So, dark and lovely….
The “Cairo Toe” (The University of Manchester)
The earliest known prosthesis, dating possibly as far back as 950 B.C., was discovered in Cairo on the mummified body of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman. The prosthesis is made largely of wood, molded and stained, its components bound together with leather thread. It is, as prostheses go, tiny.
maya muurs attacking aryan in thewest before 1492
Tacitus on the Jews
Tacitus, Histories, 5.2-5
[2] The Jews are said to have been refugees from the island of Crete who settled in the remotest corner of Libya in the days when, according to the story, Saturn was driven from his throne by the aggression of Jupiter [1]. This is a deduction from the name Judaei by which they became known: the word is to be regarded as a barbarous lengthening of Idaei, the name of the people dwelling around the famous Mount Ida in Crete. A few authorities hold that in the reign of Isis the surplus population of Egypt was evacuated to neighboring lands under the leadership of Hierosolymus and Judas [2]. Many assure us that the Jews are descended from those Ethiopians who were driven by fear and hatred to emigrate from their home country when Cepheus was king [3]. There are some who say that a motley collection of landless Assyrians [4] occupied a part of Egypt, and then built cities of their own, inhabiting the lands of the Hebrews and the nearer parts of Syria. Others again find a famous ancestry for the Jews in the Solymi who are mentioned with respect in the epics of Homer [5]: this tribe is supposed have founded Jerusalem and named it after themselves.
[3] Most authorities, however, agree on the following account. The whole of Egypt was once plagued by a wasting disease which caused bodily disfigurement. So pharaoh Bocchoris [6] went to the oracle of Hammon [7] to ask for a cure, and was told to purify his kingdom by expelling the victims to other lands, as they lay under a divine curse. Thus a multitude of sufferers was rounded up, herded together, and abandoned in the wilderness. Here the exiles tearfully resigned themselves to their fate. But one of them, who was called Moses, urged his companions not to wait passively for help from god or man, for both had deserted them: they should trust to their own initiative and to whatever guidance first helped them to extricate themselves from their present plight. They agreed, and started off at random into the unknown. But exhaustion set in, chiefly through lack of water, and the level plain was already strewn with the bodies of those who had collapsed and were at their last gasp when a herd of wild asses left their pasture and made for the spade of a wooded crag. Moses followed them and was able to bring to light a number of abundant channels of water whose presence he had deduced from a grassy patch of ground. This relieved their thirst. They traveled on for six days without a break, and on the seventh they expelled the previous inhabitants of Canaan, took over their lands and in them built a holy city and temple.
Frank Snowden
Blacks in Antiquity
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970
pp. 11-12
“blá-maðr, m. A BLACK MAN, NEGRO, i.e. AN ETHIOPIAN, Al. 51, Orkn. 364 (referring to A.D. 1152), distinguished from the Saracens and Arabians; three ‘blámenn’ were sent as a present to the German emperor Frederic the Second, Fms. x. 3: in romances blámenn are mentioned as A KIND OF ‘BERSERKERS,’” q.v., Finnb. ch. 16, Kjalnes. S. ch. 15; cp. Scott’s Ivanhoe, note B. See AN ICELANDIC-ENGLISH DICTIONARY by Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson(1874)
Phyllis Galembo
Chief Oadume Uwabidie of Issele-Uku, Nigeria, 1994
Phyllis Galembo
Chief Oshodin of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria, 1994
http://www.galembo.com/kings-chiefs-women/index.htm
Book 17, part 3
The writers who have divided the habitable world according to continents divide it unequally. Africa wants so much of being a third part of the habitable world that, even if it were united to Europe, it would not be equal to Asia; perhaps it is even less than Europe; in resources it is very much inferior, for a great part of the inland and maritime country is desert. It is spotted over with small habitable parts, which are scattered about, and mostly belonging to nomad tribes. Besides the desert state of the country, its being a nursery of wild beasts is a hindrance to settlement in parts which could be inhabited. It comprises also a large part of the torrid zone. All the sea coast in our quarter, situated between the Nile and the Pillars (of Hercules)[Gibralter], particularly that which belonged to the Carthaginians [today’s Tunisia], is fertile and inhabited. And even in this tract, some spots destitute of water intervene, as those about the Syrtes, the Marmaridae, and the Catabathmus.
STRABO
GEOGRAPHY
p111 Book I Chapter 2 (end)
24 (30) The same mistake is made by those who say that Homer is not acquainted with the isthmus that lies between the Egyptian Sea and the Arabian Gulf, and that he is in error when he speaks of “the Ethiopians that are sundered in twain, the farthermost of men.” Men of later times are wrong when they censure Homer for saying that, for it is correct. Indeed, the reproach that Homer is ignorant of this isthmus is so far from being true, that I affirm not only that he knows about it, but that he describes it in express terms, and that the grammarians beginning with p113Aristarchus and Crates, the leading lights in the science of criticism, even though Homer speaks of it, do not perceive that he does. The poet says: “the Ethiopians that are sundered in twain, the farthermost of men.” About the next verse there is a difference of opinion, Aristarchus writing: “Abiding some where Hyperion sets, and some where he rises”; but Crates: “abiding both where Hyperion sets and where he rises.” 31Yet so far as the question at issue is concerned, it makes no difference whether you write the verse one way or the other. For Crates, following the mere form of mathematical demonstration, says that the torrid zone is “occupied”78 by Oceanus and that on both sides of this zone are the temperate zones, the one being on our side, while the other is on the other side of it. Now, just as these Ethiopians on our side of Oceanus, who face the south throughout the whole length of the inhabited land, are called the most remote of the one group of peoples, since they dwell on the shores of Oceanus, so too, Crates thinks, we must conceive that on the other side of Oceanus also there are certain Ethiopians, the most remote of the other group of peoples in the temperate zone, since they dwell on the shores of this same Oceanus; and that they are in two groups and are “sundered in twain” by Oceanus. Homer adds the words, “abiding both where Hyperion sets and where he rises,” because, inasmuch as the celestial zodiac always lies in the zenith above its corresponding p115terrestrial zodiac and inasmuch as the latter does not by reason of its obliquity79 extend outside the territory of the two Ethiopias, we must conceive that the entire revolution of the sun takes place within the width of this celestial zone, and that his risings and his settings take place herein, appearing differently to different peoples, and now in this sign and now in that. Such, then, is the explanation of Crates, who conceives of the matter rather as an astronomer; but he might have put it more simply — still saving his point that this was the sense in which the Ethiopians are “sundered in twain,” as Homer has stated — namely, by declaring that the Ethiopians stretch along both shores of Oceanus from the rising to the setting of the sun. What difference, I say, does it make with respect to this thought whether we read the verse as Crates writes it, or as Aristarchus does — “abiding some where Hyperion sets and some where he rises”? For this, too, means that Ethiopians live on both sides of Oceanus, both towards the west and towards the east. But Aristarchus rejects this hypothesis of Crates, and thinks that the people referred to as divided “in twain” are the Ethiopians in our part of the world, namely, those that to the Greeks are most remote on the south; but he thinks these are not so divided “in twain” that there are two Ethiopias, the one lying towards the east and the other towards the west, but that there is just one, the one that lies south of the Greeks and is situated along Egypt; and he thinks that the poet, ignorant of this fact, just as he was ignorant of those other matters which p117Apollodorus has mentioned in the second book of his work entitled “On the Catalogue of Ships,” told what was not true about the regions in question.