read Revelations, like this false Zodiac, it has nothing to do with St. John, but in fact Bishop Athanasius. This is the same thing. How could the French remember the stolen Egyptian Zodiac so well? It was rectangular, but what they remembered is circular. Thus it is the French who made the Zodiac they placed in the Temple of Goddess Het-Heru for tourist these days, and the tourist guides will tell you that is the French one. So!
You can see that even in those early times we were dealing with astronomy, and Europeans have not gone one inch further than those Africans along the Nile. What you have to remember, however, is that the Papyrus of Hunefer deals with the Africans who came down the Nile, who were already using this type of thing: and we must wonder since we don't have the day-to-day, or enough artifacts to put them together to see the transition. Why is it that the Yorubas of West Africa have the same structure of the deity system as the Nile Valley? I don't remember much because the Yorubas in their own folklore speak of having come from the Nile Valley; so you can stop wondering right there, since it is from their earliest teachings in their folklores.
When we go down the Nile and look at the engineering, and our engineering goes not only to the building of the pyramids by Imhotep, this multi-genius, but equally to the time of Senwosret II, with the division of the Nile water; equally to stop the rush of water. That would put us right back to 2,200 Before the Common "Christian" Era (B.C.E.).
The use of navigation and navigational instruments by using the sun and the stars as navigational tools—we have the best record of that going back even before Pharaoh Necho II, who saw the navigation of the entire continent and had a map of Africa in almost the common shape it is; and that dates to ca 600 B.C.E. Whereas Herodotus, who came to Egypt in 457 B.C.E., and Erastosthenes, who came there between 274–194 B.C.E., used maps which were rectangular in shape. They reflected the end of Africa being where the Sahara is, the southern end of the Sahara, meaning that they had no concept of Africa from about Ethiopia south to Monomotapa, now called the Republic of South Africa. It is important to note that England played a major role in most of the distortion that we are talking about.
Then we come again to another part that we are talking about, that is, agriculture, before we even come to writing. At the gathering state, when man observes the seed germinating, and out of that came the religious conflict, which other men are to later follow, comes out of one of the most secret symbols of the religiosity of Egypt and other parts of Africa. We are now talking about the dung beetle, and the observation of the African along the Nile with respect to the dung beetle, otherwise called the Scarab. The dung beetle hibernates, goes into the manure of a donkey, horse and the cow, only animals with grass manure. And that beetle remains in there for twenty-eight days; you know that particular beetle died in your mind. And when the beetle finally comes out, what better symbol will you have than the resurrection?
The beetle played the same part in the religion of the Egyptians that spread to other parts of Africa, and subsequently into Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and so on. Thus the beetle became the symbol of resurrection. Of course the religion itself had started then. Just imagine you've got to go back 1000 years and see your woman giving birth to a baby. I hope I did not frighten most of you fellows about childbirth; because if you had some experience of seeing a baby being born, you would be less quick to abandon your child. As you are standing there and this baby comes from the woman's organ. You witness this, while the pelvic region is expanding about four or five inches in diameter for the head to pass through, and you are there. You can't perceive that you have anything to do with this 100,000 or 5,000 years ago. Witnessing the birth of that baby sets you thinking. You immediately start to transcend your mind, and you also start to attribute this to something beyond. Thus you start to believe. You start to wonder' why is it here? Where did it come from? And where is it going ? Because you are now experiencing birth! But your experience is coming from a woman. Thus you start to pray and the woman becomes your Goddess, your first deity. She becomes Goddess Nut, the goddess of the sky; and you become God Geb, the god of the earth. You suddenly see the sun in all of this and you realize that when the sun came the light came; and when the sun went, the light went; when the moon came you saw a moon in there and you don't see any light because the light is not shining on it. So you see there is a God, at least there is the major attribute of God because you realize when that doesn't happen, the crops and the vegetation don't come.
You also realize that the sun and the moon make the river rise, and the Africans regarding these factors created the science of astronomy and astrology. Astrology, having nothing to do with your love life. Astronomy is the chart of the scientific data of the movement of the planets and the sun and so forth, to the movement of each other. Astrology is a physical relationship of astronomy, the water rising at the high tide and that is what the ancients spoke about and the division of the two disciplines.
It was the Greeks like Plato, Aristotle and others who came and learned. In those days the students would come and read for their education. There were no books to take home, there were no publishing houses like now. You had only one book and most of the subjects were taught orally. Certain instructions were given toe to toe, shoulder to shoulder, mouth to ear. I will go no further than that. Some of you here may know how that was done and under what conditions. The English adopted it and called it Freemasonry. Sir Albert Churchward's book, Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man, is a corner stone of Freemasonry. Churchward was a big man in England. Besides being a physician, he was also one of those who made English Freemasonry what it is today. So in another adaptation, the British took twenty-two tablets from Egypt, brought them here and set up what they called "Freemasonry." Of course, the Americans followed suit.
