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
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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
Jahdney, you have just posted a genetics paper which was universally condemned as an unscientific, politically motivated attack on Greeks by “Scientists” from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. 5 of the “geneologists” were from this country:
Dropped genetics paper lacked scientific merit
Nature 415, 115 (10 January 2002); doi:10.1038/415115b
Sir – Even though the controversial withdrawal of a paper on the genetic relatedness of Palestinians and Jews by the journal Human Immunology (see Nature 414, 382; 2001) is a minor episode compared with the tragedies caused by ethnic/religious conflicts over past decades, the issues involved are worth revisiting.
The stated purpose of the paper by Antonio Arnaiz-Villena et al. was to “examine the genetic relationships between the Palestinians and their neighbours (particularly the Jews) in order to: (1) discover the Palestinian origins, and (2) explain the historic basis of the present … conflict between Palestinians and other Muslim countries with Israelite Jews”.
They conclude: “Jews and Palestinians share a very similar HLA genetic pool that supports a common ancient Canaanite origin. Therefore, the origin of the long-lasting Jewish–Palestinian hostility is the fight for land in ancient times.”
It is difficult to believe that knowledge of genes may help to explain the present conflict. Although population genetics can address issues of relatedness of populations, mating patterns, migrations and so on, obviously it cannot provide evidence about reasons for conflicts between people.
Our primary concern, however, is that the authors might be perceived to have been discriminated against for political, as opposed to legitimate scientific, reasons.
Even a cursory look at the paper’s diagrams and trees immediately indicates that the authors make some extraordinary claims. They used a single genetic marker, HLA DRB1, for their analysis to construct a genealogical tree and map of 28 populations from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Japan. Using results from the analysis of a single marker, particularly one likely to have undergone selection, for the purpose of reconstructing genealogies is unreliable and unacceptable practice in population genetics.
The limitations are made evident by the authors’ extraordinary observations that Greeks are very similar to Ethiopians and east Africans but very distant from other south Europeans; and that the Japanese are nearly identical to west and south Africans. It is surprising that the authors were not puzzled by these anomalous results, which contradict history, geography, anthropology and all prior population-genetic studies of these groups. Surely the ordinary process of refereeing would have saved the field from this dispute.
We believe that the paper should have been refused for publication on the simple grounds that it lacked scientific merit.
Neil Risch
Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California 94305, USA
Alberto Piazza
Department of Genetics, Biology and Biochemistry, University of Torino, Via Santena 19, 10126 Torino, Italy
L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California 94305, USA
As a Greek I have nothing against black people and respect Ethiopians as an ancient people like my people but listen to me when I say STOP DEFAMING MY PEOPLE SO YOU CAN PURSUE YOUR OWN REVISIONIST CLAIMS! White supremecist and Bugarian nationalists are using afrocentric ideas against Greeks as well! enough is enough
regards from Greece,
thank you sokratis. But this was not an attack from FYROM.
The basis of the report was to prove modern Jews as ancestors of that land of israel(this project was funded by Hungarian Gyorgy George Soros I beleive) but also Soros has been known to support the FYROM political progaganda against Greeks…anyways thats not the point.
That study is all over the internet and is the main source by nationalist internet self-experts of Balkans despite that many major science departments dispute it.
“The limitations are made evident by the authors’ extraordinary observations that Greeks are very similar to Ethiopians and east Africans but very distant from other south Europeans; and that the Japanese are nearly identical to west and south Africans.”
Important line there:
Assuming SubSaharan thing was proof – how on earth are Greeks so distant from the neighboring Europeans, after thousands and thousands of years, Greeks spread all across the region, from what is today Turkey, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and lets not forget Southern Italy was all Greek colonies. That would mean southern Italians would have the same, because that was all settled by Ancient Greeks.
Oh, and the Japanese being closley related to South and East Africans. Yeah theres definitley something wrong there.
it wouldnt suprise me at all if this is FYROMian propaganda
i googled Anu Mauro and nothing comes up with that name except for this site, which makes this guys credibility questionable
plus mauro in the greek alphabet translates to black…alittle coincidental. probably one of FYROM’s “many great historians” (LOL) trying to leave a hidden message for the greeks
jahdey u must be a FYROMian to believe that stupid study. please read below
“Even a cursory look at the papers diagrams and trees immediatly indicates that the authors make some extraordinary claims.
They use a single genetic marker HLA DRB1 for their analysis to construct a genealogical tree and map of 28 populations from Europe, Middle East, Africa and Japan. Using results from the analysis of a single marker particularly one likely to have undergone selection for the purpose of reconstructing geneologies is unreliable and unacceptable pratice in population genetics”
Neil Risch- Stanford University
Alberto Piazza- University of Torino
L. L. Carvalli Sforza- Stanford University
This “research” has nothing to do with science. It is just low anti-Greek propaganda fabricated by anti-Greeks who made up this “research” for political interests in favour of the pseudo-state of FYROM
This “research” is fictious and ridiculous to such a degree, that it was never accepted by any serious scientist and no genealogical approved its publication, so as not to lose their credibility and reputation
—————
an international research paper published in August 2002 before being dropped and ridiculed due to its flawed research. It was devised by researchers (the team included some Macedonian Slavs) at the Department of Immunology and Molecular Biology in the Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain and claimed that Greeks (and Japanese) were shown to have genetic origins in Africa as opposed to Europe. Despite being initially published, the research was finally dismissed in the journal Nature by leading geneticists Neil Risch, Alberto Piazza, and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza:
“The limitations are made evident by the authors’ extraordinary observations that Greeks are very similar to Ethiopians and east Africans but very distant from other south Europeans; and that the Japanese are nearly identical to west and south Africans. It is surprising that the authors were not puzzled by these anomalous results, which contradict history, geography, anthropology and all prior population-genetic studies of these groups. Surely the ordinary process of refereeing would have saved the field from this dispute.” Nature 415, 115 (10 January 2002)© Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Ironically the Macedonians (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) in the dropped research were found to be a pure race decended directly from the Ancient Macedonians.
Are you guys joking? Greeks were not and are not black, there is no damn evidence to support that, this is a huge affront to Greek culture, I’m greek, we certainly arent black, and neither were the Egyptians, and neither were the punic people, I understand black nationalism and what its trying to do, but stealing the cultures of other people and trying to claim them for your own isnt helping the african cause, how about you donate funds to poverty stricken people rather than type up this pesudo-science bullshit all day, you’ve got no right to steal culture, and its damn offensive that you try.
Keep on informing Dr Mauro,Africa’s role as Pa & Ma,of current system(s),in all areas of people activity(s),has really been down-played.The collective “white” psyche,realises this,hence the suppression/oppression/falsification of African peoples & History.Race-ism?
Ancient, medieval and modern Greeks were never “black” or “african”, they were always Caucasian in origins and we can take it as far back as with the Minoans 2700 to 1450 BC