Discover Ethiopia, Birthplace of Humanity

“The Ethiopians were regarded by the Greeks as the best people in the world. Homer speaks of them in the Iliad as the ‘blameless Ethiopians’. He claims that they were visited by Zeus, the king of the gods, by the goddess Iris, who travelled to their country to participate in their sacrificial rites, and by Poseidon, the sea god, who ‘lingered delighted’ at their feasts. This theme was taken up, in the first century BC, by Diodorus of Sicily, who asserted that the gods Hercules and Bacchus were both ‘awed by the piety’ of the Ethiopians, whose sacrifices, he claims, were the most acceptable to the gods.”

Passage from ‘The Ethiopians, A History’ by Richard Pankhurst 

The Queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon

Presented at the Vancouver Grand Masonic Day, October 16, 1999
by VW Bro. Art Scott, Victoria Columbia Lodge No. 1
SOURCE: http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/gmd1999/sheba.html

Upon reading the title of this paper, you may well wonder, “what on earth has the Queen of Sheba got to do with Freemasonry?” As a matter of fact, it was when I asked myself this very same question that I began to pursue the story of the Queen of Sheba and her visit to King Solomon following the completion of his famous temple in Jerusalem. Your next question well might be “where in Freemasonry is there any reference to the Queen of Sheba?” The answer: in the Board of Installed Masters. The Board of Installed Masters is a ceremony, not a degree, so I will plead “not guilty” of divulging any secrets when I tell you that during this ceremony the VOSL is opened at I Kings 10. After witnessing and participating in the Board of Installed Masters, and having listened to the aforementioned scripture read many, many times, I began to wonder what the relevance of this passage was to the ceremony of installation. Why did the Queen of Sheba come to visit Solomon? Was she the only monarch who came? What was so special about her visit that it is afforded such detail in the VOSL? And what is the Masonic significance of I Kings 10?

Let us begin by referring to I Kings 10:

1. And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to prove him with hard questions

2. And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones; and when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him all that was in her heart

3. And Solomon told her all her questions: there was not anything hid from the king, which he told her not

4. And when the queen of Sheba had seen all Solomon’s wisdom, and the house that he had built,

5. And the meat of his table, and the sitting of his servants, and the attendance of his ministers, and their apparel, and his cup bearers, and his ascent by which he went up into the house of the Lord; there was no more spirit in her

6. And she said to the king, It was a true report that I heard in mine own land, of thy acts and of thy wisdom

7. Howbeit I believed not the words until I came, and mine eyes have seen it: and behold, the half was not told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard

8. Happy are thy men, happy are these thy servants which stand continually before thee, and that hear thy wisdom

9. Blessed be the Lord thy God, which delighted in thee, to set thee on the throne of Israel: because the Lord loved Israel forever, therefore made he thee king, to do judgment and justice

10. And she gave the king an hundred and twenty talents of gold, and of spices very great store, and precious stones: there came no more such abundance of spices as these which the queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon

11. And the navy also of Hiram, that brought gold from Ophir, brought in from Ophir great plenty of almug trees, and precious stones

12. And the king made of the almug trees pillars for the house of the LORD, and for the king’s house, harps also and psalteries for singers: there came no such almug trees, nor were seen unto this day

13. And king Solomon gave unto the queen of Sheba all her desires, whatsoever she asked, beside that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty. So she turned and went to her own country, she and her servants

Who was the Queen of Sheba?