These Africans had moved along the entire continent. You see, we are treating the Egyptians today as if the Egyptians had a barrier that stopped them from going to other parts of Africa. So we say the Egyptians were of a special race, and they had nothing to do with the other Africans. Can you imagine the Thames River at this side stopping the people from the other side from contact with this side, especially when a man standing over there saw a woman here bathing naked; do you think that that river would stop him? Do you think that the Alps stopped a German from going to see an Italian woman? What makes you think that the little river or a little bit of sand would stop a man from seeing a woman naked over there in Africa? I'm using these common symbols so that you can appreciate what I mean. So it isn't because when you go to Egypt you will notice that the ancient Egyptians are shown by the artist as the ancient Nubians or Ethiopians or anybody else, except when you are talking about the conquerors. In most of these museums they purposely bring you the statues of the Greeks, of the Romans, of the Persians, the Assyrians, and the Hyksos. They don't bring you any of the Africans. So when they can't help it, and they need to bring you one that you call a typical African like Pharaoh Mentuhotep III, it is important to Egypt that they have to show him. What they did was to make his nose flat, so you can’t tell the difference.
Thus once in a while, but when they couldn't do it, what they did say, was: "Well, Negroes came into Egypt in the Eighteenth Dynasty." Now it couldn't be, because the Portuguese hadn't created Negroes until the seventeenth century, C.E., but how come the Negroes created by the Portuguese have a place they called Negroland, which was in fact the Songhai Empire? In the map you could see where Negroland was, and so how do you get the "Negroes and Negroland" way back in the Eighteenth Dynasty? The Eighteenth Dynasty has such figures as Akhenaton, or Amenhotep IV, and his father, whom the Greeks called Amenhotep III; in the West you would call him Amenophis III. The civilization in Africa did not spread only from along the Nile, but it spread into your own writings, documents, and belief system right here in England.
I now go back to the Etruscans, who later became the Romans; the people of Pyrrhus, who later became the Greeks, because Pyrrhus was what later became Greece. But we don't have these people until they came from the island of the Mediterranean or the Great Sea. At the time when they left, the Egyptians were the colonizers of other Africans in Egypt. Setting up the first educational system for the people of Pyrrhus, where the borders of Libus (now Libya) and Egypt meet; a little enclave which later became Africa. It is there that the educational system for the Greeks occurred, and from there the Africans moved the system to a place called the city of Elea. It is there that the Greeks would come. This is after they left the Greek peninsula, go to the Italian peninsula where they would meet others to come over to Libus, because they couldn't come the other way as they were going illegally, sneaking out! Remember, the period of time of which we are speaking, there is no writing in Greece yet. Until Homer there is no writing in Greece. No record you could deal with. Whatever they learned, came from outside, came from Egypt, came from Babylonia. The Babylonian writings are part of this origin of Greece as well as the writings from at least 4100 B.C.E., the First Dynastic period, and this is not when writing started along the Nile. This is the First Dynasty, when Egypt reorganized herself from under two men. The war between the north, headed by King Scorpion, and the south headed by King Narmer, and that will bring us to about 4100 B.C.E. when Narmer started United or Dynastic Egypt.
So the pre-dynastic period was the period of the introduction of religion, of mathematics and science, engineering, law, medicine and so forth. The period of documentation also started then to some extent in the First Dynasty. The period of belief in "One God" really did not start with Akhnaten, that is, when somebody said there must be only "One God." But the period of absorbing "One God" didn't start then, because it is that period in 4100 B.C.E., when Narmer, after defeating Scorpion, the leader of the North, decided that the deity of the North, God Amen (which you say at the end of every prayer, you are still praying to the African God Amen), be put together with his own deity of the South, God Ra. But they didn't notice that he made "One God' out of the two, God Amen-Ra. He used them in that respect. But the people fell into civil war and there was division again. From that union, God Amen-Ra became God Ptah, and the Goddess of Justice became Maat. Justice, shown as a scale which is the same symbol now used in the United States for justice, except that there is no justice in the United States, because one scale is up, the other is down, and that is not justice; that is "just this"! Justice is when both scales are on the same level, and so the African in America who asks for justice is being foolish. The symbol says you will never get it; you'll get "just this"!
Before these symbols came the laws on morality and human behavior, the Admonitions to Goddess Maat—Goddess of Justice and Law. There were forty-two Admonitions to Goddess Maat forming the foundation of justice. Then there are the teachings of Amen-em-eope one thousand years before Solomon stole them, some of which he plagiarized word for word, and others he paraphrased, which are now called the Proverbs of Solomon. And yet if we could have stopped there we would have done enough. But it wasn't the last of it, so to speak. Because we came down with jurisprudence, the basis of law attached to the deity which we are teaching now as jurisprudence. And there is a thing in the African jurisprudence that a harborer should not get away from the penalty of the thief.
During the earliest time of the Kingdom of Ethiopia, King Uri, the first King of Ethiopia had spoken about, "justice isn't based upon strength, but on morality of the condition of the event." This now interprets as "the stronger should not mistreat the weaker"; and this is supposed to be something said by Plato, just like the nonsense we hear that "the Greeks had democracy." The Greeks have never democracy. They never had one in the past and they don't have it now. When they were supposed to have had democracy in Greece no more than five percent of the people had anything you could call democracy. When you look at that, you find it was from this background going back to the time of Amen-em-eope that theses fundamental laws came from, you could see why those laws spread from North Africa and into Numidia, which is today called Tunisia.
