The spread of the Nile valley civilization and the African culture

By Dr. Yosef Ben-Jocahnnan

When we speak of the Nile valley, of course we are talking about the 4,100 miles of civilization, or the beginning of the birth of what is today called civilization. I can go to one case of literature in particular which will identify the Africans as the beginners of civilization to which I refer. And since I am not foreign to the works of the Africans in Egypt, otherwise called Egyptians, I think that should be satisfactory proof. This proof is housed in the London Museum t hat is holding the artifacts of Egypt. In that Museum yo will find a document called the papyrus of hunifer. At least you should find it there. It was there when Sir E. A. Wallace Budge used it in the translation as part of the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Papyrus of hunifer.

It was there at that time, a copy of which is in the library of Syracuse University in New York, and I quote from the hieratic writing, “We came from the beginning of the Nile where God Hapi dwells, at the foothills of The Mountains of the Moon.” “We,” meaning the Egyptians, as stated, came from the beginning of the Nile. Where is “the beginning of the Nile?” The farthest point of the beginning of the Nile is in Uganda; this is the White Nile. Another point is in Ethiopia. The Blue Nile and White Nile meet in Khartoum; and the other side of Khartoum is the Omdurman Republic of Sudan. From there it flows from the south down north, And there it meets with the Atbara River in Atbara, Sudan. Then it flows completely through Sudan (Ta-Nehisi, Ta-Zeti or Ta-Seti, as it was called), part of that ancient empire which was one time adjacent to the nation called Meroe or Merowe. From that, into southern part of what the Romans called “Nubia,” and parallel on the Nile, part of which the Greeks called “egypticus”; the English called it “Egypt” and the Jews in their mythology called it “Mizrain” which the current A rabs called Mizr/Mizrair. Thus it ends in the sea of Sais, also called the great sea, today’s Mediterranean Sea. When we say thus, we want to make it certain that Hapi is still god of the Nile, shown as a hermaphrodite having the breasts of a woman and the penis of a man. God hapi is always shown tying two symbols of the “Two hands,” Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, during dynastic periods. The lotus flower is the symbol of the south and the papyrus plant, the symbol of the north.

But we need to go back beyond Egypt. I used Egypt as the starting point, in that of the civilizations in the world, Egypt has more ancient documents and other artifacts than any other civilization one could speak of. So when you here them talk about Sumer and Babylon, and all those other places theoretically, they can’t show you the artifacts. Thus my position is, first hand information is the best proof, and I can show you the bones and other remains of Zinjanthropus Boisei about 1.8 million years ago. But no one can show you the remains of Adam and Eve, et al.

So I have the proof and you have the belief. If you want to see it you can go to the Croydon National Museum in Naiorbi, Kenya; there, you will se the Bones Zinjanthropus Boisei. If you want to see the remains of “Lucy,” you can go to the national Museum associated with the University of Addis Ababa. Of course, there a host of other human fossils that existed thousands of years ago all over Africa; but you can’t find one of Adam and Eve in any part of Asia.

But we have to go beyond that. We can look at the artifacts before writing came into being. We will then be in archaeological finds along the Nile. Also you would find that there were two groups of Africans; one called the “Hutu,” and one called the “Twa.” The Twa and the Hutu take us back 400,000 B.C.E (Before the Common Christian Era) in terms of artifacts. The most ancient of these artifacts, one of the most important in Egypt is called the “Ankh” which the Christians adopted as the “Crux Ansata” or “Ansata cross.” The ankh was there amongst these people, equally the “Crook” and “Flail.” All of these symbols came down to us from the Twa and Hutu. You know the Twa by the British Anthropologists who called them “pygmies” there’s no such thing in Africa known as “pygmy” much less “pygmies.” But the people call them selves Twa and Hutu, so that’s who they are. 