I don’t want to spoil my story, but before going any further, I should tell you that no archaeological evidence has ever been unearthed or uncovered that suggests or supports that the Queen of Sheba ever visited King Solomon. There are, however, records of the ancient country of Sheba, which date from 715 BCE. Sheba was sometimes called Saba, meaning “Host of Heaven,” and “peace,” and is thought to be what is now the country of Yemen in the South West corner of Arabia where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean. The people who lived in Sheba were called Sabaeans. The Sabaeans have been described as a tall and commanding people, both woolly-haired and straight-haired. Semitic in origin, they are believed to have been descendants of the land of Cush in the Bible. The Sabaean people inhabited most of NW and SW Arabia, some 483,000 square miles of mountains, valley and deserts. Some historians claim that Ethiopia, on the western end of the Red Sea, was also part of Sheba’s territory. The Sebaeans conquered all of the other South Arabian countries at the start of the Christian era. Sheba was a wealthy country, rich in gold and other precious stones, as well as incense and exotic spices sought by neighboring kingdoms. From ancient times, perfumes and spices were popular commodities in the near East, and the spice trade was a particularly active one. From both the Bible and other classical sources it appears that the valuable plants from which the coveted aromatic resins, incense, spices, and medicinal potions were produced, were grown mainly in the kingdoms of southern Arabia. From this area, major land and sea trade routes branched out to all the great trading centers of the ancient world. The Sabaeans were both extensive traders and bandits and engaged in the slave trade. Sheba engaged in a lucrative caravan trade. By 1000 BCE, camels frequently traveled the 1400 miles up the “Incense Road” and along the Red Sea to Israel. The spices of Sheba were highly prized. Frankincense, an offering to the gods, was heaped on funeral pyres, and given as an antidote for poison, and as a cure for chest pains, hemorrhoids and paralysis. Myrrh, an ingredient in fragrant oils and cosmetics, was used in preparing bodies for burial, for healing ear, eye and nose ailments, and inducing menstruation. Other Sabaean spices were saffron, cummin, aloes and galbanum. The capital of Sheba was the city of Ma’rib. Nearby was a great dam, which may have been as high as 60 feet, which provided enough water to make Sheba an agricultural nation, as well as a land of beautiful gardens. It was a fertile oasis in the desert. There is evidence that this dam burst, and the devastation caused by the ensuing flood, coupled with the loss of water for agriculture, may have led to the demise of several Sabaean cities which no longer exist today. Because of its isolation, Sheba was secure from military invasion for at least 500 years, and was independent and at peace with its neighbors during the 11th and 10th century BC History reveals that at least five kings preceded the Queen of Sheba. Yet Arabian documents portray all of Arabia as matriarchal and ruled by queens for over 1000 years. In Ethiopia, the Kebra Negast refers to a law established in Sheba that only a woman could reign, and that she must be a virgin queen. Rule by queens was not unusual in prehistoric times. Women played a large role in government, especially in the Near East where there is evidence of their prominence in economics, the family, and religion. According to Ethiopian legend, the Queen of Sheba was born in 1020 BCE in Ophir, and educated in Ethiopia. Her mother was Queen Ismenie. Sheba was known to be beautiful, intelligent, understanding, resourceful, and adventurous. A gracious queen, she had a melodious voice and was an eloquent speaker. Excelling in public relations and international diplomacy, she was a also competent ruler. The historian Josephus said of her, “she was inquisitive into philosophy and on that and on other accounts also was to be admired.” Since Sheba was a center of astronomical wisdom and the ruling monarch was the chief astronomer/ astrologer, religious life involved worship of the Sun and Moon. Shams was the Sun god. The earliest known Arabian temple was at Ma’rib, the capital of Sheba, and was called Mahram Bilqus, “precincts of the Queen of Sheba.” In Arab lore, this queen was named Bilqus or Balkis; in Ethiopia, Makeda (also Magda, Maqda and Makera), meaning “Greatness” or “Great One.” Others say Maqda is a short form of Magadhi, and that Magadhi was a long-gone tribal language in which there were sixty-three different ways to say each word. All that can be ascertained now is that it stands for the letter “M” —that’s what Maqda means. Years later, the historian Josephus, referred to her as Nikaulis, Queen of Ethiopia and Egypt

Why did the Queen of Sheba come to visit King Solomon?

We are told in the Holy Bible that when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones. We are also told that she came to prove him with hard questions. And we learn that when the Queen of Sheba had seen and tested Solomon’s wisdom, and the house that he had built, and the splendor of his court, and the number of his servants, and the attendance of his ministers, and their apparel, and his ascent by which he went up into the house of the Lord she was overwhelmed. How did Sheba learn of the wisdom of King Solomon? The leader of her trade caravans, Tamrin, owned 73 ships and 787 camels, mules and asses, with which he journeyed as far as India. Having also traded with Israel, he brought gold, ebony and sapphires to Solomon, for use by his 700 carpenters and 800 masons who were building the great temple of Jerusalem. Tamrin told Sheba about the temple, and how Solomon administered just judgement, and how he spake with authority, and how he decided rightly in all matters which he enquired into, and how he returned soft and gracious answers, and how there was nothing false about him. Each morning, Tamrin related to the Queen about all the wisdom of Solomon, how he administered judgement and how he made feasts, and how he taught wisdom, and how he directed his servants and all his affairs and how no man defrauded another—”for in his wisdom he knew those who had done wrong, and he chastised them, and made them afraid, and they did not repeat their evil deeds, but they lived in a state of peace.” And the Queen was struck dumb with wonder at the things that she heard, and she thought in her heart that she would go to him. When she pondered upon the long journey she thought that it was too far and too difficult to undertake. But she became very wishful and most desirous to go that she might hear his wisdom, and see his face, and embrace him, and petition his royalty. Sheba’s desire to encounter Solomon was ardent enough for her to embark on a 1400 mile journey, across the desert sands of Arabia, along the coast of the Red Sea, up into Moab, and over the Jordan River to Jerusalem. Such a journey required at least six months time round trip each way, since camels could rarely travel more than 20 miles per day. Arabian camels were tall and hardy, able to store water and fat for three weeks while living only on desert roughage. Wearing saddles of oak padded with colorful fabric, and hung with gold chains and crescents to win the favor of the gods, camels in a caravan were strung together by ropes made of goat hairs. Baby camels born along the way were carried on the back of the camel ahead to assure its mother of its wellbeing. As Sheba prepared for her journey, her own devotion to wisdom fueled her anticipation. Solomon’s commitment to building the Temple reflected not only his love of magnificent architecture, but also his piety. Over 3000 proverbs have been attributed to Solomon, as well as 1005 psalms, the book of Ecclesiastes and in the Christian Apocrypha, The Wisdom of Solomon. Solomon’s wisdom was not only political and theological; he was also an expert on natural history. A gardener, he planted olive, spice and nut trees as well as vineyards; he admired and studied spiders, locusts and harvesting ants. According to the Bible, he could talk about plants from the cedar in Lebanon to the hyssop growing on the wall; and he could talk of animals and birds and reptiles and fish

