WAS JESUS BLACK? The earliest gods and messiahs on all the continents were black.

Research has yielded an impressive amount of material on the subject...The Messiahs, some of whom lived many centuries before Christ, had lives which so closely paralleled that of Christ that it seems most likely that the story of the latter was adapted from them. Moreover, the word Christ comes from the Indian, Krishna or Chrisna, which means "The Black One." J.A. Rogers Many of the madonnas painted in the earliest centuries of Christ- iandom were black, according to historians, and it wasn't until the Renaissance that it became popular to give the mother of Christ the features of a Florentine maiden [a white woman] Washington Post (Religion) May 4, 1979. Here in the United States, well over 95% of the 27 to 30 million people of African descent are Christians and they joined most of the rest of the Christian world in observing the birth of Jesus on December 25, Christmas Day. No other historical figure has received the recognition, veneration and unquestioned loyalty of Black people in the Western world that Jesus has. Yet, despite their widespread respect for and worship of Jesus, few Black people in the Americas or elsewhere ever have raised the question of whether He was Black and whether the doctrine He espoused was of African origin. Trained by white theologians or taught in White owned, controlled or financed seminaries, the average Black minister will not only deny that Jesus was a black man and claim that it is sinful to raise the question of His color, but also will insist that Jesus was colorless and declare that the blue- eyed blond painting of him hovering over the minister's pulpit is just a White reflection of Christ's universality. It is quite understandable, then, that the masses of Black Christians, who generaLly hold their ministers in high esteem, blithely continue to bow before, pray to and worship a blue-eyed blond stranger whom they have come to know as Jesus without ever questioning this image and its impact on them, their families and the Black race as a whole. Recognizing the historical significance of religion to Black people and observing its present role in their nations and communities the world over, this writer feels that it is high time that the deeply-rooted religious beliefs of Blacks be fully examined by Black scholars with an eye toward freeing the race of false doctrines and misconceptions that were designed to perpetuate Black inferiority and servility. Since religion plays a key role in molding Black opinion and guiding Black behavior in Africa and the diaspora, the specific intent of this article on religion, is to reveal what modern science is proving each day - that the roots of all major religions are traceable to the Black people of ancient Africa and that most of the world's venerated religious leaders were Blacks. It is hoped that these revelations will instill a sense of pride in Black people, hasten the day when false images will be removed from their houses of worship and free them of the widespread assumption - which is deeply embedded in their individual and collective subconscious - that they are cursed and doomed to failure because they were not created in God's image. Professor Locksley D.M. Geoghagen is one of the few black authorities on the origin of the Christian religion. A scholar of African-Jamaican ancestry, he has served as the Associate Director of the Educational Opportunities Program and a teacher in the Education Department at Cal Poly College, San Luis Obispo, California. He is a learning specialist with expertise in

brain physiology, especially the cerebral hemisphere, and has teaching credentials on the community college level in psychology, education, political science, counseling and pupil personnel. Professor Geoghagen is also the coordinator of Leadership Programs at Cal Poly College. A rare pluridisciplinary scholar, Professor Geoghagen has lectured broadly on subjects that range from melanin and the pineal gland to the African roots of civilization. He has often lectured with the distinguished author and scholar, Dr. Donald Cheek, and has traveled extensively, especially in Africa, with the world renowned historian, Dr. Yosef benJochannan. Professor Geoghagen has completed the course requirements for the Ph.D. in education at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and he plans to soon enter the field of Egyptology as an understudy of Dr. ben-Jochannan, Professor Geoghagen's expertise on early Christianity has been acquired over the past ten years, during which time he has engaged in research, lecturing and writing in the United Sates, the Caribbean and Africa. The following is an interview with Professor Geoghagen on religion in general and the ancestry of Jesus in particular. MAAT: Professor Geoghagen, why don't I just start with the question before us: Was Jesus a Black man? Geoghagen: Yes, unequivocally and beyond a shadow of doubt, Jesus was a black man and there is much evidence to substantiate this. However, before I discuss this evidence, I would like to consider in some detail who Jesus was and to focus on the history of Christianity because Jesus' blackness will not be fully understood or accepted without this background. MAAT: Okay, just who was Jesus? Geoghagen: That is a very difficult question to answer, for Jesus was and still is many things to many people. To Christians he is a part of the Godhead, the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Prince of Peace, the Word made flesh, the messiah of Jewish expectations. Hence, through his trials, sufferings, temptations, death and resurrection, He provides for the remission of sins, redemption and life eternal for those who follow his teachings and accept him as their personal savior. To me, he is one of the world's 16 crucified saviors -- the last of them, I might add - whose lives fit an almost identical pattern from the time of Horus in 4100 B.C. (according to the most ancient beliefs, he was the first crucified savior) to the time of Judas Christas (Christ the anointed) in the pre-Christian era. In essence, the life that Jesus purportedly led, the activities in which he engaged, his teachings, his trials and sufferings and eventual death and resurrection, are identical to those of Horus and Osiris (two ancient Egyptian gods) and the other 14 crucified saviors. This point of view or revelation, though potentially shocking to the mass of believers, is nevertheless common knowledge to scholars. So Jesus and the belief system that he represents are thus a reappearance of one of the most beautiful ideas of the ancient black Africans of Ta-Merry - now called Egypt - which represented the eternal Father by the ever- coming Son, as in the Child Horus. This was the child of a mother who was the eternal virgin. The doctrines of the Incarnation, i.e., the word made flesh: the virgin birth, the resurrection, the Father-God who is identical to his own son and other doctrines (believed to be specifically Christian) were Egyptian long before there was even the concept of Adam and Eve, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

MAAT: Are you saying that Christianity as a religion had its origins in ancient Egypt? Geoghagen: Yes. In addition to what I have just stated, in the Eschatology of the Egyptians is found a trinity and a unity, and the Egyptians believed in punishment as well as everlasting happiness. Not surprisingly, then, the doctrine of everlasting life and the belief in the resurrection of the "Spiritual Body" are, according to Dr. Albert Churchward(author of Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man, Origins of Freemasonry, The Origin And Evolution of Religion, The Origin And Evolution of The Human Race, etc.) "the brightest and most prominent features of the Egyptian religion, and this we find was their belief before the time of the first king of the first dynasty." The general teachings and cosmological world view of the Egyptians eventually filtered down and provided the foundation for later so-called 'Western Religions,' i.e., Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This point is thoroughly documented by the brilliant and prolific African scholar, Dr. Josef ben-Jochannan, in an epic work, African Origins of the Major Western Religions. These teachings were handed down to the Essenes (a mythical Jewish sect in pre-Christian times) who were responsible for the development of many of the teachings and concepts attributed to Jesus. MAAT: Are you suggesting, then, that Jesus was an Essene? Geoghagan: There is no doubt in my mind that Jesus was an Essene. Essene doctrine is directly traceable to its African-Egyptian roots. In short, Jesus was one of the world's 16 crucified saviors whose beliefs and teachings were founded on the doctrines and principles of the ancient African Mystery System, and the events of his life directly parallel those of Horus (the first crucified savior), who lived at least 4100 years before Christ. For example, Horus was born of a virgin (immaculate conception), he disappeared at age 12 and reappeared at 30; he died at age 33 and descended into Hell. On the third day, he arose again and ascended into Heaven to sit on the right hand of his father, etc. Horus was cut into 14 pieces; Jesus was stabbed fourteen times. Horus' mother could find only one piece of him, his penis, and so she built obelisks in his memory. Jesus had the same phallic symbol associated with him, i.e., he had no sexual relations (at least after the conference of Nicene in 325 A.D.). So as you can see, Jesus and the other world saviors are copies of Horus. Their biographical facts are the same; only the names have changed. MAAT: Are there parts of Jesus' life that are generally unknown to the public? GEOGHAGEN: Yes, much if not most of the facts surrounding his life are absolutely unknown to the general public. To be specific, there is a twenty-one year period of his life that is completely unaccounted for in the Gospel. These 21 years, I would argue, are of critical importance in understanding who Jesus was as well as the source, inspiration and eventual development of his message and ministry. The fact is that not only Jesus but also John the Baptizer and some of Jesus'disciples were taught, by Egyptian priests, some of the fundamentals of the African Mystery System which later, through adaptations and distortions, became the foundation for what is now known as Christianity in its various forms and manifestations. The fact that Jesus was an initiate in the African Mystery System; that Jesus was taught and did study at various subsidiary lodges of the Grand Lodge of Luxor in Africa and elsewhere (i.e. Tibet, India, etc.) The fact that it was in Africa that Jesus became acquainted with the Essenes, who were largely responsible for much of the teachings credited to Jesus.

MAAT: You keep mentioning the ancient African Mystery System.Can you briefly tell us what this was? Geoghagen: Basically, the African Mystery System was the educational system of Africa. It was called a 'mystery' by E. Budge, the Famous Egyptologist, and other Egyptian scholars; but it was not a mystery to Africans. It encompassed many branches of knowledge, including all of the sciences, philosophy, physics, all of the liberal arts and, of course, religion and metaphysics. The foundation of that which was later called Greek philosophy comes directly from the African Mystery System. If an individual wants confirmation of this, he can consult such books as G.M. James' Stolen Legacy, B.D. Alexander's History of Philosophy, Alfred Weber's History of Philosophy, William Turner's History of Philosophy and Zeber's History of Philosophy. Included as a part of the ancient African Mystery System were the major beliefs contained in the so-called 'Western Religions' of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For those who want a closer look at this, I would recommend the Egyptian Book of the Dead and The Ancient Mysteries by C.H. Vail. Another book which provides great detail is Albert Churchward's Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man. It lays out all of the Hebrew, Christian and Hindu doctrines that come directly from the African Mystery System. A comparable book, also written by Churchward, is Origin And Evolution of Religion. MAAT: Speaking of references, do you have any sources that support your shocking revelations concerning the life of Jesus? Geoghagen: I most assuredly do. The details of Jesus' life from ages 12 to 33 are documented in the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus The Christ by Levi. It gives an account of Jesus' interaction with his African masters and the teachings which they bestowed on him. Further, it documents the travels of Jesus from Africa to India and his eventual return to Africa; and confirms how Jesus acquired his cosmological world view in the process. The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors by Kersey Graves documents much of what I've said thus far. Stolen Legacy by George G.M. James, The Kione Bible (the original new testament written between ca. 50 A.D. - 100 A.D.). Anacalypsis by Godfrey Higgins, The Black Messiah by Albert Cleage Jr., and Jesus and The Zealots by S.G.F. Brandon, The Apocryphal New Testament by M.R. James, Rahids' Aquarian Gospel (another portion of the books removed from the Bible). The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics by J. Doresee. There are literally hundreds of references to back up what I have said, including the work of Gerald Massey, E.A. Wallis Budge, Joel A. Rogers, Albert Churchward and, of course, the works of Yosef benJochannan. These references that I have given will allow interested scholars and individuals to begin to scratch the surface of the wealth of material that is available on this subject. MAAT: You keep mentioning the Essenes and the fact that Jesus was somehow connected with them. Who are the Essenes and have there been Any scientific or archaeological discoveries that document their existence? Geoghagen: A large portion of 'Western Culture' is indebted to a little known secret cult (a direct offshoot of the African- Egyptian Mystery System) which was called Essene, among other names. This cult of Hebraic people has been identified by their occupation, geographical location, forms of worship and peculiarities of faith. They have been variously known as The

Baptizers, The Third Sect, Men of Essa, The Mystery Sect, The Seers, The Pious, The Associates, The Apron Makers, The Propheciers, Seekers Of The Prince of Righteousness, The Essenes and The Ossenes. Ancient documents indicate some of the earliest Essene origins. Pliny the Elder (70-77 A.D.) called them the Hessenes. Josephus (6-8 A.D.) labeled them the Essenes. The same term was later used by Chrysostam, Eusebius, Porphery, Hippolytus, and many other ecclesias and chroniclers. Many of the descriptions given by these writers, particularly Eusebius and Pliny, depict the Essenes as an 'awesome, ascetic, pietistic sect which might be viewed as the forerunner of today's 'mod' communities.' This quotation is from Jesus Christ Super Psychic by T.N. Tiemeyer. Anyway, these and many other ancient references to the Essenes were fragmentary, distorted and often inaccurate. For example, ancient writers reported that the Essenes "lived without women, having renounced all sexual love." Yet recent diggings in their ancient cemetery have so far unearthed a number of female skeletons. Greek and Roman historians also failed to discern the religious and mystical element which were basic to Essene thought. MAAT: But what is their relationship to Jesus and what evidence do you have to support it? Geoghagen: Like you, my primary concern with the Essenes is the relationship of their Order of Sect, and how, through their guidance and direction, Jesus was able to develop his own spiritual talents. For countless centuries, scholars have suggested that many of the teachings attributed to Jesus were very much influenced by the teachings of the Essenes. No doubt the expression of such a viewpoint subjects one to declarations of heresy by those in orthodox church circles. In other words, to even suggest that any part of the message of Jesus is or was less than original with Jesus is, no doubt, heresy. But, heresy or not, the historical facts speak for themselves. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls by a young Bedouin, Mohammad elDeeb, in 1945, did much to shed some light on this controversial topic. These scrolls were discovered in the northwest part of the Dead Sea Valley near Jericho in a series of caves on the edge of a valley named Wali Qumran. In the entire twentieth century, no discovery has had a greater impact on Biblicists, theologians and Judea-Christian exponents than the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most scholars greeted the news with exultation. Such was not the case, however, for orthodox Christian believers in Jesus as "the only begotten Son of the Father." Hence, their response to the discovery of the scrolls and its implications was less than joyful. Ancient prophets, such as Isaiah, Moses and Zacharia, had predicted the coming of "the Messiah," "the Holy One of God," "the Prince of Peace," etc. And, early Bible authorities were aware that the Essenes had prophesied the coming of a "teacher of righteousness." It was naturally assumed that this was a term equivalent to those in the scriptures and that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Essene prophecies as well. But the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed that by the time of Jesus, the "teacher of righteousness" had already come and gone. Compounding this is the fact that the Dead Sea Scrolls were a source of further embarrassment to scholars of Biblicism because many of the sayings attributed to Jesus as original are found in the Essene records. Among the expressions and sayings generally claimed by Christians as original with Jesus, but yet contained in the pre-Christian Essene records are: "Peace on Earth and good will to men," "You are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world." "The thirst for righteousness." "The kingdom of God." "The Sons of light and the Children of darkness."

