The ancient Ethiopians and their widespread influence on the early history of civilization
In discussing the origin of civilization in the ancient Near East, Professor Charles Seignobos in his history of Ancient civilization, notes that the first civilized inhabitants of the Nile and Tigris Euphrates valleys, were dark skinned people with short hair and prominent lips; and that they are referred to by some scholars as Cushites (Ethiopians), and as Hamites by others. This ancient civilization of the Cushites, out of which the earliest cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia grew, was not confined to the Near East. Traces of it have been found all over the world. Dr. W. J. Perry refers to it as the archaic civilization. Sir Grafton Elliot Smith terms it as the Neolithic Heliolithic culture of the Brunet – Browns. Mr. Wells alludes to this early civilization in his Outline of History, and dates its beginnings as far back as 15,000 years B.C. this peculiar development of the Neolithic culture, included many or all of the following odd practices: (1) Circumcision, (2) the queer custom of sending his father to bed when a child is born, known as couvades, (3) the practice of massage, (4) the making of mummies, (5) megalithic monuments (i.e. Stonehenge), (6) artificial deformation of the heads of the young with bandages, (7) tattooing (8) religious association of the sun and the serpent, and (9) the use of the symbol known as the swastika for good luck. . . . Elliot smith traces these associated practices as a sort of constellation all over this Mediterranean / Indian-Ocean Pacific area. Where one occurs, most of the others occur. They link Brittany with Borneo and Peru. But this constellation of practices does not crop up in the primitive home of the Nordic or Mongolian peoples, nor does it extend southward much beyond equatorial Africa. . . . The first civilization in Egypt and the Euphrates-Tigris valley probably developed directly out of this widespread culture.” (Outline of History, pp. 141-143)
This civilization is called NEOLITHIC by Wells. This is a mistake; for we have overwhelming evidence that these ancient peoples had long passed out of the new Stone Age of culture, and were erecting edifices which could only have been constructed by means of hard metal tools. Iron is the very backbone of civilization, and the Iron Age began very anciently in Africa. The researches of scholars like Boas, Today and Dubois would lead us to believe that the art of mining iron was first developed in the interior of Africa, and that the knowledge of it passed through Egypt to the rest of the world. (See W.E.B. Dubois, The Negro, pp. 144 – 146, Home University Library, New York and London, 1915)
In modern geography the name Ethiopia is confined to the country known as Abyssinia, an extensive territory in East Africa. In ancient times Ethiopia extended over vast domains in both Africa and Asia. It seems certain, “declares Sir E.A. Wallis Budge that classical historians and geographers called the whole region from India to Egypt, both countries inclusive, by the name of Ethiopia, and in consequence they regarded all the dark skinned and black peoples who inhabited it as Ethiopians. Mention is made of Eastern and Western Ethiopians and it was probable that the easterners were the Asiatics and the western Africans.” (History of Ethiopia, Vol. 1., Preface, by Sir E.A. Wallis Budge.) In addition, Budge notes that, “Homer and Herodotus call the peoples of Sudan, Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, and Western Asia and India Ethiopians.” (Ibid., p. 2.) Herodotus wrote in his celebrated History that both the western Ethiopians, who lived in Africa who dwelled in India, were black in complexion, but that the Africans had curly hair, while the Indians were straight haired. (The aboriginal black inhabitants of India are generally are generally referred to as Dravidans, of whom more will be said as we proceed.) Another classical Historian who wrote about the Ethiopians was Strabo, from whom we quote the following: “I assert that the ancient Greeks, in the same way as they classed all the northern nations with which they were familiar as Scythians, etc., so I affirm, they designated as Ethiopia the whole of northern countries towards the ocean.” Strabo adds that “If the moderns have continued the appellation of Ethiopians to those only who dwell near Egypt, this must not be allowed to interfere with the meaning of the ancients.” Ephorus says that: “The Ethiopians were considered as occupying all the south coasts of both Asia and Africa,” and adds that “this is an ancient opinion of the Greeks.” Then we have the view of Stephanus of Byzantium, that: “Ethiopia was the first established country on earth; and the Ethiopians were the first who introduced the worship of gods, and who established laws. “ The vestiges of this early civilization have been found in Nubia, the Egyptian Sudan, West Africa, Egypt, Mashonaland, India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Arabia, South America, Mexico, and the United States. Evidence about this can be found in such works as the voices of Africa, by Dr. Leo Froebenius; Prehistoric nations, and ancient America, by John D. Baldwin; Rivers of Life, by Major General J. G. R. Forlong; A Book of The Beginnings, by Gerald Massey; Children of The Sun and The Growth of Civilization, by W.J. Perry; The Negro, by Professor W.E.B. Dubois; The Anacalypsis, by Sir Godfrey Higgins; Isis unveiled by Madam H.P. Blavatsky; The Dillusion of Culture by Sir Grafton Elliot Smith; The Mediterranean Race, by professor Serqi; The Ruins of Empires, by Count Volney; The Races of Europe, by Professor William Z. Ripley; and last but not least, The Brilliant Monographs of Mr. Maynard Shipley: New Light on Prehistoric cultures and Americans of a million years of age. (See also Shipley’s Sex and The Garden of Eden Myth, a collection of assays, the best of the lot being one entitled: Christian Doctrines in Pre-Christian America.) These productions of Mr. Shipley have been issued in pamphlet form in the Little Blue Book series, published by Mr. E. Haldeman- Julius, of Girard Kansas.
