Read an extract from:
The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality
Cheikh Anta Diop
(First published 1955)
According to the unanimous testimony of the Ancients, first the
Ethiopians and then the Egyptians created and raised to an
extraordinary stage of development all the elements of civilization,
while other peoples especially the eurasians, were still deep in
barbarism. The explanation for this must be sought in the material
conditions in which the accident of geography had placed them at the
beginning of time. For man to adapt, these conditions required the
invention of sciences complemented by the creation of arts and
religion.
It is impossible to stress all that the world, particularly the Hellenistic
world, owed to the Egyptians. The Greeks merely continued and
developed, sometimes partially, what the Egyptians had invented. By
virtue of their materialistic tendencies, the Greeks stripped those
inventions of the religious, idealistic shell in which the Egyptians had
enveloped them. On the one hand, the rugged life on the Eurasian
plains apparently intensified the materialistic instinct of the peoples
living there; on the other hand, it forged moral values diametrically
opposite to Egyptian moral values, which stemmed from a collective,
sedentary, relatively easy, peaceful life, once it had been regulated
by a few social laws.
To the extent that the Egyptians were horrified by theft, nomadism,
and war, to the same extent these practices were deemed highly
moral on the Eurasian plains. Only a warrior killed on the battlefield
could enter Valhalla, the Germanic paradise. Among the Egyptians,
no felicity was possible except for the deceased who could prove, at
the Tribunal of Osiris, that he had been charitable to the poor and had
never sinned. This was the antithesis of the spirit of rapine and
conquest that generally characterized the peoples of the north,
driven, in a sense, away from a country unfavoured by Nature. In
contrast, existence was so easy in the valley of the Nile, a veritable
Garden of Eden, between two deserts, that the Egyptians tended to
believe that Nature's benefits poured down from the sky. They finally
adored it in the form of an Omnipotent Being, Creator of All that
Exists and Dispenser of Blessings. Their early materialism - in other
words, their vitalism - would henceforth become a materialism
transposed to the sky, a metaphysical materialism, if one may call it
that.
On the contrary, the horizons of the Greek were never to pass
beyond material, visible man, the conqueror of hostile Nature. On the
earth, everything gravitated around him; the supreme objective of art
was to reproduce his exact likeness. In the "heavens", paradoxically,
he alone was to be found, with his early faults and weaknesses,
beneath the shell of gods distinguished from ordinary mortals only by
physical strength. Thus, when the Greek borrowed the Egyptian god,
a real god in the full sense of the word, provided with all the moral
perfections that stem from sedentary life, he could understand that
deity only by reducing him to the level of man. Consequently, the
adoptive Pantheon of the Greeks was merely another humanity. This
anthropomorphism, in this particular case, was but an acute
materialism; it was characteristic of the Greek mind. Strictly speaking,
the Greek miracle does not exist, for if we try to analyze the process
of adapting Egyptian values to Greece, there is obviously nothing
miraculous about it, in the intellectual sense of the term. At most we
can say that this trend toward materialism, that was to characterize
the West, was favorable to scientific development.
Once they had borrowed Egyptian values, the worldly genius of the
Greeks, emanating basically from the Eurasian plans and from their
religious indifference, favoured the existence of a secular, worldly
science. Taught publicly by equally worldly philosophers, this science
was no longer a monopoly of a priestly group to be jealously guarded
and kept from the people, lest it be lost in social upheavals:
The power and prestige of the mind which, everywhere else,
exercised their invisible empire, alongside of military force,
were not in the hands of the priests, nor of government officials
among the Greeks, but in the hands of the researcher and the
thinker. As was already visibly the case with Thales,
Pythagoras, and Empedocles, the intellectual could become the
centre of a circle in a school, an academy, or the living
community of an order, drawing nearer first to one, then to the
other, setting scientific, moral, and political goals, and tying it all
together to form a philosophical tradition.
Scientific, philosophical teaching was dispensed by laymen
distinguished from the common people only by their intellectual level
or social status. No saintly halo encompassed them. In "Isis and
Osiris", Plutarch reported that, according to the testimony of all Greek
scholars and philosophers taught by the Egyptians, the latter were
careful about secularizing their knowledge. Solon, Thales, Plato,
Lycurgus, Pythagoras encountered difficulty before being accepted
as students by the Egyptians. Still according to Plutarch, the
Egyptians preferred Pythagoras because of his mystical
temperament. Reciprocally, Pythagoras was one of the Greeks who
most revered the Egyptians. The foregoing is the conclusion of a
passage in which Plutarch explains the esoteric significance of the
name Amon: that which is hidden invisible.
As Amélineau observes, it is strange that we do not place more
stress on the Egyptian contribution to civilization:
I then realized, and realized clearly, that the most famous
Greek systems, notably those of Plato and Aristotle, had
originated in Egypt. I also realized that the lofty genius of the
Greeks had been able to present Egyptian ideas incomparably,
especially in Plato; but I thought that what we loved in the
Greeks, we should not scorn or simply disdain in the Egyptians.
Today, when two authors collaborate, the credit for their work in
common is shared equally by each. I fail to see why ancient
Greece should reap all the honor for ideas she borrowed from
Egypt.