If we look at the southern tip of Africa, a place called “Monomotapa,” before the first Europeans came there with the Portuguese in 1486, C.E. /A.D. (Christian Eera), a man called Captain Bartholomew Diaz, and subsequently anther European and his group came, one called Captain Vasco da Gama, who came there ten years later in 1496; when they came to that part of Africa they met another group of people there as well, which they called “Kaffirs.” Now this is a long time before the Boers came there in 1652. When the Boers came those Africans may have gone to the moon on vacation (or there they “didn’t meet any natives” [Africans] so they say. But one thing is certain that Bartholomew Diaz and Vasco da Gama had already left records showing that when they arrived there at Monomotapa the Khaffirs [Africans], including the small ones (Khoi Khoi and Khalaharis) (remember I didn’t say “bushmen and Hottentots,” that’s nonsense, the racist names given them by British and Dutch Boers), were already there. 

So with all these people that were found in this area we could go back at least 35,000 to 40,000 years to another group of people who left there writings and their pictures. Those people are called Grimaldi. The Grimaldi were in the southern t ip of Africa and travelled up the entire western coast, then came to the northwest coast, then came up the north western coast of Africa and crossed into Spain. Not only in Spain but all the way up to Austria; it was found that the Grimaldi had travelled and left their drawings and caves all along the way, in the Museum of Natural History, New York City, New York, you can see the Grimaldi paintings going back at least 35,000 years ago. I remind you that it is only about 31,000 years before Adam and Eve!  It is very important you realize that next time you talk about Adam and Eve. So wee are told that there is Adam and Eve that started the world, but that is a “Jewish world” and I am talking about before Abraham the first Jew. 

The country I am talking about now goes back to a period called the Sibellian Period. Sibellian I brings us to a period where you will find hieratic writings, the type that no one in modern times has been able to decipher. Sibellian II existed about 25,000 years before the birth of Jesus-the Christ. Sibellian III would bring us to about 10,000 B.C.E., in which we now have the Stellar Calendar that I talked about, and the pre-dynastic period will be considered from the same time, 10,000 to 6,000 B.C.E., and that is the point when High Priest Manetho, in about 227 to 226 B.C.E., attempted to present for the Greeks, who had imposed against him to write a kind of chronological history of the Nile Valley,. Europeans instead of saying what Manetho said in his chronology of the history of the Nile Valley, forget to say it was at the end of the Nile Valley, he addressed. For example, the “First Cataract,” i.e., an obstruction in the Nile River, is at a place called the City of Aswan, when in fact it is the last; the “Sixth Cataract” is in fact Aswan, Upper (or southern Egypt) Egypt.

This is important to understand, because Egypt, which most of us deal with and forget the rest of the Nile Valley, is not at the beginning of the Nile Valley high cultures, but the end. High culture came down the Nile; but if you go on the Nile you will always hear about the pyramids of Egypt. Yes, they are the “world’s largest”; they will blow your mind, so to speak, but they are not the first pyramids of Africa; they are the last. There are thirty-two pyramids in Sudan, none in Ethiopia, and seventy-two in Egypt. What happened is that as the Africans became so much competent in engineering, etc., they increased the size of their pyramids in sophistication; thus at the end of the Nile you could see the different forms and the colossal pyramids the largest being one by Pharaoh khufu, whom Herodotus called Cheops, and that would be one the pyramids built in the 4^th Dynasty. The first of the pyramids in Egypt being by Imhotep, for his Pharaoh Djoser/Setor (“Zozer”), the third pharaoh of the third Dynasty. The architect was the multi genius Imhotep, who introduced to mankind the first structure ever built out of stone and with joints with out mortar or any other building materials.

Now you could understand if I said the pyramids in Sudan are older than the pyramids in Egypt, and I simultaneously say that Imhotep built the first stone structure known by man. Those in Sudan were built by two methods. There were some pyramids called silt pyramids, and the second method was mud-brick pyramids. Not the type o bricks made of mud and straw mentioned in the Hebrew Holy Torah, specifically the book of Exodus. That has to be made clear. How did the silt pyramids come about? That type of pyramid came about due to the Inundation period of the Nile River. This was the period when the river overflowed its banks bringing down silt from the high lands of Ethiopia and Uganda, and from the mountain of the moon, which people of Kenya called Kilimanjaro.