It is at Numidia then that Augustine's family, continuing the practice of the Manichean religion, carried it into Rome later in the Christian Era. When he left his education in Khart-Haddas or Carthage, it is that same teaching from the Manicheans that Augustine carried into Rome. Ambrose, the greatest Christian scholar in all of Europe, became stunned. But when this twenty-nine-year-old boy arrived and spoke to Ambrose about his education in Carthage, Ambrose said, "Man, you're heavy." And Augustine took over. It was the same teachings that Guido the Monk, who went to Spain in the time of the Moors, had taught at the University of Salamanca which they had established. And it was the same Manichean concept that made Augustine write against the Stoics. Augustine wrote the fundamental principle that was to govern modern Christianity in its morality, when he presented them with a book called On Christian Doctrine. He had previously written the Holy City of God. If you want to check Augustine to see if he was an indigenous African read his Confessions. There he will tell you who he was.
When Islam came it was supposed to bring something new, but I ask "what did it bring new?" Because Islam was supposed to have started with an African woman by the name Hagar, according to Islamic literature. Hagar was from Egypt, and Abraham was from Asia—the City of Ur in Chaldea. At the time of Abraham's birth a group of African people, called Elamites, were ruling. Before Abraham, the sacred river of India has been named after General Ganges, an African who came from Ethiopia. The River Ganges still carries the name of General Ganges. And I notice in India they haven't given up the symbolic worship of the cow, which represents the Worship of Goddess Het-Heru, Hathor, the "Golden Calf" of the Jews. They also haven't given up the obelisk that still stays there, which the Hindus copied. Again came an Englishman by the name of Sir Geoffrey Higgins, who published a two-volume work in 1836, and in Volume One in particular, he is speaking about all the deities of the past being "black," but said: "I can't accept that they could have come from even Egypt, they must have come from India." He couldn't accept it!
Out of that religion of the Nile Valley came the Religion of Ngail in Kenya from the same river base. And as the situation changed you had the Amazulu going for it, because the Zimbabwe river is still there. The people who were originally there were kicked off their land by the British, and equally by the Germans. When the German Dr. Carl Peters came there, the struggle between the Germans and the English for Tanganyika was going strong; both sides killed off the people around that area who spoke the local Rowzi language. So when you talk about Zimbabwe, don't think about the nation alone. Zimbabwe also means a metropolis of buildings equal in design to the pyramids' cone shape. When the sunlight coming in strikes the altar, the altar shines because of the sunlight. They had a mixture of gold and silver, the exact thing as what happens when you are down at the rock-hewn Temple of Rameses II, which is on November 22nd, when the sun comes in past the doors. It also happens in February. This shows the commonality of the African culture throughout Africa.
And lastly, just remember that when you see the Ashantis, the Yorubas, and all the other African people, they were not always where they are now. Arab and European slavery made the African migrate from one part of the African world to the other; that is why you can see in Akan culture as written by the African writer Dr. J. B. Danquah, the people with the same hair-cut, and the same beads and jewelry system as Queen Nefertari (the wife of Pharaoh Rameses II in the Nineteenth Dynasty), and Queen Nefertiti (the wife of Pharaoh Akhnaton in the Eighteen Dynasty). It is too much to speak about it, really.
If you had known this when you were much younger, you too over there, you would have wanted a nation; for you too would have realized that if you have a golden toilet in another man's house (nation) you have got nothing. It is only when you have your own house (nation) that you can demand anything, because you don't even need to demand anything, you do it. It is only when you have your own nation that you can decide the value and the judgment of beauty. If I was ruling England and you came to run for a beauty contest, you could be disqualified even before you came. You're talking about racism; why not? This isn't your country. You cannot run for a beauty contest in a white man's country. You don't see any Europeans winning any beauty contest in China, Japan or India; but the funny thing is that they come and win one in Nigeria. As a matter of fact Miss Trinidad was a white girl. Miss Barbados also a white girl, and Miss Jamaica was a white girl, all of them in a Black country. And this is what I'm saying. You can call it racist, but you know I'm telling the truth.
What I hope I have done is to make you understand the necessity for further research; but more than all, the necessity to talk to your child. When your physician tells you that you are pregnant that's when you start teaching your child. Talk to the child at the time of birth. This is when his and/or her education starts, before he/she gets out of school, and before you and I die.
Watch: The True History of the Nile People* Dr. Ben Jochannan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWznEziWbyA
Friday, September 19, 2008
THE EYE OF HORUS--The Eye of Ra* -
The Eye*
The Wadjet (or Ujat, meaning "Whole One") is a powerful symbol of protection also known as the "Eye of Horus" and the "all seeing eye". The symbol was frequently used in jewellery made of gold, silver, lapis, wood, porcelain, and carnelian, to ensure the safety and health of the bearer and provide wisdom and prosperity. However, it was also known as the "Eye of Ra", a powerful destructive force linked with the fierce heat of the sun which was described as the "Daughter of Ra". The "eye" was personified as the goddess Wadjet and associated with a number of other gods and goddesses (notably Hathor, Bast, Sekhmet, Tefnut, Nekhbet and Mut).