These are just a few. In addition, I would like to paraphrase from T.N. Tiemeyer's Jesus Christ Super Psychic. Rev. Tiemeyer states that the Dead Sea apocalyptical scrolls and The Book of Enoch, which were found in the caves of Qumran, beyond a shadow of doubt, have been dated before Christianity. However, these writings contain numerous phrases and concepts similar to those in the Sermon on the Mount. Also a list of selected Essene sayings compared to the Beatitudes of Jesus are remarkably similar. Tiemeyer goes on to say that: "obviously the best explanation is that Jesus was taught in the training schools of the Essenes." The evidence also points to New Testament persons as disciples of this same cult. The Bible descriptions of John the Baptizer, his life and personal habits conform to the practices of the Qumran community. Again in my mind there is little doubt but that Jesus was an Essene who espoused Essene doctrine which originally came from the teachings of the African Mystery System and were later incorporated as part of the foundation of Christian thought. MAAT: Now that you have made these astounding revelations concerning the life of Jesus and the origins of his teachings, let us return to our original question: Was this figure of world renown a Black man? And, if so, are there any paintings, statues or icons that portray him as such? Geoghagen: Indeed, Jesus was a Black man, and there are numerous early paintings, statues and icons that graphically depict both Mary and Jesus as Black people. According to Godfrey Higgins (author of the monumental historical document Anacalypsis), who visited the cathedrals of Europe before the anti-religious period of the French Revolution, all the madonnas and Christ-childs were depicted as black: "In all the Romish countries of Europe, in France, Italy, Germany, etc., the God, Christ, as well as his mother are described in the old pictures to be black. The infant God in the arms of his black mother, his eyes drapery white, is himself perfectly black. If the reader doubts my words, he may go to the cathedral of Moulins - to the famous chapel of the Virgin of Loretto, to the Church of Annunciata; the Church of St. Lazaro, or the Church of St. Stephen at Genoa, to St. Francisco at Pisa; to the Church of Brixer in the Tyrol, and that of Padua; to the Church of St. Theodore at Munich, etc. This is further supported and documented by the work of J.A. Rogers, Albert Churchward, Yosef ben-Jochannan, C.W. King, J.S. Matthews, Gerald Massey and various other writers who give detailed accounts of the original Black Mary and Jesus. It was with the advent of Michaelango, who used his family to pose for the paintings that he did of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, etc. - coupled with European white racism - that we begin to see Jesus portrayed as a white man. But how could it be otherwise? How could a group of people simultaneously proclaim and practice white racism and justify slavery under the guise of bringing the message of Christianity to the 'heathens' or 'pagan black savages' in Africa - and at the same time tell the truth that Jesus was a Black man and that in fact Christianity started in Africa, where Panteus and Boteus reported that Jesus was born in a cave in Ethiopia? And that it was not until the Nicene conference that Jesus' birthplace was changed to a stable in Bethlehem. MAAT: This is the second time you have mentioned the Nicene Conference. Where was this conference held? What was it about? And who attended it? Geoghagen: There were two councils of the Christian Church held in Nicea (Nice), in what is now northwest Turkey. The most important was called in 325 A.D. by Constantine "the Great" and 219 bishops from all of the powerful Christian regions attended it. It was the intent of Constantine to change Christianity into Christiandom. In other words, religion would now become the vehicle of government control over the people. Achievement of this goal involved changing some of the tenets of Christianity. Anyone who is interested can obtain a copy of the

proceedings of the Nicene Conference and see the tremendous political struggle that was going on between the "Men of God." One will notice that at least 18 books - including the book of Mary - that were part of the Koin Bible (the original Bible up to that point) were removed from the canons. Furthermore, many of the ancient African teachings, including the concept of reincarnation, were removed from Christianity. And it was at this time that they put into the new Bible the ancient African concept of the Immaculate Conception. MAAT: Are you literally saying that the original Bible was changed at the Nicene Conference? Geoghagen: Yes. But this was not the first time that Church leaders had gotten together to fight over what was to be accepted as Christianity. A similar conference was held in Jamnia in A.D. 90, at which time other changes were made. MAAT: Getting back to the questions of whether Jesus was a Black man: Some scholars, of course, would challenge your position that Jesus was a black man on the ground that he was Jewish and could not therefore have been Black. Geoghagen: My opinion is that those would be very misinformed scholars because the original Jews were Black people. MAAT: Some scientists today might also raise the point that the ancient Shroud of Turin, which has been highly touted by the press and which many now claim bears the image of Jesus, does not appear to depict a Black man. What would be your response to this? Geoghagen: It would be of little consequence as to whether the shroud of Turin appears to be Black, Asian, Caucasian or whatever, because the only thing that scientists are able to determine at this point is that indeed this probably was a shroud that covered a human body and does not appear to be fake. But no Scientist alive of whom I am aware - racist or nonracist, Christian or non-Christian can in any way, shape, form or fashion document that the Shroud of Turin is the one that was placed over Jesus' body at the time of his death. MAAT: Was Jesus the only great religious leader who was Black? Geoghagen: Absolutely not. Most of the ancient prophets and saviors of most religions were depicted in their original form as Blacks. MAAT: If all of these ancient prophets, gods and goddesses were Blacks, does this suggest a universal Black dominance in the ancient world? Geoghagen: Most certainly, yes. One might read Gerald Massey's Egypt: The Light of the World, from archaeological and anthropological evidence alone, there is no doubt that the race of Black people was the seed race for humanity. In other words, we were here before anyone else and our presence was felt and known throughout the world.

We not only occupied Africa, but our remains have been discovered from the Fiji Islands to Tasmania, Melanesia, India, China, Japan, Mexico and even Europe. Many scientists have shown that the original race of people in all of these areas was the Black race. MAAT: Why is it that the facts that you have revealed here are unknown to the general public? Geoghagen: They are intentionally kept from the public. You take a situation where you have a group of people - namely white people - who have actually taken philosophy, religion, education, science, liberal arts, everything that you can associate with the word "culture" from Black people. They have taken it, distorted it, adopted it and used it against the very people from whom they received it as a justification for slavery. So, it was convenient to enslave Blacks in Africa under the guise of spreading Christianity when it fact the religion as developed in Africa (there were 27 bishops and seven Popes of the North African Church before the first one in Rome - this is documented in the book Libers Pontificals, which, when translated into English, is Book of the Popes). I should also point out here that few references are made to the fact that three of the earliest fathers of the Christian church were Blacks. St. Augustine (born at Tagaste, Numida, North Africa in 354 A.S.), who set the moral doctrine of the Christian Church; Tutillian and Cyprian. How could white people tell Blacks that they had no history or culture other than that which Europeans gave them and at the same time tell them that Christianity was not only developed by Blacks, but that its master, Jesus, was a Black man? This could not be done. MAAT: Why do you think that it is important for Black people to know that Jesus was a Black man and that Christianity is of African origin? Geoghagen: I feel that this information is critical to the self- esteem and future of Blacks around the globe. Our contributions as the originators of high culture or "civilization" have been systematically kept from us. Our inventions, our philosophies, our religious concepts and systems have been stolen, co-opted, distorted, adopted and then used against us. We as a people must begin to assert ourselves and to reclaim our history and our science, and become knowledgeable about who we are, whence we came, and where we are going. Without a thorough knowledge and understanding of African history (including the development of Christianity in Africa), our future as a people is at best bleak. -------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright 1997, Legrand Clegg II, All Rights Reserved

Cheikh Anta Diop argues that many Ancient Egyptians were Black Africans; the Greek debt to Egypt. Peter Myers, July
6, 2002; update June 13, 2004. My comments are shown {thus}. Write to me at mailto:myers@cyberone.com.au. You are at http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/diop.html. The argument that Ancient Egypt was African deserves to be put.

Of course, there was also mixing with the Semitic-speaking peoples (the Akkadians, Phoenicians and Hyksos, the people of Babylonia and Assyria, and later the invading Arab armies) and with Indo-Europeans (elements of the Mitanni, Hyksos, Hittites and Sea Peoples; the invading Persian Empire, the Greeks that came in Alexander's wake; then the Romans). (1) Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization (2) G. K. Osei, a black American (3) DIODORUS OF SICILY (4) Herodotus Histories: the Egyptians (2.35-91) (5) Martin Bernal puts the case for African/Semitic influence on the formation of Greek culture and institutions (6) Cyrus H. Gordon on race-mixing in Egypt (7) Donald B. Redford enters the Afrocentrist debate

(1) Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization,

edited and translated by Mercer Cook, Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago 1974. The Great Sphinx had a negro head: diop1.jpg King Narmer, long regarded as the first Pharaoh - with negro features: diop5.jpg Pharaohs Zoser and Cheops: diop6-7.jpg Pharaohs Mycerinus and Mentuhotep I: diop8-9.jpg Pharaoh Sesostris I: diop10.jpg Pharaohs Tuthmosis III and Taharqa: diop12-13.jpg Egyptian women - note their wavy braided "Afro" hair: egypt-women.jpg Another painting of Egyptian women - 18th Dynasty, c. 1400 B.C. - from The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, by Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson (The British Museum Press, London 1995; pocket edition 2002), p. 193: egypt-women-2.jpg Egyptian women's braided wigs: diop25-6.jpg I'm not trying to polemicise history, as Martin Bernal is in his Black Athena series. Bernal keeps accusing other scholars of "Anti-Semitism", making out that Jews are the saviors of the Black movement today. Yet he ignores the Jewish Bible's responsibility for giving Ancient Egypt - its Pharaohs, its religion, its achievements - a bad reputation. What else does "Exodus" mean, but escape from Pharaonic Egypt? The Jewish Bible's enmity towards Ancient Egypt was later taken up by Christians who stamped out the Egyptian religion, and Moslems who pillaged the pyramids. Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization, edited and translated by Mercer Cook, Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago 1974. {p. 1} What Were the Egyptians? In contemporary descriptions of the ancient Egyptians, this question is never raised. Eyewitnesses of that period formally affirm that the Egyptians were Blacks. On several

occasions Herodotus insists on the Negro character of the Egyptians and even uses this for indirect demonstrations. For example, to prove that the flooding of the Nile cannot be caused by melting snow, he cites, among other reasons he deems valid, the following observation: "It is certain that the natives of the country are black with the heat. ..." {endnote 1: The History of Herododus, translated by George Rawlinson. New York. Tudor, 1928, p. 88.} To demonstrate that the Greek oracle is of Egyptian origin, Herodotus advances another argument: "Lastly, by calling the dove black, they [the Dodonaeans] indicated that the woman was Egyptian. ..." {endnote 2: Ibid., p. 101.} The doves in question symbolize two Egyptian women allegedly kidnapped from Thebes to found the oracles of Dodona and Libya. To show that the inhabitants of Colchis were of Egyptian origin and had to be considered a part of Sesostris' army who had settled in that region, Herodotus says: "The Egyptians said that they believed the Colchians to be descended from the army of Sesostris. My own conjectures were founded, first, on the fact that they are black-skinned and have woolly hair. ..." {endnote 3: Ibid., p. 115.} Finally, concerning the population of India, Herodotus distinguishes between the Padaeans and other Indians, describing them as follows: "They all also have the same tint of skin, which approaches that of the Ethiopians." {endnote 4: Ibid., p. 184.} Diodorus of Sicily writes: {quote} The Ethiopians say that the Egyptians are one of their colonies which was brought into Egypt by Osiris. They even allege that this country was originally under water, but that the Nile, dragging much mud as it flowed from Ethiopia, had finally filled it in and made it a part of the continent. ... They add that from them, as from their authors and ancestors, the Egyptians get most of their laws. It is from them that the Egyptians have learned to honor {p. 2} kings as gods and bury them with such pomp; sculpture and writing were invented by the Ethiopians. The Ethiopians cite evidence that they are more ancient than the Egyptians, but it is useless to report that here. {endquote} {endnote 5: Histoire universelle, translated by Abbe Terrasson. Paris, 1758, Bk. 3 p. 341.} If the Egyptians and Ethiopians were not of the same race, Diodorus would have emphasized the impossibility of considering the former as a colony (i.e., a fraction) of the latter and the impossibility of viewing them as forebears of the Egyptians. In his Geography, Strabo mentioned the importance of migrations in history and, believing that this particular migration had proceeded from Egypt to Ethiopia, remarks: "Egyptians settled Ethiopia and Colchis." {endnote 6: Bk. 1, Chap. 3, par. 10.} Once again, it is a Greek, despite his chauvinism, who informs us that the Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Colchians belong to the same race, thereby confirming what Herodotus had said about the Colchians. {endnote 7: The Colchians formed a cluster of Negroes among white populations near the Black Sea ... } The opinion of all the ancient writers on the Egyptian race is more or less summed up by Gaston Maspero (1846-1916): "By the almost unanimous testimony of ancient historians, they belonged to an African race [read: Negro] which first settled in Ethiopia,

on the Middle Nile; following the course of the river, they gradually reached the sea. ... Moreover, the Bible states that Mesraim, son of Ham, brother of Chus (Kush) the Ethiopian, and of Canaan, came from Mesopotamia to settle with his children on the banks of the Nile." {endnote 8: Gaston Maspero, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l'Orient. Paris: Hachette, 1917, p. 15, 12th ed. (Translated as: The Dawn of Civilization. London, 1894; reprinted, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1968.)} ... {p. 3} Besides, Herodotus was not a credulous historian who recorded everything without checking; he knew how to weigh things. When he relates an opinion that he does not share, he always takes care to note his disagreement. Thus, referring to the mores of the Scythians and Neurians, he writes apropos the latter: "It seems that these people are conjurers; for both the Scythi- ans and the Greeks who dwell in Scythia say that every Neurian once a year becomes a wolf for a few days, at the end of which time he is restored to his proper shape. Not that I believe this, but they constantly affirm it to be true, and are even ready to back up their assertion with an oath." {endnote 10: Herodotus, p. 236.} He always distinguishes carefully between what he has seen and what he has been told. After his visit to the Labyrinth, he writes: {quote} There are two different sorts of chambers throughout half under ground, half above ground, the latter built upon the former; the whole number of these chambers is three thousand, fifteen hundred of each kind. The upper chambers I myself passed through and saw, and what I say concerning them is from my own observation; of the underground chambers I can only speak from report, for the keepers of the building could not be got to show them, since they contained, as they said, the sepulchers of the kings who built the Labyrinth, and also those of the sacred crocodiles. Thus it is from hearsay only that I can speak of the lower chambers. The upper chambers, however, I saw with my own eyes and found them to excel all other human productions. {endquote} {endnote 11: Ibid., pp. 133-134.} Was Herodotus a historian deprived of logic, unable to penetrate complex phenomena? On the contrary, his explanation of the inundations of the Nile reveals a rational mind seeking scientific reasons for natural phenomena: {quote} Perhaps, after censuring all the opinions that have been put forward on this obscure subject, one ought to propose some theory of one's own. I will therefore proceed to explain what I think to be the reason of the Nile's swelling in the summertime. During the winter, the sun is driven out of his usual course by the storms, and removes to the upper parts of Libya. This is the whole secret in the fewest possible words; for it stands to reason that the coun{p. 4} try to which the Sun-god approaches the nearest, and which he passes most directly over, will be scantest of water, and that here streams which feed the rivers will shrink the most. To explain, however, more at length, the case is this. The sun, in his passage across the upper parts of Libya, affects them in the following way. As the air in these regions is constantly clear, and the country warm through the absence of cold winds, the sun in his passage across them acts upon them exactly as he is wont to act elsewhere in summer, when his path is in the middle of heaven that is, he attracts the water. After attracting it, he again repels it into the upper regions, where the winds lay hold of it, scatter it, and reduce it into a vapor, whence it naturally enough comes to pass that the winds which blow from this quarter

 the south and southwest are of all winds the most rainy. And my own opinion is that the sun does not get rid of all the water which he draws year by year from the Nile, but retains some about him. {endquote} {endnote 12. Ibid., pp. 88-89.} These three examples reveal that Herodotus was not a passive reporter of incredible tales and rubbish, "a liar." On the contrary, he was quite scrupulous, objective, scientific for his time. Why should one seek to discredit such a historian, to make him seem naive? Why "refabricate" history despite his explicit evidence? Undoubtedly the basic reason for this is that Herodotus, after relating his eyewitness account informing us that the Egyptians were Blacks, then demonstrated, with rare honesty (for a Greek), that Greece borrowed from Egypt all the elements of her civilization, even the cult of the gods, and that Egypt was the cradle of civilization . Moreover, archeological discoveries continually justify Herodotus against his detractors. Thus, Christiane DesrochesNoblecourt writes about recent excavations in Tanis* {footnote: Tanis, the Biblical Zoan, at the mouth of the eastern branch of the Nile Delts}: "Herodotus had seen the outer buildings of these sepulchers and had described them. [This was the Labyrinth discussed above.] Pierre Montet has just proved once again that 'The Father of History did not lie.'" {endnote 13: Sciences et Avenir, No. 56, October 1951.} It could be objected that, in the fifth century B.C. when Herodotus visited Egypt, its civilization was already more than 10,000 years old and that the race which had created it was not necessarily the Negro race that Herodotus found there. But the whole history of Egypt, as we shall see, shows that the {p. 5} mixture of the early population with white nomadic elements, conquerors or merchants, became increasingly important as the end of Egyptian history approached. According to Cornelius de Pauw, in the low epoch Egypt was almost saturated with foreign white colonies: Arabs in Coptos, Libyans on the future site of Alexandria, Jews around the city of Hercules (Avaris?), Babylonians (or Persians) below Memphis, "fugitive Trojans" in the area of the great stone quarries east of the Nile, Carians and Ionians over by the Pelusiac branch. Psammetichus (end of seventh century) capped this peaceful invasion by entrusting the defense of Egypt to Greek mercenaries. "An enormous mistake of Pharaoh Psammetichus was to commit the defense of Egypt to foreign troops and to introduce various colonies made up of the dregs of the nations." {endnote 14: Cornelius de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Egyptiens et les Chinois. Berlin, 1773, II, 337.} Under the last Saite dynasty, the Greeks were officially established at Naucratis, the only port where foreigners were authorized to engage in trading. After the conquest of Egypt by Alexander, under the Ptolemies, crossbreeding between white Greeks and black Egyptians flourished, thanks to a policy of assimilation: "Nowhere was Dionysus more favored, nowhere was he worshiped more adoringly and more elaborately than by the Ptolemies, who recognized his cult as an especially effective means of promoting the assimilation of the conquering Greeks and their fusion with the native Egyptians." {endnote 15: J. J. Bachofen, Pages choisies par Adrien Turel, "Du Regne de la mere au patriarcat." Paris: F. Alcan, 1938, p. 89.} These facts prove that if the Egyptian people had originally been white, it might well have remained so. If Herodotus found it still black after so much crossbreeding, it must have been basic black at the start.

