Nile Valley Contributions and African Heritage

Published 2025-05-12 · Duration 10:10 · Video file (63 MB)

Dr. Van Sertima discusses the overlooked contributions of African civilizations to early Egyptian history and challenges Eurocentric interpretations of ancient Egyptian

Transcript
There's our primitive African people living on the edge of a replete of African civilization. And people like myself who seek to establish the quintessential African heritage are dismissed as romantics, because it's all very well to talk about primitive and tripe. Africa is either as a primitive in the past or a problem in the present. That's the only thing people are interested in. But when you start to deal with something crucial and serious, that seeks to re-establish the essentially quality of man regardless of his race, this is considered a romantic enterprise. But when they're dealing with primitives, it's not romantic, it's correct. As I said, I have to have dull over Europe. I've not only lived in Western Europe in London. I have lived in Eastern Europe. I have lived in villages in Eastern Europe. There are many a-stirtered people share one back room. I don't write about European tribal peoples or European villages, because that is the edge of the rip me of Europe. Europe's genius cannot negate. By the lowest common denominator, we go to the Ancient Greek, and Romans the classical heritage of Europe. When we're dealing with European genius, why is it then romantic to deal with the genius of the African? When we're trying to reclaim the heritage of our people? When we come to deals with the Egyptian, therefore, I want to make that quite clear. That we have reached a stage in our studies now, whether it absolutely not a single doubt. That's the effectiveness of the Egyptian in that early classical period. Not only in the dawn, but in the noon dynasty, the 18th and 19th dynasty, the upthorned me. That he's actually seen in the museums he has seen, he's seen, Ramsey's the second black. When they put him onto the gamma rays, he's turned brown. This scientist did all sorts of things. I don't have to deliberately did that, but he came out brown when they were finished experimenting with him. And I've seen similar things in the United States, when in December the 4th 1975, I brought out an article on the upthorned page of the New York Times. The discovery of an African presence in America, which the New York Times published under the subheading bad news for Columbus. And I published the beginning of that article, which was given considerable prominence and circulated all over the world. I noted that this Smithsonian Institute had stated on the man who would make her that they had called two skeletons of Africans in the Virgin Islands at House Bay. They said that were Africans, they said they're working in the 30s, they said they were from in the 1280 grave, which is more than 200 years before Columbus. They said that they had one of them had an ex-forum of three Colombian Indian ornaments. But logically and strappy, graphically, that is both by style and by strata, very with phone, those Africans were pre-Columbian. Yet when this story circulated through the New York Times through my publication in the New York Times, they denied everything. They said that were not sure they were Africans. They said that they had one said it was a pre-Columbian dental ritual at the Congress for the nature of their feet, but they may have fallen on their teeth. They said that so-called that seek into the bones and that therefore they could not carbon-day if the skeletons. They said there was so much carbon in the skeletons that if they used the carbon-day thing meant that the Africans were not in 1250, they did. They were probably in the 13th century. Incredible lies. In order not to deal with this because it was considered that if this thing got any further, it may lead to some trouble in the Virgin Islands. I have since found that where those skeletons were found, the highest incidence of bone cancer exist in the Caribbean. I don't intend to go in for it in any revelations about it because I would like to return to the United States. This is serious business that as soon as we come close to serious knowledge about our people, everything is put in our way. All sorts of arguments, they accept the African is supposed to have certain skeletons, features and properties that said all along they're seeing that and they're saying that as soon as they find them in the wrong place, where you should not be all the classifications for them. They want to change the classification. When Bruce William's came to conference to show that Tassetti was the oldest monarchy in the Nile Valley, it receded the Egyptian and that created the Egyptian, this stopped using the words of anization that the countries started talking about cultures. And this has completely affected or researched. It's not saying talking about democracy and freedom and as soon as one exercises one freedom to pursue a study, then that study is crushed up or is pushed into corner or is dismissed from the mainstream. In a study of Egyptian civilization, the Nile Valley civilizations, the deal with the African presence and earlier we have to deal with that period in particular where the Greeks invaded Egypt. And in that period, we find that all the great Greeks call as many of them, not all many of them, went to Europe to study, went Egypt to study. We find Pythagoras, for example, spending seven years in Egypt, some people claim 22. He comes back and he profoundly affects the mathematical systems, he brings the Pythagorean theorem. We have evidence that it existed long before Pythagoras. We have evidence of many of the standards and units and measures coming out of Egyptian world and touching the Greek. Not that the Greeks didn't have standard units and methods because I'm not crazy, I'm curious. That's the one thing I don't get involved in that the Egyptians created the standards and the Greeks didn't have standards. I'm not saying that I am saying that there were certain accurate measurements. Far more accurate among Egyptian scientists with the Greeks took onto themselves and passed through their civilization. He has it not only in physics and mathematics and shagante the opposite of brilliant paper, in which he showed a whole series of mathematical equations in which you could see the profound death in geometry and so the nomad tree in algebra that you report to the Greeks that you reported after them to the Egyptians. Dr. Finch here is written a brilliant essay on medicine where you show the profound death that was owed the Greek-Sports Egyptian medicine. Egyptians were the first to divide the socialized medicines where everybody could get medical care free of charge. They were the first to have specialists, I specialists, peer specialists, no specialists, specialists for every program of the body. Herodotus reported on this. They were, they made advances in many areas of medicine. They're medical papyraya still with us. Their books have not totally disappeared. Inspired by the vast destruction of African books, inspired by the sack of the library, where perhaps as much as half a million manuscripts disappear, we still have at least 10 surviving medical books from Africa. The most famous ever-sperpyrus and Edwin Smith-Pepirus, Edwin Smith-Pepirus is 1500 BC. 3,500 years old, yet is contains chapters and intestinal disease, upgalmology, pregnancy diagnosis. The whole range, help in the axis of whole range of things on the circulation of the blood, the post-diagnostic discussions, A study of fractures in the Clapper Plan Disification in the matter with respect to that, we find photographs whose words were taken from Egyptian texts and transferred to the Greek books, the Greek medical books, without any credit whatsoever, which gives us an offer to them. And then we hear about the father of medicine, hypocrisy, when he took the theory of the Italian Army and opposites and actual passages were for work from the Egyptian. And these things are not taking into consideration. Nobody wants to admit them even when they present it. There is no talk about it. Dr. Papadamus, the Greek physicist, has done more work to show the impact of the African-Zemba's atomic theory. Newton himself pointed that the atomic theory was first the Egyptian.
Dr. Ivan Van SertimaNile Valley ContributionsAfrican HeritageAncient EgyptColumbus