BACK TO RESOURCES

Dr. Ivan Van Sertima - Before Columbus

Download IVAN VAN SERTIMA - BEFORE COLUMBUS • 32KB

Before Columbus - Dr. Ivan Van Sertima

My subject today is Egyptian science. It takes, in fact, a great deal of courage to attempt such a subject because Egypt, unlike any other civilization, ranged over three millennia and its science begins very early indeed. Our science today, modern science, the efflorescence of modern science, the flowering of modern science, the high point of modern science only ranges over about a century.

Several developments have been going on for a few centuries. But the things that we are seeing now moving with great speed every day now there is a new invention. The Egyptians had a tremendous advantage and over 3000 years. So many things have happened that is quite impossible, partly through the lack of records, but partly through the fact that we have even when we find records, we are overwhelmed by the data and some of it has not yet been interpreted. The Egyptians had the most remarkable science of ancient times. Now, one could not begin a discussion of Egyptian technology or Egyptian science without first pointing out who are the Egyptians? I think in this church. It is taking already for granted that the original Egyptians were black, and that is largely the case. There is no question now about it. Not only was Egypt original, Egypt largely black, dominantly black, but it was culturally African. It was technologically African. Its religion was African, its language was African. The discovery of Crystal in Nubia and at Hierakonpolis of elements that were later to flower in Egypt. These are found south of Egypt, where there has been no question of the black bass. You will have find these empires, particularly at coastal at Coastal in Nubia, where Bruce Williams discovered Seal and Williams discovered this enormous royal cemetery of 33 tombs. And in these tombs, they found hundreds of shattered pots and stoneware vessels, and they brought them back to United States. They were patched together. You could tell from the microscopic cracks how they could be fitted together. And then they found, having fitted it together laboriously over quite a number of years, that the Falcon God Horus, the chief god of the Egyptians, originated in the Sudan even before it moved up into Egypt. They find a dozen black kings reigned in the Nile Valley even before even before Scorpion and Narmer, the first of the great Egyptian kings. They find that the hieroglyphs, the world's first major writing system, which was the fact of the writing systems in the world, are the major writing systems that is also found written by the Black Kings and the blacks that are found south of the Egyptian world at least two centuries before the Egyptian dynasty There also you find the sedex, the palace facades, all the elements, all the political and religious elements that have become associated with Egyptian central organization, Egyptian philosophy, Egyptian religion, all the things that decorate the kings, all the things that have become part of the royal paraphernalia, all of these things are found first among the blacks in the Sudan as they move up into Egypt. There comes the question, But are these Egyptians black? And the reason why this is brought in question is two reasons. There are two reasons. The one is the obvious one prejudice. The obvious one is easy to deal with, because there you have when Egypt was rediscovered by Europeans, when the Greeks saw it at first, thousands of years ago, they knew that the people were black. They made it quite clear that these were not only black skinned people, but wooly haired, because people have contended that you have dark Europeans like Italians, etcetera, in Southern Europe, etcetera, and the dark skinned does not make you black. And that the English, for example, have a habit of calling anybody darker than them. Black They call the Spanish black. Okay. This was used at the conference until Diop pointed out. But what about the hair? You know that that is something you can't argue with. And Herodotus said they were not only black skinned, but wooly hair. Those of you who have read or heard about that conference, remember the absurd Abdullah who jumped up when Diop showed that even the melanin content in the mummies when he scraped the mummies and by the way, Diop discovered and it comes out in a very interesting interview with Dr. Finch he had in Senegal this summer that Diop discovered that people had been scraping the mummies before. And they knew. They knew. They never said a word. They kept what they discovered quiet. And when he scraped skin off and he put it in the laboratories, he found that the melanin content in the skin clearly established they were an African race, that you did not find that melanin dosage in the European. And when he begged them to give him just a little square millimeter so that he could study more closely, refused a square inch or so of other mummies, they would not let him have it. When the OP established the blackness of the Egyptians, Abdullah jumped up and said, Even if they're black skinned, they are white. Yes. And it was very important to the European to think so, because he in his arrogance. Had conquered most of the known world. In his arrogance, he had shattered all before him. In his arrogance, he had destroyed other civilizations. Now the Africans invaded Europe to at least three times, but they never destroyed European civilization. They enriched it. This is the great tragedy. Whenever Europe advanced, she stamped her foot. And what she found, the arrogance that led to that contempt that my way is the only way so that those people who