Horus was an ancient a sky god whose eyes were said to be the sun and the moon. However, he soon became strongly associated with the sun (and the sun god Ra as Ra-Horakhty ("Ra, who is Horus of the two horizons") while Thoth was associated with the moon. An ancient myth describes a battle between Horus and Set in which Horus´ right eye was torn out and Set lost his testicles! Thoth magically restored Horus´ eye, at which point it was given the name "Wadjet" ("whole" or "healthy"). In this myth it is specifically stated that it is Horus´ left eye which has been torn out, so the myth relates to the waxing and waning of the moon during which the moon appears to have been torn out of the sky before being restored once every lunar month.
There are a number of depictions of the restoration of the eye in Greco-Roman temples. Thoth is assisted by fourteen gods including the gods of the Ennead of Hermopolis or thirty male deities (in Ismant el-Kharab, the Dakhla Oasis). Each god represented one of the fifteen days leading up to the full moon, and to the waning moon. The restored eye became emblematic of the re-establishment of order from chaos, thus closely associating it with the idea of Ma´at. In one myth Horus made a gift of the eye to Osiris to help him rule the netherworld. Osiris ate the eye and was restored to life. As a result, it became a symbol of life and resurrection. Offerings are sometimes called "the Eye of Horus" because it was thought that the goods offered became divine when presented to a god.
WADJET FRACTIONS:
The Eye of Horus was believed to have healing and protective power, and it was used as a protective amulet. It was also used as a notation of measurement, particularly for measuring the ingredients in medicines and pigments. The symbol was divided into six parts, representing the shattering of Horus´ eye into six pieces. Each piece was associated with one of the six senses and a specific fraction.
More complex fractions were created by adding the symbols together. It is interesting to note that if the pieces are added together the total is 63/64 not 1. Some suggest that the remaining 1/64 represents the magic used by Thoth to restore the eye, while others consider that the missing piece represented the fact that perfection was not possible. However, it is equally likely that they appreciated the simplicity of the system which allowed them to deal with common fractions quickly, after all they already had a symbol for the number "1" and they had other numerical notations available when they needed to use smaller fractions.
According to later traditions, the right eye represented the sun and so is called the "Eye of Ra" while the left represented the moon and was known as the "eye of Horus" (although it was also associated with Thoth). However, in many cases it is not clear whether it is the left or right eye which is referred to. Others myths suggest that it is Horus´ right eye which was torn out and that the myth refers to a solar eclipse in which the sun is momentarily blotted from the sky.
The Eye of Ra
According to one myth, Ra (who was at that point the actual Pharaoh of Egypt) was becoming old and weak and the people no longer respected him or his rule. They broke the laws and made jokes at his expense. He did not react well to this and decided to punish mankind by sending an aspect of his daughter, the Eye of Ra. He plucked her from the Ureas (royal serpent) on his brow, and sent her to earth in the form of a lion. She waged war on humanity slaughtering thousands until the fields were awash with human blood. When Ra saw the extent of the devestation he relented and called his daughter back to his side, fearing that she would kill everyone. However, she was in a blood lust and ignored his pleas. So he arranged for 7,000 jugs of beer and pomegranate juice (which stained the beer blood red) to be poured all over the fields around her. She gorged on the "blood" and became so drunk that she slept for three days and awoke with a terrible hangover. Thus mankind was saved from her terrible vengeance.
There are a number of different versions of the myth, and a number of goddesses are given the title "Eye of Ra", in particular Hathor, Sekhmet, Tefnut, Bast, Mut, Nekhbet and Wadjet . The "Daughter of Ra" was sometimes symbolised as a Cat who protected Ra from the serpent Apep (linking it with the leonine aspects of Hathor, Bast, Sekhmet, Tefnut, Mut, Nekhbet and Wadjet amongst others). The Cat was also thought to be able to cure and scorpion or snake bite and was associated with the goddesses Isis (although she is only linked to the symbol in its protective function).
The Wadjet (or Ujat, meaning "Whole One") is a powerful symbol of protection also known as the "Eye of Horus" and the "all seeing eye". The symbol was frequently used in jewellery made of gold, silver, lapis, wood, porcelain, and carnelian, to ensure the safety and health of the bearer and provide wisdom and prosperity. However, it was also known as the "Eye of Ra", a powerful destructive force linked with the fierce heat of the sun which was described as the "Daughter of Ra". The "eye" was personified as the goddess Wadjet and associated with a number of other gods and goddesses (notably Hathor, Bast, Sekhmet, Tefnut, Nekhbet and Mut).
Horus was an ancient a sky god whose eyes were said to be the sun and the moon. However, he soon became strongly associated with the sun (and the sun god Ra as Ra-Horakhty ("Ra, who is Horus of the two horizons") while Thoth was associated with the moon. An ancient myth describes a battle between Horus and Set in which Horus´ right eye was torn out and Set lost his testicles! Thoth magically restored Horus´ eye, at which point it was given the name "Wadjet" ("whole" or "healthy"). In this myth it is specifically stated that it is Horus´ left eye which has been torn out, so the myth relates to the waxing and waning of the moon during which the moon appears to have been torn out of the sky before being restored once every lunar month.