The effort of certain historians to classify these ancient Cushites as Caucasoids does not deceive honest historical students any longer. This may well be illustrated by a passage from the pen of scholarly friend Bishop William Montgomery Brown: “For the first two or three thousand years of civilization, there was not a civilized white man on the earth. Civilization was founded and developed by the swarthy races of Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt, and the white race remained barbaric that in those days an Egyptian or a Babylonian priest would have said that the riffraff of white tribes a few hundred miles to the north of their civilization were hopelessly incapable of acquiring the knowledge requisite to progress. It was southern colored peoples everywhere In China, in Central America, In India, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt and Crete who gave the northern white peoples civilization.” (The Bankruptcy of Christian Supernaturalism, p. 192)
Quite a few Egyptologists have defended the idea that the ancient Egyptians originally came from Asia. There never was any evidence to backup this view, and the only reason it was adopted, was because it was fashionable to believe that no African people was capable of developing a great civilization. Godfrey Parsons refers to Egyptian civilization in his Stream of History, p. 154, New York and London 1932, as “genuinely African in its origin and development.” Herodotus came to the same conclusion 2000 years ago, but he is not taken seriously by majority of modern historians, except where his facts agree with certain theories of said historians. Theories are more precious to some historians than facts, even when the facts flatly contradict their theories. Dr. Froebenious, the great German anthropologist, had examined the ruins of ancient cultures in southern, eastern and western Africa, of an antiquity rivaling those of Egypt and Sumer. Sir John Marshall and Dr. E. Mackay have uncovered the remains of a great Dravidan civilization in India which rose to its peak over 5000 years ago. The newspapers generally report these discoveries as startling and unexpected. They tell us that nobody ever dreamed that these ancient nations ever existed. This novelty, however, does not exist for real students. Anyone familiar with the works of G. Elliot Smith, W.J. Perry, Sir Godfrey Higgins, Dr. H.R. Hall, Sir Henry Rawlinson, John D. Baldwin, Gerald Massey and General Forlong, will not be surprised that the very novel archaeological discoveries announced by the press. Since we are dealing with historical sources and authorities, a study of the researches of Sir Henry Rawlinson, the father of Assyriology, on the Ethiopians in the ancient East, is in order. The following extract is condensed from an essay entitled: On the Early History of Babylonia:
1. The early system of writing which they brought with them has the closest affinity with that of Egypt – in many cases indeed, there is an absolute identity between the two alphabets.
2. In the Biblical genealogies, Cush (Ethiopia) and Mizrain (Egypt) are brothers, while the former sprang Nimrod (Babylonia.)
3. In regard to the language of the primitive Babylonians, the vocabulary is undoubtedly Cushite or Ethiopian, belonging to that stock of tongues which in the sequel were everywhere more or less mixed up with the Semitic languages, but of which we have probably the purest modern specimens in the Mahra of Southern Arabia and the Galla of Abyssinia.
4. All the traditions of Babylonia and Assyria point to a connection in very early times between Ethiopia, Southern Arabia and the cities on the lower Euphrates.
5. In the future proof of the connection between Ethiopia and Chaldea, we must remember the Greek tradition both of Cepheus and Memnon, which sometimes applied to Africa, and sometimes to the countries at the mouth of the Euphrates; and we must also consider the geographical names of Cush and Phut, which although of African origin, are applied to the races bordering on Chaldea, both in the bible and in the Inscriptions of Darius. (Essay-VI, Appendix, Book I, History of Herodotus, translated by Professor George Rawlinson, with essays and notes by Sir Henry Rawlinson and Sir J.G. Wilkinson.)