It is in this perspective that we are talking about Africa as a people. Because, all of that period of time we are talking about, you can go there no and you see the artifacts in museums all over Europe and in United States of America. I’m not speaking to you chronologically, because I am using my recall; let us go back to the event that took place; and as I thought about this, something about medicine came to my mind, I remember going to the double Temple of Haroeris and Sobek; Haroeris represented by the Cobra Snake and Sobek represented by the Nile Crocodile. In that temple at the rare you will find the drawings of medical instruments going back to the time of Imhotep. That will bring us to 285 B.C.E. to the construction of the double temple which was during Greek rule. Most of the medical instruments you see there are the exact dimension, the exact styles and shapes still used in medical operating theatres today. You could see all kinds of symbols relating to the use incense; you could also find the beginnings of the aspect of the calendars (the dating process for  the farmers) the same Coptic farmers still use, the 13-monts calendar, twelve months of 32 days each, and one month of five days. The same one the Ethiopian government still uses, officially; that calendar is a means of telling time to date. When we go to the temple of the Goddess Het-heru (Hathor) at a place called Dendara, we see the beginning of what is called the Zodiac. The French stole the original, and in carrying it to France, in hot pursuit by the Arabs of Egypt, they dropped it in the river Nile. Yet a Frenchman said he remembered everything and produced a whole new one within two weeks. So if you read Revelations, like this false Zodiac, it has nothing to do with St. John but in fact Bishop Athanasius. This is the same thing, how could the French remember the stolen Egyptian Zodiac so well? It was rectangular but what they remembered is circular. Thus it is the French who made the Zodiac they placed in the Temple of Goddess Het-Heru for tourists these days, and the tourist guides will tell you that is French one. So!

You can see that even in those early times we were dealing with astronomy and the Europeans have not gone one inch further than those Africans along the Nile. What yoy have to remember, however is that the Papyrus of Hunefer deals with Africans who came down the Nile, who were already using this kind of thing: and we must wonder since we don’t have the day-to-day, or enough artifacts to put them together to see the transition. Why is it that the Yorubas of West Africa have the same structure of diet system as the Nile Valley? I don’t remember much because the Yorubas in their own folklore speak of having come from the Nile Valley: so you can stop wondering right there, since it is from their earliest teachings in their folklores.

When we go down the Nile and look at the engineering and our engineering goes not only to the building of pyramids by Imhotep, this multi-genius, but equally to the time of Senwosret II, with the division if the Nile water, equally to stop the rush of water. That would put us right back to 2,200 Before Common “Christian” Era (B.C.E.).

The use of navigation and navigational instruments by using he sun and the stars as the navigational tools –we have the best record of that going back even before Pharaoh Neco II, who saw the navigation of the entire continent and had a map of Africa in almost the common shape it is; and that dates to ca 600 B.C.E. whereas Herodotus who came to Egypt in 457 B.C.E., and Erastotshenes, who came there between 247—194 B.C.E., used maps which were rectangular in shape. They reflected the end of Africa being where Sahara is, the southern end of Sahara, meaning that they had no concept Africa from about Ethiopia  south to Monomotapa, now called the republic of south Africa. It is important to note that England played a major role in most of the distorting that we are talking about.

Then we come again to another part that we are talking about, that is agriculture, before we even come to writing. At the gathering stale, when man observes the seed germinating, and out of that came a religious conflict, which other men are to later follow, comes out of the most secret symbols of the religiosity of Egypt and other parts of Africa. We are now talking about the dung beetle, and the observation of the African along the Nile with respect to the dung beetle, otherwise called the scarab. The dung beetle hibernates, goes into manure of a donkey, horse and the cow, only animals with grass manure. And that beetle remains in there for 28—days; you know that particular beetle died in your mind. And when the beetle comes out, what better symbol would you have than resurrection?

