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Egypt Revisited - Dr. Ivan Van Sertima.pdf

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Dr. Ivan Van Sertima - Egypt Revisited

I want to dedicate this lecture tonight to my Queen of the Nile, Jacqueline Van Sertima. The lecture tonight is based on a book which I edited, which came out just about two months ago. Egypt Revisited.

It's more than a revisitation of Egypt, the land because Egypt, the land is now controlled by non- egyptians. I received a very serious letter from England a few days ago in which a gentleman who's been trying, along with other blacks in Britain to establish the African origin of Egyptian civilization, submitted to me letters by the British Museum and others, pointing out to him that very few Egyptians would accept that they're African. And I had to point out to him, But those Egyptians are not Africans at all. It's very important to understand that here in America, the American president is not a Native American. He's not indigenous to America, he's not an Aboriginal or original American. Likewise, in Egypt, we are dealing with people who invaded Egypt around 638 AD and very few of them have anything whatsoever to do with the pyramid age. With the remarkable achievements of the early Egyptians, we have to make a very clear distinction between the modern Egyptian and the ancient Egyptian. That does not mean that Egypt does not contain native Egyptians. When Sadat was here a few years ago, Sadat said on CBS, I am a black man and I'm the first to Pharaoh in 2000 years. Of course, it was struck off the air, but they repeated it in other places like the Jesse Jackson. Now the battle is being waged fiercely, very fiercely, even though letters were sent to me about two years ago, inviting me to join the Unesco International Commission for rewriting the history of the world. Every time a letter arrives, first of all, they send to ask me for my veto, which I sent. Then they sent to ask me what? What issues, what areas, what dates, what periods I would be interested in which I laboriously told them in great detail what areas I would be interested in. Then another letter comes half a year later from another person, another section asking me what I would like to do. It goes on and on like that. There is profound resistance in the world to this. It is a very serious matter and it has become a very serious matter now in the United States because there is a movement on in many parts of this country to infuse African and African American materials into the curriculum. Thus it is that more and more I'm being invited to speak to all white audiences who come there politely and hope that they will have a chance to contradict or to jeer and then find that they have nothing much they can say that could contradict the evidence before them. It is amazing how little is known about the discoveries that have been made over the last 15 to 20 years. The big debate about this question arose in 1974, when for the first time Cheikh Anta Diop of Senegal and Theophile Obenga of the Congo came to Unesco to give their version of the story. This is the first time a world body, a world historical body, a world body set, an historical reconstruction, actually invited Africans to say something about their own history. It was a very important meeting. And in fact, with the death of Diop, we had mourned so deeply his passing. But we found a few months ago in September that his good friend and colleague, Teofilo Banga, visited the United States and he had an opportunity to meet him in Washington. But just before he came, he submitted to me a huge book of about 800 pages in French, dealing with the philosophy of the early theorems. This is a stunning book. And in this volume you have a translation in English, in beautiful English, by two remarkable women, Elizabeth Clemens and Irene Davida, which tries to capture the essence of the work on the philosophy of the fields. And the one thing that emerges and emerges with great clarity is the fact that the thinking of the early Egyptians is very African. They were the first people to develop a conception, a complex conception of the origin of the universe. And it was no simple matter about suddenly God appeared and he just breathed on the water. It wasn't as simple as that. They actually talked about an actual state. They actually talk about the primal stuff of the universe, and they speak of this curious unity to a strange vibration, perhaps through some explosion that occurs in this primal stuff that releases some peculiar latent consciousness which emerges as God, who then reconstitutes the primal elements of the universe and sets it on its course. Now, this is as close to modern physics as anyone could come. European conceptions of the universe, ancient conceptions of the universe are not as complex and modern as this. And the most unusual thing is that we have found among the Dogon in West Africa, among the Bambara and other African peoples, the same ideas, even the name for God, Amun, which we repeat in all our prayers today. Amen. Which is from Amun. You find AMA among the Dogon, etcetera. So that even the name for God, the word which we still use today in our prayers. Amen.