In the study of ancient affairs, folklore and tradition throw an invaluable light on historical records. In Greek mythology we read the great Ethiopian King, Cepheus, whose fame was so great that he and his family were immortalized in the stars. The wife of King Cepheus was queen Cassiopeia, and his daughter Princess Andromeda. The star groups of the celestial sphere, which are named after them, are called the ROYAL family – (the constellations: cepheus, CASSIOPEIA and ANDROMEDA.) It may seem strange that the legendary rulers of ancient Ethiopia should still have their names graven on our star maps, but the voice of history gives us a clue. A book on astrology attributed to Lucian declares that: “The Ethiopians were the first who invented the science of the stars, and gave names to the planets, not at random without meaning, but descriptive of the qualities which they conceived them to possess; and it was from them that this art passed, still in an imperfect state, to the Egyptians.” The Ethiopian origin of astronomy is beautifully explained by Count Volney in a passage in his Ruins of Empires, which is one of the glories of modern literature, and his argument is not based on guesses. He invokes the weighty authority of Charles F. Dupius, whose three monumental works, The Origin of Constellation, The origin of worship and The Chronological Zodiac, are marvels of meticulous research. Dupius placed the origin of the Zodiac as far back as 15,000 B.C., which would give the world’s oldest picture book an antiquity of 17,000 years. (This estimate is not excessive as it might first appear, since the American astronomer and mathematician, Professor Arthur M. Harding, traces back the origin of the Zodiac to about 26,000 B.C.) In discussing star worship and idolatry, Volney gives the following glowing description of the scientific achievements of the ancient, and of how they mapped out the signs of the Zodiac on the star-spangled dome of the heavens:
Should it be asked at what epoch this system took its birth, we shall answer on the testimony o the monuments of astronomy itself, that is principles appear with certainty to have been established about seventeen thousand years ago, and if it be asked to what people it is to be attributed, we shall answer that the same monuments, supported by unanimous traditions, attribute it to the first tribes of Egypt; and reason finds in that country all the circumstances which could lead to such a system; when it finds there a zone of sky, bordering on the tropic, equally free from the rains of the equator and the fogs of the North, when it finds there a central point of sphere of the ancients, a salubrious climate, a great but manageable river, a soil fertile without art or labor, inundated without morbid exhalations, and placed two seas which communicate with the richest countries; it conceives that the inhabitant of the Nile, addicted to agriculture from the facility of communications, to astronomy from the state of his sky, always open to observation, must have been the first to pass from the savage to the social state; and consequently to attain the physical and moral sciences necessary to a civilized life.
It was, then, on the borders of the upper Nile, among a black race of men that organized the complicated system of the worship of the stars, considered in relation to the productions of the earth and the labors of agriculture… Thus Ethiopian Thebes named stars of inundation, or Aquarius, those stars under which the Nile began to overflow; stars of the ox or bull, those under which they began to plough, stars of the Lion, those under which that animal, driven from the desert by thirst, appeared on the banks of the Nile; stars of the sheaf, or of the harvest virgin, those of the reaping season; stars of the lamb, stars of the two kids, those under which the precious animals were brought forth. … Thus the Ethiopians having observed that the return of the inundation always corresponded with the rising of a beautiful star which appeared towards the source of the Nile, and seemed to warn the husbandman against the coming waters, he compared this action to that of the animal who, by his barking, gives notice of danger, and he called this star the dog, the barker (Sirius). In the same manner he named the stars of the crab; those were the sun, having arrived at the tropic, retreated by a slow retrograde motion like the crab of Cancer. He named stars of the wild goat, or Capricorn, those were the sun, having reached the highest point in his annual tract . . . imitates goat, who delights to climb to the summit of the rocks. He named stars of the balance, Libra, those where the days and nights being equal, seemed in equilibrium, like that instrument; and stars of the scorpion, those where certain periodical winds bring vapors, burning like the venom of the scorpion. (Volney’s Ruins of Empires, pp. 120-122, New York, 1926)
The traditions concerning Memnon are interesting as well as instructive. He was claimed as a king by the Ethiopians, and identified with the pharaoh Amunoph or Amenhotep, by the Egyptians. A fine statue of him is located in the British museum, in London. Charles Darwin makes a reference to this statue in his Descent of Man which is well worth reproducing: “When I look at the statue of Amunoph III, I agreed with two officers of the establishment, both competent judges, that he had strongly marked Negro type of features.” The features of Aknaton (Amenhotep IV) are even more Negroid than those of his illustrious predecessor; That the earliest Egyptians were African Ethiopians, (Nilotic Negros), is obvious to all unbiased students of central history. Breasted’s claims that the early civilized inhabitants of the Nile valley and Western Asia were members of a great white race, is utterly false, and is supported by no facts whatsoever.