call themselves Christians call themselves Christians. Mind you, in the name of our brother, the Christ. They actually europeanizing the Christ used him in his name to enslave us. Right. So that to this day people are very confused, blaming on Christianity. What has nothing to do with the essential Christ, but had to do with the European conception of Christianity or their practice of Christianity, which was to make a mockery of the whole thing so that the life of man great dichotomies occurred in Europe, so that the sensual life of man, the magic, the joy, the sheer joy of being human, of being alive, became mocked in the Spanish Inquisition, where it was forbidden to laugh. That is the absurdity to which a younger people, immature, arrogant because of their insecurities, was to bring the Christian religion. They even crucified their scientists, Galileo and all of these people who suffered because they had the courage to make statements that were not in agreement with the church. The church even banned the study of advanced mathematics as late as the 17th century. It was a capital offense to study advanced mathematics in Europe. Why? Because the Arabs and Africans were doing it. The study, Arabic manuscripts in this language of science was in Arabic at that time. And Arabic, by the way, doesn't belong to the Saudi Arabians. When one talks of Arabic, one is now talking outside of just one race. Arabs are not a race. Okay. You have black Arabs, You have white Arabs, people speaking, Arab Arabs. That is how it was carried. And when the Arabs moved into Africa, they became Africans. And when that first attack was made on Europe by the Muslims, it included a vast number of Africans and Africans were to come out of Africa and continue those movements. But what did the Africans bring to Europe? They did not bring destruction. Obviously, people were killed. All battles end in the killing of people. So Africans killed Europeans too, but they did not enslave them. They did not destroy their cultures. They enrich them. The Moorish thing, the first paved streets in Europe, the first library in Europe were brought by the Africans and Arabs in the Muslim invasion. They brought light, not darkness. They brought a different kind of gentleness to invasion. It did not have the rapacity, the aggression, the murder, the sense that one had to kill in order to be. It was not necessary. This was very alien to the spirit of those invasions. When Hannibal entered Europe, too, he spent there ten years. You cannot see any shattered European statues. Wherever the European is March, he smashed our noses or blown like the Sphinx. Just two two years ago. I was on the telephone in a link up with Cheikh Anta Diop and Gamal Mokhtar, the Egyptian at Unesco in Paris, and we had Egyptian and French translators. And what were we discussing? The fact that in the back room of the British Museum are the splinters of the Sphinx knows. We're trying to get the Egyptians to reclaim it. And why did that happen? Why did the nose always offend them? Because it was the one feature that made us look different from them when they walked into Egypt, the Napoleonic armies and all their arrogance saw not the humbled African that they had reduced into slave. They saw God like African, the Sphinx, the greatest figure, still the largest figure of carving sculpture of a human being. They saw a broad browed, broad nose, broad cheeked, broad lipped, broad chin, God staring down at them with contempt, and they blew off its nose. Or they tried to. This was the beginning of an attack on anything that. Reminded them that the African had once stood on the highest rung of civilization. It was very important to make the slave and later the colonial and the second class citizen in the Americas and throughout the world, the African included, to make him believe that he was an inferior, that the reason why he had not made it as they did, the reason why they had the power and the influence and everything, was because it was ordained, because they were biological inferiors, because they were cursed, because they did not have the genes, the brains in order to be as good as the European. Therefore, the reveal a history that showed that this was just the opposite, that they had built great cities, that they had been involved in technology, not only involved, but they had built the ground floor upon which others were to build that European metaphysics, European philosophical doctrines, European scientific concepts, European machines fed upon inventions. They fed upon the genius of that world, the back of that world. So it wasn't simply muscle. It wasn't simply muscle of the African world that helped to build Europe. It was also the genius. No invasion has ever led so much to the counter invasion as the Greek on the Egyptian. Because although the Greeks physically invaded Egypt, Egypt spiritually invaded Greece, because when the Greeks attacked the Africans, they then began to be profoundly affected and changed by the essence of African thinking. Thus it is that every major Greek thallus of Miletus Democritus Pythagoras Eudoxus marched into Egypt and sat at the foot of Egyptian teachers and learned their doctrines, learned their science. Pythagoras did not initiate the Pythagorean theorem. He merely announced it. All of these people were profoundly affected by Aristotle. All there is a whole range of them. James mentions them in his book. Those people who were profoundly affected. I'm going to touch on various aspects, but let me say something about the James book, and this must stand as a warning about other people who are trying to establish parallels or influences of the African on the European or the