Was it to see the temple?

It is understandable that any monarch might wish to view such a magnificent edifice, the fame of which was spreading across the civilized world. And according to legend, she was indeed given a first hand tour of the temple while it was being constructed. A gracious host, Solomon showed Sheba his gardens of rare flowers ornamented with pools and fountains, and the architectural splendors of his government buildings, temple and palace. She was awed by his work on the temple, by his great lion-throne and sandalwood staircase, and by his enormous brass basin carried by the twelve brass bulls which symbolized the twelve months of the year

Was it to observe his government and the immensity of his court?

King Solomon came to the throne of Israel in 965 BCE. Solomon had fleets of Phoenician-built ships on the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean Solomon’s empire was so vast that he found it necessary to divide his kingdom into twelve states, To administer his royal cities, Solomon may have been the first to have a “public service” as we know it today. It was the duty of each state to provide one month’s supply, not only of food, but also of barley and straw for the horses, and even horses themselves if necessary, for the needs of the royal household. This put quite a burden on the farmers and shepherd of the country, and taxation was very high. To give you an idea of how great this burden was, consider the following: The provisions needed in one day for Solomon’s court were: 30 cors (about 188 bushels or 240 gallons) of flour, 60 cors (about 375 bushels or 480 gallons) of meal, 10 fat oxen, 20 pasture-fed cattle, 100 sheep, plus numerous harts, gazelles, roebucks and fattened fowl

Was it to observe or test his wisdom?

According to the Bible, the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon at Jerusalem to test him with hard questions. Not only did Sheba ask Solomon philosophical questions; she also tested him with riddles. Since early Biblical times, it would seem that the posing of riddles was a standard exercise among people of power. For example, in the Book of Judges we read that Samson engaged in riddles with his opponents. (Judges 14:12, 18.)The questions she asked were probably riddles commonly used in Arab polite conversations. During the time of Solomon’s reign, it became fashionable to set and solve riddles, a kind of game, which opens up wide horizons of knowledge and language. Riddles and riddle-like anecdotes appear to have wandered from one town to another and from one country to another. There was a passion for riddles at the courts of Hiram, King of Tyre and of Solomon, King of Israel. It is not inconceivable that the Queen of Sheba also had a passion for riddles, since she “came to prove him with hard questions.” The Targum Sheni, Midrash Mischle, and Midrash Hachefez (Arabic books) describe twenty-two of her riddles. The delight in seeing the point where the generality of a riddle coincides with a specific allusion is akin to the delight in the proverb, which in turn raises an actual case in point into the sphere of generality. This is what was regarded at that time as wisdom—the solving of riddles and the formulating of generalizations. On this, the fame of Solomon’s wisdom was originally founded; and when, in later times, wisdom acquired a deeper meaning and was regarded as an insight into the riddle of life and as an attitude of mind that rises above the passionate whirl of life towards the peace of the timeless, Solomon, known to his age as the great solver of riddles and friend of proverbs, remained the model of a man in whom all aspects of wisdom were united. When I first read about this passion for solving riddles, I soon wondered, “what kind of questions would be asked in a riddle?”
Upon further investigation, I found some examples of the kinds of riddles Balkis may have asked Solomon. Here are a few:

Balkis: “What is evil?”

Solomon: “The eyes of the Lord in every place monitor good and evil, and in them is the definition.”

Balkis: “Are the eyes or the ears superior?”