We read of Memnon, king of Ethiopia, in Greek mythology, to be exact in Homer’s Iliad, where he leads an army of Elamites and Ethiopians to the assistance of King Priam in the Trojan War. His expedition is said to have started from the African Ethiopia and to have passed through Egypt on the way to Troy. According to Herodotus, Memnon was the founder of Susa, the chief city of the Elamites. “There were places called Memnonia,” asserts Professor Rawlinson, “supposed to have been built by him in both Egypt and at Susa; and there was a tribe called the Memnones or Moroe. Memnon then unites the Eastern and Western Ethiopia, and the less we regard him as an historical personage the more we must view him as personifying the ethnic identity of the two races.” (Ancient Monarchies, Vol. 1, Chap. 3). The ancient people of Mesopotamia are sometimes called the Chaldeans, but this is inaccurate and confusing. Before the Chaldean rule in Mesopotamia, there were the empires of the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and the Assyrians. The earliest civilization of Mesopotamia was that of the Sumerians. They are designated in the Assyrio-Babylonian inscription as the black-heads or black faced people, and they are shown on the monuments as beardless and with shaven heads. This easily distinguishes them from the Semetic Babylonians who are shown with beards and long hair. From the myths and traditions of the Babylonians we learn that their cultures came originally from the south. Sir Henry Rawlinson concluded from this and other evidence that the first civilized inhabitants of Sumer and Akkad were immigrants from the African Ethiopia. John D. Baldwin, the American Orientalist, on the other hand, claims that since ancient Arabia was also known as Ethiopia, they could just as well come from that country. These theories are rejected by Dr. R. Hall, of the Dept. Of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities of the British Museum, who contends that Mesopotamia was civilized by a migration from India! “The ethnic type of the Sumerians, so strongly marked in their statues and monuments,” says Dr. Hall, “was different from those of the races which surrounded them as was their language from those of the Semites, Aryans or others; they were decidedly Indian in type. The face type of the average Indian of today is no doubt much the same as that of his Dravidan race ancestors thousand of years ago. . . . And it is to this Dravidan ethnic type of India that the ancient Sumerians bear resemblance, so far as we can judge from his monuments. . . . And it is by no means improbable that the Sumerians were an Indian race which passed, certainly by land, perhaps also by sea, through Persia to the valley of the two rivers. It was in the Indian home (perhaps the Indian valley) that we suppose for them that their culture developed. . . . On the way they left the seeds of their culture in Elam. . . . There is little doubt that India must have been one of the earliest centers of human civilization, and it is natural to suppose that that strange un-Semetic and un-Aryan people who came from East to civilize the West were of Indian origin, especially when we see with our own eyes how very Indian the Sumerians were in type.” (The Ancient History of the Near East, pp. 173-174, London, 1916) Hall is opposed in his history of Sumerian origins by Dr. W.J. Perry, the great anthropologist, of the University of London.
“The Sumerian stories or origins themselves tell a different tale,” Perry points out, “for from their beginnings the Sumerians seem to have been in touch with Egypt. Some of their early texts mention Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha. Dilmun was the first settlement that was made by the god Enki, who was the founder of Sumerian civilization. Magan was famous among the Sumerians as a place whence they got diorite and copper, Meluhha as a place whence they got gold. Dilmun has been identified with some place or other in the Persian Gulf, perhaps the Bahrein islands, perhaps a land on the eastern shore of the Gulf. In a late inscription of the Assyrians it is said that Magan and Meluhha were the archaic names for Egypt and Ethiopia, the latter being the south-western part of Somaliland that lay opposite.” (The Growth of Civilization, pp. 60-61, 2nd edition, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1937, Published by Penguin Books Ltd.)