Asiatic, etcetera. Please be very careful not to point to simple things which could be done by any people anywhere in the world. James, for example. And that's a brilliant classic, but he has it has weaknesses and many blacks followed this quite blindly and casually. For example, he mentioned the doctrine of the existence of God among the Egyptians, which passed over among the Greeks. That is absolute nonsense. Anyone can think of God, rightly or wrongly, it occurs automatically. You're living in a universe where you're aware of the billions of stars spinning around you. The strange motion of the heavens, the extraordinary mystery of life itself that could occur even to an ape that had nothing to do with the Egyptians passing anything on to the Greeks. You have to be very specific when you're talking about influences, because people blame us to say, Look, you're claiming the blacks began everything and we are not even people. No one is saying that. People are people are people. Man was born in Africa. The first man is therefore an African. There is no question about that. All men therefore be whatever their race, have African ancestors somewhere down the line. That is at the very early stage we are saying we go beyond that. We are not talking simply about man being born in Africa. But that doesn't prove anything because the European says, Look what the mess you made of it. You were born first and you were long last. So it's not an argument necessarily in one's favor. One has to go beyond that. And the evidence points beyond that, that not it wasn't merely a question of man being born in Africa, but the first civilizations were in Africa. The first high cultures were in Africa, the first sciences Advanced sciences were in Africa. And one has to trace in what precise way they were taken out of that African world. And in what precise way did they affect the rest of the world? Because the European likes to claim everything he has claimed everything. And some of the slides you will see today will startle you. I will speak for some time before I come to those slides so as not to cause disruption. But let me touch on a number of things. Agriculture. This was supposed to be the beginnings of high civilization because many people, Europeans and Africans, Asians, were running about hunting for animals. ET cetera. They were in a sort of nomadic state. And then came settlement Agriculture brought this in some cases, some people were so poor off that they merely scratched the soil and remained at that level. But in along the great rivers, particularly the Nile Valley, the Africans built up an incredible civilization. They were the first people in agriculture. Just two years ago in this comes out in the book Blacks and Science, which by the way, is on sale here in Blacks in Science. You have an essay by Randolph Sheldon Close, the team that went out and discovered that at Wadi Cubana in ancient Egypt 18,000 years ago at Wadi Kubani and at Wadi Toshka Nubia in the Sudan, blacks were cultivating crops scientifically. They had entered the area of crop science that was not thought to have come to the world until 7000 years later. In other words, all other civilizations, be they European, Asiatic or Asiatic, America, was not. Oh, yes, there were Americans because they had crossed the Bering Straits by then. All civilizations, be they African, Asiatic or American, were not. Yet at that stage, Africans had entered what is known as the Neolithic phase, the phase of agriculture. They found a mortar and pestle. 18,000 years old. The first mortar and pestle in the world for grinding corn. For grinding. Corn is found in Nubia and in Egypt. Their medicine startles us the quality of their medicine. You will see a picture of him hotep. And when you see his picture, you would have to be blind. More than color blind. You would have to be truly blind. The question whether he's an African or not and he comes straight out of that great third dynasty where the first enormous pyramid was built. He was known as Imhotep's Imhotep. He was known as Otus among the Greeks. He was worshiped. And in fact, you will see Asclepius, the European holding an African stick. He's the god of healing among the Greeks, and he's holding an African stick with the African snake crawling up the stick there. That is not Greek at all. That is not Greek at all. Even when I was in East Africa, I was given a stick with the snake by chief in Hema. The second as a gift. I came to New York and I fell asleep in the bus. That was my first experience of New York. I never saw it again. I like to think it went back to Africa. Their medical papyri. It is not true that we have no books. Fortunately for us, apart from the fact that there still are papyri that is books, because books were not made in squares as they are made today. That happened after the 15th century. They were rolled up papyri, often laboriously written out. ET cetera. All over the world. But apart from the medical papyri that exists, apart from the books that the texts that still exist, the good thing about Africans is that they wrote everywhere. Those of you who've been to Egypt will note that Africans wrote everywhere and they didn't do it like how they do it in the New York subway. They wrote intelligently, but they wrote everywhere. There are at least ten medical texts that survive, and the two most important are the Ebers Papyrus and Edwin Smith papyrus. And the these papyri are quite astonishing considering their age. The Ebers papyrus, for example, which is 1500 years before Christ. That is about 3500 years ago, written by Africans 3500 years ago has chapters on intestinal