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
It is easy to dismiss Afrocentric research because most of it is filled with dubious information. Cheikh Anta Diop and Yosef Ben-Jochannan, who bases his most of his research on the misinformation of George James, are some of the worst offenders. What I find funny is these individuals even turn on African scholars such as Clarence E. Walker who provide evidence of how Afrocentric is just as biased and dubious as Eurocentric is. The issue here is reporting historical accounts accurately and neither Eurocentric nor Afrocentric do this.
No one has yet to explain how was it that ancient Greeks could report upon the teachings, mythology and culture believes of Egyptian, Ethiopian and others when not one of these Greek scholars, including Herodotus, spoke or understood Egyptian or Ethiopian or whatever. Their knowledge of the different people they met was limited and often very dubious, never mind being influenced by cultures they understood very little about. Its only been in recent modern history that Egyptologists were able to decrypt ancient Egyptian, something the ancient Greeks could not even do never mind trying to explain Egyptian culture, that shows evidence of how limited Greek knowledge of different cultures was. This ability to be able to decrypt ancient Egyptian gives one the ability to read the works of the Egyptians directly from the Egyptians and not the works of dubious Greek interpretations. Meanings and interpretations are often lost in translation from one culture to another, this is not a new phenomena misinterpetations of cultures and people happened all the time but with the ability to understand ancient Egyptian from the Egyptians themselves has given modern Egyptologists a direct insight of who the Egyptians were based upon their writings and not someone else, revealeding that much of what was passed down to us by the Greeks was the Greek interpretations of cultures they did not understand, revealing how different Greek culture was from those others(Egyptian, Ethopian, etc.) that they were writting about. This is why the 17th, 18th and 19th century Eurocentric works that James and others base most of their information upon have been dismissed. These believes that
Afrocentric scholars hold are not new ones, most are based upon the dubious works and Romantic ideas of 17th, 18th and 19th century Eurocentric belief system. In fact if we look at what the ancient Greeks write, we will find that the opposite is true. Ancient Hellenist scholars were one of the first to teach about ethnocentric and most Greek academia was highly biased with Hellenocentricism. The philosophy, historiography, and polity of other highly educated societies was often neglected from being taught to students, or worse, treated as invalid.
Do you know where the oldest uni in the world is at?whose works are you basing you comments on?Or is it speculation and Caucasoid-theory-can you prove beyond resonable doubt,differences between greek and aegyptian/gypsie cultures? Romance aside how well do you know Africa?
I am basing my information upon the research works of Egyptologists and Classicists and they have already shown there is a difference between Greek and Egyptian cultures because unlike their predecessors, modern Egyptologists can now decrypt ancient Egyptian and its evidence shows against Afroasiatic influences across the ancient Greek culture. If what Bernal and other Afrocentric state is true then we would expect to find Egyptian influence not just in the outermost peripheries of Greek culture and practices but on the central elements themselves, on what was most unique in about ancient Greek culture. Do the institutions of Greek culture and civilization resemble those of Egypt or Africa? Most evidence discovered so far proves not and instead show how different Egyptian culture and ideas were from those of Greek. Egypt was a noble culture but to assert that it had anything to do with Greek democracy, philosophy or their religious believes is ludicrous. The Greeks believed passionately in the human free will even when that will conflicted with that of the gods. Politically, they rejected hierocracy and priestly rule even before recorded history begins. Egypt, by contrast, was a theocracy in the most literal sense throughout its long history. History to the Greeks was an account of individuality while Egypt chronicles was all events to the uniform and ceremonial pattern of the cosmic order. Even during Ptolemaic rule of Egypt yes there was some infused Egyptian & Greek ideas and symbolism which was at that time not an easy balance between old Hellenic models of autocracy and the oldest royal theology of the conquered country. Although the Greek and Egyptian cultures had started slowly to blend in everyday life under the Ptolemeis, there always remained marked incompatibilities between the two because of the different perceptions of the Greek mind (insisting on binary alternatives) verses that of the Egyptian mind (where opposite concepts can coexist). These two very different mind sets was the cause of separation between the two cultures a desirable and encouraged act by the Ptolemaic rulers in order to preserve the cultural identity of the dominant Greek minority (the gymnasium class) from being absorbed into the Egyptian one within a few generations. Ptolemies never encouraged the learning of local language and literature in Greek schools, not a programme fostered or encouraged by the court. The two cultures were much more different then alike then most people think.