Solomon: “The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the Lord hath made both. Degrees of deafness and blindness, these are man’s province, and measurable.”

Balkis: “What is the most powerful organ of the body, Solomon?”

Solomon: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”

Balkis: “How are body and spirit connected?”

Solomon: “The baseness of spirits is derived from their bodies. The nobility of bodies is derived from their spirits.”

Balkis: “What is it? An enclosure with ten doors; when one is open, nine are shut, and when nine are open, one is shut?”

Solomon: “The enclosure is the womb, and the ten doors are the ten orifices of man, namely his eyes, his ears, his nostrils, his mouth, the apertures for discharge of excreta and urine, and the navel. When the child is still in its mother’s womb, the navel is open, but all the other apertures are shut, but when the child issues from the womb the navel is closed and the other orifices are open.”

Balkis: “Seven leave and nine enter; two pour out the draught and only one drinks.”

How did Solomon respond? “Seven are the days of woman’s menstruation, nine the months of her pregnancy; her two breasts nourish the child, and one drinks.”

Other riddles concerned with common objects and materials. At one point, Sheba asked, “What when alive does not move, yet when its head cut off, moves?”

Solomon’s answer: “The timber used to build a ship.”

Another riddle she proposed was: “It is many- headed. In a storm at sea it goes above us all, it raises a loud and bitter wailing and moaning; it bends its head like a reed, is the glory of the rich and the shame of the poor, it honors the dead and dishonors the living; it is a delight to the birds, but a sorrow to the fishes. What is it?”

Solomon replied, “Flax, for it makes sails for ships that moan in the storm. It provides fine linen for the rich and rags for the poor, a burial shroud for the dead, and a rope for hanging the living. As seed it nourishes the birds, and as a net it traps the fish.”

Some of Sheba’s questions were related to the Hebrew Bible. For example, “The dead lived, the grave moved, and the dead prayed. What is it?” The answer: “The dead that lived and prayed was Jonah; the fish, the moving grave.” In one theological riddle, she asked: “What is the ugliest thing in the world, and what is the most beautiful? What is the most certain, and what is the most uncertain?”

Solomon replied, “The ugliest thing…is the faithful turning unfaithful; the most beautiful is the repentant sinner. The most certain is death; the most uncertain, one’s share in the World to Come.”

Solomon is said to have collected over 3,000 proverbs or folk sayings filled with practical advice from around the Near Eastern world. The proverbs dealt with a variety of subjects. The book of Proverbs in the Holy Bible are thought to have originated from Solomon, as are the Song of Solomon and even the book of Ecclesiastes is attributed to some as Solomon’s wisdom in his declining years. In addition to riddles which required a verbal answer, Sheba tested Solomon’s ingenuity in action. Dressing five boys and girls identically, she asked him to detect their sex. When he handed them bowls of water for them to wash their hands, the girls, unlike the boys, rolled up their sleeves. Sheba also brought Solomon two flowers alike in appearance, but one was real while the other was artificial; he distinguished them by noting how bees swarmed to the flower with the genuine fragrance. Then, giving him a large emerald with a curved hole in the middle, she asked him to draw a thread through it; he sent for a silkworm, which crawled through the hole drawing with it a silken thread. The Midrash Hachefez reports still another test of Solomon’s cleverness. Sheba presented Solomon with the sawn trunk of a cedar tree, the ends cut off so that they looked the same; she asked Solomon which end had been the root, and which the branches. Solomon ordered the tree stump to be placed in water. When one end sank while the other floated, he said to her, “The part which sank was the root, and that which floated on the surface was the end containing the branches.” According to the Kebra Negast, the questions and tests were mutual; Solomon also challenged Sheba. Sadly, existing legends describe only a few of the artful strategies he used to outwit her. During Sheba’s six month visit with Solomon, she conversed with him daily. The Kebra Negast informs us that “the Queen used to go to Solomon and return continually, and hearken unto his wisdom, and keep it in her heart. And Solomon used to go and visit her, and answer all the questions which she put to him … and he informed her concerning every matter that she wished to enquire about.” Frequently, they roamed Jerusalem together, as she questioned him and watched him at work. She sought astronomical knowledge, for which he was known; Solomon had developed a new calendar that added an extra month every nineteen years. But historians believe there was more to the Queen of Sheba’s motives than simply to see the temple or to satisfy her curiosity about Solomon’s wisdom