disease, helminthiasis, ophthalmology, dermatology, gynecology, obstetrics, pregnancy, diagnosis, contraception, dentistry, surgical treatments of abscesses, tumors, fractures and burns. Chapters on movement of the heart, the pulse, diagnostic percussion. We are supposed to be the witch doctors. Commenting on this he says, in fact, the papyrus. And he speaks now about the Edwin Smith papyrus, which occurs earlier and which is not as complex as the Ebers Papyrus, which records 1500 B.C., the Edwin Smith Papyrus, which is 2600 B.C., which is about 5000 years ago. He says of it, This papyrus proves the existence of an objective and scientific medicine devoid of theories and magic, except in one case, and based on the attentive and repeated observation of the patient on bedside experience and on a hitherto unsuspected knowledge of anatomy. So even in that very early stage, you find quite unusual kind of medicine occurring. Dr. Finch, Dr. Newsome had written about early doctors, and Dr. Finch takes it further. Let me say something about what emerges from the new semester, which you will see in blacks and Science, where he speaks of the fact that Imhotep is the true father of medicine. He emerges as a multi genius, an architect and engineer, a doctor. ET cetera. But there are 1 or 2 people before him. There is a woman, a chief physician called Prichette. There is there is the first what he believes to be the first what is suggested to be the first man called Athetis who wrote books on anatomy. He was the son of Minis, the first great Pharaoh. But we have not found the books. They have not found the books. But this Imhotep was an extraordinary man. He lived around 2009 80 BC during the reign of Susa of the third dynasty, and he was the first man to take the pyramid to the Heights. He was the first to make the these enormous things out of hewn stone. And he built this incredible step pyramid. He was a he became worshiped as a deity by both Africans and Europeans. And in fact, later on, he was not only identified with Asclepius, the European God of healing, but then he was later identified with Christ, even though he was clearly very black. It's very strange how Christ a brother. And I'm not commenting because we do not know what kind of mixtures he had in American terms. He would be called black. But it's very strange how that brother was given golden hair and blue eyes and eventually became not the gentle father that could have saved us, but almost was turned into a figure that could mock us so that I remembered as a boy crying when a friend of mine, I was a young man then I was about 20. And I even then, even though I believed in European superiority, because we were trained to believe in that and we were trained at that time. I had never read anything about Africans except Tarzan. This boy turned to me and he said, you know, why are we fighting? You know? We could never beat the white man. Even Christ is white. Even God is white. And I mean I mean, I cried. I couldn't. I mean, because I couldn't question that at the time that God must have known the white man was superior, that he chose to appear in a white form. This is how we thought of it. And this is before they did it with great deliberateness. They knew they had to make him white. Everything had to be made European so that the man they conquered could no longer have qualms and doubts he could feel. Look, why should I question these people? Truly, they are superior. Not only are they more powerful and wealthy than I am, but even God chose them. They are the chosen people. God chose them because even His prophets are white. Even the man he sent as a messenger is white. How could he be white? Even the Messiah comes the Messiah. Egyptian, the anointed. He in in in in Matthew chapter two, verse 15. He says, out of Egypt, I have called my son. That could be translated two ways. Either that he was originally Egyptian, which I don't think he was, but he was sent to Egypt. When Herod started the tremendous persecution, Christ was smuggled into Egypt and Christ grew up in Egypt. And when he said, Out of Egypt, I have called my son, he was calling him back for the mission, but he was educated in Egypt. He was childhood was in Egypt. He lived in the village of Marathia, near Hierakonpolis. Therefore, he is profoundly affected by Egyptian teachings. He was to give a personal lightning and particularity to his preaching so that you can't just say, Oh, because he there is a cynicism in his teaching that he's in sin because Christ, because of his extraordinary personal lightning and magic, was able to invest a special quality to what he taught. Those men are beyond race because Muhammad was no Arab, Muhammad was nearly killed by the Arabs. He was an Arab in race. Or if an Arab is a race, Arab is not a race. But he was among the Saudi Arabians. He grew up that was part of his flesh and blood. But he fought against everything that was Arab, just like Christ. Christ fought against everything that was Jewish, although he was a Jew. And when I say everything that was Jewish, I mean everything that was that had distorted everything that was Jewish, that was tribal and clannish. And materialistic. He fought against those values. That is why the high priest. Wanted to turn him over to the Romans and kill him. The Romans didn't think he was important. Just a little barefoot carpenter who had made a bit of a noise somewhere, healing people and making a lot of working wonders. They wondered why the fuss. But the Jews were out to get him because he was not behaving the way they wanted him to behave. He went into the church and raised them out. He had no stupid idea that because this is a church, you could make it into anything you please. The hardest was the