This is a word that runs through just like the word Christ, which is also an African word, Cresdee Christ the anointed one, which first appears among the Africans. So that the reason why this battle rages is because Egypt was the foundation of a great number of our arts and sciences and philosophy. It is because Egypt was not only central to Africa, it was central to Europe and to Asia. It is because the Greeks, who are now accredited with the world's first great civilization, actually sat at the foot of the Egyptians. That is why this is a major issue. It was said, and it is still being said that although Egypt is in Africa because it has borders that open it up to Europe and Asia, the backward barbarians of Africa, south of Egypt did not have any major civilization. What happened is people trickled down from Europe and trickled down from Asia, bright people, more advanced types, creating civilization, which then trickled down to the benighted barbarians south of Egypt. What we are finding now, in fact, that the benighted barbarians are not in Africa. They are elsewhere. Because what has been discovered before we come to Egypt, let me deal with something that is significant. What is being discovered is that you do not have any Europeans on the earth until about 55,000 years ago. And those Europeans are black pink people. That is, people who drop pigmentation do not occur until around that time when the blacks in Europe and that has been established that there are no people on the earth except black people, not just in Africa. Because in. Produce six stages of man. All the stages of man are found in Africa. Only three of those stages are found in Europe and Asia. The first three stages died off in Africa. They never got anywhere. The last three stages not only spread across Africa, but moved out to Europe and Asia. We have finally Neanderthal man, which is not complete man, also African, but with a lobe of the brain missing. The seat of conscience, not necessarily of consciousness, but of the higher type of consciousness which we have. Then we have finally man, Homo sapiens sapiens and scientists in three independent universities at Berkeley, in California, in Hawaii and at Oxford, University of all places in in England, have shown that the founding population of the modern world, not just the first man, that's irrelevant. The first man being born in Africa doesn't mean anything because the first man was not modern. The first man did not have our brain. What they have found is the last man was born in Africa, not just the first modern man. What scientists have recently discovered as a result of the study of DNA polymorphisms is that all man now living on this planet is descended from a black woman who lived about 140,000 years ago.

The African actually contains all the genetic material and they know at what point he begins to mutate into other types. That mutation has nothing to do with evolution of other types. It has to do with changes brought about by ecological conditions, for example. It is understood that hair follicles are affected by heat and cold where there is great heat, hair tends to be short so as to allow heat to escape where there is great cold. Heat tends to be long in order to protect the neck from cold. Coloration is produced by the dropping of pigmentation in the eyes somewhere near south western Russia. The African was caught in the ice. There are no no Europeans, meaning that there are no Caucasians in Europe at this stage during the warm interstadial. There are only black people in Africa, in Europe and in Asia. Eventually, however, as a result of the ice Age, black people who produced albino types, which is a mutation which does not survive easily in Africa because albinos do not have protection, melanin protection against the sun and are destroyed very quickly. But in the ice it became an advantage. So that albino type became the dominant type. The black type did not totally disappear in Europe. Thus, when England was invaded by the Romans, they found one of the Roman generals, noted Pliny remarks on it that the Roman general noted that there were some black people in Britain actually native to Britain, black people living among the pink skinned types, so that sometimes pigmentation was retained. You also find pigmentation retained among the Eskimos because pigmentation became a disadvantage in the ice, not in temperate zones which we live in now, but in the ice, because you could not easily mineralize the bones with if you had a screen against the sun because the sun did not come in easily into the skin in the ice age. So that you have to have something that would enable the most of the sun to come into the skin. Hence melanin became inactive in in types which later became called Caucasoid or Cro-Magnon. Now other changes began to occur, things like the narrowing of the nose because a narrow nose bleeds more freely in the ice. The broader expansive nose is more adapted to tropical regions. This thing has nothing to do with inferiority or superiority. These are merely the responses to ecological imperatives. What has happened, however, over the centuries, particularly the slave trade, has placed certain values, certain properties and certain people with dark skin and light skin. These are the later myths of man.