There are a number of depictions of the restoration of the eye in Greco-Roman temples. Thoth is assisted by fourteen gods including the gods of the Ennead of Hermopolis or thirty male deities (in Ismant el-Kharab, the Dakhla Oasis). Each god represented one of the fifteen days leading up to the full moon, and to the waning moon. The restored eye became emblematic of the re-establishment of order from chaos, thus closely associating it with the idea of Ma´at. In one myth Horus made a gift of the eye to Osiris to help him rule the netherworld. Osiris ate the eye and was restored to life. As a result, it became a symbol of life and resurrection. Offerings are sometimes called "the Eye of Horus" because it was thought that the goods offered became divine when presented to a god.
WADJET FRACTIONS:
The Eye of Horus was believed to have healing and protective power, and it was used as a protective amulet. It was also used as a notation of measurement, particularly for measuring the ingredients in medicines and pigments. The symbol was divided into six parts, representing the shattering of Horus´ eye into six pieces. Each piece was associated with one of the six senses and a specific fraction.
More complex fractions were created by adding the symbols together. It is interesting to note that if the pieces are added together the total is 63/64 not 1. Some suggest that the remaining 1/64 represents the magic used by Thoth to restore the eye, while others consider that the missing piece represented the fact that perfection was not possible. However, it is equally likely that they appreciated the simplicity of the system which allowed them to deal with common fractions quickly, after all they already had a symbol for the number "1" and they had other numerical notations available when they needed to use smaller fractions.
According to later traditions, the right eye represented the sun and so is called the "Eye of Ra" while the left represented the moon and was known as the "eye of Horus" (although it was also associated with Thoth). However, in many cases it is not clear whether it is the left or right eye which is referred to. Others myths suggest that it is Horus´ right eye which was torn out and that the myth refers to a solar eclipse in which the sun is momentarily blotted from the sky.
The Eye of Ra
According to one myth, Ra (who was at that point the actual Pharaoh of Egypt) was becoming old and weak and the people no longer respected him or his rule. They broke the laws and made jokes at his expense. He did not react well to this and decided to punish mankind by sending an aspect of his daughter, the Eye of Ra. He plucked her from the Ureas (royal serpent) on his brow, and sent her to earth in the form of a lion. She waged war on humanity slaughtering thousands until the fields were awash with human blood. When Ra saw the extent of the devestation he relented and called his daughter back to his side, fearing that she would kill everyone. However, she was in a blood lust and ignored his pleas. So he arranged for 7,000 jugs of beer and pomegranate juice (which stained the beer blood red) to be poured all over the fields around her. She gorged on the "blood" and became so drunk that she slept for three days and awoke with a terrible hangover. Thus mankind was saved from her terrible vengeance.
There are a number of different versions of the myth, and a number of goddesses are given the title "Eye of Ra", in particular Hathor, Sekhmet, Tefnut, Bast, Mut, Nekhbet and Wadjet . The "Daughter of Ra" was sometimes symbolised as a Cat who protected Ra from the serpent Apep (linking it with the leonine aspects of Hathor, Bast, Sekhmet, Tefnut, Mut, Nekhbet and Wadjet amongst others). The Cat was also thought to be able to cure and scorpion or snake bite and was associated with the goddesses Isis (although she is only linked to the symbol in its protective function).
Horakhty * "Horus of the two horizons",
As Horakhty (Harakhty), or "Horus of the two horizons", Horus was the god of the rising and setting sun, specifically the god of the east and the sunrise who was worshipped in Heliopolis. The Pyramid Texts refer to him as "god of the east" linking him with Anhur (who may have been a form of Horus the Elder and Shu), and indicate that the deceased king will be reborn in the eastern sky as Horakhty. He was depicted as a falcon or a falcon-headed man wearing the solar disk and the double crown or the atef crown and the uraeus (royal cobra). Sometimes he was depicted as a falcon-headed crocodile who occassionally wears a sun disc.
When this aspect was adopted into the Ennead (Heliopolitan theology), he became Ra-Heru-akhety (Ra-Horakhty), a combined god of Horus and Ra who represented the sun as it traveled across the sky (while Khepri and Atum represented the rising and setting suns respectively). He was the patron of the Pharaoh and the noble classes and the most popular form of Ra after the Middle Kingdom.
As Horakhty (Harakhty), or "Horus of the two horizons", Horus was the god of the rising and setting sun, specifically the god of the east and the sunrise who was worshipped in Heliopolis. The Pyramid Texts refer to him as "god of the east" linking him with Anhur (who may have been a form of Horus the Elder and Shu), and indicate that the deceased king will be reborn in the eastern sky as Horakhty. He was depicted as a falcon or a falcon-headed man wearing the solar disk and the double crown or the atef crown and the uraeus (royal cobra). Sometimes he was depicted as a falcon-headed crocodile who occassionally wears a sun disc.
When this aspect was adopted into the Ennead (Heliopolitan theology), he became Ra-Heru-akhety (Ra-Horakhty), a combined god of Horus and Ra who represented the sun as it traveled across the sky (while Khepri and Atum represented the rising and setting suns respectively). He was the patron of the Pharaoh and the noble classes and the most popular form of Ra after the Middle Kingdom.
"Horemakhet" "Horus in the horizon", "Father of Terror".