{p. 27} Before examining the contradictions circulating in the modern era and resulting from attempts to prove at any price that the Egyptians were Whites, let us note the astonishment of a scholar of good faith, Count Constantin de Volney (1757-1820). After being imbued with all the prejudices we have just mentioned with regard to the Negro, Volney had gone to Egypt between 1783 and 1785, while Negro slavery flourished. He reported as follows on the Egyptian race, the very race that had produced the Pharaohs: the Copts. {quote} ... all have a bloated face, puffed up eyes, flat nose, thick lips; in a word, the true face of the mulatto. I was tempted to attribute it to the climate, but when I visited the Sphinx, its appearance gave me the key to the riddle. On seeing that head, typically Negro in all its features, I remembered the remarkable passage where Herodotus says: "As for me, I judge the Colchians to be a colony of the Egyptians because, like them, they are black with woolly hair. ..." In other words, the ancient Egyptians were true Negroes of the same type as all native-born Africans. That being so, we can see how their blood, mixed for several centuries with that of the Romans and Greeks, must have lost the intensity of its original color, while retaining nonetheless the imprint of its original mold. We can even state as a general principle that the face is a kind of monument able, in many cases, to attest or shed light on historical evidence on the origins of peoples. {endquote} After illustrating this proposition by citing the case of Normans who still resembled the Danes 900 years after the conquest of Nor- mandy, Volney adds: {quote} But returning to Egypt, the lesson she teaches history contains many reflections for philosophy. What a subject for meditation, to see the present barbarism and ignorance of the Copts, descendants of the alliance between the profound genius of the Egyptians and {p. 28} the brilliant mind of the Greeks! Just think that this race of black men, today our slave and the object of our scorn, is the very race to which we owe our arts, sciences, ana even the use of speech! Just imagine, finally, that it is in the midst of peoples who call themselves the greatest friends of liberty and humanity that one has approved the most barbarous slavery and questioned whether black men have the same kind of intelligence as Whites! {endquote} {endnote 7: C. F. Volney, Voyages en Syrie et en Egypte. Paris, 1787, I, 74-77.} {p. 28} In 1799 Bonaparte undertook his campaign in Egypt. Thanks to the Rosetta stone, hieroglyphics were deciphered in 1822 by Champollion the Younger, who died in 1832. He left as his "calling card" an Egyptian grammar and a series of letters to his brother, Champollion-Figeac, letters written during his visit to Egypt (1828-1829). Thesc were published in l833 by Champollion-Figeac. From then on the wall of the hieroglyphics was breached, unveiling surprising riches in their most minute details. {p. 46} Let us start with the oldest of these theses, that of Champollion the Younger, set forth in the thirteenth letter to his brother. It concerns bas-reliefs on the tomb of Sesostris I, also visited by Rienzi. These date back to the sixteenth century B.C. (Eighteenth Dynasty) and represent the races of man known to the Egyptians. This monument is the oldest complete ethnological document available. Here is what Champollion says about it: {quote} Right in the valley of Biban-el-Moluk, we admired, like all previous visitors, the astonishing freshness of the paintings and the fine sculptures on several tombs. I had a copy made of the peoples represented on the bas-reliefs. At first I had thought, from copies of

these bas-reliefs published in England, that these peoples of different races led by the god Horus holding his shepherd's staff, were indeed nations subject to the rule of the Pharaohs. A study of the legends informed me that this tableau has a more general meaning. It portrays the third hour of the day, when the sun is beginning to turn on its burning rays, warming all the inhabited countries of our hemisphere. According to the legend itself, they wished to represent the inhabitants of Egypt and those of foreign lands. Thus we have before our eyes the image of the various races of man known to the Egyptians and we learn at the same time the great geographical or ethnographical divisions established during that early epoch. Men led by Horus, the shepherd of the peoples, belong to four distinct families. The first, the one closest to the god, has a dark red color, a well-proportioned body, kind face, nose slightly aquiline, long braided hair, and is dressed in white. The legends designate this species as Rot-en-ne-Rome, the race of men par excellence i.e., the Egyptians. There can be no uncertainty about the racial identity of the man who comes next: he belongs to the Black race, designated under the general term Nahasi. The third presents a very different aspect; his skin color borders on yellow or tan; he has a strongly aquiline nose, thick, black pointed beard, and wears a short garment of varied colors; these are called Namou. Finally, the last one is what we call flesh-colored, a white skin of the most delicate shade, a nose straight or slightly arched, blue eyes, blond or reddish beard, tall stature and very slender clad in a {p. 47} hairy ox-skin, a veritable savage tattooed on various parts of his body; he is called Tamhou. I hastened to seek the tableau corresponding to this one in the other royal tombs and, as a matter of fact, I found it in several. The variations I observed fully convinced me that they had tried to represent here the inhabitants of the four corners of the earth, according to the Egyptian system, namely: 1. the inhabitants of Egypt which, by itself, formed one part of the world ...; 2. the inhabitants of Africa proper: Blacks; 3. Asians; 4. finally (and I am ashamed to say so, since our race is the last and the most savage in the series), Europeans who, in those remote epochs, frankly did not cut too fine a figure in the world. In this category we must include all blonds and white-skinned people living not only in Europe, but Asia as well, their starting point. This manner of viewing the tableau is all the more accurate because, on the other tombs, the same generic names reappear, always in the same order. We find there Egyptians and Africans represented in the same way, which could not be otherwise; but the Namou (the Asians) and the Tamhou (Europeans) present significant and curious variants. Instead of the Arab or the Jew, dressed simply and represented on one tomb, Asia's representatives on other tombs (those of Ramses II, etc.) are three individuals, tanned complexion, aquiline nose, black eyes, and thick beard, but clad in rare splendor. In one, they are evidently Assyrians, their costume, down to the smallest detail, is identical with that of personages engraved on Assyrian cylinders. In the other, are Medes or early inhabitants of some part of Persia. Their physiognomy and dress resemble, feature for feature, those found on monuments called Persepolitan. Thus, Asia was represented indiscriminately by any one of the peoples who inhabited it. The same is true of our good old ancestors, the Tamhou. Their attire is sometimes different; their heads are more or less hairy and adorned with various ornaments; their savage dress varies somewhat in form, but their white complexion, their eyes and beard all preserve the character of a race apart. I had this strange ethnographical series copied and colored. I certainly did not expect, on arriving at Biban-el-Moluk, to find sculptures that could serve as vignettes for the history of the primitive Europeans, if ever one has the courage to attempt it. Nevertheless, there is something flat-

{p. 48} tering and consoling in seeing them, since they make us appreciate the progress we have subsequently achieved. {endquote} {endnote 3: Champollion-Figeac, Egypte ancienne. Paris: Collection l'Univers, 1839, pp. 30-31. ...} For a very good reason, I have reproduced this extract as Champollion-Figeac published it, rather than take it from the "new edition" of the Letters published in 1867 by the son of Champollion the Younger (Cheronnet-Champollion). The originals were addressed to Champollion-Figeac; therefore his edition is more authentic. {p. 49} Champollion's conclusion is typical. After stating that these sculptures can serve as vignetles for the history of the early inhabitants of Europe, he adds, "if ever one has the courage to attempt it." Finally, after those comments, he presents his opinion on the Egyptian race: {quote} The first tribes that inhabited Egypt, that is, the Nile Valley between the Syene cataract and the sea, came from Abyssinia to Sennar. The ancient Egyptians belonged to a race quite similar to the Kennous or Barabras, present inhabitants of Nubia. In the Copts of Egypt, we do not find any of the characteristic features of the ancient Egyptian population. The Copts are the result of crossbreeding with all the nations that have successively dominated Egypt. It is wrong to seek in them the principal features of the old race. {endquote} {endnote 4: Champollion-Figeac, ibid., p. 27.} {p. 50} Champollion's opinion on the Egyptian race was recorded in a memoir prepared for the Pasha of Egypt, to whom he delivered it in 1829. {p. 63} In Les Egyptes, a volume published around 1880, Marius Fontanes attacks the same problem: {quote} Since the Egyptians always painted themselves red on their monu- ments, partisans of the "southern origin" had to point out a great number of interesting peculiarities likely to help solve the ethno-graphical problem. Near the Upper Nile today, among the Fulbe, whose skin is quite yellow, those whom contemporaries consider as belonging to a pure race, are rather red; the Bisharin are exactly of the same brick-red shade used on Egyptian monuments. To other ethnographers, these "red men" would probably be Ethiopians modified by time and climate, or perhaps Negroes who have reached the halfway mark in the evolution from blackness to whiteness. It has been noted that, in limestone areas, the Negro is less black than in granitic and plutonic regions. It has even been thought that the hue changed with the season. Thus, Nubians were former Blacks, but only in skin color, while their osteology has rcmained absolutely Negritic. The Negroes represented on Pharaonic paintings, so clearly deline- ated by engravers and named Nahasou or Nahasiou in the hiero- glyphics, are not related to the Ethiopians, the first people to come down into Egypt. Were the latter then attenuated Negroes, Nubians? Lepsius's canon gives ... the proportions of the perfect Egyptian body; it has short arms and is Negroid or Negritian. From the anthropological point of view, the Egyptian comes after the Polynesians, Samoyeds, Europeans, and is immediately followed by African Negroes and Tasmanians. Besides, there is a scientific tendency to find in Africa, after excluding foreign influences, from the Mediterranean to the Cape, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, nothing but Negroes or Negroids of various colors. The ancient Egyptians were Negroes, but Negroes to the last degree. {endquote} {endnote 20: Marius Fontanes, Les Egyptes (de 5000 a715). Paris: Ed. Lemerre, n.d., pp 44-45.}

{end of quotes}

(2) G. K. Osei, a black American (LL.B., LL.M., Ph.D.), wrote in his 1983
Introduction to G. Elliot Smith's booklet The Influence of Ancient Egyptian Civilization in the East and in America (New York, 1983; I have this booklet but its publisher details are unclear; I obtained it from a Black American bookstore, most likely A&B Books Publishers Brooklyn, NY 11201): "The Great kings of Africa peacefully spread the African civilization to other parts. This peaceful process was disturbed by the coming of the Hyksos into Egypt. These people conquered lower Egypt and ruled it for nearly two hundred years. They were eventually expelled by a king from Upper Egypt. The kings who came after the explusion of the Hyksos extended the boundaries of Egypt into Asia. Many nations in Asia came under the direct control of Egypt. At this time Egypt was the most powerful country in the world. African culture spread to those conquered nations until a mad half-cast (mulatto) came on the throne. This mad king was non other than Amenophis IV also known as Akhanaten. "Akhanaten when he mounted the mighty throne deserted the old culture. He changed the religion of Egypt, and he married a white woman from Mitanni. His wife's name was Nefert-iti ("The Fair One Comes"). It was the Egyptians who called Tadukhipa, Dushratta's daughter Nefer-iti. She was at first sent to Egypt to marry Amenophis III but when she arrived the king had died so she had to marry the king's son -Akhenaton. Akhenaton changed his wife's name from Nefertiti to Nefer-neferu-Aten, "Aten is the Fairest of the Fair." It is very important to state here that the decline of the mighty Kingdom began from the time Akhenaton came on the throne. The royal blue blood that ran through the veins of those mighty kings had become diluted by the end of the eighteenth Dynasty. The Kings were the sons of white women from Asia. It must be remembered that the mother of Akhenaton was a white woman called Tyi or Tii. Queen Tii was a foreign woman whose father's name was Iuya and came from Asia Minor. The marriages of the Pharoahs to foreign women shocked the priests of Amen. The priests told Akhenaton that the dynastic miracle of the divine birth should continue but this mad king Akhenaton paid them no attention. Instead the priests were persecuted and Amen was deserted by the King. Akhenaton built a new capital where he started to worship his god. The history of the African Race would be different today if Akenaton had not abandoned the old African Culture to embrace that of a foreign country. He failed to send the army to defend the frontiers his great and proud ancestors had established. As a result of his negligence the mighty empire of Africa fell to pieces. The present day (1983) African leaders must never marry white women. White women will never help them to build Africa to become once again the teacher of the world. We will teach the African to see beauty in himself." Osei was introducing G. Elliot Smith's booklet THE INFLUENCE OF ANCIENT EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION IN THE EAST AND IN AMERICA : before-columbus.html. I do not post ALL of Diop's material. The fact that he and Elliot Smith overstated their case, that they were wrong about some things, does not undo the ways in which they were right. The reaction against Diffusion has gone too far.

(3) DIODORUS OF SICILY tr. C.H. Oldfather, Harvard University Press

(Loeb), Cambridge Ma. 1968. Written about 56 B.C. BOOK I chapter 96 {in Volume 1 of the Loeb series} {p. 327} 96. But now that we have examined these matters, we must enumerate what Greeks, who have won fame for their wisdom and learning, visited Egypt in ancient times, in order to become acquainted with its customs and learning. For the priests of Egypt recount from the records of their sacred books that they were visited in early times by Orpheus, Musaeus, Melampus, and Daedalus, also by the poet Homer and Lycurgus of Sparta, later by Solon of Athens and the philosopher Plato, and that there also came Pythagoras of Samos and the mathematician Eudoxus, {note 1} as well as Democritus of Abdera and Oenopides {note 2} of Chios. As evidence for the visits of all these men they point in some cases to their statues and in others to places or buildings {note 3} which bear their names, and they offer proofs from the branch of learning which each one of these men pursued, arguing that all the things for which they were admired among the Greeks were transferred from Egypt. Orpheus, for instance, brought from Egypt most of his mystic ceremonies, the orgiastic rites that accompanied his wanderings, and his fabulous account of his experiences in Hades. For the rite of Osiris is the same as that of Dionysus and that of Isis very similar to that of Demeter, the names alone having been interchanged; and the punishments in Hades of the unrighteous, the Fields of the Righteous, and the fantastic conceptions, current among the ... {translator's notes} 1 The famous astronomer, geographer, and mathematician of Cnidus, pupil of Plato. His stay in Egypt is well attested 2 Cp. p. 336, n. 1. 3 For instance, according to Strabo (17. 1. 29), in Heliopolis were pointed out the houses where Plato and Eudoxus had stopped. {end notes} {end Diodorus} Read the original - from Diodorus: diodorus-v21.jpg.

