Why Didn't They Tell You?

“… and the truth shall make you free.”

— Jesus of Nazareth (John 8: 32b)

Why Didn’t They Tell You That Egypt is in Africa and Ancient Egypt Was an African Civilization

Obviously Egypt (the Arab Republic of Egypt) is physically located on the Continent of Africa but today is generally thought of as being a part of the Middle East or Near East. It is aligned culturally, religiously, and racially with Western Asia (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf are among the countries included in this group). This kind of shift in perspective is not unique to that region of the world. Some years ago, I was surprised, somewhat taken aback, when at a professional education meeting in the Deep South a young man from a college in Virginia commented that this was his first time in the South. Some people no longer consider Virginia to be a southern state because culturally, politically, and in other ways it may identify more with the Northeast than the Southeast. Be it as it may, this new perspective cannot take Virginia out of the South historically; Virginia was a slave state, a leading member of the Confederacy, a Jim Crow state, and sits south of the Mason-Dixon Line.   

It does not take much imagination to see that over a period of 5,000 years or more, the Egyptian people changed racially and otherwise. A constant flow of Asiatics, Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, and the Arab conquest about 1,400 years ago certainly lightened the population, especially in the north. With whom did the ancient Egyptians identify?

Four to five thousand years ago, who did the Ancient Egyptians more closely identify with, Asiatics of western Asia or Africans to the south of Egypt? The answer is unequivocal. They identified with the black people to the South, in the interior of Africa. The late Basil Davidson, who spent a lifetime studying African people and cultures, observed that “…this “God’s land” which the old Egyptians believed to lie west of the Nile and which had, for them, a mystical significance linked to their own remote ancestry.” (Lost Cities of Africa, p. 31). They looked to the south and west, perhaps to areas such as Nabta Playa, near the present day border of Egypt and Sudan. In another of his works, Davidson further observes that “The peopling of pre-dynastic Egypt’ to quote Fairman again, ‘must have been largely the result of the desiccation of the Sahara.’ The ancient Egyptians belonged, that is, not to any specific Egyptian region or Near Eastern heritage but to that wide community of people who lived between the Red Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, shared a common Saharan-Sudanese culture,’ and drew their reinforcements for the same great source, even though, as time went by, they absorbed a number of wanderers from the Near East.” (Africa in History, p. 15).  

Close Ties between Egypt and Nubia (Kush, Ethiopia)

Whenever order broke down in Egypt, the Egyptians looked to the South for deliverance. As the Old Kingdom came to an end, Egypt was plagued by Asiatic and Libyan invaders for 150 years, during the First Intermediate Period (2130-1980 B.C) of disorder. The Egyptians looked to the South for help. In the Prophecy of Neferty, it was written,

There is a king who will come from the South

Ameny true of voice is his name

He is born of a woman of the Land of the Bow

He is a child of the heartland of Nekhen

He will take up the White Crown

He will unite the Two Mighty Goddesses

He will appease the Two Lord Gods,

With what they desire.

This prophecy is associated with the 12^th Dynasty because it is believed that the name Ameny in the second line refers to King Amenemhat I, the first king of the glorious 12^th Dynasty. The prophecy said that this king from the South, son of a woman of the “Land of the Bow”, will unite the two lands and deliver them from the Asiatics. The Land of the Bow is Nubia (Kush or Ethiopia). The king will possess legitimacy as the son of a Nubian woman who is evidently of royal blood and a king maker. My concern is not with whether or not this is even a true prophecy in the sense of being uttered before the event. What I want to emphasize is the fact of where the ancient Egyptians turned for help. They looked to the South. The next time order broke down at the end of the Middle Kingdom, leaders from the South, evidently Nubians, moved north, threw out the foreigners, and unified the country again to begin the glorious New Kingdom.

The last time the Egyptians appealed to the Southerners was the beginning of the 25^th Dynasty. Before the Kushites engaged in any warfare in Egypt, the Kushite King Kashta had traveled to Thebes, from his capital of Napata in Kush, “where he was confirmed in power by the priests of Amon.” (W. Y. Adams, Nubia: Corridor to Africa, p. 260). This event occurred before 751 B. C, the year Kashta died. After Kashta’s death, Piankhi ascended to the throne. When the priest and military leaders at Thebes became alarmed over the actions of the Libyan nomarchs in northern Egypt, they appealed to Piankhi for help. He eventually heeded their call for help. He did not go north to invade Egypt but to ward off Libyans who were trying to take Thebes.

Recently two archaeologists, Timothy Kendall and El-Hassan Ahmed Mohamed, working in the Sudan (country in which ancient Kush was located) at the ancient sites of Jebel Barkal and Napata (ancient capital of Nubia) located between the 3^rd and 4^th cataracts of the Nile, have done some remarkable work and published some of their results in a visitor’s guide entitled Nubian Karnak: Jebel Barkal and its Temples. A few quotes will suffice to demonstrate some of their remarkable findings.

 In referring to the ceremony at Thebes called “the going forth of Min”, the authors note that “Here Min-Amun’s Nubian origins are again made clear by the fact that the liturgy was to be performed by a “Nubian of Punt” who, like the god himself, was pictured as black [this writer’s italics]. … Behind the priests carrying the statue of the ithyphallic (erect penis) god appear others carrying smaller statues representing Egypt’s most prominent former kings (36 altogether), from the present king going back to Menes, the historical first. The ceremony implies that the Egyptians recognized the “royal ka” as having passed from a primeval Nubian Min (identified in those scenes only as Amun-Re Kamutef) to Menes and then to all later kings of Egypt to the present!”

Finally I want to share a few more enlightening quotes from Randall and Mohamed, which put a different light on the Egyptian 25^th Dynasty:

“Given what we have learned about Jebel Barkal, we can perhaps begin to view the rise of the Native Nubian dynasty at Napata in a different light: not as the anomaly of history that the Egyptologists have traditionally considered it but rather as a Kushite nationalistic effort to reprise an event from their legendary past. The event in question, of course, was that, described above, reported by Diodorus (3.3,2-7): that at the beginning of time Egypt was first settled by by Kushites (Aithiopeans), who introduced civilization there through their leader and first king, Osiris, who also introduced the white crown.”

Diodorus was not the only Greek who believed that Egypt was colonized by Kushites (Ethiopians). As a matter of fact, they seemed pretty certain that the Nubians were anterior to the Egyptians. When the Kushites took over in Egypt to form the 25^th Dynasty, Egypt had declined artistically, culturally, and in other ways. The 25^th Dynasty kings engaged in works of restoration. That was the reprise, doing again what their ancestors had done more than 2,000 years before.

The 25^th Dynasty Kushite kings changed the crown to the “Cap Crown” with two uraei, one being the white crown of Upper Egypt and the other being the red crown of Lower Egypt. Thus “By duplicating the mountain [the crown was formed like the mountain, Jebel Barkal], the Cap Crown proclaimed its wearers to be sons of the ancient god of Napata, the possessors of he “royal ka”, and the only legitimate heirs to the god’s first kingship, which united the lands of Kush, Upper Egypt, and Lower Egypt.”

Two thousand ago a young Rabbi from Nazareth said that the truth will make you free. That is still true today.