house of God for him. Therefore, what was holy was the truth is not putting on nice clothes and making nice noises and swinging incense to the church makes you holy. I think it is important that we should reinterpret Christ, the brother, because many people have turned away from Christianity under the assumption that it is European. The reason why the Europeans found it so difficult to be Christians is because true Christianity was alien to what was happening in Europe. That is why Hitler. Eventually emerged the Antichrist. It was an opposition to all the all the values that Christ presented, Christ upturned, Christ upturned the Roman ideas about what was right and what was wrong. The Europeans, for example, felt this arrogance, this pride was very important. Christ said, No, it is the humble man. It is the meek who shall inherit the earth. They felt the great wealth would make them rise to the top of the heap. Christ said, No. The rich man is as hard for the rich man to enter my heaven as it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. He turned everything upside down. So that he challenged the values. That is why he became a candidate for assassination, because he was a rebel. He was not the kind of thing that they lock up now in the church and where the pope could start stand above the vast horror and poverty of the world and make a lot of simple platitudinous statements and think that he's close to God. Some of the things that those popes have done. If Christ was alive, he would have whipped them. Let me leave that alone for a while. Let me come back to Egypt. Yet. I am in Egypt because this has to do with Egypt. It is not just science, because in those days, the concept of the universe, the concept of man, the purity of the individual, the power within man had to do with science. Religion and science, therefore, in that pure and absolute sense, were connected and inseparable. That is why it is so hard to separate these things. When one comes back to the primal source, one begins to see why these things are not separable but integrated. But to come back to the medicine, Dr. Finch points out in his essay that they may have had some form of a socialized medicine. This is extremely interesting because their medical services were open to all. The doctors were paid by the state, and you find that they had an advanced and detailed knowledge of neuroanatomy. The structure and function of the cardiovascular system, unsurpassed skills in bandaging, which we know nobody could bandage. Even today like the Egyptians when they bandage, you are properly bandaged. Your bondage for thousands of years because Princess Minnie in 1963 at the University of Oklahoma, they took cells out of her hand and found that they were so well preserved that it just one other step they could have been put in a solution and transplanted. It was they had reached that extraordinary stage of development. The chemistry of mummification is quite extraordinary. also had specialist guilds. They were the first people to introduce high specialization in medicine. They had a doctor for every organ, and they did this as early as the old kingdom, many, many thousands of years ago. Then they moved towards a more generalized medicine, and then they turned back to specialization, as Dr. Finch points out, in the Ptolemaic period. When we come to deal with pyramids, and that is a long story. But let me point to a few things about the pyramids. Today I will show you an unusual method by which the Egyptians were able to illuminate the tunnels and chambers on the ground, that they built certain connections, certain shafts that link up with certain stars, and they had metal reflectors. And when the star shone on the metal reflector, it would be reflected up on the wall, hitting out, reflecting. This would go right through their tunnels and chambers. So they had a light source from the sun. Not the candle because they were always astonished. How come? Could the Egyptians draw these marvelous paintings far on the ground in chambers that normally would be too dark? And if you lit a candle, the candle would have less smudges on the wall. There was no evidence of the candle grease or the candle smoke in those paintings. And they wondered how come they found the smokeless light source? But they were already making use of the sun through reflection. They were running it through the light of the sun. They were running it through the ground in all of those complex mazes and chambers. One will also point to the method they used to move the great stones, the ramps, the levers, building up the one story, the scaling ladders, which they didn't think they have. They're scaling ladders with wheels. There are evidence of the ramps and levers there, evidence of them moving. There is one stone they left in the quarry, which was 1100, 1618 tons. The largest stone ever moved successfully here in the Americas is 217 tons. And the astonishing thing is that the Americans were found to be moving the stones, which they hadn't moved before. When they started to move heavy stones, they were using the identical method of the Egyptians. What is also strange, too, that the Americans had developed in Peru, you will see at saksaywaman. You will see what is known as fitted megalithic masonry, where you have enormous blocks of stone, sometimes with ten sides. Everything here has four sides in this room. Almost. That's the standard method of building. Everything is standard in squares. But in Egypt and in parts of ancient South America, you will find blocks which have many sides, not four. And you want to know how on earth could they know how to fit blocks with eight sides onto a block another block and they're