(4) Herodotus Histories: the Egyptians (2.35-91)

from http://www.richmond.edu/~wstevens/grvaltexts/herodotus2.html ... it is by mere coincidence that the Bacchic ceremonies in Greece are so nearly the same as the Egyptian - they would then have been more Greek in their character, and less recent in their origin. Much less can I admit that the Egyptians borrowed these customs, or any other, from the Greeks. My belief is that Melampus got his knowledge of them from Cadmus the Tyrian, and the followers whom he brought from Phoenicia into the country which is now called Boeotia. Almost all the names of the gods came into Greece from Egypt. My inquiries prove that they were all derived from a foreign source, and my opinion is that Egypt furnished the greater number. For with the exception of Neptune and the Dioscuri, whom I mentioned above, and Juno, Vesta, Themis, the Graces, and the Nereids, the other gods have been known from time immemorial in Egypt. This I assert on the authority of the Egyptians themselves. The gods, with whose names they profess themselves unacquainted, the Greeks received, I

believe, from the Pelasgi, except Neptune. Of him they got their knowledge from the Libyans, by whom he has been always honoured, and who were anciently the only people that had a god of the name. The Egyptians differ from the Greeks also in paying no divine honours to heroes. Besides these which have been here mentioned, there are many other practices whereof I shall speak hereafter, which the Greeks have borrowed from Egypt. The peculiarity, however, which they observe in their statues of Mercury they did not derive from the Egyptians, but from the Pelasgi; from them the Athenians first adopted it, and afterwards it passed from the Athenians to the other Greeks. For just at the time when the Athenians were entering into the Hellenic body, the Pelasgi came to live with them in their country, whence it was that the latter came first to be regarded as Greeks. Whoever has been initiated into the mysteries of the Cabiri will understand what I mean. The Samothracians received these mysteries from the Pelasgi, who, before they went to live in Attica, were dwellers in Samothrace, and imparted their religious ceremonies to the inhabitants. The Athenians, then, who were the first of all the Greeks to make their statues of Mercury in this way, learnt the practice from the Pelasgians; and by this people a religious account of the matter is given, which is explained in the Samothracian mysteries. In early times the Pelasgi, as I know by information which I got at Dodona, offered sacrifices of all kinds, and prayed to the gods, but had no distinct names or appellations for them, since they had never heard of any. They called them gods (Theoi, disposers), because they disposed and arranged all things in such a beautiful order. After a long lapse of time the names of the gods came to Greece from Egypt, and the Pelasgi learnt them, only as yet they knew nothing of Bacchus, of whom they first heard at a much later date. Not long after the arrival of the names they sent to consult the oracle at Dodona about them. This is the most ancient oracle in Greece, and at that time there was no other. To their question, "Whether they should adopt the names that had been imported from the foreigners?" the oracle replied by recommending their use. Thenceforth in their sacrifices the Pelasgi made use of the names of the gods, and from them the names passed afterwards to the Greeks. Whence the gods severally sprang, whether or no they had all existed from eternity, what forms they bore- these are questions of which the Greeks knew nothing until the other day, so to speak. For Homer and Hesiod were the first to compose Theogonies, and give the gods their epithets, to allot them their several offices and occupations, and describe their forms; and they lived but four hundred years before my time, as I believe. As for the poets who are thought by some to be earlier than these, they are, in my judgment, decidedly later writers. In these matters I have the authority of the priestesses of Dodona for the former portion of my statements; what I have said of Homer and Hesiod is my own opinion. The following tale is commonly told in Egypt concerning the oracle of Dodona in Greece, and that of Ammon in Libya. My informants on the point were the priests of Jupiter at Thebes. They said "that two of the sacred women were once carried off from Thebes by the Phoenicians, and that the story went that one of them was sold into Libya, and the other into Greece, and these women were the first founders of the oracles in the two countries." On my inquiring how they came to know so exactly what became of the women, they answered, "that diligent search had been made after them at the time, but that it had not been found possible to discover where they were; afterwards, however, they received the information which they had given me."

This was what I heard from the priests at Thebes; at Dodona, however, the women who deliver the oracles relate the matter as follows:- "Two black doves flew away from Egyptian Thebes, and while one directed its flight to Libya, the other came to them. She alighted on an oak, and sitting there began to speak with a human voice, and told them that on the spot where she was, there should henceforth be an oracle of Jove. They understood the announcement to be from heaven, so they set to work at once and erected the shrine. The dove which flew to Libya bade the Libyans to establish there the oracle of Ammon." This likewise is an oracle of Jupiter. The persons from whom I received these particulars were three priestesses of the Dodonaeans, the eldest Promeneia, the next Timarete, and the youngest Nicandra- what they said was confirmed by the other Dodonaeans who dwell around the temple. My own opinion of these matters is as follows:- I think that, if it be true that the Phoenicians carried off the holy women, and sold them for slaves, the one into Libya and the other into Greece, or Pelasgia (as it was then called), this last must have been sold to the Thesprotians. Afterwards, while undergoing servitude in those parts, she built under a real oak a temple to Jupiter, her thoughts in her new abode reverting - as it was likely they would do, if she had been an attendant in a temple of Jupiter at Thebes - to that particular god. Then, having acquired a knowledge of the Greek tongue, she set up an oracle. She also mentioned that her sister had been sold for a slave into Libya by the same persons as herself. The Dodonaeans called the women doves because they were foreigners, and seemed to them to make a noise like birds. After a while the dove spoke with a human voice, because the woman, whose foreign talk had previously sounded to them like the chattering of a bird, acquired the power of speaking what they could understand. For how can it be conceived possible that a dove should really speak with the voice of a man? Lastly, by calling the dove black the Dodonaeans indicated that the woman was an Egyptian. And certainly the character of the oracles at Thebes and Dodona is very similar. Besides this form of divination, the Greeks learnt also divination by means of victims from the Egyptians. The Egyptians were also the first to introduce solemn assemblies, processions, and litanies to the gods; of all which the Greeks were taught the use by them. It seems to me a sufficient proof of this that in Egypt these practices have been established from remote antiquity, while in Greece they are only recently known. The Egyptians do not hold a single solemn assembly, but several in the course of the year. Of these the chief, which is better attended than any other, is held at the city of Bubastis in honour of Diana. The next in importance is that which takes place at Busiris, a city situated in the very middle of the Delta; it is in honour of Isis, who is called in the Greek tongue Demiter (Ceres). There is a third great festival in Sais to Minerva, a fourth in Heliopolis to the Sun, a fifth in Buto to Latona, and a sixth in Papremis to Mars. ... With respect to the Egyptians themselves, it is to be remarked that those who live in the corn country, devoting themselves, as they do, far more than any other people in the world, to the preservation of the memory of past actions, are the best skilled in history of any men that I have ever met. The following is the mode of life habitual to them:- For three successive days in each month they purge the body by means of emetics and clysters, which is done out of a regard for their health, since they have a persuasion that every disease to which men are liable is occasioned by the substances whereon they feed. Apart from any such precautions, they are, I believe, next to the Libyans, the healthiest people in the world - an effect of their

climate, in my opinion, which has no sudden changes. Diseases almost always attack men when they are exposed to a change, and never more than during changes of the weather. They live on bread made of spelt, which they form into loaves called in their own tongue cyllestis. Their drink is a wine which they obtain from barley, as they have no vines in their country. Many kinds of fish they eat raw, either salted or dried in the sun. Quails also, and ducks and small birds, they eat uncooked, merely first salting them. All other birds and fishes, excepting those which are set apart as sacred, are eaten either roasted or boiled. In social meetings among the rich, when the banquet is ended, a servant carries round to the several guests a coffin, in which there is a wooden image of a corpse, carved and painted to resemble nature as nearly as possible, about a cubit or two cubits in length. As he shows it to each guest in turn, the servant says, "Gaze here, and drink and be merry; for when you die, such will you be." The Egyptians adhere to their own national customs, and adopt no foreign usages. Many of these customs are worthy of note: among others their song, the Linus, which is sung under various names not only in Egypt but in Phoenicia, in Cyprus, and in other places; and which seems to be exactly the same as that in use among the Greeks, and by them called Linus. There were very many things in Egypt which filled me with astonishment, and this was one of them. Whence could the Egyptians have got the Linus? It appears to have been sung by them from the very earliest times. For the Linus in Egyptian is called Maneros; and they told me that Maneros was the only son of their first king, and that on his untimely death he was honoured by the Egyptians with these dirgelike strains, and in this way they got their first and only melody. There is another custom in which the Egyptians resemble a particular Greek people, namely the Lacedaemonians. Their young men, when they meet their elders in the streets, give way to them and step aside; and if an elder come in where young men are present, these latter rise from their seats. In a third point they differ entirely from all the nations of Greece. Instead of speaking to each other when they meet in the streets, they make an obeisance, sinking the hand to the knee. They wear a linen tunic fringed about the legs, and called calasiris; over this they have a white woollen garment thrown on afterwards. Nothing of woollen, however, is taken into their temples or buried with them, as their religion forbids it. Here their practice resembles the rites called Orphic and Bacchic, but which are in reality Egyptian and Pythagorean; for no one initiated in these mysteries can be buried in a woollen shroud, a religious reason being assigned for the observance. The Egyptians likewise discovered to which of the gods each month and day is sacred; and found out from the day of a man's birth what he will meet with in the course of his life, and how he will end his days, and what sort of man he will be - discoveries whereof the Greeks engaged in poetry have made a use. The Egyptians have also discovered more prognostics than all the rest of mankind besides. Whenever a prodigy takes place, they watch and record the result; then, if anything similar ever happens again, they expect the same consequences. With respect to divination, they hold that it is a gift which no mortal possesses, but only certain of the gods: thus they have an oracle of Hercules, one of Apollo, of Minerva, of Diana, of Mars, and of Jupiter. Besides these, there is the oracle of Latona at Buto, which is held in

much higher repute than any of the rest. The mode of delivering the oracles is not uniform, but varies at the different shrines. Medicine is practised among them on a plan of separation; each physician treats a single disorder, and no more: thus the country swarms with medical practitioners , some undertaking to cure diseases of the eye, others of the head, others again of the teeth, others of the intestines, and some those which are not local. More at http://www.richmond.edu/~wstevens/grvaltexts/herodotus2.html

(5) Martin Bernal puts the case for African/Semitic influence on the formation of Greek culture and institutions, in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume II
The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ 1991. Martin Bernal's reply to Mary Lefkowitz: from Bryn Mawr Classical Review 96.04.05 ----- http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1996/96.04.05.html Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. New York: New Republic and Basic Books, 1996. $24.00. ISBN 0-465-09837-1. Reviewed by Martin Bernal, Cornell University. When Mary Lefkowitz first encountered Afrocentrism in 1991, she was appalled. She discovered that there were people writing books and teaching that Greek civilization had derived from, or had even been "stolen" from Egypt. They were making claims that the Ancient Egyptians were black, as were Socrates, Cleopatra, and other important cultural figures in the Ancient World. They maintained that Greece had been invaded from Africa in the Middle of the 2nd millennium, that Greek religion and mystery systems were based on Egyptian prototypes and that what was called "Greek" philosophy was in fact the secret wisdom of Egyptian lodges of a Masonic type. She also discovered that these arguments were being supported by gross errors of fact, such as the idea that Aristotle had plundered the Egyptian library at Alexandria as a basis for his own massive philosophical and scientific writings. In fact, of course, the library at Alexandria was founded by Macedonian Greeks at least 30 years after Aristotle's death. If Mary Lefkowitz knew that this was all fantasy and did not conform to the facts as painstakingly assembled by modern classicists and ancient historians, why did she bother to confront it at all? She explains that it was because Afrocentric literature was widely read and that it was being taught, not merely in a number of school districts but also in some universities. Furthermore, when she had attempted to question Afrocentric speakers on her own campus (Wellesley) she had been rudely rebuffed. Even worse, when she appealed to colleagues for help they often failed to support her. Their ostensible grounds for this reluctance was the relativist position that as all history is fiction, there was room for many different stories. Thus, for them Afrocentrist history was no less true than the classicists' version of the roots of Greek civilization. However, Mary Lefkowitz believes that another and more significant reason why her colleagues let her down, was the fear of being labeled as racist.

She sees the Afrocentrists as living in a sealed off intellectual ghetto, impervious to outside information, where they pay no attention to the truth of their propositions but are purely concerned with the "feel good" factor and boosting the low self-esteem of African-Americans. While she has some respect for this motive, she denies that it has any place in the writing and teaching of history which must always remain objective. Thus, she has felt obliged to stand up and be counted against what she sees as the Afrocentrist assault on the basic principles of education, respect for the facts, logical argument and open debate. For this reason, she wrote a series of overlapping articles on these "myths". This book is a compilation from these with added material and argument. Its purpose is to expose Afrocentric absurdities once and for all, but its length is required because their demolition has turned out to be rather more complicated than she first supposed. Before going any further, I should like to look at what is meant by "Afrocentrism." As Mary Lefkowitz points out, the term was invented by Molefi Asante, who sees it as a way to escape Eurocentrism and its extensions, by looking at the world from an African standpoint. Since then, the label "Afrocentrist" has been attached to a number of intellectual positions ranging from "All good things come from Africa," or as Leonard Jeffries puts it: "Africa creates, Europe imitates," to those, among whom I see myself, who merely maintain that Africans and peoples of African descent have made many significant contributions to world progress and that for the past two centuries, these have been systematically played down by European and North American historians. Mary Lefkowitz dislikes the whole gamut. She swipes at Frederick Douglass, Edward Blyden and W.E.B. Du Bois for maintaining that African Americans shared a common African heritage with Ancient Egypt. However, her principal objection is to the 20th century group that some African-Americans refer to as "Nilocentric," because of its relative neglect of other African regions and civilizations, and its focus on the Nile Valley and Egypt. I too am included in her attacks but her rogues' gallery consists of John Henrik Clark, Cheikh Anta Diop, Yosef Ben-Yochannan and above all George G.M. James.1 That Afrocentrists should make so many mistakes is over-determined. They have the sense of being embattled in a hostile world and of possessing an absolute and general truth, which makes one have less concern about details. More important than these reasons, however, are the extraordinary material difficulties they have faced in acquiring training in the requisite languages, in finding time and space to carry on research, money to buy books or even gain access to libraries, let alone finding publishers who could provide academic checks and competent proof readers. None of these difficulties applies to Mary Lefkowitz, who has been thoroughly educated in Latin and Greek (though not in Ancient Egyptian), has for many years been tenured at a rich college and has received financial grants from massive foundations in order to write her attacks on Afrocentrism. That Professor Lefkowitz should make so many factual errors is much more intriguing. For instance: Pelops was not, as she writes (p. 13), the legendary founder of Argos. His activities in Greece were focused on Elis and Pisa not the Argolid. She states that hieroglyphics were deciphered in 1836 (p. 35). In fact, Champollion, the man who deciphered them, had died in 1831. The dates generally given for the decipherment are 1821-2, when he made the breakthrough or 1824 when he published his Precis du systeme hieroglyphique ... She writes that the theory that the Nile flood is the result of snow melted by South Winds