As Horemakhet (Harmakhet, Harmachis) or "Horus in the horizon", he represented the dawn and the early morning sun. He was often depicted as a sphinx with the head of a man, a lion or a ram (the latter providing a link to the god Khepri, the rising sun). It is often suggested that the Great Sphinx of Giza is a representation of Hor-em-akhet with the face of the fourth dynasty pharaoh Kafre (Chephren). He was also depicted as a falcon or as a man with the head of a falcon wearing a variety of crowns.
He was thought to be a source of wisdom as well as a representation of the sun. According to legend, prince Tuthmosis IV (Eighteenth Dynasty) was hunting in the marsh close to the Sphinx. He took a nap between its paws and dreamt Hor-em-akhet-Atum-Khepri was actually his father and that he was destined to be pharaoh. The god promised Tuthmosis the throne if he would remove the sand which was burying him. Tuthmosis agreed and was true to his word. He became pharaoh and not only cleared the sand but promoted Ra-Hor-em akhet above Amon-Ra (heralding perhaps the rejection of Amun by Akhenaten in favour of the Aten, which was represented as a sun disc).
The pharaoh also dedicated a small temple to Hor-em-akhet on which the Sphinx was described as Hor-em-akhet-Hauron. It is thought that the Syrian and Palestinian workforce working near to the Sphinx associated it with their god of the underworld, Hauron. This link may explain the Sphinx´s epithet, "Father of Terror".
He was thought to be a source of wisdom as well as a representation of the sun. According to legend, prince Tuthmosis IV (Eighteenth Dynasty) was hunting in the marsh close to the Sphinx. He took a nap between its paws and dreamt Hor-em-akhet-Atum-Khepri was actually his father and that he was destined to be pharaoh. The god promised Tuthmosis the throne if he would remove the sand which was burying him. Tuthmosis agreed and was true to his word. He became pharaoh and not only cleared the sand but promoted Ra-Hor-em akhet above Amon-Ra (heralding perhaps the rejection of Amun by Akhenaten in favour of the Aten, which was represented as a sun disc).
The pharaoh also dedicated a small temple to Hor-em-akhet on which the Sphinx was described as Hor-em-akhet-Hauron. It is thought that the Syrian and Palestinian workforce working near to the Sphinx associated it with their god of the underworld, Hauron. This link may explain the Sphinx´s epithet, "Father of Terror".
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Pharoah Khufu Boat: (Solar Barque)
Words from Sankofa*
Nova Documentary: The 10 Greatest Discoveries.......
We will attempt to bring to you the reader , one by one of these astonishing discoveries. The Egyptians created a boat that has locked in a great "Technological Break Through" way before our time. 4600 yrs ago this boat was constructed. Held together with little pieces of wood and a kind of sewing. No doubt that Pharoah Kufu's boat is the most extrodiaray artifact in the world today. 13 stories high, 12,oo parts... Why would Khufu buried a ship by his pyramid? Did this boat serve a practical purpose? It did play a vidal religious role.
Boat's in Egyptology means the Nile....the Nile means Egypt. Treausres gold and Jules came from Nubia.
In 1954, the Egyptian archaeologist Kamal el Mallak made an astonishing discovery. In a pit at the foot of the Great Pyramid, he uncovered the world's oldest planked vessel. Buried in pieces by Khufu's son, the so-called Solar Barque may have carried the pharaoh's body across the Nile for burial, or it may have served solely a symbolic purpose, lying ready to transport the king in the afterlife.
The boat's 1,224 separate components included cedarwood planking and oars, ropes of halfa grass, wooden dowels and battens, and copper staples. Its near-perfect preservation allowed conservators to reconstruct the 144-foot-long craft, which is now housed in a white museum built over the pit where it was found. Modern ropes were used to lash it together, but its timbers are 95 percent original.
As you move along this composite image, you'll see the boat's 12 oars, ten along the sides and two larger ones at the stern. The blades were insufficient to move a vessel of this size and were either ornamental or used for steering only. The high, curving prow and stern resemble those of papyrus boats common in ancient Egypt. Notice also the cabin and canopy amidships, which were originally covered in rush matting. Can you find the forward canopy?
***********************************************************************************
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6iROkJBFXI
Nova Documentary: The 10 Greatest Discoveries.......
We will attempt to bring to you the reader , one by one of these astonishing discoveries. The Egyptians created a boat that has locked in a great "Technological Break Through" way before our time. 4600 yrs ago this boat was constructed. Held together with little pieces of wood and a kind of sewing. No doubt that Pharoah Kufu's boat is the most extrodiaray artifact in the world today. 13 stories high, 12,oo parts... Why would Khufu buried a ship by his pyramid? Did this boat serve a practical purpose? It did play a vidal religious role.
Boat's in Egyptology means the Nile....the Nile means Egypt. Treausres gold and Jules came from Nubia.
In 1954, the Egyptian archaeologist Kamal el Mallak made an astonishing discovery. In a pit at the foot of the Great Pyramid, he uncovered the world's oldest planked vessel. Buried in pieces by Khufu's son, the so-called Solar Barque may have carried the pharaoh's body across the Nile for burial, or it may have served solely a symbolic purpose, lying ready to transport the king in the afterlife.