The beetle played the same part in the religion of Egyptians that spread to other parts of Africa, and subsequently into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and so on. Thus the beetle became the symbol of resurrection. Of course religion its self had started then. Just imagine you’ve got back 1000 years and you see your woman giving birth to a baby. I hope I did not frighten mist of you fellows about child birth; because if you had some experience of seeing a baby being born, you would be less quick to abandon your child. As you are standing there and this baby comes from the woman’s organ. You witness this while the pelvic region is expanding about four or five inches in diameter for the head to pass through, and you are there. You can’t perceive that you have anything to do with this 100,000 or 1000 years ago. Witnessing the birth of that baby gets you thinking. You immediately start to transcend your mind, and you also start attributing this to something beyond. Thus you start to believe. You start to wonder’ why is it here? Where did it come from? And where is it going? Because you are now experiencing birth! But your experience is coming from a woman. Thus you start to pray and the woman becomes your Goddess, your first diety. She becomes Goddess Nut, the goddess of the sky; and you become God Geb, the god of the earth. You suddenly see the sun in all of this and then you realize that when the sun came the came and when the sun went, the light went; when the moon came you saw a moon in there and you don’t see any light because the light is not shining on it. So you see there is God, at least there is the major attribute of God because you realize when that doesn’t happen, the crops and vegetation don’t come.

You also realize that the sun and the moon make the river rise, and the Africans regarding these factors created the science of astronomy. Astrology, having nothing to do with your love life. Astronomy is the chart of scientific data of the movement of the planets and the sun and so forth, to the movement of each other. Astrology is a physical relationship of astronomy, the water rising at high tide and that is what the ancients spoke about division of the two disciplines. 

It was the Greeks like Plato, Aristotle, and others who came and learned. In those days would come and read for their education. There were no books to take home; there were no publishing houses like now. You had only one book and most of the subjects were orally taught. Certain instructions were toe to toe, shoulder to shoulder, mouth to ear. I will go no further than that. The English adopted it and called Freemasonry. Churchward was a big man in England. Besides being a physician, he was also one of those who made English Freemasonry what it is today. So in another adaptation, the British took twenty-two tables from Egypt, brought them here and set up what they called “Freemasonry.” Of course the Americans followed suit.

These Africans had moved along the entire continent. You see, we are treating the Egyptians today as if the Egyptians had a barrier that stopped them from going to other parts of Africa. So we say Egyptians were of a special race, and they had nothing to do with the rest of the Africans. Can you imagine Thames River at this side stopping the people from the other side from communicating with this side, especially when a man standing over there saw a woman here bathing naked; do you think that river would stop him. Do you think the Alps stopped Germans from seeing an Italian woman? What makes you think that the little River or a bit of sand would stop a man from seeing a woman over there in Africa? I am using these common symbols so that you can appreciate what I mean. So it isn’t that when you go Egypt you will notice the ancient Egyptians are shown by the artists as the ancient Egyptians Nubians or Ethiopians or any one else, except when you are talking about the conquerors. In most of these Museums they purposely bring you the statues of the Greeks, of the Romans, of the Persians, the Assyrians and the Hyskos. They don’t bring you any of the Africans. So when they can’t help it, and they need to bring you one that you call a typical African like Pharaoh Mentuhotep III, it is important to Egypt that they have to show him. What they did was to make his nose flat, so you can tell the difference.

Then once in a while, but when they couldn’t do it, what they did say was; “Well Negroes came into Egypt in the Eighteenth Dynasty.” Now it couldn’t be, because the Portuguese hadn’t created Negroes until the seventeenth century, C.E., but how come the Negroes created by the Portuguese have a place called Negroland, which was in fact the Songhai Empire? In the map you could see where Negroland was, and so how do you get the Negroes and Negroland back in the Eighteenth Dynasty? The eighteenth Dynasty has such figures as Akhenaton, or Amenhotep IV, and his father, whom the Greeks called Amenhotep III; in the west you could call him Amenophis III. The civilization in Africa did not spread only from along the Nile, but it spread into your own writings, documents, and belief systems.