"was not far from the truth" (p. 77). In fact, it is false and, as the great Greek scientist Eudoxos realized, it was the result of rains in Ethiopia. We are all capable of this kind of sloppiness and such errors are relatively trivial and harmless. Other mistakes are less innocent. For instance, she says that Eudoxos was supposed to have gone to Egypt when it was under Persian domination. Mary Lefkowitz is virtually alone in doubting that he did go, and it is also generally agreed that he went in the 380s or 370s BC when Egypt was independent.2 This error too might seem to be simply the result of her slapdash approach. However, the mistake helps her general case that the Ancient Greeks knew very little about Egypt, by suggesting that Eudoxos did not visit Egypt but that if he did, his knowledge of it would somehow have been obscured by Persian rule or, as she puts it, it "might have presented serious difficulties" (p. 79). A more substantial and significant error is her statement on (p. 6): "Since the founding of this country (the USA), ancient Greece has been intimately connected with the ideals of democracy." In fact, the very source she cites, states something very different: ... in 1787 and 1788 the Anti-federalists did not have a classical leg to stand on. There was no tradition of representative democracy to which they could appeal, and direct democracies like Athens, bore the stigma of instability, violence, corruption and injustice ... (such) that even many friends of democracy in America avoided using the word. Like the advocates of mixed government, they used the word "republic ..."3 Mary Lefkowitz's sloppiness here might seem inconsequential, but in fact, it serves a very important purpose in her general argument. It is the implication that one cannot have freedom or democracy without a respectful awareness of ancient Greece, and that there has been a continuous flame of such reverence that can only be doused at our peril. Therefore -- she implies -- the Afrocentrists are enemies of freedom. This suggestion is untenable even within the Western tradition. The English "Revolution" of the 17th century relied on the anti-royalist aspects of the Bible and myths of Saxon freedom, while the American and French revolutions of the 18th century took Republican Rome as a model. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that since the 1820s, the images of ancient Greece, and Athens in particular, have usually served a positive function. On the other hand, ante-bellum Southern writers used Ancient Greece and Athens to demonstrate the political and cultural benefits of slavery.4 And today, extreme conservatives with whom -- as we shall see -- Mary Lefkowitz is intimately connected, are using images of ancient Greece for their own political agendas. Another type of error found in Not Out of Africa comes from the author's discovering what she wants and then failing to check further. For example, referring to the information Egyptian priests gave to the writer Diodoros of Sicily in the 1st century BC, she writes of their claims of Egyptian influence on Greece and adds that: "these included many Egyptian customs in their laws." He does not say what exactly these laws might have been; presumably no one really knew. The idea that early Greek law was inspired by Egyptian law is a historical fiction (p.75).5 On the following page, she repeats the charge that Diodoros lacked specific information. The passage she cited was from Diodoros I.98.2. If she had gone back to I.77.5 she would have

seen that Diodoros (or his informants) had specified that Solon had adopted an Egyptian law according to which everybody had to declare the source of their income.6 In I.79.3 Diodoros specified yet another Solonic law supposed to derive from Egypt, his famous seisachtheia "shaking off of debts" according to which a man could not be imprisoned or enslaved for debt. Whether or not Diodoros' claims are correct -- the last has been treated seriously in the 20th century, though there are chronological problems -- they are clearly specific.7 It is clear that in her eagerness to discredit Diodoros as vague and unspecific she failed to see, or at least to note, references that would weaken her case. I find it flattering that Mary Lefkowitz sometimes prefers to attack claims that I do not make to ones that I do. For an instance of the former class, there is her belief that I derive the Greek word hikesios "suppliant" from the Egyptian HK3 h3st "chieftains of foreign hill country," later known to the Greeks as Hyksos. These people invaded Egypt from the North East, in the 18th century BC and some of them may have gone on to the Aegean. In fact, I make no claim about the etymology of Hiko or hikneomai from which hikesios would appear to be derived. What I do say is that there was a punning relationship between Hyksos and hikesios and that the Egyptian name may have been the basis of Hikesios as the specific local title of the god Zeus. Where she attacks claims that I do make, she does precisely what she accuses the Afrocentrists of doing: she selects her evidence rejecting data that does not support her arguments. For instance, she admits the "ingenuity" of my proposal that the name Athena derives from the Egyptian Ht Nt, the religious name of the city of Sais, the center of the cult of the virgin goddess Neit. Furthermore, she provides no alternative, nor does she question the phonetics of my proposed etymology. Nevertheless, she rejects it because of what she sees as dissimilarities between the two goddesses (p. 65). The outline of the evidence for the etymology, which I shall present in more detail in volume III, is set out in volume I (pp. 5152). In this, I make it clear that Plato too identified the two goddesses, that there was strong iconographic or pictorial evidence linking them, and that a derivation from Ht Nt would explain the double use of the name for the goddess and her city. Why should Mary Lefkowitz make so many slips and use so many slippery arguments, when she does not have the excuses of many Afrocentrists of lacking training and resources? One reason is that although more than four years have passed since 1991, the book was obviously written in a hurry. It still shows signs of its origin in the cobbling together of articles written with passionate urgency for the popular and semi-popular press, with a few academic excursions. Nevertheless, I am convinced that this is less significant than the impact of two other factors, which, interestingly, she shares with the extreme Afrocentrists. The first of these is her conviction that she possesses an absolute general truth that allows her to be cavalier with specifics. The second is that she and her allies feel besieged and therefore they sometimes feel obliged to abandon the niceties of open academic debate. Her general truth is that Greece did not derive any significant part of its civilization from Egypt. In this, she not only flies in the face of Greek and Roman tradition but even goes further than most of her classicist colleagues. For instance, she is extremely doubtful that Plato ever went to Egypt because, she maintains, references to the visit only appear in the late Hellenistic period (1st century BC). However, according to recent scholarship on the issue, the tradition of the journey goes back to Speusippos, Plato's nephew and his successor as head of the Academy.8 Similarly, Mary Lefkowitz challenges 19th and 20th century classical scholarship when she says that:

Every English translation [of Herodotos II 43.2] that I know of says that Heracles was descended distantly "from Egypt." But the translation is incorrect. Herodotos is talking about Aegyptus the man rather than Aigyptos the country (p. 25). Her grounds for this defiance of conventional wisdom are that all the earlier scholars have mistranslated the preposition apo, which according to her, in this context can only mean "descent from" and "If he had meant Egypt the country he would have written ek" (p.181). There are three reasons why all the translators preferred Egypt to Aigyptos. The first is that no mythographer associated Lynkeus the sole surviving son of Aigyptos with either -- let alone both -- of Herakles' parents.9 Secondly, there was no point in making any distinction, because Danaos' twin brother, the legendary Aigyptos was supposed to have come directly from Egypt. The third reason is that the earlier scholars were not concerned by Herodotos' use of apo here. Mary Lefkowitz exaggerates the difference between it and ek. There are scores if not hundreds of instances of Herodotos' having used apo in its original sense of "motion from or out of". The phrase ap' Aigyptou itself appears twice a few chapters later in the lines, Melampos brought into Greece things that he had learned in Egypt, and "The names of nearly all the gods came to Greece from Egypt."10 Mary Lefkowitz's far fetched claim here can easily be explained in terms of her eagerness to separate Greece from Egypt and the desire to use her knowledge of language to intimidate the Afrocentrists. It does not cast doubt on Mary Lefkowitz's knowledge of Greek and Latin. On the other hand, while she knows these languages, she does not know much about linguistics and she has virtually no understanding of language contact, which is the relevant field when looking at the relations between Egypt and Greece. For instance, she writes: Once they were able to read real Egyptian ... it became clear to them that the relation of Egyptian to Greek culture was less close than they imagined. Egyptian belonged to the Afroasiatic family while Greek was an Indo-European language, akin to Sanskrit and European languages like Latin (pp. 57-8). The family relationships are undoubtedly correct, but to my knowledge, no Afrocentrist has ever argued that there was a genetic relationship between Egyptian and Greek. What they and I maintain is that Ancient Egyptian culture had a massive impact on that of Greece and that this is reflected in a substantial number of Egyptian names loan words in Greek.11 Mary Lefkowitz does not seem to realize that lexical loans primarily reflect contemporary contacts, not past genetic relationships. For example, while Chinese is even more distant genetically from Korean and Japanese than Egyptian and Semitic are from Greek, Korean and Japanese are filled with Chinese loan words.12 At another point she writes: Vague similarities do not prove any connection between words. The sound qualities of vowel consonants alike change when words are assimilated from one language to another, and even loan-words are transformed: for example, the Latinized Greek word episcopus becomes bishop in the mouths of Saxon converts in the 9th century A.D. (pp.23-4)13 The last clause may impress her readers with her learning, but in fact, it undermines her basic argument. If words as apparently dissimilar as episcopus and bishop can be related, it shows that given semantic parallels, "vague similarities" should be taken into account. Furthermore, the net must be cast still more widely when, as is the case with Egypt and Greece, contact

between two cultures has been carried on for many thousands of years and there will be many different phonetic correspondences. More of Bernal's reply: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1996/96.04.05.html. {end Bernal material} Martin Bernal on the Aryan Invasions: gimbutas.html. Martin Bernal equates the Exodus with the Expulsion of the Hyksos: archaeology-bible.html.

(6) Cyrus H. Gordon on race-mixing in Egypt

Gordon wrote in his book The Ancient Near East, 3rd edition, revised (W. W. Norton & Co, New York, 1965), p. 53: {quote} Egypt had a long prehistory ... There is evidence of a number of migrations. At an early date (perhaps well back in the fifth millenium) Hamito-Semites swept down from Asia into the Nile Valley, where they vanquished an earlier population. Egypt has always been exposed to infiltration from the north and south ends of the Nile Valley. Negroes came from the south and constituted the main racial stock of Nubia in antiquity and of the Sudan today. Further north, however, the white immigrants predominated, with the result that the population came to be light brown and to speak an Egyptian language related to the Semitic languages of Asia. {endquote} {end}

(7) Donald B. Redford enters the Afrocentrist debate

From Slave to Pharaoh: The Black Experience of Ancient Egypt by Donald B. Redford http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0801878144/qid=1086985198/sr=16/ref=sr_1_6/103-2213591-1843826?v=glance&s=books ... Donald B. Redford is a professor of classics and ancient Mediterranean studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Among his many books are (as editor) The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt and The Oxford Essential Guide to Egyptian Mythology, and (as author) Akhenaten, the Heretic King and Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times. ... In From Slave to Pharaoh, noted Egyptologist Donald B. Redford examines over two millennia of complex social and cultural interactions between Egypt and the Nubian and Sudanese civilizations that lay to the south of Egypt. These interactions resulted in the expulsion of the black Kushite pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty in 671 B.C. by an invading Assyrian army. Redford traces the development of Egyptian perceptions of race as their dominance over the darker-skinned peoples of Nubia and the Sudan grew, exploring the cultural construction of spatial and spiritual boundaries between Egypt and other African peoples. Redford focuses on the role of racial identity in the formulation of imperial power in Egypt and the legitimization of its sphere of influence, and he highlights the dichotomy between the Egyptians' treatment

of the black Africans it deemed enemies and of those living within Egyptian society. He also describes the range of responsesfrom resistance to assimilationof subjugated Nubians and Sudanese to their loss of self-determination. Indeed, by the time of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, the culture of the Kushite kings who conquered Egypt in the late eighth century B.C. was thoroughly Egyptian itself. Moving beyond recent debates between Afrocentrists and their critics over the racial characteristics of Egyptian civilization, From Slave to Pharaoh reveals the true complexity of race, identity, and power in Egypt as documented through surviving texts and artifacts, while at the same time providing a compelling account of war, conquest, and culture in the ancient world. {end} Let us suppose that Diop's account is true - that "whites" came late to civilization, but subsequently rose to eminence; and that "blacks" at the same time fell from those heights. Is not the Marxist Cultural Revolution, in the West since the 1960s, destroying civilization? Preventing its transmission to the younger generation? Marxism as anti-civilization: anticiv.html. Is it too, not based on Akhnaton's "Monotheism"? Sigmund Freud on the connection between Akhnaton and Jewish "Universalism": moses.html. Robert Ellwood shows in his book The Sixties Spiritual Awakening (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ, 1994) the connection between the New Left and a Jewish reassertion of monotheism as "the fundamental premise of Western religion: a single transcendent center of value that is more than merely subjective and beside which everything without exception must be weighed and judged" (p.95): new-left.html The "Black Books" site http://www.ncobra.com/documents/booksguide.html says this of Dr G. K. Osei: "85. No Woman No Cry: The Life of Bob Marley, by Dr. G. K. Osei. This is the classic that was written by one of the legendary, Independent Black publishers, Dr. Osei, a Ghanaian who died in the last phase of his work in North America." To purchase G. K. Osei's books second-hand via Abebooks: http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/BookSearch?an=g+k+osei. The MAAT Newsletter (Africentric Scholarship): http://www.melanet.com/clegg_series/scholarship.html. More on the Phoenicians: http://phoenicia.org/ To order Cheikh Anta Diop's book The African Origin of Civilization from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1556520727/qid=1025912029/sr=11/ref=sr_1_1/t/102-7280709-4452105 To purchase Cheikh Anta Diop's books second-hand via Abebooks: http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/BookSearch?an=cheikh+anta+diop.

HER-EM-AKHET
LESSON ONE

"Almost all the names of the gods came into Greece from Egypt" - - HORODOTUS "Almost all the names of the gods came into Greece from Egypt. My inquiries prove that they were all derived from a foreign source, and my opinion is that Egypt furnished the greater number. For with the exception of Neptune and the Dioscuri, whom I mentioned above, and Juno, Vesta, Themis, the Graces, and the Nereids, the other gods have been known from time immemorial in Egypt. This I assert on the authority of the Egyptians themselves. The gods, with whose names they profess themselves unacquainted, the Greeks received, I believe, from the Pelasgi, except Neptune. Of him they got their knowledge from the Libyans, by whom he has been always honoured, and who were anciently the only people that had a god of the name. The Egyptians differ from the Greeks also in paying no divine honours to heroes. Besides these which have been here mentioned, there are many other practices whereof I shall speak hereafter, which the Greeks have borrowed from Egypt. The peculiarity, however, which they observe in their statues of Mercury they did not derive from the Egyptians, but from the Pelasgi; from them the Athenians first adopted it, and afterwards it passed from the Athenians to the other Greeks. For just at the time when the Athenians were entering into the Hellenic body, the Pelasgi came to live with them in their country, whence it was that the latter came first to be regarded as Greeks. Whoever has been initiated into the mysteries of the Cabiri will understand what I mean. The Samothracians received these mysteries from the Pelasgi, who, before they went to live in Attica, were dwellers in Samothrace, and imparted their religious ceremonies to the inhabitants. The Athenians, then, who were the first of all the Greeks to make their statues of Mercury in this way, learnt the practice from the Pelasgians; and by this people a religious account of the matter is given, which is explained in the Samothracian mysteries. In early times the Pelasgi, as I know by information which I got at Dodona, offered sacrifices of all kinds, and prayed to the gods, but

had no distinct names or appellations for them, since they had never heard of any. They called them gods (Theoi, disposers), because they disposed and arranged all things in such a beautiful order. After a long lapse of time the names of the gods came to Greece from Egypt, and the Pelasgi learnt them, only as yet they knew nothing of Bacchus, of whom they first heard at a much later date. Not long after the arrival of the names they sent to consult the oracle at Dodona about them. This is the most ancient oracle in Greece, and at that time there was no other. To their question, "Whether they should adopt the names that had been imported from the foreigners?" the oracle replied by recommending their use. Thenceforth in their sacrifices the Pelasgi made use of the names of the gods, and from them the names passed afterwards to the Greeks. Whence the gods severally sprang, whether or no they had all existed from eternity, what forms they bore- these are questions of which the Greeks knew nothing until the other day, so to speak. For Homer and Hesiod were the first to compose Theogonies, and give the gods their epithets, to allot them their several offices and occupations, and describe their forms; and they lived but four hundred years before my time, as I believe. As for the poets who are thought by some to be earlier than these, they are, in my judgment, decidedly later writers. In these matters I have the authority of the priestesses of Dodona for the former portion of my statements; what I have said of Homer and Hesiod is my own opinion. The following tale is commonly told in Egypt concerning the oracle of Dodona in Greece, and that of Ammon in Libya. My informants on the point were the priests of Jupiter at Thebes. They said "that two of the sacred women were once carried off from Thebes by the Phoenicians, and that the story went that one of them was sold into Libya, and the other into Greece, and these women were the first founders of the oracles in the two countries." On my inquiring how they came to know so exactly what became of the women, they answered, "that diligent search had been made after them at the time, but that it had not been found possible to discover where they were; afterwards, however, they received the information which they had given me." This was what I heard from the priests at Thebes; at Dodona, however, the women who deliver the oracles relate the matter as follows:

'Two black doves flew away from Egyptian Thebes, and while one directed its flight to Libya, the other came to them. She alighted on an oak, and sitting there began to speak with a human voice, and told them that on the spot where she was, there should henceforth be an oracle of Jove. They understood the announcement to be from heaven, so they set to work at once and erected the shrine. The dove which flew to Libya bade the Libyans to establish there the oracle of Ammon.' This likewise is an oracle of Jupiter. The persons from whom I received these particulars were three priestesses of the Dodonaeans, the eldest Promeneia, the next Timarete, and the youngest Nicandra- what they said was confirmed by the other Dodonaeans who dwell around the temple. The Dodonaeans called the women doves because they were foreigners, and seemed to them to make a noise like birds. After a while the dove spoke with a human voice, because the woman, whose foreign talk had previously sounded to them like the chattering of a bird, acquired the power of speaking what they could understand. Lastly, by calling the dove black the Dodonaeans indicated that the woman was an Egyptian. And certainly the character of the oracles at Thebes and Dodona is very similar. Besides this form of divination, the Greeks learnt also divination by means of victims from the Egyptians." - HORODATUS -

HER-EM-AKHET
LESSON TWO

"The widespread damage to the temple images has allowed misinformed and misguided scholars to argue from the temple

evidence that ancient Kemet was a multi-racial society and therefore belongs to the world's heritage and not necessarily to African history."