Another great nation of Ethiopian origin was Elam, a country which stressed from the Tigris River to the Zagros Mountains of Persia. Its capital was the famous city of Susa, which was founded about 4,000 B.C., and flourished from that date to its destruction Moslem invaders about the year 650 C.E. (Christian Era.) in speaking of The Elamites, H. G. Wells H. H. Johnson, to have been Negroid in type. There is a strong Negroid strain in the modern people of Elam. (Outline of History p. 166) Archaeological evidence favors this view. Reginald S. Poole, the English Egyptologist noted that: “There is one portrait of an Elamite (Cushite) king on a vase found at Susa; he is painted black and thus belongs to the Cushite race.” (Quoted by Professor Alfred C. Haddon, in his History of Anthropology, p. 6, London, 1934) Thinker’s Library Edition, published by Watts and Co., 5 & 6 Johnson’s court, Fleet St.., London, E. c-4 England.)
In former times of the Asiatic negro spread, we can explain how, useless the land connections of those days were more extended, through Eastern Australia to Tansmania, and from the Solomon island to the new Caledonia and even New Zealand, to Fiji and Hawaii. The Negro element in Burma and Annam is, therefore, easily to be explained by supposing that in ancient times Southern Asia had a Negro population ranging from the Persian Gulf to Indo-China and the Malay Archipelago. (See an Introduction to African Civilization, by Willis N. Higgins. Ph.D. and John G. Jackson, pp. 188-190, New York, 1937)
Most readers of history know about the Celts, ancient inhabitants of Europe, whose priests were known as Druids. It is gene rally thought that these Celts were Caucasoid, but Sir Godfrey Higgins, after much study came to the conclusion that they were a Negroid people. Higgins wrote a ponderous volume entitled The Celtic Druids. In the following passage from his Anacalypsis he modestly refers to it as a essay: “In my essay of the Celtic Druids, I have shown that a great nation called Caltae, of whom the Druids were the priests, spread themselves almost over the whole earth, and are to be traced in their rude gigantic monuments from India to the extremity of Britain.
The religion of Buddha of India is well known to have been very ancient.” (Higgins here is referring to the first Buddha, who is supposed to have lived between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, and not to Gautama Buddha who lived about 600 years B. C. There were at least ten Buddhas mentioned in the sacred books of India). “Who these can have been but in this opinion I am not singular. The learned Maurice says the Cuthies (Cushites), i.e. Celts, built the great temples in India and Britain, and excavated the caves of the former; and the learned mathematician, Reuben Burrow, has no hesitation in pronouncing Stonehenge to be a temple of the black curly-headed Buddha.” (Anacalypsis, Vol. I, Book I, Chap. IV, New York, 1927)
Though it is believed that Columbus discovered America, it is now definitely known to the students of American Archaeology that Columbus came late. Professor Leo Weiner has written a three volume work, Africa and the Discovery of America, in which he argues that the New World was discovered by Africans long before the time of Columbus. Professor Weiner was led to this conclusion partly from the following evidence:
1. 1. African works in American Indian languages.
2. 2. Vases and pipe-bowls found in the ruins of the Mound-Builders, showing Negro faces on their surfaces.
3. 3. The presence of African foods in America, such as the peanut and the yam.
4. 4. The totemic organization of the Amerindian tribes, very similar to African totemism. (Totemism is a sort of primitive theory of evolution. For instance, certain tribes are divided into clans, and each clan is, as a rule named after some species of an animal. Let us suppose a tribe is divided into four clans, bearing the following names: (1) eagle, (2) bear, (3) crow and (4) wolf. A member of the Bear clan will consider himself as descended from bears, a member of a wolf clan will tell you that he is a wolf and that all his ancestors were wolves, and so on; this clan ancestor being known as the Totem. There are numerous definitions of totemism but the best is one by Professor A. VB. Haddon: “Totemism, as Dr. Frazer and I understand it in its fully developed condition, implies the division of a people into several totem kins, or as they are usually termed, totem clans, each of which has one or sometimes more than one totem. The totem is usually a species of an animal, sometimes a species of a plant, occasionally a natural object or phenomenon, very rarely manufactured article. The totems are regarded as kinsfolk or protectors of the kinsmen, who respect them and refrain from killing and eating them. There is thus recognition of mutual rights and obligations between the members of the kin and their totem. The totem is the crest of symbol of the kin.”
“Professor Weiner solves the riddle of old American civilization with an Arabico-Mandingo lexicon and derives everything of importance in the New World from the highly civilized coast of Gambia and Sierra Leone. From brightest Africa came the principal American food plants, the Mayan calendar and the Mexican religion. It may be added that Professor Weiner swarms his Negros across the Atlantic in no less than fifty voyages before Columbus.”