They have nothing to do with science, and we have built whole cultures upon them. Even a person's life can hang upon the shape of their nose or the color of their skin. Anyways, these are later diseases of the mind. They have nothing to do with science. But Egyptian thing was very serious because after the slave trade it was assumed that black people were basically inferior. They had been conquered, their worlds had been shattered, their empires had disintegrated. European diseases descended like the plague in Africa. In some places, like in Tanzania. Europeans introduced Rinderpest Not deliberately, of course, but that disease killed 5.5 million head of cattle in one area. As a result, the people died because the cattle was central to them. We have found areas in Tanzania where we found Africans were smelting steel 1500 to 2000 years ago. Steel in the middle of the Iron Age and machine superior to the European machines. Achieving temperatures of 1850°C where whereas Europe never achieves the temperatures until the end of the 19th century, the Africans were doing it in the fifth. These machines were able to produce a fine bloom of carbon steel in a single stage process, whereas even in the middle of the 19th century, Europe had to produce it in two crude stages. The sintering of solid particles before it could reach the final stage of fine carbon steel. They have found astronomical observatories in Africa, in Kenya, going back to 300 years before Christ. They have found breakthroughs in medical science in Africa. They found Africans using aspirin hundreds of years before us. The Bantu people using Salix Capensis, which is salicylic acid. They found the Africans using tetracycline as an antibiotic 14 centuries ago when we only started to use it in the 1950s. It's found in Nubia and the Bones of Africans. The lowest incidence of infectious disease in an ancient population where tetracycline was found. They found Africans who had developed eye cataract surgery at a time when nobody was performing eye cataract surgery. They found Africans, invented the first drug to treat hypertension and psychotic disorder. Reserpine. The Africans produced the most effective drug to deal with diarrhea, which we now call pectin. We don't even know where it came from. They found Africans had invented the vaccine long before Jenner. That the smallpox vaccine is specific and complex vaccine had actually come into America through the slave Onesimus. Cotton Martha, his slave master, reported upon it. They found that the most one of the most effective things in the early treatment of eye diseases by stigma was created by Africans, and that in this country, in African Americans synthesize physostigmine which we're using for certain eye diseases. We don't even know about that. Even our Coca Cola comes from the cola. Now drink. The most famous drink in Africa, which is now the most famous drink in the world. It has a little more fizz in it. Cola Company only learned recently that it had something to do with the Africans, just as the the most famous cartoon character that the first thing that hits you in the morning, Bugs Bunny. That's not the white bunny or a gray bunny. That was a black bunny. It comes the butter rabbit stories that came out of the Bantu in Africa that traveled with the slaves into the South. Picked up by Joel Chandler Harris and then changed by Walt Disney. And then whereas, the animal, the major animal whom the rabbit outwits in Africa becomes Elmer Fudd. We don't even we can't even see the changes. There it is. And there it's not. So much of our heritage has been borrowed and transformed by other peoples and claimed to be their own. But nothing absolutely nothing, is more serious. Nothing has affected world consciousness and world development and world science more than what Africans did in Egypt. That is why it is deadly serious. I've been to places where I spoken on Egypt. The classes and the teachers are so nice because she thinks that when I leave, she's going to be able to break down everything I say. And then the students are serious questions. Questions which she thinks will embarrass me. She or he. And I answer it in a way I know she could not go back afterwards and on answer it. And sometimes after the politeness, the assumption that you're going to go away and you're going to be embarrassed and all that, after the politeness comes the cold stare, hoping you leave very soon. Actually saw that we went to speak at the archeological society in New York. I will not name the specific place and they invited me to dinner and everybody was laughing and talking and so forth, trying to soften me up so that when I get on the stage, I wouldn't be too militant. And then in the middle of the dinner, this. Archeologists start talking about, you know, it's not necessarily it hasn't been decided yet. That man was born in Africa, probably. He was born in Asia. And I put down my knife and fork, you know, and I said, that is nonsense. We have been through that before. We have spent so much time with that. They have found all the sequences of man in Africa. How could we talk about Asia after we have searched and searched for early man in Asia, we have found no such time and everybody is startled to know why you getting so passionate.

This is a nice little dinner. I looked up and I saw his a twinkle in his wife's eyes. She she must have been beating her to death with all sorts of things over the years. And she's so glad that black man could sit at this table and give him a rough time after eating his food. These are very serious matters. It affects us tremendously because we have found all the traces, all the main traces in the Egyptian civilization coming out of inner Africa. There is no question about it. Cheikh Anta Diop and Theophile Obenga showed in lectures that went on for hours with great detail that the language of the Egyptians was an African language as the so-called Semitic elements came in much later through the movement of other peoples, long after the classical period of Egyptian pyramid science, mummification, etcetera. These are later movements and they affected the lexical or surface aspect of the language. They did not affect the deep structure of grammar, which they could trace and show familial relationships with many African languages. We have found hieroglyphs, Egyptian hieroglyphs in West Africa. Our good friend Arch, the former archbishop of Lagos, Olumide Lucas, has shown in his work religion in Egyptian religion in West Africa, traces and traces of these things. Among the Yoruba, we affirm the Dogon who ran away when they heard the Europeans were attacking and destroying their people. They ran into the mountains. Now we find they have close connections with Egyptian thinking they may actually have affected it and been affected by it in later stages. We are startled by their science. They have found things about the stars that our machines in space only found three and a half years ago. They were talking about it five centuries ago. We are not we haven't been. These three are not descended from any little people. The Dogon mapped the movement of the star Sirius B, the only photograph that star in 1970. They dance the orbit of the star five centuries ago. The father celebration begins. Five centuries ago. They showed where that star would be up to the year 1990. Our machine showed their debt correct. The African shows it 50 year elliptical orbit. Our machines showed their dead. Correct. They show its orbit on its own axis. We don't know about that one yet appointed an object flashing and darkening, contracting and expanding within the region of Sirius B. Do you know when we found that three and a half years ago? It's a dwarf nova in the region of Sirius B they call it the egg of the world. The movement of the French into Egypt, the attack in the early 18th century or the middle of the 18th century brought people in like Volney. And when Volney looked at the pyramids and he looked at the Sphinx, he said, These Negroes whom who now are the objects of our contempt. These were the masters, the makers of our arts and sciences. And he wasn't talking through his hat. All the Europeans who had written about the Africans and the early times had no doubt that they owed much of their science and thinking to the Africans. You look at the Greeks. The Greeks talked of the Egyptians. Herodotus said they were black skinned and wooly haired. Others at diapers quoted more than a dozen sources quoting what these Egyptians were. And the Greeks came at the end of the great classical era. All the pyramids were built, after the marvelous like the Sphinx and the Great Mummies. ET cetera. And the Europeans, the first Europeans who came to Africa around 500 BC, 300 B.C., rather, because the Persians came around 500. The Greeks under Alexander came around 300 BC, and those Europeans did not despise the Africans. They worshiped them. Do you know who was their God? The African God. Zeus went into Greece. Do you know who was the mother of God? Do you know who was the major female figure in the world? Not just in Africa, but in Europe? ISIS who married Osiris? You have ISIS shrines in Greece, ISIS shrines in Rome, ISIS shrines in Britain, even the lunatic Caligula built a shrine to ISIS. Do you know who was worshiped as the mother and child for hundreds of years before Michelangelo appeared in the scene and started drawing his family as Jesus? ISIS and Horus, the mother and child. That's the beginning of the black Madonna and child in Europe. And it was the run right across Europe. And the Europeans worshiped blackness because the Egyptians had made black the divine color. Do you know who the Greeks made? The goddess of wisdom, Minerva? A black woman whom they make the goddess of chastity. Our theme is a black woman who is an enchantress in the Odyssey Circe, a black woman with African features. You could see it on the early Grecian vases. Who was Andromeda? Who married Perseus, the Greek hero? You could see on vases. Although she has European features, she's painted black because black was thought to be the color of beauty. And look at their other Medea who have Jason win. The Golden Fleece is represented as a black woman. And whom did they make a god? The first man to be made into true God by both Africans and Europeans. A black man, Imhotep, father of medicine. The Greeks made no claims that were later made by other Europeans. As Martin Bernard points out, it was not until 1830 that there was a deliberate, sustained intellectual attempt to deny the black contribution to ancient Egypt because it made Europeans feel ashamed. So there was a sustained attempt, which is sustained up to this day, to try and deny the African his contribution to the major civilization in the world. They've even argued that Mesopotamian civilization or Sumerian civilization precedes the Egyptian. It is not true.