You make some very legitimate points yet there are a few misconceptions. Firstly during the time of Greek historians like Herodotus, there were Greek settlements in Egypt. These Greek settlers of course spoke Greek,, but they also learned the Egyptian language. These Greeks living in Egypt served as interpreters to Greek travelers like Herodotus, who could interpret what the Egyptian priests would recount. Secondly, Egyptian ideas did not influence alll of Greece true,, but many and this the most influential scholars and philosophers did go to Egypt and learn. The ideas and philosophy they brought back were rejected by the ethnocentrist Greeks primarily because they were so foreign to Greek ideas. Philosophers like Aristotle and Socrates were rejected and sentenced to death for introducing such foreign concepts into Greece. Yet these very men re now hailed as the gfathers of Greek Philosophy. A philosophy that they learned in Egypt and were hated for and executed for by the Greek elites. Another thing the Egyptian language was only lost after the Christian era around the 3rd century A.D when the Egyptian temples were shut down and the sacred writings banned. After this time the language became lost til modern times when the Rosetta stone was found. Interestingly this sone the key to understanding ancient Egyptian was inscribed during the time of the Greek ruler of Egypt Ptolemy. So obviously there were Greeks that were very knowledgable of the Egyptian language. Greek culture was very different and unique from Egypt.. but there were very strong influences flowing from this part of Africa.
Interesting points and valid in some instances. Many cultures, including Egyptian influence each other and Greek culture does not fall out of that norm, that is true but not to the extend that some are trying to make it out. Aristotle and Socrates, especially Aristotle were Hellenocentricism, and a correction on their “death sentences”: Aristotle was not put to death for anything, he was very Hellenocentric and he died of natural causes; he was an outcast from Athens because he was not an Athenian native not because he taught “Egyptian ideology”, he was from the Greek northern city, Stageira. Socrates was put to death as a traitor to Athens because his ideas and views were seen as favorable towards Sparta during the Peloponnese wars. In other words he favorite Spartan ideology over Athenian and at a time when these two cities were fighting with each other that was a dangerous thing to do. You are correct that there were Greek cities on the Northern seacoasts of N. Africa long before Alexander the Great but their their supposed “learning” of Egyptian is greatly exaggerated, most Egyptian they “learned” they Hellinized, such as “Zeus Ammon” a bad rendering of Amun which is Egyptian for “hidden one”, but the Greeks revised “Amun” to “Ammon” which is Greek fro “Sand”, in other words the Greek translation meant “God of Sands” not “God of mystery” as the original meaning for Amun did. Whatever Egyptian and other native languages Greeks in diaspora learned they were bad renderance and often Hellinized to better understand foreign concepts they came into contact with.
Andrea
Your posts are idle chit-chats disgusied as something scholarly.
Just cite me one peer reviewed authority that supports your view. Just one…on a view of the Y-haplotype of Greeks, or on your view of cranofacial metrics.
Besides, do you figure that reciting “caucasiod” like a rote learning infant would cut any ice with me. Essentially, you may need to understand that caucasiod means nothing.
It is a useless expressive term anachronistic and obsolete. It is neither scientifc nor factual. According to that the theory of that word, there are more Black caucasians than there are white caucasians. For example Tutsis, Fulanis, Hausas, Amharas, Masais, Somalis, Yemenis, etc etc all have caucasiod features. But all reasonable people know that they are Black Africans.
The focus on this site is the achievement of Black Africans. We do not recognize your ignorant definition of “true African” or true blacks or true negroes. There are no such things. We all Black and Brown Africans are the same products of the same love.
You need to go figure out why northern Europeans remain physically on the outliers of the human family. You need to figure out where your complexes arise. But don’t hate on the Africans, and don’t try sounding smarter than you really are. Cause that comes off very flat.
Jahdey