The Indian was not the original African. Professor Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian Institution, as authority on the Amerinds, contends that the ancestors of the Indians came from Asia via Bering Strait 10,000 years ago. American civilization is older than that. The ruins of Tiahuanaco, in Bolivia, according to Dr, Rudolph Muller, a noted German astronomer, are between 10,000 and 14,000 years old. The remains of this ancient city show that it was inhabited by a highly civilized people. (See an article entitled “The Oldest City in the World,” by A. H. Verrill, in the N. Y. Herald-Tribune Magazine, July 31, 1932) Excavations in Mexico have produced startling results. Dr. Maximus Neumayer, a distinguished Brazilian archaeologist examined the pyramids of Teotihuacan, which he estimates to be 45,000 years of age. He thinks that these pyramids were built by a people akin to the Egyptians; and from their arrangement suggests that they form a sort of model of the solar system, with a pedestal in the center representing the sun. We must also mention the discoveries of Professor Ramon Mena, Curator of the Department of Archaeology of the Mexican Government. This scientist explored the ruins of the great city of Palenque, and concluded that the ancient Metropolis was built over 10,000 years ago. He also found that the inhabitants of the city were familiar with the manufacture and use of Stucco. The celebrated French archaeologist, Desiree Charny, unearthed statues around Mexico City, more than fifty years ago, with faces showing Negroid features. Pictures of some of them may be seen in Ignatius Donelley’s Atlantis, pp. 174-175.we have reliable proof of the presence of men of the Ethiopian race in pre-Columbian America. Farther Roman, one of the first catholic missionaries to arrive in the New World, records that a tribe of black men came from the south and landed in Haiti, and that they were armed with darts and guanin (a composition of silver, gold and copper), and were known as the black guanins.
Most of us are familiar with the Mayan civilization of the Yucatan and Central America, since American archaeologists have devoted many years of intensive research to these territories. Among the speculations involving the origin of this culture, those of LePlongeon and Raquena are most valuable. Professor Rafael Requena, a Venezuelan archaeologist, holds that there was once an island in the Atlantic Ocean, of continental dimensions, known to the ancients as Atlantis, that this island was settled by Egyptians, who in turn established colonies In America before the submergence of Atlantis. The findings of Professor Augustus LePlongeon are of great interest. This Franco-American archaeologist discovered the ruins of a palace in Chichen Itza in 1874. He found in this structure, known as prince Coh’s palace, pictographs and inscriptions which he was able to decipher.
That Atlantis was connected with the history of ancient Ethiopia there can be little doubt. The Greek philosopher, Proclus, stated in his works that he could present evidence that Atlantis at one time actually existed. He cited as his authority The Ethiopian History of Marcellus. In referring to Ethiopian history to prove the existence of Atlantis, Proclus plainly infers that Atlantis was a part of Ethiopia. (See Cory’s Ancient Fragments of the Phoenician, Carthaginian, Babylonian, Egyptian and other Authors, London, 1876. See also, Maynard Shipley’s New Light on Prehistoric Cultures and Bramwell’s Lost Atlantis.)
In reviewing James Bramwell’s Lost Atlantis, Mr. Lewis Gannet states that: “The German anthropologist Frobenius definitely locates Atlantis in Nigeria, whose ancient civilization he relates to that of the Etruscans and the Assyrians.” (New York Herald –Tribune, Mar. 3, 1938) Dr. Frobenius found ruins of palaces, terra cotta fragments and beautiful statuary in Jorubaland, a district in Nigeria between the Niger River and the Atlantic Ocean; and heard among the Jorubian legends of an ancient royal city and its palace with walls of gold, which in the long ago had sunk beneath the waves. The German scholar, Eugen Georg, is a keen student of the Atlantis question, and the following remarks of his are worthy of our attention:
The New Age that began after the disappearance of Atlantis was marked at first by the world wide dominance of Ethiopian representatives of the black race. They were supreme in Africa and Asia, and they even infiltrated through southern Europe. During the present era – that is the last 10,000 years - the white race has come to possess the world. According to the occult tradition, Semetic peoples developed wherever the immigrating white colonists from the north were subjugated by the black ruling class, and inter-mixture occurred, as in oldest Egypt, Chaldea, Arabia and Phoenicia. (The Adventure of Mankind, by Eugen Georg, pp. 121-122, New York, 1931)
So far we have given little or no attention to the evidence of comparative religion. The study of ancient religious history is important, for religion, like philosophy, changes but slowly. Institutional religion, being conservative and static in its outlook, has preserved much ancient lore that would have otherwise been lost to the modern student. The Greek philosopher Xenophanes (572-480 B.C) pointed out a profound truth when he observed that the gods men worship very closely resemble the worshipers. In the words of this ancient sage: “Each man represents the gods as he himself is. The Ethiopian as black and flat-nosed the Thracian as red-haired and blue-eyed; if the horses and oxen could paint, they would no doubt depict the gods as horses and oxen.” This being the case; when we find the great nations of the world, both past and present, worshiping black gods, then we logically conclude that these peoples are either members the black race, or that they originally received their religion in part from the black people. The proofs are abundant. The ancient gods of India are shown with Ethiopian crowns on their heads. According to the Old Testament, Moses first met Jehovah during his sojourn among the Madianites, who are an Ethiopian tribe.