The earliest thing we have found in Mesopotamia is about 2600 BC, whereas the earliest dynasty in Egypt conservative estimate is 3100 BC. And we have found in 1962 the American team under Bruce Williams and Keith Seale discovered an African pharaoh, an African Pharaonic dynasty preceding the Egyptian before the first Egyptian dynasty. And there at Ta-seti, at a place called Coastal, on the edge of the Sudan, they found that 12 black pharaohs reigned even before the first Egyptian pharaoh, and that all the major elements, all the major elements that were to be the foundation of pharaoh civilization in Egypt had been planted by the blacks. They found the palace facades that were later appear in Egypt. There among the blacks, the palace, the Rex there already among the blacks, the Falcon, God, Horus, the sun, the Christ figure already there among the blacks. 200 years before the first Egyptian dynasty. And if they reverse Horus, they had to be Osiris, the God figure, the male aspect of God as ISIS was the female aspect of God. And the Africans did not call God. He. How can God be He? He's a he and a she. He must represent the two aspects. And there they found all the animal symbols that were later to appear in Egypt. And there they found the crown sitting on the pharaoh. That's an unmistakable shape. The crown that sat on the heads of the southern pharaohs. That was later to sit beside the crown of the North when the Africans moved up into Egypt. And there, above all, they found the hieroglyphs, the beginning of a writing system created by the blacks. As I have pointed out, when I was in England, I was taught that Africans were preliterate. I was told that they was missing something. They just had oral tradition. They just talked and you recorded their talk and that's all they had. They never wrote. I did not know that the English were pre-literate. The English have no script. You know, The English do not have a writing system. We have English sounds. English doesn't have a writing system. This is Roman. There are very few Europeans who have writing system. The Spanish do not have a writing system. Roman The Germans do not have a writing system. Roman The English do not have a writing system. Roman How many writing systems are there in Europe? There is the Cyrillic alphabet. In Russia, there is the Greek script, there's the Roman script. There's the Phoenician script, which is partly affected by the Egyptian. There is the Celtic script, which is partly affected by the African, according to the book of Ballymote is part African and part European. Does Africa have no scripts? There is the mandate script from that Udmurt detect 3500 years before Christ. Thousands of inscriptions. In Monday there is the hieroglyphic script created acoustic before it moves up into Egypt. No script on earth has as old books as we have found in African hieroglyphs. No, people on Earth have as complex early philosophy as the Africans, as you will see. Translated from the Egyptian texts, the book of the coming forth by night and day and other pyramid texts. ET Cetera, which deals with the origins of the universe in very complex terms. No, people have an early literature in medicine. No. People have an early literature in mathematics. And in spite of the massive destruction of Africa and the massive destruction of documents, they survive in their fragmented state as proof and witness that they had it. And then there's the Meroitic script, which the A of Bangor is now trying to break at Unesco. And then there's the Akan script, both a drum script and a written script. And there's the fact of script, the only script that traveled to America with Africans. It is found used by the Saramaka in the jungles of Suriname. Then there are other scripts. The Himyaritic script and even the Arabic script was invented in its first stages by Abu Aswan and our African, it appears in the diaries of Ibn Khallikan, Page 663. Let us deal with the question now. The scientific question, who were the Egyptians, first of all? Cheikh Anta Diop went to the museums where they had mummies. No, people on earth survived. No people on earth have been preserved as long as the Africans. There is no European mummy, no European body that is more than 150 to 200 years. The Russians have recently caught up on mummification.