The most likely reason for the queen’s visit

According to the ritual of the Masonic ceremony pertaining to the installation of a Worshipful Master into the Chair of King Solomon, we are told that when the temple at Jerusalem had been completed, by the wisdom of King Solomon and assisted by the strength of Hiram, King of Tyre and the beautifying skill of Hiram Abiff, the monarchs of the neighboring countries sent their ambassadors bearing precious gifts to King Solomon to congratulate him upon the completion of his great and holy work. But the sovereign of a more distant country —the Queen of Sheba—was not be content to send an embassage. She, herself, would go up to Jerusalem, so that her own eyes might see the magnificent Temple, and her own ears might hear the wisdom of King Solomon, whose fame was spread abroad throughout the then known world. It is most likely that the Queen of Sheba’s mission was for the purposes of trade and the gifts exchanged were to open up trade relations. One must realize that the kingdom over which Solomon ruled was far more extensive than the Israel we think of in today’s world. King David, Solomon’s father, had won from the Edomites a strategic port and a great tract of surrounding land where the desert stopped at the narrow waterway leading to Arabia and Africa. This port at the head of the gulf of Akabah was called Ezion-geber, and provided access to Ophir, the port of the great Arabian or East African gold land. David ruled from Syria to Egypt. For four hundred miles north to south, and 100 miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea, David’s sovereignty connected the three continents

When Hiram, King of Tyre, learned of the seaport on the southern gulf, he sent a message of congratulations and friendship to David. This friendship was a boon. Tyre and Sidon and the other Phoenician city-states controlled world trade from India to the Sea of Atlantis. But the island Tyre was incapable of feeding itself, and gladly bought the Hebrew’s grain, oil, honey, and wine. In return, the Phoenician king sent David technical advisors in stone, metal, wood, cloth, and dyes. David sent Hiram oak for his oars, and Hiram sent the Jews hardwoods from the mountains of Lebanon and stone form his quarries, out of which the royal city might be constructed. King Hiram’s friendship extended to King Solomon when he succeeded the throne from his father. He gave Solomon a fleet of Phoenician-built ships, which sailed the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Soon word of Solomon was being carried around the world on Hiram’s ships. News of conquests and culture reached the far outposts and colonies. Caravans form Egypt and Arabia passing through Israel’s toll cities along the Sea Way or King’s Highway picked up information about the monarch and his court and household. When the Sabaeans learned that Solomon had established a merchant ship navy and was stepping up commercial activities in southern part of Red Sea, he caused Sheba to negotiate an agreement preventing competition with her own traders. Sheba had been in touch with all the cities of the world, in a great whirlwind of trade. She was even known to the Chinese

The Sabaeans quickly realized that opening new sea-lanes would decrease use of overland routes and various oases from which Sheba’s court derived revenue. Natural historian Pliny records: “…all along the route they keep on paying, at one place for water, at another for fodder or the charges for lodging… so that expense mount up to 688 denarii per camel before the Mediterranean coast is reached” It was necessary to consolidate commercial ties, thus there was a mutual exchange of presents, which was a well established diplomatic procedure at that time. This is thought to be the real motive of the queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon, which was both political and economic. The spices, gold and gems were probably a tribute paid for commercial favours and treaty concessions. Thus, when it says the King gave her “all she desired,” this may have included satisfactory political agreements. Balkis brought with her 120 talents of gold to give to Solomon. Given that one talent was equal to 3,000 shekels and that there are 11.5 grams in a shekel, when one does the arithmetic we find that 120 talents of gold are about 360,000 shekels or 4,140 kilograms of gold! For those who are more familiar with Imperial measure, this amounts to just over 146,000 ounces of gold, or 9,120 pounds. Can you imagine—more than 4.5 tons of gold! She also gave Solomon more spices than had even been seen at one time in Israel, no small feat insomuch as spices were almost worth their weight in gold.

The Queen’s journey to Solomon’s royal city

There are 1500 miles of desert and mountains between Sheba and Jerusalem. Although most history books claim Sheba traveled by land, one historian claims she made the voyage by ship. The queen may have employed as many as 75 ships to travel from Sheba to Solomon’s Gulf Harbour, a trip which could have taken as long as three years because of the monsoons. Then she rode on a white camel of prodigious size and exquisite poise into the city of Jerusalem. She observed the gates of the city of Jerusalem. By contrast, she recalled how her cities, palaces, even fortresses had many open doors of access. Sheba’s caravan of 797 camels, mules and asses was laden with provisions and gifts for Solomon. Since a camel’s saddle could carry 300-600 pounds, the wealth she brought was vast—gold, precious stones, furniture and spices. Throughout the day, she rode on an extravagant gold palanquin, like a four-poster bed, richly cushioned, with a roof shielding her from the sun and draperies she could close for privacy. Her handsome white camel was laden with gold and precious stones. Most likely, she was also accompanied by an armed guard to protect her from desert brigands, and by her devoted servants. Imagine the sight as Sheba’s train raised up dust in the distant desert. Around her swayed giraffes that had been transported by way of the west, and hippopotami. Six hundred camels in her entourage each held nearly 500 pounds of goods. Fifty elephants followed, four royal Numidian lions, uncountable mules. In the camel’s heavy waterskin sacks were pots of the gum of the frankincense tree. Myrrh leaves and its red resin. Gold. Pink pearls from the sea of reeds. Ivory tusks. Nard (ointment made from plants) and ambergris. The black resin of rockrose. Moon coriander. Myrtle and oliban (balsam used in medicine and perfumes). The endangered storax. Hops. Smell the scents too sweet to describe. The pungent yet aromatic smoke of her incense