We learn from the Hellenic that Zeus, king of Grecian gods, so cherished the friendship of the Ethiopians that he revealed to their country twice a year to attend banquets. “All the gods and goddesses of Greece were black,” asserts Sir Godfrey Higgins, “at least this was the case with Jupiter, Baccus, Hercules, Apollo, Ammon. The goddesses Benum, Isis, Hecate, Diana, Juno, Metis, Ceres, and Cybele were black. (Anacalypsis, Vol. I Book IV Chap. I) Even the Romans who received their religion mainly from Greece, admitted their debt to Egypt and Ethiopia. Theis may be well illustrated by the following passage from The Golden Ass or Metamorphosis, by Apelius. The author, an initiate of the Isis cult is presented as being addressed by that goddess: “I am present; I who am nature, the parent things, queen of all elements. The primitive Phrygians called me Prress imunitica, mother of the gods, the native Athenians, Ceropian Minerva; the floating Cyprians, Paphian Venus, the inhabitants of Eleusis, the ancient goddess Ceres. Some again have invoked me as Juno, others as Bellona, others as Hecate, and others Rhamnusia; and those who are enlightened by the emerging rays of the rising sun, the Ethiopians, Ariians and Egyptians, powerful in ancient learning, who reverence by dignity with ceremonies perfectly proper, call me by my true appellation, Queen Isis.” (Doane’s Bible Myths, Note, p. 478)
A study of the images of the ancient deities of both the Old and New Worlds reveal their Ethiopic origin. This is noted by Kenneth R. H. Mackenzie in T. A. Buckley’s Cities of the Ancient World, p. 180: “From the wooly texture of the hair, I am inclined to assign to the Buddha of India, the Fuhi of China, the Sommonnacom of the Siamese, the Zaha of the Japanese, and the Quetazlcoatl of the Mexicans, the same and indeed an African, or rather Nubian origin.” Most of these black gods were regarded as crucified saviors who died to save mankind by being nailed to the cross, or tied to a tree with arms outstretched as if on a cross, or slain violently in some other manner. Of these crucified saviors, the most prominent were Osiris and Horus of Egypt, Krishna of India, Mithra of Persia, Quetazlcoatl of Mexico, Adonis of Babylonia and Attis of Phrygia. Nearly all of these slain savior-gods have the following stories related about them: They are born of a virgin, on or near Dec. 25th (Christmas); their births are heralded by a star; they are born either in a cave or stable; they are slain commonly by crucifixion; they descend into hell, and rise from the dead at the beginning of Spring (Easter), and finally ascend to heaven. The parallels between the legendary lives of these pagan messiahs and the Life of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Bible are so similar that progressive Bible scholars now admit that the stories of these heathen Christs have been woven into the life-story of Jesus. (These remarkable parallels are discussed in and interpreted in a pamphlet, Christianity Before Christ, by John G. Jackson, New York, 1938)
The late Mr. Maynard Shipley, President of The Science League of America, made a very scholarly study of the various mythologies and religions of the world, and in the concluding passage of a brilliant essay, Christian Doctrines in Pre-Christian America, he offers a profoundly thought provoking statement:
That the ancient pagan creeds, legends and myths – part of the universal mythos – should be found embodied in religion of the ancient Mexicans, and that all those again are found to be but the original sources of the modern orthodox Christian religion, is by no means inexplicable, and need not be attributed to the subtlety of the Ubiquitous Devil. The explanation is that all religions and all the languages of the civilized races of men had a common origin in an older seat of civilization.