The Russians have preserved Stalin. I think they have preserved Lenin too. I'm not sure. But they preserved most of their recent leaders. When my Prime Minister died. President ET cetera. Burnham died. We sent him to Russia because we knew the Russians had learned the mummification system from the Egyptians. Unfortunately, our machine, our refrigeration unit, broke down before it got to Russia. So the Russians had to burn him or send him back home. I can't remember which. I haven't seen him since. We have the most well preserved body bodies on earth. I will show you when we come to the slides. A black woman, an African princess in Egypt who died 4000 years ago. You can still see her hair. You can still see her skin. You can still see her teeth. There is no such thing anywhere on earth. Nowhere in Europe can you find anyone preserved more than 150 to 200 years. You can test the skin as the update. He took square inches of skin from the mummies in the Museum of Man, and he put it in his lab. Cheikh Anta Diop was an extraordinary man. He went out to Paris and he worked in the most advanced nuclear lab in Europe under Frederick Joliot-curie, who was the son in law of the couple who invented or discovered radium. He built the first radiocarbon lab in Africa. He told me when we were in London, he said, when I actually saw the mummy of Ramses, the second very black as black as I am, and Cheikh Anta Diop was royally black. And he said when he came back from the experiments in Paris, he was so great. They pumped him with far more gamma rays than was necessary. Even then, he said it was still possible to get the melanin content in the skin. And when he asked them permission to do it, they said no, it would destroy the mummy. One square inch. And yet all these scientists fooling around with the mummy. Then Cheikh Anta Diop Rose brought up a very serious question. He wrote me and said, Do you know we have found something in the body of Rameses? The second that supports your theory that Africans were in America before Columbus. Do you know we found tobacco in his belly? And I wrote him back and said, No, no, no, that's not a proof, because it's just an assumption that tobacco is American, because I have shown that tobacco was both African and American, and the Nicotiana Tabacum is American, but the Nicotiana Rustica is African.

Could you test the tobacco, please? He went back and asked them for the tobacco. No, sir. Don't touch anything here. But do you know what happened? Everybody stopped working. Not a word. 48 labs in Europe involved in studying Ramses the second. And everybody suppressed the reports. They sent the wrong room in Egypt to say they're not sure that that's the body of Ramses the second anymore. Got the Egyptian minister of culture sacked. So I'm told a few months ago when we had this big fight in Dallas, because when we were we were trying to establish this Egyptian issue, they have these big things in the museums and there's no there's no relationship to blacks at all. And we made a big issue about it in this clown who should have kept his mouth quiet, jumped up and said that Egypt is beyond black or white. They have nothing to do with that, that that we do not have nothing to do with that. His grandfather's as if he has anything to do with the native Egyptian who created this incredible thing. And the Greeks knew what they were dealing with. They saw them. They were not guessing. They saw these people. They fought with them. They conquered them. They lived with them. They admired them. They took from them. Every major Greek scholar went to study in Africa. As today I, out of my shattered and fragmented world, must go to Europe both to learn and unlearn my lessons. Then in that time, did the Greeks go to Egypt? Thales of Miletus, Democritus, Pythagoras, Eutocius, Anaximander and Anaximenes Heraclitus. They all poured into Africa to study Pythagoras. According to Isaac Newton, the great European scientist spent 22 years studying in Africa. As much time as I spent in America, 22 years. Then he comes back talking about the Pythagorean theorem, the thief. And then he goes and helps build a medical school at Cos and the harmony of opposites comes out of the Egyptian system, the hot and cold treatments.