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THE VANISHING EVIDENCE OF CLASSICAL AFRICAN CIVILIZATIONS

by Professor Manu Ampim

The important work of Professor Manu Ampim has been place on its own web site, the links for which are listed below.

THE VANISHING EVIDENCE OF CLASSICAL AFRICAN CIVILIZATIONS: A 2001 Update Prof. Manu Ampim

The Vanishing Evidence series is a general summary of years of detailed observation and research. The full documentation supporting the conclusions expressed in this series of articles, including dozens of photographs, will be published in my forthcoming book, Modern Fraud: The Forged Ancient Egyptian Statues of Ra-Hotep and Nofret. I make no attempt here to prove such a complicated case as forgeries and the deliberate destruction of African artifacts in just a few short articles. Rather, this series is simply a preliminary report on my findings, which will be given extensive treatment in my book Modern Fraud. - MA SCOPE OF THE VANISHING EVIDENCE SERIES I originally wrote "The Vanishing Evidence of Classical African Civilizations" series in The Gaither Reporter in 1995-1996. The 3-part series documents the unintentional human-aided deterioration, as well as the deliberate and massive alteration, mutilation, and destruction of ancient Egyptian artifacts. The series covers three broad categories of this vanishing evidence: the Temple Evidence (part I), the Tomb Evidence (part II), and the Museum Evidence (part III). Before writing the series, I had meticulously studied artifacts and images at temples, tombs, pyramids, museums, and ancient residential sites throughout Egypt and Nubia (1990, 19941995). I also carefully examined ancient Egyptian and Nubian artifacts at nearly all of the major museums, institutes, and libraries in eleven European countries (19891990), and in dozens of cities throughout the U.S. and Canada (1991-1992). Overall, I painstakingly studied well over a million images and artifacts before writing the The Vanishing Evidence series. My initial goal was simply to follow the path of research outlined by the eminent scholar, Dr. Chancellor Williams in The Destruction of Black Civilization (1974), and conduct primary research on ancient Black civilizations. As Williams pointed out, the accurate knowledge of African science, social organization, and advanced spiritual systems can only be known from an unbiased first-hand study of the history and artifacts. Though I began my extensive multi-country research tour with a mission of documenting the specific details of the advanced African civilizations of ancient Egypt and Nubia, a quite different and unexpected theme emerged in every region that I studied. I was struck by the specific patterns of deliberate alterations and defacement of the artifacts. These patterns became clear after I had visited the initial group of European museums. What I noticed most was that these acts were more than simply knocking off the noses of statues, they involve a much broader assault on ancient Black images.

The pair statue from the Tomb of Ikhetneb has lost most of its original paint on the faces and upper body of the two images, while much of the original paint on the legs and feet still survive. It seems evident that the darker paint has been deliberately erased on the face and upper body, thus giving the images the illusion of a white-skin appearance. METHODS OF DESTRUCTION AND ALTERATION My observations of the evidence are careful and are supported by photographic and video documentation. The extensive study of over a million artifacts and images gave me the keen power of observation to make analyses of the same materials that are also available to Egyptologists, although most of them have not studied the volume of the materials that I have examined. When the artifacts in question were examined meticulously, I found that the methods used to change or damage the images are varied, and they include: subtly altering the shape of the nose on statues by using some type of sanding device; adding on false noses; reshaping or completely destroying the face on temple and tomb walls; lightening the color of the face and body paint on statues and paintings; completely eliminating the paint on statues and paintings and thus making the images appear white; destroying the lower facial structure, particularly the chin and jaw area; putting in false bluish-gray inlaid eyes; plastering over temple images with White Portland Cement during ongoing conservation work; and creating outright forgeries! These acts of fraud and deliberate destruction is what I call the handiwork of modern conspirators. I was stunned by such an angry, vicious, and widespread attack against Black images by the enemies of Classical African Civilizations. MODERN FORGERIES One of the most absurd invention of the conspirators is the forged statues of RaHotep and Nofret in the Cairo Museum. I present detailed and concrete evidence in my forthcoming book, Modern Fraud: The Forged Ancient Egyptian Statues of RaHotep and Nofret (also see part 3 of this series on the Museum Evidence) that there

is a list of specific artistic rules which are consistently applied to statue after statue throughout the pyramid age.[1] Although some writers would attempt to argue to the contrary, the fact that there was a body of specific artistic rules is demonstrated by the tens of thousands of statues and paintings that are presented in exactly the same way across various sites and cites throughout all of the major periods: the old, middle, and new kingdoms. Thus, these shocking forgeries make no artistic sense as they violate a long list of clearly defined rules, according to the ancient Egyptian rule system. Further, these fabricated European-looking statues do not make any cultural or historical sense, and it is consistent that they were found (or rather created by modern hands) during the 19th century, which has been called by some historians as The Great Age of Fakes. There is no doubt that the Ra-Hotep and Nofret forgeries stand completely outside of the ancient Egyptian artistic, cultural, and historical reality. One of the great forgeries of the 19th century which has already been proven is that of the famous Queen Tetisheri. The statue of Queen Tetisheri was purchased by the British Museum in 1890, and this fake piece (with its facial features resembling most Europeans) was paraded around the world until it was first suspected as a fraud in 1984. This fake Tetisheri statue was showcased in the British Museum special exhibit on forgeries in 1990, but not before this forgery fooled experts and deceived the world for 100 years![2]

This limestone statuette inscribed with the name of Queen Tetisheri was long regarded as an important piece for the study of ancient Egyptian sculpture of the late 17th and early 18th dynasties. Now, however, this world renown statuette is regarded as a modern forgery. WHO ARE THE CONSPIRATORS? Who are the conspirators responsible for these acts of destruction, alteration and invention is a basic question that must be answered. Brian Fagan in his book on The Rape of Egypt (1975) documents a list of culprits: the Christian Copts who

destroyed statues and monuments; the conquering Arabs who dismantled ancient buildings; and the 18th and 19th century European travelers, adventurers, and archeologists who were treasure hunters, plunderers, and looters. It was during the 19th century that a vast number of ancient Egyptian artifacts were excavated, but most of these discoveries were not adequately documented, with original on-site photographs and detailed field reports, which are now standard procedures within the archeological field. The systematic documentation of archaeological excavations did not develop until many years after volumes of artifacts were already taken from their original African sites and eventually placed in museums. Indeed, it is a sketchy record of how most of these artifacts were discovered and eventually made it onto museum floors. This brings us to the identification of a large group of conspirators, who are the handlers of the excavated artifacts. This group includes excavators, antiquities dealers, museum curators and directors, and restorers and conservationists . Somewhere between the original excavation of the artifacts, to their transport, sale and acquisition, storage, cleaning, conservation, and finally their display on the museum floor there has been a diligent effort at altering, reworking, and touching up the facial features of countless statues. The conspirators who perpetrate these acts are behind the scenes actors who use a hit and run strategy of defacement and alteration of the art. They hide their hands from public view, but the results of their fraudulent and destructive activity is plain to see by anyone who carefully examines the evidence, as their pattern of fraud is highly distinctive. The lack of original documentation of many excavated artifacts has made it easy for these conspirators to commit their fraud. It is well known that many great artifacts of ancient Egypt were destroyed by the hands of plunderers during the widespread looting and trading in antiquities that went on for centuries, but what is not well known is the full story of the artifacts that did survive the wave of plunderers and make it into modern museum collections. I show in Modern Fraud that a large number of these surviving artifacts have undergone a racial makeover at the hands of modern conspirators. The results of their fraudulent work are the countless altered artifacts, reworked pieces, fake genealogies, and a host of forged statues. The most recent revelation of the racist fabrications by this group of handlers, or more specifically Western museum directors, is reported in the current issue of Archaeology Magazine 54 (September-October 2001, p. 27). This report is associated with an article by Peter Lacovara et al. Archaeology reported that in the absence of scholarship the directors of the Niagara Falls Museum in Ontario, Canada fabricated pedigrees for many of their Egyptian mummies in the mid-nineteenth century. The most imaginative of these fake pedigrees, or false identities, was created for a bearded male mummy of the Roman period. The museum officials invented the following elaborate story for him which is a complete myth: General Ossipumphnoferu the General in Chief of Thotmes III. ... He was a man of military skill, also a famous magician. He was 60 years old when he died. The scar on his forehead was caused by an enraged elephant while defending the king from his onslaughts. A palace was erected for the general near that of the king. The museum officials took their scandalous activity even further, as for many years the general was displayed in the coffin of Iawttayesheret, a high-ranking woman from the 25th dynasty, which was 700 years before his time! It is incredible that the directors of a public museum would take an unidentified Roman period mummy, with

a European facial appearance, put him in a womans coffin from 700 years earlier, and then create a bogus identity for him as a famous general during a period which was another 700 years earlier than the coffin he was buried in! Eventhough this mummy and other artifacts at the museum were not studied comprehensively by an Egyptologist, this is yet another case which documents that Western museum directors would go to any lengths in the 19th and early 20th century to falsify evidence. Currently, there is no doubt that this list of conspirators includes local Egyptian government workers, who are carrying out many acts of destruction on a regular basis. These men either work for the Egyptian government on conservation projects, or for various European or North American archeological teams. On several occasions in the 1980s and 1990s, these unsupervised minimally-skilled government workers have been caught on video tape plastering over temple images and inscriptions! In fact, it is impossible to visit the Karnak Temple in Luxor and not see the recent defacement, and it is suspicious that with rare exception Egyptologists are silent about this matter. WHAT ARE THEIR MOTIVES After examining a vast body of artifacts, it seems evident that the ultimate motives of these groups of conspirators from the 19th century to the present is to eliminate the Black images from the ancient Egyptian historical record. This motivation is consistent with the racist views of many of the 19th and early 20th century Egyptologists who made many ridiculous assertions about Black people having little to no role in ancient Egypt, and that this was a civilization founded by white or Semitic people from the North. These baseless claims were widespread within the ranks of Egyptologists, and they helped inspire both H. M. Hergets 1941 National Geographic Magazine paintings of pale-skinned Egyptians and the imaginary white images created by Hollywood, which together have deceived the public for the past half century.[3] This nonsense was exposed in the 1950s by the late Senegalese scholar, Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop. Diop assembled an awesome body of evidence to document the Black foundation of ancient Egypt and to expose the dishonest discourse of Western Egyptologists who were, as he put it, performing intellectual acrobatics to avoid dealing with concrete evidence to support their contentions about the Northern origins of ancient Egyptian civilization.[4] The mainstream Egyptologist Bruce Trigger in The American Discovery of Ancient Egypt (1995) discusses Diops impact and that it is because of his work that ancient Egypt is now seen by mainstream scholars as an African nation. Trigger also comments that the white racist rhetoric that permeated most early twentieth-century writings about the development of Egyptian civilization has long been abandoned, [but] ideas formulated at the time have continued to influence thinking about the origins and nature of Egyptian civilization.[5] The white racist rhetoric that Trigger describes as permeating early twentieth century writings is simply a continuation of the same racist views held in the 19th century, and it is within this climate that the behind the scenes handlers had both the motives and the opportunity to deface images, alter facial features, and create racist

forgeries. RESPONSE TO THE SERIES Since I first wrote "The Vanishing Evidence" series in 1995-1996, there has been much discussion, and many individuals across the country have indicated to me that they have also observed both the human-aided deterioration and the deliberate acts of destruction against Black images and artifacts. I have examined photographs of several of these individuals who have traveled to Egypt at various times, and for the most part only a very small percentage of their photographs are useful, because the individual photographers are not trained on how to systematically document the damage. However, some of the images are invaluable as they document the ongoing assault on Black images at major temple sites. It is now known by many that the physical evidence of classical African civilizations is vanishing before our eyes in essentially every geographical area. Many people are now aware that the human-aided decay, distortion of the artifacts, and deliberate defacement is widespread and this damage is most obviously visible at popular temple sites throughout Egypt. Predictably, there have been a few white writers who have made ignorant comments about the The Vanishing Evidence series without even looking at the artifacts in question! They have not examined the first-hand evidence that I outline in the series, but they attack without anything other than empty emotion. They are in blind support of the fraudulent activity and racist scholarship of the 19th and 20th century. These people subscribe to Western colonial scholarship, eventhough this scholarship was born and bred in the brutal period of European expansion and colonialism. Egyptology as a discipline originated in this shameful 19th century era, and still maintains -- with little improvement -- its arrogant colonial discourse about African culture and civilizations. Any research that challenges this Western paradigm is automatically attacked by the apologists of this paradigm as wrong misinformed, or pseudo-scientific. These individuals are willing to do whatever it takes to ignore evidence, and in some cases lie and mislead the public. PREVIOUS DOCUMENTATION After I had begun organizing my information on the vanishing evidence theme that had emerged from my museum and field work, I later found out that a portion of my work of documenting the ongoing deterioration and destruction in Egypt had already been anticipated by the accomplished Egyptologist John Romer nearly 20 years earlier.[6] On his website, Romer republished a 1997 essay which summarizes his many years of work in the Kings Valley and is entitled The Valley of Death, wherein the author wrote: The warning has been sounded. Loud and clear. Egypts famed Valley of the Kings...is in danger itself of the death it silently encloses. In less than 25 yearsunless something is done urgentlythe valley of priceless ancient tombs could become the valley of ochre mud. And responsible is the planets prime agent of destructionman himself. Lastly, there is also video footage shot by Ashra Kwesi in his video series on The African Origin of Civilization that I recall viewing in the 1980s. Kwesis short footage showed local Arab workers chopping and plastering over wall material at one of the Luxor area temples. Kwesi's footage was

probably my first exposure to the documentation which shows the vanishing evidence of classical African civilizations. An updated version of The Vanishing Evidence series, complete with numerous photographs, form an important section in my upcoming book on Modern Fraud, which concerns the Ra-Hotep and Nofret forgeries. Prof. Manu Ampim October 2001 Prof. Manu Ampim is a historian and primary researcher on African and African American culture & history. He is director of Advancing The Research and can be reached at PO Box 18623, Oakland, CA 94619. Email: Profmanu@acninc.net. Telephone: (510) 482-5791 or 1-(888)-822-3449 x9939. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------Notes [1] I list some of these rules in Manu Ampim, Ra-Hotep and Nofret: Modern Forgeries in the Cairo Museum? in Egypt: Child of Africa (1994), pp. 207-212. I will discuss the full body of these rules in my forthcoming book, Modern Fraud: The Forged Ancient Egyptian Statues of Ra-Hotep and Nofret. [2] For details see: Mark Jones, ed., Fake: The Art of Deception (1990), pp. 160, 162. The Tetisheri statue was first suspected to be a forgery in 1984 by Mr. W.V. Davies, Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum. See Davies, British Museum Occasional Paper (no. 36, 1984). For the significance of this forgery see Manu Ampim, Ra-Hotep and Nofret: Modern Forgeries in the Cairo Museum? in Egypt: Child of Africa (1994), pp. 207-208. [Return to text] [3] William Hayes, Daily Life in Ancient Egypt, National Geographic Magazine 80 (1941): 419-515. H. M. Hergets 32 imaginary color paintings with pale-skinned Egyptians are used as illustrations for Hayes article, eventhough Hayes states the Egyptians are, and always have been, Africans, and that they are a brown and brunet (i.e. dark brown or reddish brown) skinned people. This deliberate public deceit and racism is still being carrying on by KMT Magazine, which uses these same dishonest images created by Herget more than a half century ago. For example see: KMT premiere issue (spring 1990), pp. 9, 11, 16; and KMT vol. 5, no. 4 (Winter 1994-95), pp. 45-46, 60. KMT now seems to have adopted a new favorite set of modern racist drawings by Winifred Brunton to illustrate its various articles; for the complete set of the Brunton drawings, see KMT, vol. 1, no. 4 (Winter 1990-91), pp. 52-61. Also see KMT, vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 1997), p. 31; and vol. 12, no. 3 (Fall 2001), pp. 1, 74. [Return to text] [4]Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1974), trans. by Mercer Cook. The African scholars C.A. Diop and Theophile Obenga solidified their position of Egypt as a Black civilization at the historic 1974 Peopling of Ancient Egypt Symposium. See: UNESCO, The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script: Proceedings of the Symposium held in Cairo,