going to do it without mortar and you can't put a hair in between those blocks. And now they have when they were among the Incas, the Spaniards, the Incas told them that their ancestors had discovered a method, the use of certain red leaves that could soften stone and said, you know, that is impossible. But recently scientists have discovered and let me quote it because it's an extraordinary name Scientists have discovered something called polyhydroxy poly carbohydrate. Poly carbohydrate. I can't see it with out my glasses, but it comes out of certain plants and it has the effect of softening the stone. That these people had come upon a science of of of linking these things together, of softening the stone, of being able to weather it and so that they could work it easily, something that we don't know how to do now. There were various areas they had entered in science. The movement of those stones still mystify us because although we have seen them, there are enormous barges in which they're moving incredible things, things that broke the modern cranes when when the Aswan Dam was being built and all the teams rushed down, the archeological teams rushed down to try and save some of the things in Africa. They found they couldn't move them. They could not move them. The Americans, the nuclear agency in America went and studied how the how the Egyptians used move the enormous statue across the desert, and they built up the same kind of rollers and and ramps, etcetera, and moved it because they discovered, in spite of all their sophisticated technology, that was the best method of moving it on the desert sand. They moved a nuclear reactor on the desert sand using Egyptian methods just a few years ago in Gary. You'll see a picture where the Egyptians have some peculiar oil. We don't know what it is, but when they throw it on the ground, it allows enormous objects to move as if they're sliding across the ice. You will see pictures of that with all of these men. And they're moving these logs in as fast as as the statues moved across one. They move, they fitted enough, they fit another. ET cetera. These guys were able to lift 50 ton stones and put them on the top of skyscrapers without being a fraction of an inch off the Great Pyramid. The Great Pyramid is half the height of the Empire State Building, and yet it takes up 12 blocks of Manhattan, 13.1 acres. And in spite of its enormous size, so great a size, in fact, that it is pointed out that if you broke the stone into one foot cubes, it would circle two thirds of this planet. The materials in that single great pyramid. The one foot cubes would circle two thirds of this planet. It is so large that it could hold Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul's Cathedral, the major European cathedrals of Florence, Milan, Saint Peter's Basilica of Rome. They still be room for more. Yet is done with enormous precision. The right angles at each corner of the base. Line up the walls perfectly with the four cardinal points. It's accurate within 0.07%. The north base is 755.44. The South Bay. 755.88. East Base is 755.77. The West incredible mathematical problem to make it so perfect that when it comes to that point, the sides are perfectly aligned. It takes great mathematics to do that. And because the kind of mathematics, the kind of engineering skill, the kind of architectural genius that it calls for, seems to be beyond that of ancient people. All sorts of theories have been advanced recently about spacemen coming down to build the pyramids, etcetera. What on earth are they going to do with that? And some people seem to think that that's a marvelous theory. ET cetera. And von Daniken and people like him do not take into account the slow, careful evolution of mathematics among the Egyptian Egyptians. The Africans did not just jump like that. They have an evolution of mathematics. You can see their mathematics slowly developed over the centuries. You could see the pyramid developing. You could see the mastaba, you could see the them introducing new rooms on the ground. You could see them building pyramids that have as much underneath as above. They much. They have as much. They have certain pyramids that have as much ground excavated underneath as above. And you see that the slow process until the genius Imhotep takes it a step further. And then after step pyramids, they start to build the true pyramid with steps as a superstructure. I want to point that out because one of the things that have been used against me when I was attacked in the New York Times, they said I cannot distinguish step pyramids from true pyramids. That was the quote from the man who attacked me, the Walt Disney professor of Cambridge, Glen Daniels, a man whose only claim to fame is having written some detective short stories in the manner of Ellery Queen. Never went to Africa, never did any archeology in pre-Columbian. pre-Columbian America knows nothing about the subject. He happens to be white. He happens to be a Cambridge professor. He's the head. He edits a magazine which he never sees. The general editor and general in a very general sense indeed, because he doesn't even know what is in his own magazine. Because if he had read his own magazine, which he added, he would have seen the contradiction to his argument about certain things. This is the kind of thing that we face again and again. And I warn you, do not make idle claims. You must always have backup. You must always be very specific, because the Egyptians, even when they started to build a true pyramid, which is like that which has no step, when you X-ray the pyramid, you find the steps inside. They actually built the steps first and then filled