And Isaac Newton pointed out that the Africans prefigured him before he reached that synthesis of the sciences. He said the Africans knew about gravity. Nobody even thought about gravity. The Africans indicated their knowledge of gravity by talking about the harmony of the spheres. They knew certain things were kept in a certain position because of gravitational fields. And he said the Africans even knew about the atom. They didn't know about atomic fission or fusion, but they knew of the atom as the building block of the physical universe. They called it the monad. And even though they had certain mystical notions about it, they knew it as the physical, the building blocks of the physical universe. And we heard something astonishing in Washington a few weeks ago when Teofilo Benga, the head of Bantu studies in Brazzaville, came here, the true successor to Sheikh Anta Diop. Do you know what he told us? They have found a manuscript in the British Museum that showed the Africans were already talking about the speed of light. Nobody thought of light as a traveling force. They saw it both as waves as well as particles. Do you know that is recent in our science to see light both as photons, particles as well as waves. They were talking of light as waves and particles, and they talked about the speed of light traveling millions of meters per second. Do you know what that means? And and Dr. Finch in this book deals with some of the cases, the medical cases that appear in the Edwin Smith papyrus. Now, the Egyptians wrote many medical texts. Ten of them survived because there's been massive destruction. Bishop Theodosius, that religious bigot, burnt down the Library of Alexandria, taking centuries of African scholarship into the ashes. But we still have survival of medical documents and mathematical documents. The two most famous of the medical documents of the Ebers papyrus and the Edwin Smith papyrus and the Edwin Smith papyrus only translates in the 18th dynasty of Egyptian sergeant translates cases dealing strictly with the head and neck, which means he leaves the rest out. But that is enough to tell us that our African ancestors were doing incredible things. Finch looks at these cases as a doctor and points out that they had found the locus of the brain through which auditory information is processed. That's 20th century stuff. They were doing that thousands of years ago. He said that they. Are aware of certain things, cortical centers that they actually diagnose. Things that could only be diagnosed today with x rays. Were they getting that knowledge from? It's actually written down in the Edwin Smith papyrus, a whole range of things like that. Many of the things we take for granted today as the moral edicts and laws, etcetera, You could see it down when you read Karenga's study of man, you could see how the Africans already written down these things.

And here today, we live in the shadow of the world making apologies for ourselves when we have given so much to the rest of the world. Would have given so much if 20, 30 years ago I knew about this. I lived in such anguish in my 20s, so ashamed of having African blood and so many of us have had to grow up making apologies for being in a world that we did not belong, a world controlled by others. And that was all right, because one can live in captivity that doesn't matter so much. But to know that one's mind is imprisoned, to know that even when you allow people freedom, the oppression of the mind is so great. Their ignorance of themselves and of what they have done and what they belong to, their connections are so shattered that they feel like non people. That is why we go back to this history because it makes us whole again. Look look at the cultural connections they have from mummies in Africa, in inner Africa, before they find them in Egypt. We have found mummies preserved in the fezzan 500 years before the first mummy turns up in Egypt. We have found them using Nekron, which was later used in the mummification process. We have found circumcision which led to have picked up by the Jewish sect, which at that time in the early time was largely African. We have found various cultural practices. Their totems are the African totems. Their philosophy is African. Their language is African. And here is Jean Vercoutter speaking at the Unesco conference in 1974, where he said, It is true that their writing is African, their language is African, their way of thinking is African. The problem is that we can never be sure how many of them were African. Can you imagine the schizophrenia? And then you have this man, Sheni, as I call him in my book, Shamefaced Sheni, talking about how they were not really black. It was subjective. The Greeks were being just as subjective as the these are not really black people. They're just a little dark like the Italians. The Negro phobia, the horror of it. They accept. That's why they blew off the Sphinx's nose. Standing there. And there is this God like figure of broad, broad, broad nose, broad lips, broad cheeks looking down with his broad vision on their littleness contracted in the sands under this great God like figure. And they shot off its nose and chin. It was true. The work of Cheikh Anta Diop and I had something to do with it too, because we had this international telephone link up in which we persuaded we had to persuade the modern Egyptians who were not real Egyptians. Ask the British to return the splinters of the Sphinx, chin and nose. The British eventually returned the pieces, saying that it was on permanent loan and we may have to blow off the nose again after the Arabs reconstruct it if they don't get it right. Were sad that these are a red race. They're not really Africans. They're brown mediterraneans. Why? Because the Egyptians had a habit of coloring red, putting red ocher on men and yellow ocher and women. And nobody seemed to realize through anthropology that the Africans had been doing that for thousands of years. Red represents vitality. So you put red ocher on men. Yellow represents fertility. You put yellow ocher on women. It doesn't mean the women are yellow and the men are red. Look at this. Just for this alone, you should buy this book. It shows you how the Egyptian represented himself. This is the Egyptian black.

