Black African Origins Of The Ancient Greeks Parts 1 and 2

By: Dr. Anu Mauro

It was common knowledge in ancient times that the Greeks were a spin-off of ancient and most revered Ethiopians. The Greeks themselves recorded their much vaunted relationship with the ancient Ethiopians heros in their holy books which narrate accounts of mythological Ethiopian derived heros such as
Hercules, Persus, Athene, Cassopia, Andromeda etc.

Below are some relevant myths (edited) with ‘exploratory’ notes.

ONE

MYTH NO. 8 –THE GREEK MYTHS: VOLUME 1

THE BIRTH OF ATHENE

According to the Pelasgians, the goddess Athene was born beside Lake Tritonis in Libya, where she was found and nurtured by the three nymphs of Libya, who dress in goat-skins. As a girl she killed her play-mate, Pallas, by accident, while they were engaged in friendly combat with spear and shield and, in token of grief, set Pallas’s name before her own. (hence the name PALLAS ATHENE) — Pg. 44

NOTE ON TEXT — By Robert Graves
1. Plato identified Athene, patroness of Athens, with the Libyan god-dess Neith, .. the aegis…. a magical goat-skin bag containing a serpent and protected by a Gorgon mask, was Athene’s long before Zeus claimed to be her father. Goat-skin aprons were the habitual costume of Libyan girls, and Pallas merely means ‘maiden’, or ‘youth’. Herodotus writes (iv. 189):

‘Athene’s garments and aegis were borrowed by the Greeks from the Libyan women, who are dressed in exactly the same way, except that their leather garments are fringed with thongs, not serpents.’ Ethiopian girls still wear this costume, which is sometimes ornamented with cowries, a yonic symbol.
— Robert Graves The Greek Myths: Published by Penguin Books

2…….Herodotus indicates that the loud cries of triumph, olulu, ololu, uttered in honour of Athene were of Libyan origin. . — Robert Graves: The Greek Myths.

NOTE by Anu Mauro
3. This noise producing activity in our time is now actually called
‘ullulation.’ It is the yodel like celebratory cry quite common all
across south Saharan Africa among contemporary African female populations.

Also use of this cry is still retained in the African descended cultures in the Levant (Palestine Syria Egypt etc. ) –Anu Mauro.

NOTE ON TEXT — By Robert Graves
4. Pottery finds suggest a Libyan immigration into Crete as early as 4000 B.C. ; and a large number of goddess-worshipping Libyan refugees from the Western Delta seem to have arrived there when Upper and Lower Egypt were forcibly united under the First Dynasty about the year 3000 B.C. The First Minoan Age began soon afterwards, and Cretan culture spread to Thrace and
Early Helladic Greece. —- Robert Graves The Greek Myths: 1

=================================
PART TWO

But then who were the Libyans and how are they also connected to Perseus and Andromeda and Ethiopians? …especially bearing in mind that Chemmis, located on the Nile was the name given to ancient Egypt and also translates as black or charred and that the entire continent of Africa west of Egypt
was know as Lybia in ancient times. The two word answer is ‘origins’ and ‘ancestry.’

GREEK MYTH 60 –THE GREEK MYTHS: VOLUME 1

BELUS AND THE DANAAIDS

a. KING BELUS, who ruled at Chemmis in the Thebaid, was the son of Libya by Poseidon, and twin-brother of Agenor. His wife Anchinoe daughter of Nilus, bore him the twins Aegyptus and Danaus, and a third son third son, Cepheus.

Aegyptus was given Arabia as his kingdom; but also subdued the country of the Melampodes, (blackfeet) and named it Egypt after himself.

b. Fifty sons were born to him of various mothers: Libyans, Arabians, Phoenicians, and the like. Danaus, (who was) sent to rule Libya, had fifty daughters called the Danaids, also born of various mothers: Naiads, Hamadryads. Egyptian princesses of Elephantis and Memphis, Ethiopians, and the like.

c. On Belus’s death, the twins quarrelled over their inheritance, and as a conciliatory gesture Aegyptus proposed a mass-marriage between the fifty princes and the fifty princesses. Danaus, suspecting a plot would not consent and when an oracle confirmed his fears that Aegyptus had it in his mind to kill all the Danaids, prepared to flee from Libya.

d. With Athene’s assistance, he built a ship for himself and his daughters – the first two-prowed vessel that ever took to sea – and they sailed towards Greece together, by way of Rhodes.

i. Aegyptus now sent his sons to Argos, forbidding them to return until they had punished Danaus and his whole family. On their arrival, they begged Danaus to reverse his former decision and let them marry his daughters – intending, however, to murder them on the wedding night. When he still refused, they laid siege to Argos.

j. When the siege was lifted a mass-marriage was arranged, and Danaus paired off the couples: his choice being made in some cases because the bride and bridegroom had mothers of equal rank, or because their names were similar – thus Cleite, Sthenele, and Chrysippe married Cleitus, Sthenelus, and Chrysippus

k. During the wedding-feast Danaus secretly doled out sharp pins which his daughters were to conceal in their hair; and at midnight each stabbed her husband through the heart. There was only one survivor; on Artemis’s advice, Hypermnestra saved the life of Lynceus, because he had spared her maidenhead; and helped him in his flight to the city of Lyncea, sixty furlongs away.

1. The murdered men’s heads were buried at Lema, and their bodies given full funeral honours below the walls of Argos; ….Athene and Hermes purified the Danaids in the Lemaean Lake with Zeus’s permission. Lynceus later killed Danaus, and reigned in his stead.

Meanwhile, Aegyptus had come to Greece, but when he learned lphis sons’ fate, fled to Aroe, where he died, and was buried at Patrae in a sanctuary of Serapis

NOTE ON TEXT — By Robert Graves
l. This myth records the early arrival in Greece of Helladic colonists (from Palestine, by way of Rhodes, and their introduction of agriculture into the Peloponnese. It is claimed that they included emigrants from Lybia and Ethiopia, which seems probable. — Robert Graves The Greek Myths: 1

NOTE ON TEXT — by Anu Mauro
This myth also clearly suggests that the children of Dana-us i.e. the Danaids were of African or Ethiopic origin on both their maternal and paternal sides…note their mothers place origins, as well as the paternal connection with Aegyptus, Cepheus and Belus. –Anu Mauro.

NOTE ON TEXT — by James Brunson
” Throughout the Greek legends, an Africoid or dark-skinned people are associated with Danaus and the Danaids. (The poet) Aeschylus’s, “Suppliant Maidens”, describes the Danides as “Black and smitten by the “sun”. (In the poem) when the Danaids claim an ethnic kinship to Epaphos, son of Zeus, the Argive king Pelops, rebukes them:

Nay, strangers, what ye tell is past belief
For me to hear, that ye from Argos spring
For ye to Libyan women are most like,
And no wise to our native maidens here.””

—- James Brunson : The African Presence in the Ancient Mediterranean: Isles and Mainland Greece Pg. 48 African Presence in Early Europe– Edited by Ivan Van Sertima

NOTE ON TEXT — by Anu Mauro
So this places Ethiopics not only in the early migrant populations that settled in Greece but the Danaid link can also be used to connect Perseus himself to dark skinned Ethiopic elements not to mention Andromeda and her parents . This can be gleaned from the next installment of Greek myth (Part 3) wherein the great-grand father of Perseus, his grandfather as well as his mother are shown to have had Danaaid (hence African) connections.

— Anu Mauro