Egypt from 28 January to 3 February 1974 (The General History of Africa, Studies and Documents, no. 1, 1978), p. 102. [Return to text] [5]Bruce Trigger, Egyptology, Ancient Egypt, and the American Imagination in The American Discovery of Ancient Egypt (1995), pp. 21-35. [Return to text] [6]John Romer had already done thorough work in documenting the deterioration of the monuments, with his publication, Physical Deterioration of the Royal Tombs in the Valley of the Kings: A Progress Report on the 1977-1978 Season of the Brooklyn Museum Theban Expedition (1978). Along the same lines, Romer wrote The Rape of Tutankhamun (1993), which was later turned into a one-hour PBS television documentary in 1994. [See: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7171/romer.html] [Return to text] Note, if any portion of this text, or any of the graphics in this article are used, please credit Prof. Ampim. Also, please do not use the photos without the accompaning captions.

THE VANISHING EVIDENCE OF CLASSICAL AFRICAN CIVILIZATIONS Part I: The Temple Evidence Prof. Manu Ampim

3RD SEASON OF FIELD RESEARCH (AUGUST SEPTEMBER 1995) I reported in the March 1995 issue of the The Gaither Reporter that on my previous primary research trip to Egypt and Nubia in November/December 1994 I found a significant increase in the activity of various Euro-American and Egyptian government conservation teams. I further noted that there is a direct relationship between these conservation teams and the accelerated defacement and destruction of many ancient Egyptian images and inscriptions, particularly on the temple walls. I also indicated in my article that while several of the greatest Pharaonic (ancient Egyptian) monuments are in a state of rapid decay, there is a steady flow of Africentric study tours which are visiting these monuments, while doing nothing to either document the remaining but rapidly disappearing images and artifacts, or to help save these great African monuments for future generations. After my 1994 trip to Egypt/Nubia, I recognized that due to the incredible rate of decay and destruction there is little time to document the surviving evidence of classical African civilizations on the monuments of this region. Thus, I recently completed my third season of field research to this area to photograph and video the evidence that is virtually disappearing from temple walls every day. In fact, there has been a threat to the survival of the Pharaonic monuments since the middle of the

19th century when these half-buried structures were removed from the sand by European adventurers. When these structures were uncovered, they were destabilized upon being exposed to the natural elements (sun, wind, and rain), and to looters who swiftly dismantled the temple structures for profit schemes and to use the stones as building material. My 3rd season of work in Egypt and northern Nubia consisted of 5 weeks (August/September 1995) of field research. I conducted primary (first-hand) research at 27 sites throughout this Nile Valley region, from Tanis, Giza, and Sakkara in northern Egypt, to Aswan, Sehel Island, and Beit al-Wali in northern Nubia. My main task was to observe, record, and document the vanishing evidence of classical African civilizations. My other objectives were to acquire further ammunition to document the Ra-Hotep/Nofret forgeries in the Cairo Museum, and to continue my study of ancient African social organization and spiritual culture.
1

As I had expected when I returned to Egypt/Nubia in 1995, some of the temple carvings that were visible in November/December 1994 had disappeared in just eight months. The disappearance of these carvings is due mainly to the fact that nearly every ancient Egyptian temple is currently under some level of conservation. This so-called conservation work is being carried out by two main groups: European and American research teams, and Egyptians working under the auspices of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (formerly the Egyptian Antiquities Organization). In many cases, these two groups have not conserved the monuments by keeping them from further damage or lost, but rather they have permanently damaged and even deliberately destroyed images and inscriptions that have been in existence for thousands of years. Thus, the erosion of the monuments in recent years caused by the natural elements and the pressure of industrialization, urban growth, and agricultural development have been far outstripped by the deliberate destructive acts by European researchers and Arab workers and citizens. DESTRUCTION OF THE PHYSICAL EVIDENCE The wall surface of the great Karnak Temple of Egypt is literally being taken apart stone by stone, as conservation workers are removing dozens of pounds of rock and wall material every day and discarding them as debris. The rate of defacement and destruction of Karnak and other temples is stunning. I have documented in just over half a year the progressive lost and calculated damage to the temple carvings. In just 15 minutes local Egyptian government workers (most of whom are Arab), in alliance with Western conspirators from Europe and North America, are able to deface sacred African temple carvings from one of the worlds most profound collections of art which have remained in reasonably good condition for nearly 4,000 years. With a few crude strokes, these so-called restorers and conservationists are altering the facial features of relief images, defacing many temple scenes, and demolishing other scenes until they are almost unrecognizable. A careful examination of the pattern of wall damage at Karnak substantiate these points. It seems evident that this crude, clumsy, and incompetent conservation work is aimed at nothing less than the destruction of all the physical evidence which demonstrates that both ancient Egypt and Nubia are classical African civilizations .

Currently, the wall surface of the great Karnak Temple, along with its images and inscriptions, is being thoroughly dismantled. This concerted effort to destroy the physical evidence of classical African civilizations is evident when one considers the facts. For example, with the construction of the Aswan High Dam in 1960, the whole area of lower Nubia was flooded and is now under Lake Nasser, the largest man-made lake in the world. The ancient Nubian remains/artifacts were effectively destroyed before the nature, quantity, and significance of this material could be determined. Tragically, these artifacts are at the bottom of Lake Nasser and will probably never be recovered. This is a devastating lost in regards to preserving the memory of the classical Nubia. Most of the limited Nubian artifacts that were salvaged before the rising flood waters damaged them were shipped off to museums throughout Europe and America.

(A) Modern conspirators have deliberately cut a line through the face of Ramses II in order to change the shape of his nose.

(B) The face of Ramses IV has been completely obliterated by modern conspirators. Many of the monuments now remaining in northern Nubia are the more recent temples built under foreign rule by the Greeks and Romans, so that there are numerous images on these structures which represent European -- not African -faces. In fact, many of the popular temples in Egypt and northern Nubia are from the foreign Greco-Roman period, so there is a significant mixture of indigenous Africans and a host of foreigners from southern Europe and western Asia. With the vast majority of the physical evidence of an African Nubia already destroyed or removed from northern Nubia itself, the next project of the conspirators is to erase the memory of an African Egypt. I have found that in most cases on the walls of ancient Egyptian temples, when there is a rare undamaged African image it is safely away from the view of most tourists, because the average tourist rarely has the time or interest to venture beyond the regular tourist track and see these powerful African images. Every single tour guide (who are almost all Arabs) that I have observed take tourists to the same areas of the temple to point out only selected scenes and images. There is hardly time for tourists to wonder off and explore on their own, and if there is a break in the formal tour people are usually at the concession area using the bathroom, eating, or buying souvenirs. They are not expending energy walking long distances and climbing over walls trying to see (not to mention study) every section of these huge Karnak Temple complex, which includes a host of smaller temples, courts, shrines, obelisks, halls, statues, wall carvings, pylons, mud-brick houses, and an open-air museum, etc.

The original wall surface has been thoroughly destroyed and then smoothed over with White Portland Cement by modern conspirators. The right shoulder and lower body of one of the figures is still visible. The widespread damage to the temple images has allowed misinformed and misguided Egyptologists to argue from such sources as the temple evidence that ancient Egypt was a multi-racial society and therefore belongs to the worlds heritage and not necessarily to African history. There are probably about a million tourists each year who visit Egypt and Nubia, and they get a totally false view of the identity of the builders of these great civilizations, largely because the evidence of the builders Black origin is disappearing. This vanishing evidence has enabled dishonest Egyptologists and tour guides to misrepresent the identity of the founders and builders of ancient Egypt by selectively pointing out the non-African images on the walls. Actually, many of the images which appear to look non-African have undergone a racial make-over and look nothing like they did originally. These images have been crudely recarved by European and Arab conspirators who work hard to eliminate all traces of African facial features. Only through exhaustive firsthand research can one demonstrate from the surviving on-site temple evidence that ancient Egypt was a Black civilization.

An Egyptian government worker stands in front of the massive wall damage that he has just created. The evidence of his destructive activity is on the ground around him: scaffolding, piles of dismantled wall material, tools, mixing water, and a bag of White Portland Cement to smooth over the wall surface after the images and inscriptions are broken away. CHICAGO HOUSE CONSERVATION Currently, there are a couple of major temple conservation and restoration efforts in the Waset (Luxor) area of Egypt. One such effort is the Great Hypostyle Hall

Project of Karnak, which is a joint project by the Centre Franco-Egyptian detude des Temples of Karnak and the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology, at Memphis State University. A second project is the Epigraphic Survey of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. The Oriental Institute project is headquartered at the Chicago House in Luxor, Egypt. The Chicago House has been engaged in an ongoing conservation effort in the Waset (Luxor) area for over 70 years in order to document the scenes and inscriptions on the walls of the endangered and rapidly decaying Pharaonic monuments of this area. The Waset area contains the largest concentration of ancient temples still standing anywhere in the world. The work of the Chicago House includes creating a photo archive of 15,000 negatives and some 20,000 prints (as of 1990), which provides the most extensive photographic coverage of Waset temples and tombs available in one place anywhere in the world. However, the Chicago House project is concerned with simply recording the temple scenes and inscriptions and not with protecting the monument carvings from further deterioration and destruction . Thus, while the Chicago House artists, photographers, and Egyptologists are making a record of the temple wall materials, the carved surfaces are practically falling off the wall before their eyes. As the human-aided erosion and deliberate destruction continue, soon there will be nothing left but bare walls and the drawings and photos created by the Chicago House. Once all of the original evidence vanishes, the official records of what the Waset area temple carvings looked like will be kept by the Chicago House. Egyptologists and other scholars will be able to consult these records, while the general public will be forced to rely on a distorted second-hand view of ancient Egyptian civilization. In years to come, with the original evidence gone from the temple walls one will have to do thorough archival research to find the evidence of the Black origins of ancient Egypt and Nubia. In fact, even while there are temple carvings still visible today, European Egyptologists and scholarly publications such as KMT Magazine do not hesitate to present racist drawings and depictions that clearly ignore and contradict the historical facts. The Chicago Houses limited concept of conservation is to record all of the scenes and inscriptions on the Waset area temples, so that volumes of books can be created and available for scholars and researchers to consult after the carvings have vanished. The problem with this approach, of course, is that we will be forever dependent on the accuracy and interpretations of the European artists and photographers of the Chicago House. The Chicago Houses work of documenting the material on temple walls is far from being an exact science. Instead, the photographs depend heavily on the light source and angle, and the exposure and development of the film. The more damage there is to a wall surface, the greater the difficulty in interpreting a photograph, where details can become confusing or even lost in the shadows. As a backup to the photograph, the artists stand in front of the temple wall and trace (directly on the surface of the photoprint) the shapes and proportions of the original carving, while eliminating the damaged areas. The drawing is later inked and examined independently by two Egyptologists who make suggestions for corrections or restorations of missing or damaged areas of the scene. Afterwards, there are

repeated consultations between the artists and Egyptologists so that the drawings are as faithful as possible to what is preserved on the wall. This process is far from being precise as the final inked drawings are ultimately determined by the assumptions and interpretations of the European Egyptologists and artists . Moreover, it is well established within the field of Egyptology that mistakes are often made by the most careful artists and researchers. PROJECT 2000 WORLD HISTORY AGENDA The Europeans are the only group on the planet which have the audacity to write a history of the world, and there is little doubt that they will put together an explosive barrage of propaganda about classical African civilizations and other cultures of the world in the year 2000. With Project 2000, the European propaganda machine will be in high gear as they tell and re-tell the history of the world. With much of the original evidence of classical African civilizations gone, the European obsession with the falsification of African history and culture will be much easier and more effective. RECOMMENDATIONS The Waset temples and other Pharaonic monuments throughout Egypt are in jeopardy, and unfortunately unless there is swift action taken the carvings of some temples will completely disappear within a few years, while those of others will be gone by next century. 1. African Americans should join the growing effort and write letters to the Supreme Council of Antiquities demanding that there be a 10-year moratorium on all excavations in Egypt, and that instead of more unnecessary excavations the international resources be focused on true conservation and saving the temples and other Pharaonic monuments. 2. The African American community should challenge Africentric study tours to stop the excessive European-style tourist trips to Egypt, and instead either eliminate these trips or transform them into work/study tours, where they are conducting field work and documenting the remaining artifacts.
2

3. African people must create several central archives of photographs and video tapes of the monuments and artifacts in order to preserve an independent record of the remaining evidence of classical African civilizations. (Advancing The Research has already begun this project and I welcome any duplicate photos and video tapes in order to continue working toward establishing an extensive independent archive of source material.)
Originally published 1995.

[1]

For a summary of my work on these forgeries, see: Ra-Hotep and Nofret: Modern

Forgeries in the Cairo Museum? pp. 207-212 in Egypt: Child of Africa (1994), edited by Ivan Van Sertima. For more details see: Manu Ampim, Towards Black Community Develop: Moving Beyond the Limitations of the Lecture Model, 2nd ed. (1996) pp. 169-177.
[2]

Prof. Manu Ampim is a historian and primary researcher on African and African American culture & history. He is director of Advancing The Research and can be reached at PO Box 18623, Oakland, CA 94619. Email: Profmanu@acninc.net. Telephone: (510) 482-5791 or 1-(888)-822-3449 x9939. Note, if any portion of this text, or any of the graphics in this article are used, please credit Prof. Ampim. Also, please do not use the photos without the accompaning captions.