The boat's 1,224 separate components included cedarwood planking and oars, ropes of halfa grass, wooden dowels and battens, and copper staples. Its near-perfect preservation allowed conservators to reconstruct the 144-foot-long craft, which is now housed in a white museum built over the pit where it was found. Modern ropes were used to lash it together, but its timbers are 95 percent original.
As you move along this composite image, you'll see the boat's 12 oars, ten along the sides and two larger ones at the stern. The blades were insufficient to move a vessel of this size and were either ornamental or used for steering only. The high, curving prow and stern resemble those of papyrus boats common in ancient Egypt. Notice also the cabin and canopy amidships, which were originally covered in rush matting. Can you find the forward canopy?
***********************************************************************************
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6iROkJBFXI
Friday, September 5, 2008
Egyptian Hieroglyphic's Symbols
Click the link by the name to see full description of each symbol.
Adoration (dua) - "Adore"
Akh (akh) - "Effectiveness"
Ankh (ankh) - "Life"
Ba (ba) - "Soul"
Baboon (ian) - "Sun", "Moon"
Basket (nebet) - "All", "Lord"
Bow (iunet, pedjet) - "Enemies"
Brazier (khet) - "Fire"
Cartouche (shenu) - "Sun", "Pharaoh"
Cobra (iaret)
Colors
Djed Column (djed) - "Stability"
Ear (mesedjer) - "Hearing"
Eye of Horus (udjat, wadjet) - "Sun"
Feather (shut) - "Truth"
Gold (nebu) - "Tomb"
Headrest (weres) - "Sun"
Heart (ieb) - "Soul"
Ka (ka) - "Conscience"
Knife (des)
Knot of Isis (tiet) - "Life"
Lapwing (rekhyt) - "Peoples"
Lotus (seshen) - "Lower Egypt"
Menet Necklace (menet)
Mountain (djew)
Nefer (nefer) - "Beauty"
Palace Wall (serekh) - "King's Home"
Papyrus (mehyt) - "Upper Egypt"
Phoenix (benu) - "Sun"
Pool (she) - "Water"
Praise (henu) - "Praise"
Sa (sa) - "Protection"
Sail (hetau) - "Breath"
Scarab beetle (kheper) - "Sun"
Sekhem Scepter (sekhem) - "Power", "Might"
Senet Board Game (senet)
Shen Ring (shenu) - "Eternity"
Sistrum (sesheshet) - "Placation"
Sky (pet) - "Sky"
Star (seba) - "Afterlife"
Swallow (menet) - "Souls"
Tree (nehet) - "Life", "Rising Sun"
Vulture (neret)
Was Scepter (was) - "Power"
West (imenet) - "Afterlife"
Adoration (dua) - "Adore"
Akh (akh) - "Effectiveness"
Ankh (ankh) - "Life"
Ba (ba) - "Soul"
Baboon (ian) - "Sun", "Moon"
Basket (nebet) - "All", "Lord"
Bow (iunet, pedjet) - "Enemies"
Brazier (khet) - "Fire"
Cartouche (shenu) - "Sun", "Pharaoh"
Cobra (iaret)
Colors
Djed Column (djed) - "Stability"
Ear (mesedjer) - "Hearing"
Eye of Horus (udjat, wadjet) - "Sun"
Feather (shut) - "Truth"
Gold (nebu) - "Tomb"
Headrest (weres) - "Sun"
Heart (ieb) - "Soul"
Ka (ka) - "Conscience"
Knife (des)
Knot of Isis (tiet) - "Life"
Lapwing (rekhyt) - "Peoples"
Lotus (seshen) - "Lower Egypt"
Menet Necklace (menet)
Mountain (djew)
Nefer (nefer) - "Beauty"
Palace Wall (serekh) - "King's Home"
Papyrus (mehyt) - "Upper Egypt"
Phoenix (benu) - "Sun"
Pool (she) - "Water"
Praise (henu) - "Praise"
Sa (sa) - "Protection"
Sail (hetau) - "Breath"
Scarab beetle (kheper) - "Sun"
Sekhem Scepter (sekhem) - "Power", "Might"
Senet Board Game (senet)
Shen Ring (shenu) - "Eternity"
Sistrum (sesheshet) - "Placation"
Sky (pet) - "Sky"
Star (seba) - "Afterlife"
Swallow (menet) - "Souls"
Tree (nehet) - "Life", "Rising Sun"
Vulture (neret)
Was Scepter (was) - "Power"
West (imenet) - "Afterlife"
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Discoveries and Inventions of Ancient Egypt
As we view the world today, on a Global scale we see many inventions. We would never know that so many of the inventions today are "Afrocentric inventions" in it's origins....done thousands of years ago. From all regions of of Afrika. Such things as birth control, automatic doors just to name a few is from the wisdom of intelligent African's. As we already know so much was stolen from Africans...and it pays homage and respect to our ancestors to reclaim our rich forefathers inventions and our rich history.