I now go back to the Etruscans, who later became the Romans; the people of Pyrrhus, who later became the Greeks, because Pyrrhus was later, became Greece. But we don’t have these people until they came from the island of the Mediterranean or the Great Sea. At the time they left, the Egyptians were the colonizers of the other Africans in Egypt. Setting up the first educational system for the people of Pyrrhus, where the borders of Libus (now Libya) and Egypt meet; a little enclave which later became Africa. It is there that the educational systems for the Greeks occurred, and from there Africans moved the system to a place called the city of Elea. It is there that the Greeks would come. This is after they left the Greek peninsula; go to the Italian peninsula where they would meet others to come over to Libus, as they couldn’t come the other way as they were going illegally, they were sneaking out! Remember, the period of time which we are speaking, there is no writing in Greece yet. Until Homer there is no writing in Greece. No record you could deal with. Whatever they learned, came from outside, came from outside, came from Egypt, came from Babylonia. The Babylonian writings are part of this origin of Greece as well as the writings from about 4100 B.C.E., the first Dynastic period, and this is not when writing started along the Nile. This is the first recognized herself from under two men. The war between the North headed by King Scorpion, and the South headed by King Namer, and that will bring us to about 4100 B.C.E. when Namer started United or Dynastic Egypt.

So the pre-dynastic period was a period of the introduction of religion, of mathematics and science, engineering, law, medicine and so forth. The period of documentation also started then to some extent in the First Dynasty. The period of belief in “one God” really did not start with Akhnaten, that is, when someone said there must be only “one God.” But the period of absorbing “one God” didn’t start there, because it is that period in 4100 B.C.E., when Namer, after defeating Scorpion, leader of the North, decided that the diety of the North, God Amen (which you say at the end of every prayer, you are still praying to the African God Amen), be put together with his own diety of the South, God Ra. But they didn’t notice that he made one God out of two, God Amen-Ra. He used them in that respect. But the people fell into civil war and there was division again. From that union, God Amen-Ra became God Ptah, and the Goddess of justice became. Justice shown as a scale which is the same symbol now used in the United States for justice, except that there is no justice in the United States, because one scale is up, and the other is down, that is no justice; and that is “just this”! Justice is when both scales are on the same level, and so the African in America who is asking for justice is being foolish. The symbol says you’ll never get; all you’ll get is “just this”!

Before these symbols came, the laws on morality and human behavior, the Admonitions to Goddess Maat-Goddess of Justice and Law. There were forty-two Admonitions to Goddess Maat forming the foundation of justice. Then there are the teachings of Amen-em-eope one thousand years before Solomon stole them, some of which he plagiarized word for word, and others he paraphrased, which are now called the Proverbs of Solomon. And yet if we could have stopped there we would have done enough. But it wasn’t the last of it, so to speak. Because we came down with jurisprudence, the basis of the law attached to the deity which we are teaching now as jurisprudence. And there is a thing in African jurisprudence that harborer should not get away from the penalty of the thief. 

During the earliest time of the Kingdom of Ethiopia, King Uri, the first king of Ethiopia had spoken about, “justice isn’t based upon strength, bout on the morality of the condition of the event.” This now interprets as “the stronger should not mistreat the weaker”; and this supposed to be something said by Plato, and just like the nonsense we hear that “the Greeks had democracy.” The Greeks have never had democracy. They never had one in the past and they don’t have it now. When they were supposed to have had democracy in Greece no more than five percent of the people had anything you could call democracy. When you look at that, you find it was from this background going back to the time of Amen-em-eope that these fundamental laws came from, you could see why those laws spread from North Africa and inti Numidia, which is today called Tunisia.

It is at Numidia then that Augustine’s family, continuing the practice of the Manichean religion, carried into Rome later in the Christian era. When he left his education in Khart-Haddas or Carthage, it is that same teaching from the Manicheans that Augustine carried into Rome. Ambrose, the greatest Christian scholar in all Europe, became stunned. But this twenty-nine year old boy arrived and spoke to Ambrose about his great education in Carthage, Ambrose said, “Man, you’re heavy.” And Augustine took over. It was the same teachings that Guido the Monk, who went to Spain in the time of the Moors, had taught at the University of Salamanca which they had established. And it was the Manichean concept that made Augustine write against the Stoics. Augustine wrote the fundamental principle that was to govern modern Christianity in its morality, when he presented them with a book called On Christian Doctrine. He had previously written the Holy City of God. If you want to check Augustine to see if he was an indigenous African read his Confessions. There he will tell you who he was. 