The evidence seems to show that the “original center of culture,” referred to by Mr. Shipley, was that vast domain known to the classical geographers and historians as Ethiopia. A study of religious images throws much light on this early civilization. The tau (T-shaped) cross is thought by many Christians to be a unique emblem of their faith. The fact is that this cross is of ancient Ethiopian origin. In the words of an outstanding student of symbolism: “The Ethiopic form of the tau is a exact prototype of the conventional Christian cross; or, to state the fact in its chronological relation, the Christian cross is made in the exact image of the Ethiopian tau.” (Sex Symbolism. P. 9, by William J, Fielding, Little Blue Book No. 904.) The cross was known to all the ancient nations, and was sometimes shown with the image of a man upon it. The Church Father, Minucius Felix, writing in the early part of the third century, severely rebukes the pagans for their adoration of crosses: “I must tell you that we neither adore crosses nor desire them; you it is ye pagans … for what else are your ensigns, flags and standards, but crosses gilt and beautiful. Your victorious trophies not only represent a cross, but a cross with a man upon it.” Commenting on the preceding extract, the American scholar, T. W. Doane, notes that:
It is very evident that this celebrated Christian Father alludes to some Gentle Mystery, of which the prudence of his successors has deprived us. When we compare this with the fact that for centuries after the time assigned for the birth of Jesus Christ, he was not presented as a man on the cross, and that the Christians did not have such a thing as the crucifix, we are inclined to think that the effigies of a black or dark skinned crucified man were to be seen in many places in Italy even during the last century, may have something to do with it. (Bible Myths, p. 197, 7th Edition)
The same writer also refers to “the Mexican crucified god being sometimes represented as black,” and that “crosses were also found in Yucatan, as well as Mexico with a man upon them.” (Ibid., p. 201)
Very suggestive is the fact that representations of the virgin mother and infant savior are often black. This is true in the case of the paintings and images of Isis and Horus, of Devaki and Krishna, and in many cases of Mary and Jesus.
The most ancient pictures and statues in Italy and other parts of Europe, which are adored by the faithful as representations of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, reveal the infant draped in white, but with a black face and in the arms of a black mother. . . . How does it happen that the virgin mother of the Mexican Savior-God so closely resembled the black virgins of Egypt and Europe? Had they not all a common origin?” (Sex and the Garden of Eden Myth, pp. 50-51, by Maynard Shipley, Little blue book No. 188) Mr. A H. Verrill, an American archaeologist visited an Indian shrine in a small town in Guatemala a few years ago, and found that on a special festival day Indians travelled to this little church to bow down to the image of a black Christ. From the attendant ceremonies, Verrill judged the rite to be of Mayan origin, (See Verrill’s Old Civilizations of the World, New York, 1938) The Mayans possessed knowledge of the arts and sciences equivalent to that of the ancients of the Old World, but upon that we can not dwell, since limitations of space forbid it. The reader is referred to Professor Paul Radin’s fine book on the American Indians, where after surveying the marvelous scientific achievements of the Mayans of Yucatan and Central America, Dr. Radin admits that: “No excavations have ever revealed to us any simpler nature from which this very elaborate culture could possibly have been developed.” (The Story of The American Indian, p. 77, Garden City, 1937.) Egypt and Western Asia tell the same story. “In each case we have a standard of measuring-rod of authentic historical record,” declares Samuel Laing, of certainly not less than 8,000 and more probably 9,000 or 10,000 years, from the present time; and in each case we find ourselves at this remote date, in presence, not of rude beginnings, but of a civilization already ancient and far advanced. We have populous cities, celebrated temples, an organized priesthood, an advanced state of agriculture and of the industrial and fine arts; writing and books so long known to their origin is lost in myth; religions in which advanced philosophical and moral ideas are already developed; astronomical systems which imply a long course of accurate observations. How long this prehistoric age may have lasted, and how many centuries it may have taken to develop such a civilization, from the primitive beginnings of the Neolithic and Paleolithic origins, is a matter of conjecture. All we can infer is, that it must have required an immense time, much longer than that embraced by the subsequent period of historical record.” (Human Origins, by Samuel Laing, p. 30, London, 1913)
Much more could be said on this subject, but since this essay is addressed mainly to readers who have little time for the study of history, it must be made as concise as possible. The numerous citations from standard scientific and historical works, it is hoped, will be of some benefit to students who are out of reach of large public libraries, or who lack the leisure time necessary for reading and research along these lines.
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