And in return, King Solomon had assembled an array of gifts for her arrival. Great caskets of sticky Nubian millet beer awaited her party. The gifts were staked on mules outside Solomon,s palace, ready for her people to take to their camp and enjoy. Silks and linens from Gaza, Assyria, and Lebanon. Tapestry from Ma-Wara-Mnar. Dresses, sweet fruit from Iraq, Mongolistan winter melons. And basins of water from the spring at Siloe. Following the queen’s arrival, Solomon gave her a luxurious apartment in a palace next to his, and provided her with fruits, rose trees, silks, linens, tapestries, and 11 bewitching garments for each day of her visit. Daily, he sent her (and her 350 servants) 45 sacks of flour, 10 oxen, 5 bulls, 50 sheep (in addition to goats, deer, cows, gazelles, and chicken), wine, honey, fried locusts, rich sweets, and 25 singing men and women

What happened after she arrived?

History has given way to legend and fable. As I mentioned earlier, (1) there is no evidence to support the story that the Queen of Sheba ever visited King Solomon; and (2) according to the Holy Bible, King Solomon gave unto the queen of Sheba all her desires, whatsoever she asked, beside that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty. So she turned and went to her own country, she and her servants. Yet consider the imagery and romance that have been conjured in some of these alternative endings, which come from Arabic and Ethiopian legends and folk tales:

The Marriage of Solomon and Sheba

When she arrived in his court, Sheba found Solomon arrayed in a cloth of gold, so that at first he looked like a statue of gold with hands of ivory. Solomon received her with every sort of festive preparation. He led her to behold the works of his palace and then the grand works of the temple. Balkis was lost in admiration. The king was captivated by her beauty and in a short time offered her his hand. Balkis was pleased to have conquered his proud heart, and she accepted his hand. Their troth was solemnized by the presentation of a ring by the Queen of Sheba to Solomon. Sheba took out from inside the plaiting of her black hair, a golden ring and handed it to Solomon. He receives it with a gasp. For it resembles in many ways the breastplate of twelve engraved gems worn by the high priests of Israel for the purpose of divination. But it is more precise, more pristine. Four gems only shine from the four sides of the circle, and these, Sheba explains in a whisper so perfect Solomon hardly recalls her speaking, signify writing and numbering (the blue stone), the equality of male and female (the green stone), blood (the red stone), and light (a dull reflecting metal). This alleged love affair has been captured both in poetry and in the movies (Solomon and Sheba, a 1959 Hollywood spectacular about the famed reign of King Solomon over ancient Israel in which the voluptuous Queen of Sheba plots his overthrow, starring Yul Brynner and Gina Lollobrigida)

Sheba Falls for Hiram Abiff

The Queen of Sheba was overwhelmed by the splendor and beauty of the magnificent edifice created by Solomon. On one of her visits to the temple, Balkis repeatedly requested to meet the architect who had wrought such wondrous things. Solomon delayed this meeting as long as possible, but finally he found it necessary to accede to her request. At the command of the king, Hiram Abiff, the mysterious artificer, was brought into the presence of Balkis, Queen of Sheba. Hiram looked deeply into the soul of Balkis and cast on the queen a look that penetrated her very heart. Upon recovering from this unforeseen occurrence, she regained her composure and questioned as well as defended Hiram from the ill-will and rising jealousy of Solomon. When Balkis requested to see the countless host of workmen that had created the temple, Solomon protested the impossibility of assembling them all at once; (there had been 70,000 involved in his projects) but Hiram, leaping on a stone to make himself more visible, with his right hand described in the air the symbolic Tau, and immediately the men hastened from all parts of the work into the presence of their master. Seeing this, the queen wondered and secretly repented her choice of a husband. She felt that she was in love with the mighty architect. Seeing the affection of Balkis for Hiram Abiff, Solomon set out to destroy it. He prepared for the humiliation and ruin of his rival. To this end, Solomon employed three fellowcrafts who were envious of Hiram. The reason for their envy was that Hiram had refused to raise them to the degree of a master mason due to their lack of knowledge and their idleness. They arranged to sabotage the pouring of the molten bronze for the great brazen sea. When the molten metal was poured in the presence of Solomon and Sheba, the liquid escaped its containment and flowed like lava over the adjoining places. The observers panicked into a terrified crowd. Hiram attempted to arrest the flow with a great quantity of water, but without success. The dishonoured artificer could not remove himself from the scene of the disaster. He was called into the flames by Tubal Cain (the first artificer in metals). After being promised that he would have a son whose descendants would perpetrate his race and rule the world for many centuries, he was given a hammer by Tubal Cain and returned to the earth. Hiram did not hesitate to test the efficacy of the hammer, and the dawn saw the great mass of bronze cast. Hiram was filled with joy and the Queen of Sheba was exulted. The people came running up to admire this secret power which in one night had repaired everything