them up to build the cone. So they never lost conception of the steps. And even in the Nubian period, the 25th Dynasty, when they started to build pyramids again, which they hadn't done for two centuries before or they hadn't done for a long time, since 1600 BC, they hadn't done pyramid building. They started it again around 800 BC and they built miniature step and true pyramids. They couldn't build the great pyramids that they had built in earlier times. Why? Because in the early time when the Africans were built in those extraordinary monuments, they were at peace. They had conquered all around them. They were had no threat from the invaders. The European were sitting quietly chewing his cud in Europe. In the 25th dynasty, they couldn't do that. There was war. The sound of war all over. The Syrians were attacking. They captured the Jews. The blacks saved the Jews in 701 BC, and the blacks appeared in Jerusalem and the Syrians were crushed under Taharqa, who had not yet been King. Hezekiah, the king of the Jews, was wondering where he should surrender to the Syrians until, as the Bible says, in kings, you know. And then they heard say of Taharqa, Behold, I have come out to fight against thee. And then the Assyrians were defeated and the Jews were saved. Because at that time and bear that in mind, there was a very close association because many of the Jews were blacks anyway, they were brothers. It is only within recent times that most of the Jews have become Europeans. The Jew is not a race. Bear that in mind. There are black Jews and there are white Jews. There are different changing political situations that have caused the extraordinary situation that we find today. I don't want to comment on that. To come to other aspects that are very important. The machines, they had machines like the Marquette and I have a picture here. I've been looking at the book, The Lost Discoveries, and discovering to myself the reason why they're lost because they're in the wrong book. guy is taking things that are Egyptian and putting Caucasoid faces on the discoverers. You see the Marquette and they're right in the heart of Egypt on the black African sun. Okay. All right. Let me change that phrase under an African sun. Under the African sun and they're with this machine test doing with the plumb line, etcetera, are marking off the north south, establishing this north south line and the caucasoid faces totally All they have is a tan skin. They they have they don't have and there's nothing African about them. All of his discoveries have caucasoid faces. He got there is a machine. There's a man called hero or heroine in the Alexandrian world, when even in the Alexandrian world, African genius and technology still predominated. Even in the Alexandrian world when the Greeks had come in. The reason why they had built Alexandria in Africa was because it was close to African science and genius. Why didn't they go back to Europe and build it there? Those were the people who were teaching at the time. And he takes heroin and makes him into European heroin, invented a model temple. When you go to the altar and you turn on. Look, look at the time, you know, 300 years before Christ, when the priest goes to the altar and he lights a fire. The doors open and the congregation comes in when the service is coming to an end. The fire starts to go down, the doors begin to close, you leave, and when the fire outs the doors close automatically, you can imagine what it is to do something like that. Then he invented the pneumatic organ, which you will see all these things and talking about you will see in the slides. He also invented the first steam engine. And do you know what was the principle of power for that steam engine? Jet propulsion. Jet propulsion. And they're calling this Greek, the Alexandrian period, Greek, that this is a Greek. There is no that is no nothing Greek about heroine or hero. You look at their obelisks. Those were not just monuments like that. The obelisks had shadows, the true shadows on the ground at certain times of the day. You could mark it off. I have seen a shadow clock in Belgium. You could tell the day with up to five minutes. And this is long before Christ, you know, these tremendous objects. And you could see from the shadow, you could measure it, and then you could start cutting into minutes. ET cetera. You could cut it down like a clock. They built the shadow clock. They built the water clock. They built the sundials. ET cetera. It is, said Ben Pappademas did his study, and he's a Greek physicist who showed the enormous debt the Greeks owed to the Egyptians. Pappademas pointed to the fact that Archimedes, his brother, his they claim to be the inventor of the lever, but he must admit it was the black Imhotep who was the master of the lever, an inclined plane long before the Greeks. He pointed to the fact that the Egyptians were centrally head in mining and metallurgy and metal alloying, metal fabrication wires and rivets, glass complex irrigation systems, shipbuilding. And when we come to ships, they had 3000 years of shipbuilding. Someone was pointing out to me on my way here that they have found a ship, a tremendous boat built by the Egyptians, which the priests use, and that after they put this enormous boat up, they would pull it. The pieces. It was all fitted in a certain way. We could pull it to pieces and fit it back again. Extrodinary science that existed among these people. They had also started to do things in the camera. They didn't carry it very far. But most important, they started to do things with airplanes. I have a picture here of the first model of a glider. I have no knowledge or proof that it was powered, that it had