This is the Indo European or Caucasian. This is the Nubian and other blacks of Africa. And this is the Semite. He makes it quite clear this is the one that survives the centuries where he paints it clearly because now he's not dealing with symbolic colors since he's representing all the races he wants to show you in minute detail who is who in his world. Cheikh Anta Diop brought that to our attention, but Cheikh Anta Diop published it in black and white. I spent a lot of money to get that in color because I didn't want any mistake. I want it to be seen clearly. You cannot see this clearly in black and white. You have to see it in color. It's the only one that survives from Egypt. This book is filled with about 200 photographs, and you will see the pharaohs and you will see their queens and you will see the scribes and you will see the vast concentration of black African faces. It is true that Egypt was not homogeneous. It had a lot of people as well. Since it had borders open, all the people trickled in. They weren't all black, but they looked at Britain. Britain has a million blacks. They've trickled in. Would you say Britain is black if the major figure, the dominant figures are black? The major population is black because a few people trickled in. That's the black population. It's a black civilization. There are more blacks in Britain than in my country. But does that make Britain black? They're going to pick the odd little figure here and there because the king sometimes married outside a king is supposed to bring as many people into his harem as possible, not only necessarily in his own nation. Sometimes if he has quarrels and fights with other people or he wants to make alliances, you bring other people into the harem. So the odd figure may appear and then it even becomes more so during the later dynasties when there are invasions. Egypt was invaded by many people. It was invaded by the Hyksos around 1660 B.C. for 150 years. There are no black pharaohs until the blacks through the hyksos out of the place. And then came the Persians under Cambyses around 520 BC, ravaging all before them, laying flat the capital of the black, smashing noses and breaking up statues and temples. And then came the Greeks who respected the African, even though they conquered him. Those were the major great Europeans who began to take African geometry, African medicine, African calendar. Who do you think created the day for us? You hear about Greeks and Romans, the Greeks and Romans turned it around. But where did they initially get it? The Mesopotamians and the Greeks, they did not measure the day as three 65.25 days. They did not know it was so accurate. They had 364 and 365 day years until the Egyptians, with their precise astronomy, established that the year was actually 300 65.25 days. But the Africans introduced the leap year.

We no longer have a leap year, by the way. We call it the leap year. It's just a leap day. Every four years. We adjust our time by putting an extra day in February, whereas the Egyptians adjusted it by adding a whole year, every 1460 years to make it more correct. They were then left with 365 days. Do you know they took out five days of the year, which we still celebrate. We don't even know where that comes from. Why does everybody get wild in the last. Five days of the year. The Egyptians did that. It starts with December the 25th, which Africans call the Day of Horus. Horus is the Christ and African bird. Christ Christ. We don't even know that. We think the Europeans introduced Christmas. All that was taken from the earlier work. But the Africans having theirs for the gods Festival days for the gods were left with 360 days, which they cut into 12 days of exactly 30 days each. So they had regular months. Because later Europeans took that and changed it around and took the days, the quarter into February and took the fight into the rest of the year. We now have no longer regular months. We have 28 day months, 29 day months, 30 day months and 31 day months. We need a rhyme in order to remember which is which. Geometry was developed by Africans along the Nile. They took the geometry. Herophilus is credited with first taking shape. Dr. Finch shows in this study of the Edwin Smith papyrus that Paul Staking was detailed by the Egyptians. It was not caught up by the Europeans until 1000 years later. Yet they are the father of this and the father of that. And the father of this and the father of that. It is only within this century that first comes the political revolution, which is not finished. But now comes the other revolution more significant and permanent, the cultural or spiritual revolution. it is important to note that these two things have to go hand in hand. We cannot advance merely by shouting big black slogans because you may be big and black, but you may have nothing in your head. It happened in Africa. It happened with the Nigerians, powerful nation. Oil and all sorts of things. Seize power. And what they started doing building all sorts of incredible white elephants. They could have transformed Nigeria. They could have transformed Africa. If Nkrumah or people like that or Cheikh Anta Diop had that wealth at their hands and that vast country, they could have transformed the black world because they had something up here. It is the universe. The mouth. The mouth of a nation is not enough, we can only transform the world if you have something in your head. It's not enough to have power. It's an extraordinary. Things are happening in the world today. Everything is being turned upside down very quickly. But those things were had seeds in an earlier time. It is just that it's finding focus in a man that enables us to see this revolution occurring. We have to find such types of men in our own world. Okay. It doesn't stop there because something revolutionary is beginning. We are finding things in Africa every other month. That is startling. It was reported by the Dr. Finch. They found the cobbled road in the Congo. 50,000 years. We don't even know what to do with that. In Zimbabwe, I think it was. They found a mine that is 43,000 years old. It's in southern Africa. I'm not sure it's in Zimbabwe. It's somewhere in southern Africa. They found a mine that is 4 to 3000 years old. It doesn't prove that Africans were smelting metals at that time. No, but they had dug a deep pit far, far below the ground with underground chambers, the mine hematite and specular. Right. We have found things that startle us. The Russians informed me that they had found perfectly ground spherical crystal lenses in ancient Egypt, indicating that our people had already got lenses. That may explain how the Dogon were able to make certain observations in the sky, observations that startled us because for their time it's amazing that they had such precise calculations. The Egyptian thing makes us aware of so many things. When you look at the great dynasties, you look at the breakthroughs, the advances that were made in that time. You look at the pyramids, for example. Let me close on that. The Japanese tried to build a pyramid in 1978. It was a disaster.