Sheba Falls For Hiram Abiff (version 2)

One day Balkis and her maids went beyond Jerusalem and there encountered Hiram. The two confessed their love, and deliberated how Balkis could retract the promise she had given to King Solomon to marry him. It was their decision that Hiram would be the first to leave Jerusalem. Balkis would meet him in Arabia after eluding the vigilance of the king. She would accomplish this by removing the ring from his finger when he was overcome by wine. By this means, she could withdraw the troth that had pledged her to him. Solomon, meanwhile, hinted to the three fellow craft that the removal of his rival Hiram Abiff would be acceptable to him. The three fellowcraft assailed him in sequence and the third ruffian killed him with a setting maul. Immediately before his death, Hiram managed to throw the golden triangle about his neck into a deep well. The master architect was dead. In due course the Temple was completed without Hiram Abiff

Yet Another Hiram Abiff Romance

The masons were a breed near invisible to all others. By far the greater number of the sacred builders (some thought to have worked on the pyramids of Egypt) the masons were unbound spirits who fled the unjust and immoral regimes of the Nile delta after building the pyramids. They rowed to all ports of the Great Sea (Mediterranean) They scattered overland with their families in horse carts. They moved like nomads, in small groups resembling tinkers and smiths with their tools and aprons. Sometimes they put a T-shaped cross on their foreheads as a sign for “god” and “iron”. They found a more favourable climate for their work in Phoenicia, and laboured on several projects in Tyre. All the time they preserved faithfully the secrets of stone, brick and engraving, and of the care of the dead. They settled in the Holy Land as well. At the time of Solomon, brother masons usually wore beards but no mustaches, and their wives worked along side them. They lived by geometry. They knew their tools and their materials and they knew the uses of silence. Thus, when Solomon was anointed king in 965 BCE, he did not know of the masons until introduced into their order by Hiram, King of Tyre. Now they had gathered again, stonesquarers, hewers of wood, drawers of water, philosophers, sawyers of the underground lime, smelters of bronze, architects, smiths in silver and gold, apprentices, journeymen, astronomers, masters —skilled craftsmen in the thirty-nine kinds of sacred work. They focused their energies on the Temple mountain, feeling that this assignment from Hiram and Solomon was worthy of the brotherhood. They worked a month at a time, then rested for a month, then returned for another month’s labors. The conifers from Lebanon were cut, smoothed and finished far from the temple site because Solomon did not consider it good to have the loud sound of iron tools in the near workings. Iron was the hand of war. In the temple precincts, white stones as heavy as a thousand men were set into immaculate row upon row with an effortlessness known only to the masons. Solomon was called the Grand Master of the work when the temple was being built. Hiram, King of Tyre, controlled the overseas sources of wealth that made the work possible, and at least half of the work force; he was called the Grand Master of the Work. And the “other” Hiram of Tyre, the architect, was the third of the Grand Masters. Hiram had done good work in Tyre. But his preeminence in the building of Solomon’s temple was not due to his reputation. Nor had it been granted by his patron, the King of Tyre. It had come to him by his merit, on a specific day. On the morning that the foundation stone was being laid, Hiram drew a diagram on his trestle board of a certain three sided figure, and he observed that the squares drawn up on the short sides summed up exactly equal to the square drawn down the longest side, and he cried out “Eureka!” And Solomon appreciated this accomplishment, and appointed him Grand Architect of Jerusalem. Some of the masons said that this Hiram, son of the widow, was an artist wiser that the world had ever seen. Others argued that the work of the men of a hundred nationalities was the key, and that unless each one of these men—every last one—felt and continued to feel that his agreement was sacred, they could do nothing, but so long as the decision to cooeperate was made again and again every morning by every man, then the boundaries of their work would continue to amplify. There was, however, certain work that the masons did not do. No free man worked in the iron and copper mines of the Arabah. This wet, dirty and dangerous job was done by slaves, both male and female. One day, there was dissension amongst the workers. Hiram, chief architect and paymaster, felt the stirrings most. The different pay grades of workmen announced to the paymaster at what level they worked, and were paid accordingly. The ranks were specified in code. For example, burden bearers might say “servitude” and the journeymen masons and carpenters might say “worker’s pool,” and the overseers said “the way.” And in the old Semite tongue, all these three phrases sounded almost exactly alike, but for an accent or an inflection. But the men began to say different words. Hiram King of Tyre recognized immediately that this was the signal of worker unrest, a bad omen. One day, as Hiram stood before three huge drums of gold ingots facing his 150,000 men he motioned them to begin to approach. One by one they stepped forward and pronounced a word according to they hierarchy of their functions and were paid. To Hiram’s shock, one man rudely grabbed for his payment. Suddenly the orderly line gave way and the troops burst into the Temple in a great surge. There was shouting. Three men in an extremity of tension and anger confronted the grand master, demanding money, satisfaction, the truth. Hiram staggered and went down slowly. He was bleeding from the head and side. There was a point of a compasses stuck in his heart. Then there was chaos and riot. Loyal masons fell upon Hiram’s attackers, but the guilty escaped. Finally, at twilight, there fell stillness. Hiram had been left for dead in a rubble of gold. But he was still alive. He rose and left the temple, still bleeding. He knew the blood would never stop. He pressed towards the tents, to Sheba. And he found her, she found him, she loved, they loved, with love as intense as death, passion as incomprehensible as the grave. Sheba mobilized her thousands. The body of the queen’s last love lay buried in a grassy knoll outside Jerusalem, underneath an Egyptian gum acacia with mud around its roots. The long line of men and animals from the land of women gradually disappeared into the horizon. Sheba fled south through the Gulf of Aquaba