MonotheismPhilosophy National Government Architecture Organized Science Anthropology-Ethnology (identifying and labeling racial groups)
Botany ZoologyAstronomy Mathematics Medicine Anatomy (identifying and labeling internal and external body parts)
Antibiotics Embalming Surgical instruments Medical specialists (Doctors who treated specific ailments) Dentists
Transportation Rudder Canals (including the first Suez canal) Navy (including the circumvention of the African continent) Technology Steam engine (Heron of Alexandria, a native Egyptian, called Michanikos, the Machine Man) Automaton (Heron) Automatic door (Heron)Lock Key Clock Loom Ink Metal piping Egg hatchery Carpentry joints Fiberglass
Sexual Contraceptive Spermicide Circumcision Personal Comb Hot Comb/Hair straightening comb Scissors Shoes (sandals) Birthdays Cosmetics Beauty shop Eye makeup Deodorant Toothbrush Toothpaste Cough drops Wigs Customs Wedding ring Handshake Table manners"Amen"
(Hidden) Thumbs up, thumbs down Food & Drink Pancakes Marshmellows AgriculturePlow Home Air-cooling system Fan Master bed room Canopy bed Indoor lighting - oil lamps Communications Calendar Writing Postal system Carrier pigeons Drum At play Checkers Senet Rattles Marbles Bowling Darts Doll making industry Mechanical toys Zoos Literature (novels, poetry, narrative, drama) Sistrum Bagpipe Trumpet Wind Organ (Heron)
References: Ancient Inventions, Peter James & Nick Thorpe, Ballentine Books, NY Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, Charles Panati, Harper & Row, NY
MonotheismPhilosophy National Government Architecture Organized Science Anthropology-Ethnology (identifying and labeling racial groups)
Botany ZoologyAstronomy Mathematics Medicine Anatomy (identifying and labeling internal and external body parts)
Antibiotics Embalming Surgical instruments Medical specialists (Doctors who treated specific ailments) Dentists
Transportation Rudder Canals (including the first Suez canal) Navy (including the circumvention of the African continent) Technology Steam engine (Heron of Alexandria, a native Egyptian, called Michanikos, the Machine Man) Automaton (Heron) Automatic door (Heron)Lock Key Clock Loom Ink Metal piping Egg hatchery Carpentry joints Fiberglass
Sexual Contraceptive Spermicide Circumcision Personal Comb Hot Comb/Hair straightening comb Scissors Shoes (sandals) Birthdays Cosmetics Beauty shop Eye makeup Deodorant Toothbrush Toothpaste Cough drops Wigs Customs Wedding ring Handshake Table manners"Amen"
(Hidden) Thumbs up, thumbs down Food & Drink Pancakes Marshmellows AgriculturePlow Home Air-cooling system Fan Master bed room Canopy bed Indoor lighting - oil lamps Communications Calendar Writing Postal system Carrier pigeons Drum At play Checkers Senet Rattles Marbles Bowling Darts Doll making industry Mechanical toys Zoos Literature (novels, poetry, narrative, drama) Sistrum Bagpipe Trumpet Wind Organ (Heron)
References: Ancient Inventions, Peter James & Nick Thorpe, Ballentine Books, NY Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, Charles Panati, Harper & Row, NY
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Monday, September 1, 2008
Ancient Egyptian Astronomy*
by
Dr Theophile Obenga-->
Ancient African Science-->
The oldest Pharaonic astronomical texts date back to the ninth Egyptian dynasty (c.2150BC). They gave the names of thirty-six stars which rise within ten days of each other at the same time as the sun. Regarding comets, astronomers seem to have recorded under Thutmosis 111 (1504-1450) the apparition of Halley's comet. This is very possible for if comets visible to the naked eye are rare, comets which describe elliptic orbits are periodically observable: this is the case of Halley's and Encke's comets.The course of stars and planets was also a preocupation of the Egyptians. According to Chabas
(1) "Four thousand years ago, the Egyptians know that the earth moved in space and they did not hesitate to attribute the knowledge of this astronomical fact to the generations who had preceded them centuries ago."In antiquity the Egyptian civil calendar was the only calendar to be based on astronomy; this Egyptian calendar is the very foundation of our present calendar. Thales, the Greek sage, received his scientific education in Egypt, where the annual calendar of 365 days had been known as early as 4200BC and where the Great Bear, a constellation of the boreal hemisphere, was well and truly identified by the Egyptians, who called it "Meskhetyou."
Dr Theophile Obenga-->
Ancient African Science-->
The oldest Pharaonic astronomical texts date back to the ninth Egyptian dynasty (c.2150BC). They gave the names of thirty-six stars which rise within ten days of each other at the same time as the sun. Regarding comets, astronomers seem to have recorded under Thutmosis 111 (1504-1450) the apparition of Halley's comet. This is very possible for if comets visible to the naked eye are rare, comets which describe elliptic orbits are periodically observable: this is the case of Halley's and Encke's comets.The course of stars and planets was also a preocupation of the Egyptians. According to Chabas
(1) "Four thousand years ago, the Egyptians know that the earth moved in space and they did not hesitate to attribute the knowledge of this astronomical fact to the generations who had preceded them centuries ago."In antiquity the Egyptian civil calendar was the only calendar to be based on astronomy; this Egyptian calendar is the very foundation of our present calendar. Thales, the Greek sage, received his scientific education in Egypt, where the annual calendar of 365 days had been known as early as 4200BC and where the Great Bear, a constellation of the boreal hemisphere, was well and truly identified by the Egyptians, who called it "Meskhetyou."