a power source, but it was a glider. And as I have told you before, this glider is found in the museum. It was put there in 1896. It was found at Saqqara and the Europeans put it in the museum and labeled it the bird. That is a model of a bird until Carlisle Mishra, who knows about aeronautics, discovered that birds have legs and this doesn't and that birds do not have reverse dihedral wings and that birds have feathers. And this doesn't. And there are several features. Birds have different kinds of tails. And this one had its tail missing, but it had evidence of a rudder attached. Do you know that since that discovery, they have found 14 models of airplanes and one of them has been found in America? And it doesn't have South American inscriptions. It's not Egyptian either. But one of them has been found in Colombia, a gold airplane, a gold model of an airplane.. These things point to a movement, you see. It wasn't just simply bits and pieces because these people were getting into everything. They were the first people to invent the shower bath. Do you know that the Egyptians had shower baths? The Europeans did not have shower baths until very late in the day. I know about European bathing because I have lived in Europe. English people bed on Friday night. Some of them I remembered once, I think it was Churchill or one of them was boasting for how long they had done without the bath. They just hit their face and that's it. The that was one of the extraordinary things that was noted in the Muslim part of Europe, the Arab African dominated part of Europe. The extraordinary cleanliness of the people. The Africans introduced baths in Europe. Things are so astonishing when you hear things like that. We, the dirty people. We're the illiterates who created the first script. The barefoot people who created the first machine to mass produce shoes. The clock. We the time. We are the people who do not know how to keep time. Do you know the first clock invented this country was by Benjamin Banneker, a black. One can speak at great length on many things. Next week, I'm going to introduce you. To my visit to NASA. The various things I learned or didn't learn there. Today, I will show you some slides, just fleetingly, of me with Dr. Colonel Gregory, who will be the first black pilot of a space shuttle. He wouldn't just be a member of the crew like Colonel Bluford. He would actually pilot the space shuttle. And you will also see me with Colonel Bolden, who will be going up in 1985. I will also introduce you to many aspects of African American science and other aspects of science throughout the world. I'm about to move now into slides where I could show you some of these things I've been talking about before. I do that, however, I want you to note what an enormous debt. It wasn't just the question of technology's burgeoning in Egypt, but coalescing in such a way that something very unusual began to happen. It is as if we were at that stage of history where we had become to feel almost something, focusing in ourselves, that it became a beam and a light. That was a period in which it would have been impossible for any invader to have destroyed us. Let me say this. You may not know it. This looks like a dark period, but this is a period in which. It is possible for the soul of the European to be subverted because he is filled in spite of his surface arrogance. He is filled with enormous doubt. The certitudes of the past, the certainties with which he has ruled, no longer have the stability they once had. It is in this period. That these values, which we learn by going back to our ancestors, can not only make us a new whole people and lift us out of the illness and fragmentation of the past. It can also invade the European, even as the Egyptian did. Bear that in mind. It is trough this. is because of this. That one goes back into history. Because there is lightning in history. There is submerged lightning, there is buried power there. It is as if one is coming back to a source, not just to the source of origins, not just the origins, but to the source of original power, because the human being is the source of power. When you're dead, you're nothing. You're just bones and flesh. ET cetera. You may have a spirit, but it is gone somewhere else. But when you are alive, you contain fantastic energies. You are also millions of years old. You are not 41 or 40 8 or 16. You are millions of years old and you are carrying powers that link you up with the whole universe. If those powers are understood and they can be understood through a relinking. They can be understood through a linking with the power source of the ancestors because the gene does not die, it runs on. It is something that runs out of those centuries. 10,000 years is nothing in the history of the universe. It took millions of years to make us. 500 years is nothing. We are not destroyed. How can we stand in this room and speak like this in spite of 500 years of slavery and colonization? It shows that the spirit of man is imperishable. There is a golden thread that runs through the human soul that cannot be cut. We cannot be. We were cut once, but it's only through our folly that we can remain cut from our ancestors. We have to link that thread again, a thread that not only links us to the past, to our fathers and our forefathers and our grandfathers, but the thread that links us to all of our family throughout the world. When we can do that, a beam of light springs out of our lives. First our individual lives, then our group lives that will not only affect the black race and redeem it, but will subvert the race that has in its attempt to destroy us, begun to destroy itself. Thank you very much.