When Islam came it was supposed to bring something new, but I ask “what did it bring new?” because Islam was supposed to have started with an African woman by the name Hagar, according to Islamic literature. Hagar was from Egypt, and Abraham was from Asia—the city of Ur in Chaldea. At the time of Abraham’s birth a group of African people, called the Elamites, were ruling. Before Abraham, the sacred river of India has been named after general Ganges, an African who came from Ethiopia. The river Ganges still carries the name of General Ganges. And I notice in India they have not given up the symbolic worship of the cow, which represents the worship of Goddess Het-Heru, Hathor, the “Golden Calf” of the Jews. They also haven’t given up the obelisk that still stays there, which the Hindus copied. Again an English man by the name of Sir Gofrey Higgins, who published a two volume work in 1836, and in Volume one in particular, he is speaking about all the deties of the past being “black,” but said: “ can’t accept that they could have come from even Egypt, they must have come from India.” He couldn’t accept it!

Out of that religion of the Nile Valley came the religion of the Ngail in Kenya from the same river base. And as the situation changed you had the Amazulu going for it, because the Zimbabwe River is still there. The people who were originally there were kicked off their land by the British, and equally by the Germans. When the German Dr. Carl Peters came there, the struggle between the Germans and the English for Tanganyika was going strong; both sides killed off the people around that area who spoke the Rowzi language. So when you talk about Zimbabwe, don’t think about the nation alone. Zimbabwe means a metropolis of buildings equal in design to the Pyramids’ cone shape. When the sunlight coming in strikes the altar, the altar shines because of the sunlight. They had a mixture of gold and silver, the same thing that happens when you are down at the rock-hewn temple of Rameses II, which is on November 22^nd, when the sun comes in past the doors. It also happens in February. This shows the commonality of the African culture throughout Africa.

And lastly, just remember that when you see the Ashantis, the Yorubas,and all the other African people, they were not always where they are now. Arab and European slavery made the African migrate from one part of the African world to another; that is why you can see in Akan culture as written by the African writer Dr. J. B. Danquah, the people with the same hair cut, and the same beads and jewelry system as Queen Nefertari (the wife of Pharaoh Rameses II in the nineteenth Dynasty), and Queen Nefertiti (the wife of Pharaoh Akhnaton in the Eighteenth Dynasty). It is too much to speak about it, really.

If you had known this when you were much younger, you too over there would have wanted a nation; for you too would have realized that if you have golden toilet in another man’s house (nation) you have got  nothing. It is only when you have your own house (nation) that you can demand anything, because you don’t even need to demand anything, you do it. It is only when you have your own nation that you can decide the value and judgment of beauty. If I was ruling England and you came to run for a beauty contest, you could be disqualified even before you came. You’re talking about racism; why not? This isn’t your country. You can not run for a beauty contest in a white man’s country. You don’t see any Europeans wining beauty contests in China, Japan or India; but the funny thing is that they come and win one in Nigeria. As a matter of fact Miss Trinidad was a white girl. Miss Barbados also a white girl, and Miss Jamaica was a white girl, all of them in a black country. And this is what I am saying. You can call it racist but you know I am telling the truth. 

What I hope I have done is make you understand the necessity for further research; but more than all, the necessity to talk to your child. When your physician tells you that you are pregnant, that’s when you start teaching your child. Talk to the child at the time of birth. This is when his and or her education begins, before he/she gets out of school, and before you and I die.

(A lecture delivered for the Minority Ethnic Unit of the Greater London Council, London, England, March 6—8, 1986. It was addressed mainly to the African community in London consisting of African people from the Caribbean and African people from Africa.)