THE VANISHING EVIDENCE OF CLASSICAL AFRICAN CIVILIZATIONS Part II: The Tomb Evidence Prof. Manu Ampim
In August/September 1995, I undertook my 3rd season of field research in Egypt and Nubia. I conducted primary (first-hand) research at 15 sites in 1994 and 27 sites in 1995. As I indicated in part I of this series, my work of documenting modern forgeries and studying ancient African social organization and spiritual culture was superseded by the overwhelming problem of the rapid decay and deliberate destruction of many temple and tomb carvings. The vanishing evidence of classical African civilizations is more apparent from the temple evidence than from the tombs because the temple conservation work is obvious from the scaffolding, which is visible from different locations within a temple. Not only does the scaffolding draw attention but the workmens equipment and the broken up pieces of temple wall surface lying on the ground are also easily noticed. Whereas, when a tomb is under conservation, the structure is usually closed to the public until the repair work and secret behind-the-scene alterations are complete. The altering of Black (African) facial features and the lightening of the skin colors of painted reliefs inside the tombs are central aspects of the conspiracy to destroy the memory of classical African civilizations. The two main conspirator groups carrying out these acts are European and American research teams, and local government workers. Throughout Egypt and Nubia, the tomb images have suffered different levels of decay and destruction. In places such as Giza the tombs are closed as there is little left to see; in Tell Amarna the tomb carvings are in an advanced state of decay; in El Kab and Aswan many of the images have been systematically defaced; and in Beni Hassan only 4 of the 39 tombs are open because the rest are badly

damaged. The only major location which has escaped serious tomb damage is Sakkara, but this may not remain true in the future because the conspirators work is not complete, until they have destroyed or defaced all the evidence of classical African civilizations.

Modern conspirators have thoroughly erased the facial characteristics of these Black images.

EATING MUMMY In the tombs, not only have the faces of many wall images been altered or destroyed, but the crimes against African mummies are almost beyond description. There is a tradition dating back to at least 1000 A.D. in which Arabs and later Europeans engaged in the practice of eating mummy. This practice has been written about by a number of authors, and it was widespread in modern Egypt and Western Europe. It consisted of countless ancient African mummies being burned, ground up, and made into a kind of powder in order to be eaten. This incredible act of cannibalism was considered an effective medical practice and folk remedy. The belief became widely prevalent that cures could be obtained by eating ground-up preserved bodies. Eating mummy was considered effective in treating contusions, coughs, epilepsy, migraines, ulcers, cases of poison, and as a general panacea. Mummies or fragments of mummies were taken from their tombs and sent to Cairo and Alexandria, where merchants sent the ground-up parts all over Western Europe.

In the European Middle Ages and Renaissance mummy trafficking was widespread. Egyptian mummies were so sought after that the chaplain to Queen Catherine de Medici of France made a special trip to Egypt in 1549 and, together with some physicians from Italy, broke into a number of tombs around Sakkara in a quest for mummies to use in various medicines. Catherines father-in-law, King Francis I of France, also carried ground-up mummy in a pouch around his waist at all times in case of an emergency. The mummy madness was such that if a genuine ancient Egyptian mummy was not available, local Arabs would use the corpses of executed criminals or those who had died from disease. They used these modern substitutes to meet the high demand for mummy powder, despite the protest against this barbaric practice by some physicians, among them the French surgeon Ambroise Par, who stated, It causes great pain in their stomachs, gives them evil smelling breath and brings about serious vomiting. Eating Mummy had a long and respectable tradition as a medicinal remedy. This uncivilized European and Arab tradition of eating mummified human flesh was part of a flourishing trade and thus did not die out until the 19th century! It is impossible to calculate the many thousands of African mummies that ended up in the stomachs of Europeans and Arabs. MODERN VIOLATIONS The violation of African mummies has continued without hesitation in the form of local Arab citizens and tomb guardians who hide mummies in a secluded location until they can find an adventurist tourist who willing to pay and be taken to see a mummy or skeletal remains. I have seen extreme violations being carried out by Arabs at various tomb sites. In one of the Khokka tombs on the West Bank of Waset (Luxor), I witnessed two Arabs go in a tomb and take out the mummified parts of an 18th dynasty African official. They took him out of his burial place and savagely began assembling the various parts: the lower legs, the upper legs, the torso, the head, and finally they took out the mummys heart and asked me if I wanted to photograph it before they placed it inside of the chest area. All of this was done for baksheesh (tip) with no regard for the African ancestor. In many other cases, human bones have been scattered throughout the tomb, as well as broken into small pieces and thrown about in the cemetery as the robbers are making off with the loot. The Arab villagers continue to loot ancient tombs and sell the African artifacts in the illicit underground antiquities market. The destruction of African mummies has led to a gross distortion of the historical facts. For example, Dr. Wilfred Griggs and his colleagues of Brigham Young University (BYU) are in possession of an unparalleled thousands of human DNA samples, many of them from the ancient Egyptians. Dr. Griggs recently gave a presentation in San Jose, California in which he discussed the joint BYU and Rosicrucian Museum mummy project. Griggs stated that the DNA tests that were run on the Rosicrucian mummies indicated that of the 4 tested not one of the four showed the African [genetic] marker. Now that doesn'tt surprise me, he added,

because...there [were] many different races in Egypt. Griggs never gave any context for his remarks, as he did not mention the time period when each of these mummies lived. Nor did he mention the geographical location where they lived within ancient Egypt, or where their burials were found. In fact, Griggs motives are extremely questionable, because there was no balance in his statements. For example, Griggs did not indicate if the DNA results showed either a European or Asian genetic marker. He only made sure to state that the African marker was not found.

The facial damage to these four figures in a Valley of the Kings tomb is a typical pattern in the concerted effort to destroy Black images. VALLEY OF THE KINGS The main tomb work of the modern European and Arab conspirators has been on the West Bank of Waset (Luxor), and in particular the Valley of the Kings, because this is the most popular tourist location within Egypt where people go to see the ancient African tombs. The Valley of the Kings is well-known to travelers and Egyptologists as the principle burial ground of the pharaohs of dynasties 18-20, and it is one of the most significant archaeological sites in the world. The Kings Valley was intended as a quiet and secure resting place for African kings, but the artifacts in the area have suffered greatly at the hands of plunderers, treasure hunters, antiquity dealers, Egyptologists, archeologists, and tourists. Of the 62 tombs in the Kings Valley, there is usually only about 9 tombs open [as of 1995]. The rest of the tombs are closed for conservation. Since many of these Kings Valley tombs were rediscovered in the 19th and early part of the 20th century, they have fallen into disrepair. Many of them have permanently suffered from the steady pressure of thousands of tourists each day, local Arab tombrobbing villages such as Qurna, and from the destructive acts of archeologists and Egyptologists, who are more concerned with gaining recognition in academic circles

than with the welfare of the tombs. The result of all this activity has been the African mummies being violated and destroyed, burial goods being sold or shipped off to museums, paints chipping off the tomb walls, and the accumulation of salt crystals which have put the brilliantly colored reliefs in a very fragile state. BUILDING REPLICA TOMBS The problem of deterioration of the Kings Valley (KV) tombs has led to a growing international movement to build replica tombs and close the original structures. The tomb replication project will likely be implemented in the future. Under this plan, the popular tombs which have suffered irreparable damage, such as the tomb of Tutankhamen, will be permanently closed to the public. Once they are closed, the only persons who will have access to the original KV tombs will be Egyptian government officials and workers, and qualified researchers. The completion of this tomb replication project will be a major step in further erasing the memory of a Black Egypt. These replica tombs, with the lightened colors and remade facial features, will graphically demonstrate that the evidence of classical African civilizations is vanishing. The tomb publications by Western scholars are currently a main source of information on tomb decorations and details, and when some of the KV tombs are permanently closed these often inaccurate and unreliable publications will unfortunately be the exclusive source of our information. See part I of this series for recommendations on how you can help stop the vanishing evidence of classical African civilizations.

Prof. Manu Ampim is a historian and primary researcher on African and African American culture & history. He is director of Advancing The Research and can be reached at PO Box 18623, Oakland, CA 94619. Email: Profmanu@acninc.net. Telephone: (510) 482-5791 or 1-(888)-822-3449 x9939. Note, if any portion of this text, or any of the graphics in this article are used, please credit Prof. Ampim. Also, please do not use the photos without the accompaning captions.

THE VANISHING EVIDENCE OF CLASSICAL AFRICAN CIVILIZATIONS Part III: The Museum Evidence Prof. Manu Ampim

In parts I and II of The Vanishing Evidence series, I examined the progressive decay and deliberate acts of destruction to temple and tomb carvings. An additional aspect of this problem is the systematic altering of images in museums throughout Egypt and the Western World. The vast majority of statues, paintings, and relief images have been subtlety, and in many cases drastically, altered by conspirators to give them a non-African appearance. The changing of the racial identity of the vast majority of the ancient Egyptian images in museums is a major international issue which has been unaddressed. Through my primary research at nearly all of the major museums throughout Europe, America, Canada, and Egypt, I have been able to observe that there is an effective and systematic effort to destroy or eliminate the statues and paintings, which demonstrate that the founders and builders of ancient Egypt were Black people. FACIAL & RACIAL RECONSTRUCTION Museum artifacts are often manipulated and altered by a number of groups having access to these materials before they are viewed by the public. The broad group of conspirators involved with this cunning behind-the-scenes work includes: archeologists, Egyptologists, and government workers, who dig up, record, and decide the fate of the artifacts; restoration and conservation workers, who restore and piece the broken artifacts back together; and museum workers and officials who are the last group to handle the artifacts before they go on public display. The archaeologists/excavators and Egyptologists who dig up the artifacts have exclusive access to them until they are transported and turned over to a museum or other institution. Officials of an Italian museum decided to give Thutmosis III a new nose in a crude and outrageous attempt to change his racial appearance. However, many private collections have been organized around the numerous artifacts that are never reported or recorded and are consequently stolen, and then sold or smuggled out of the country by members of the excavation team. Local Arab villagers not associated with an archaeological team are also heavily involved in tomb robbing and reshaping artifact images, before they are eventually found in a private collection or public museum. Museum artifacts are therefore handled, repaired, worked on, and restored behind the scenes before they are put on public display. Thus, the time from the

initial excavation of an artifact until it is displayed for public viewing can be several years. In this time period, incredible changes are usually made to the statues, paintings, and reliefs. In fact, a careful examination of the ancient Egyptian artifacts bearing racial images in any museum or collection will demonstrate that the vast majority of items have been re-worked to change or obscure the racial identity. These museum images have been tampered with and often thoroughly deAfricanized, as they have been transformed from African to a European or some type of mixed group. The Ra-Hotep and Nofret statues are seated in strange chairs with backboards and Mdw Ntr writing near their head. These statues are among the greatest forgeries in the history of ancient African archaeology. [Manu Ampim, Modern Fraud: The Forged Ancient Egyptian Statues of Ra-Hotep and Nofret (forthcoming)] The reconstruction methods of the conspirators range from crude to sophisticated, and each process has the intent of changing the African racial identity of the images. For example, paint colors are systematically lightened or completely erased; noses are broken off or sanded down on the sides to make then thinner; the length of the lips are shortened to make them appear smaller; chins are knocked off to distort the facial structure; and other images are completely fabricated.

The Ra-Hotep statue violates a long list of clearly defined rules. A few of these rules are: Ra-Hotep is a royal son and high ranking official, but he does not wear a wig; he has a gray mustache; and he never had an emblem in his right hand across his chest.

Ra-Hotep's entire kilt belt is shown on his lap, rather than the universal ancient Egyptian practice of showing one belt-end protruding from the waist line. Also, Ra-Hotep never had an emblem in his left hand.

Museums around the world are filled with artifacts that have been thoroughly altered and de-Africanized by the conspirators. The following is a short list of these museums: The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California claims to have the largest collection of Egyptian artifacts on exhibit in the western United States, but much of its collection is actually made up of replicas and reconstructions, with images predictably resembling modern Europeans features. The Metropolitan Museum in New York, among other problems, has an entire room dedicated to Queen Hapshepsut, and every image of her has undergone obvious nose reconstruction. The National Museum of Antiquities in Holland has a number of statues that have undergone careful facial reconstruction. The Cairo Museum in Egypt contains forgeries and dozens of statues with nose alterations, and lightened colors which now resemble the pale skin tone of Europeans. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts amazingly has replacement heads in the middle of the museum floor, while the more important statues of Black rulers and officials are off to the side of the room, or in the basement, safely away from the view of tourists. The Louvre Museum in France has some of the most stunning and powerful African images of important figures anywhere in the world, yet the museum has bold signs placed in strategic locations throughout the Egyptian gallery, directing tourists to one particular statue: the unnamed seated scribe, who has undergone a thorough racial makeover and now appears European. The British Museum in England has re-worked the faces of statues so well that it in a few cases it is extremely difficult to detect their work. The Art History Museum in Austria is organized totally backward, as the foreign period of the Greeks, Romans and other invaders is placed in the front portion of the Egyptian gallery, so that this is the first impression that tourists get. Meanwhile, the real builders of Kemetian civilization are placed strategically in the back of the gallery. The Manchester Museum in Britain uses skull remains to do facial reconstructions, which almost always resembles Europeans, or else they have no particular ethnic identity. These and many other museums around the world are collectively eliminating the Black identity of the ancient Egyptian and Nubian civilizations through carefully thought out and misleading displays and gallery arrangements. The obvious goal of these institutions is to destroy the memory of a Black ancient Egypt and Nubia. Unfortunately, they have been quite successful in this long range project, as each month millions of tourists visit these museums and get a totally false impression of

the identity of the ancient Egyptians and Nubians. ORIENTATION AND DISTORTION In addition to the facial and racial makeovers that have been performed on the vast majority of artifacts, the museum gallery organization and layout is another effective method of distortion. The Art History Museum in Austria is one of many museums that use gallery layout and orientation strategies to deceive the public by confusing the racial identity of the indigenous people of ancient Egypt. For example, along with placing the Greek and Roman statues in prominent locations, museums also disregard dates and time periods, and instead lump artifacts together in general categories (such as statues, pottery, papyri, coffins, mummies, etc.), eventhough these artifacts may have been made several thousand years apart . Thus, one finds African statues from the early pyramid age next to those from the foreign period of Greek and Roman rulers at the very end of ancient Egyptian civilization 2,500 years later! MODERN FORGERIES A large number of Egyptian forgeries have been discovered over the years, and perhaps the greatest of them all are the statues of prince Ra-Hotep and his wife Nofret. These two statues in room 32 of the Cairo Museum are among the most famous ancient Egyptian statues, as they have been featured and written about in a long list of publications. Their popularity is also due to the fact that they are totally unique and they look European. Elsewhere in a preliminary essay, Ra-Hotep and Nofret: Modern Forgeries in the Cairo Museum? I have outlined 21 major problems with these unique statues that put them in direct contradiction to the strict artistic rules by which all Kemetian royal sculptors were bound. In the future, I will be publishing my full research exposing these forgeries in a forthcoming book entitled, Modern Fraud: The Forged Ancient Egyptian Statues of Ra-Hotep and Nofret.1 While ancient African culture and history continues to vanish, the African American community is doing little to stop this process. The African African community could be in the forefront of protecting and preserving the records and remains of classical African civilizations, but on this issue it lacks direction and leadership. If the current rate of destruction, distortion, and theft of temple, tomb, and museum evidence continues, then little primary evidence will remain by the end of this century, and thus the falsification of classical African culture and history will be easier and more effective. Anyone interested in joining the national campaign to stop the vanishing evidence of classical African civilizations, should refer to the recommendations in part I of The Vanishing Evidence series.

See Manu Ampim, Ra-Hotep and Nofret: Modern Forgeries in the Cairo Museum? pp. 207-212 in Egypt: Child of Africa (1994), edited by Ivan Van Sertima. Prof. Manu Ampim is a historian and primary researcher on African and African American culture & history. He is director of Advancing The Research and can be reached at PO Box 18623, Oakland, CA 94619. Email: Profmanu@acninc.net. Telephone: (510) 482-5791 or 1-(888)-822-3449 x9939. Note, if any portion of this text, or any of the graphics in this article are used, please credit Prof. Ampim. Also, please do not use the photos without the accompaning captions.