Amélineau also points out that if certain of Plato's ideas have become
obscure, it is because we fail to place them in the context of their
Egyptian source. This is the case, for example, with Plato's ideas on
the creation of the world by the Demiurge. we know, moreover, that
Pythagoras, Thales, Solon, Archimedes, and Eratosthenes, among
others, were trained in Egypt. Egypt was indeed the classic land
where two-thirds of the Greek scholars went to study. In reality, it can
be said that, during the Hellenistic epoch, Alexandria was the
intellectual centre of the world. Assembled there were all the Greek
scholars we talk about today. The fact that they were trained outside
of Greece, in Egypt, could never be overemphasized.
Even Greek architecture has its roots in Egypt. As early as the
Twelfth Dynasty, proto-Doric columns are found (Egyptian cliff tombs
of Beni Hasan). Greco-Roman monuments are mere miniatures as
compared with Egyptian monuments. Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris,
with all its towers, could easily be placed in the hypostyle hall of the
temple of Karnak; the Greek Parthenon could fit into those walls even
more easily.
The typically Negro - or Kushite, as Lenormant writes - kind of fable,
with animals as characters, was introduced into Greece by the
Egyptian Negro, Aesop, who was to inspire the fables of the
Frenchman La Fontaine. Edgar Allan Poe, in "Some Words with a
Mummy," presents a symbolic idea of the scope of scientific and
technical knowledge in ancient Egypt.
From Egyptian priests, Herodotus had received information revealing
the basic mathematical data on the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
Several mathematicians and astronomers have produced works on
that pyramid; their sensational revelations have not failed to unleash
a flood of arguments, which, as expected, are not expressed in the
form of a coherent, scientific account. Without venturing into what
might be considered excessive pyramidology, we can cite the
following:
Astronomers have noted in the Great Pyramid indications of the
sidereal year, the anomalistic year, the precessions of the equinoxes
"for 6,000 years, whereas modern astronomy knows them for only
about 400 years." Mathematicians have detected in it the exact value
of "pi", the exact average distance between the sun and the earth, the
polar diameter of the earth, and so on.
We could prolong the list by citing even more impressive statistics.
Could this result from mere chance? As Matila C. Ghyka writes, that
would be inconceivable:
Any single one of these items could be a coincidence; for them
all to be fortuitous would be almost as unlikely as a temporary
revision of the second principle of thermodynamics (water
freezing over fire) imagined by physicists, or the miracle of
typewriting monkeys... Nevertheless, thus completed and
perfected, thanks to the research of Dieulafoy, E. Mâle, and
Lun the hypothesis of Viollet-le-Duc on the transmission of
certain Egyptian diagrams to the Arabs, then to the Clunisians,
through the intermediary of the Greco-Nestoria school of
Alexandria, is quite plausible. Astronomically, the Great
Pyramid can be the "gnomon of the Great Year," as well as the
"metronome" whose harmony, often misunderstood, echoes
throughout Greek art, Gothic architecture, the first
Renaissance, and in any art that rediscovers the "divine
proportion" and the pulsation of life.
The author also quotes Abbé Moreux's opinion that the Great
Pyramid does not represent the "groping beginnings of Egyptian
civilization and science, but rather the crowning of a culture that had
attained its apogee and, before disappearing, probably wished to
leave future generations a proud testimonial of its superiority".
This astronomical and mathematical knowledge, instead of
completely vanishing from Black Africa, has left traces that Marcel
Griaule was perceptive enough to detect among the Dogon, however
astounding that may seem today.
On numerous occasions, reference has been made to the fact that
the Greeks borrowed their gods from Egypt; here is the proof:
"Almost all the names of the gods came into Greece from Egypt. My
inquiries prove that they were all derived from a foreign source, and
my opinion is that Egypt furnished the greater number."
Since the Egyptian origin of civilization and extensive borrowing of
the Greeks from the Egyptians are historically evident, we may well
wonder with Amélineau why, despite those facts, most people stress
the role played by Greece while overlooking that of Egypt. The
reason for this attitude can be detected merely by recalling the root of
the question. As Egypt is a Negro country, with a civilization created
by Blacks, any thesis tending to prove the contrary would have no
future. The protagonists of such theories are not unaware of this. So
it is wiser and safer to strip Egypt, simply and most discreetly, of all
its creations in favour of a really White nation (Greece). This false
attribution to Greece of the values of a so-called White Egypt reveals
a profound contradiction that is not the least important proof of
Egypt's negro origin.
Notwithstanding the opinion of André Siegfried, the Black is clearly
capable of creating technique. He is the very one who first created it
at a time when all the white races, steeped in barbarism, were barely
fit for civilization. When we say that the ancestors of the blacks, who
today live mainly in black Africa, were the first to invent mathematics,
astronomy, the calendar, sciences in general, arts, religion,
agriculture, social organisation, medicine, writing, technique,
architecture; that they were the first to erect buildings out of 6 million
tons of stone (the Great Pyramid) as architects and engineers - not
simply as unskilled laborers; that they built the immense temple of
Karnak, that forest of columns with its famed hypostyle hall large
enough to hold Notre Dame and its towers; that they sculpted the first
colossal statues (Colossi of Memnon, etc.) - when we say all that we
are merely expressing the plain unvarnished truth that no one today
can refute by arguments worthy of the name.
Consequently, the Black man must become able to restore the
continuity of his national historic past, to draw from it the moral
advantage needed to reconquer his place in the modern world,
without falling into the excesses of a Nazism in reverse for, insofar as
one can speak of a race, the civilization that is his might have been
created by any other human race placed in so favorable and so
unique a setting.