Now we credit the Japanese with all the fine technological knowledge. But do you know what happened to the Japanese? The Japanese said that we first are going to try to break the stone up in the quarries using bronze, the bronze tools that Egyptians had in that time. Cheikh Anta Diop had told them clearly that these Africans were not using copper and bronze tools when they were building the Great Pyramid because you cannot cut granite with those tools and that they had actually found an iron hole in the interstices of the pyramid. They found Tutankhamun's bed made of iron. They said, No, no, no, top. Got this bed from outside, probably got it out of Asia. So the Japanese tried to cut the stone. The tools broke. Do you know what they end up doing to cut that stone? They have to use air jackhammers to cut the stone. Then after they use 20th century air jackhammers to cut the stone, they put it on the barges to bring it down the Nile. When they put it on the in the mud. First of all, the barges capsized. They assumed that the Africans just put this thing and they were not picking up 50 ton stones like Africans. You know, the Japanese were picking up three ton stones. But when they put it on the barges, the barges capsized. They had to use modern steamboats. Then they brought it down the Nile, and then they started to put it on the mud. It sunk in the mud. They dragged it. It sunk in the sun. Eventually they got it up in the desert. Then come heave ho, like in Hollywood. Can't work. Would not work. They could not put those stones in alignment. The stones got cracked. The stones shattered. The stones were messed up. When we got to go to the African tournament and we go on the base of the pyramid, we found the casing. Stones are absolutely perfect. The Japanese tried to cheat in the morning when they thought nobody was looking, looking. They brought in their helicopters. They took the finest 20th century cranes. You know, they couldn't do it. They could not put those stones in proper alignment. Do you know what we have discovered? That the Africans put those stones in an alignment that is 1/1000 of an inch of mathematical perfection. The only people in the 20th century who achieved that alignment are not stone masons, opticians and jewelers dealing with fine gems. They were bringing the skill of the optician and the jeweler to deal with massive acres of stone. When these guys whom we consider to have the finest technological abilities, could not do it, they left in disgrace. They had to abandon everything. The Egyptians threw them out. They mean the, let me say the Egyptians. That pyramid is an astonishing thing. You cannot even see it today. When it was finished, it had a polished limestone covering. It shone when the sun hits it. When the moon beamed upon it, it shone like a star upon the earth. You could see it across the Sahara, hundreds of miles away, like a star upon the earth.

There is nothing built since like that. It is half the height of the Empire State Building, but it takes up 12 blocks of Manhattan. One building. It is so large that the stones that were put in that pyramid, if it were cut into one foot cubes, it would circle two thirds of the belly of this planet. Do you understand what we are dealing with? But it was possible to those Africans, because at that point in time the African thought of himself in a certain way. This is very important. They did not have television sets and radios and spaceships, but they had an extraordinary sense of wholeness. They had incredible spiritual power, a sense of the majesty of spirit. So they attempted things that were that would daunt any people before or since. My wife and I went to Egypt last year and we went to see the quarries at Aswan. That is what I wanted to see more than anything else. I wanted to see the obelisk. They abandoned that Aswan and I went down in the ground and I could not understand how could they abandoned this? It must have been a hell of a thing to cut it. It looks like if it had been cut by lasers and I had to search, I had to ask, where is the floor? Why did the Africans abandon this? The floor was so minute. It would have taken several hundred years for it to show. But we had to be perfect. We couldn't deal with mediocre stuff. We didn't want to put up something that would be gone in a hundred or 2 or 300 years. It had to last forever, as has the pyramid, as has so much that the Africans have built, including the human body whom they preserve for thousands of years. We were not satisfied in that time with mediocrity as today we are. Oh, it doesn't really matter. It's a black thing. Let's do it. How we please. We talk about time colored people's time. When we created the clock, we created the water clock and the sun. Clock on the shadow clock. Even Galileo used the African water clock in his experiments.

Even in this country, the man who first developed a major clock was Benjamin Banneker, a black man. And we moving about. Is this the only marvelous thing that we could bring to the culture is to show that we don't respect time when time is the very center of discipline, is the very center in the restructuring of man. Now, we can't go back thousands of years to this civilization, but consciousness is not does not have time. Time is a fiction. Time is is arbitrary. Time is made by us. What we can go back to in consciousness is an awareness. A consciousness. This universe. Consciousness does not have limits in time. What happened 10,000 years ago or ten minutes ago occupies the same space in consciousness. We are the universe and therefore it is possible. Drawing upon this heritage, drawing upon the power, the electricity, the dynamism that springs from these discoveries, we can get a sense of ourselves which takes us out of this mediocrity, out of this sense of being enslaved, out of this sense of being inferior. We can reconstruct ourselves. We can remake our world because of this feeling. We can remake man. We can remake our children. We can remake the world in which we live. Because drawing upon history, drawing upon the past, we recreate the quality of the present and thereby project ourselves into a totally different future. Thank you very much.

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