The Origin of the Ethiopian Monarchy—Sheba and her son Menyelek

The Bible says nothing about a marriage between Solomon and Sheba, but states simply that she returned to her own land. However, the Abyssinians (the country now known as Ethiopia) have adopted some of the Arab tales and trace the lineage of their royal house to the Queen of Sheba. The Ethiopians claim that their rulers are descended from Menilek, son of King Solomon and Queen of Sheba, thus giving rise to the imperial title “Lion of Judah.” The Kebra Negast is regarded as the final authority on the early history of Ethiopia, and its origin in the Solomonic lines of kings, which “descends without interruption from the dynasty of Menelik I, son of Queen of Ethiopia, Queen of Sheba and King Solomon of Jerusalem.” This idea exists in the folk lore of many Jewish, Moslem and Christian countries .The relationship between Ethiopia, Lion of Judah, and Israel is apparent in Ethiopia’s national emblem, the six pointed star, which corresponds to the Shield (Seal) of David on Israel’s flag Here is the tale of how Solomon’s son became the King of Ethiopia: When her visits to him multiplied, he longed for her greatly and entreated her to yield herself to him. But she would not surrender herself to him, and she said unto him, “I came to thee a maiden, a virgin; shall I go back despoiled of my virginity, and suffer disgrace in my kingdom? Swear to me by thy God, the God of Israel, that thou wilt not take me by force. For if I, who according to the law of men am maiden, be seduced, I should travel on my journey back in sorrow, and affliction and tribulation.”

And Solomon said unto her, “I will only take thee to myself in lawful marriage—I am the King, and thou shalt be the Queen. Strike a covenant with me that I am only to take thee to wife of thine own free will. This shall be the condition between us: when thou shalt come to me by night as I am lying on the cushions of my bed, thou shalt become my wife.” And behold she struck this covenant with him, determining within herself that she would preserve her virginity from him. But the ingenious King Solomon was not to be deterred by her refusal. After she had visited him for six months, the Queen of Sheba chose to return to her own country. The day before her departure, the palace servants busily prepared a festal banquet in her honor. Solomon arranged a great feast for her, beautifying his tent with purple hangings, carpets, marbles and precious stones, and burning aromatic powers and incense. “Follow me now and seat thyself in my splendor in the tent,” he told her, “and I will complete thy instruction, for thou has loved wisdom, and she shall dwell with thee until thine end and for ever.” When she agreed, he rejoiced. He prepared highly seasoned meats that would make her thirsty, fish cooked with pepper, and drinks mingled with spices. Then they dined and conversed until late in the night. Makeda attempted to retire to her own quarters. Solomon wouldn’t hear of her departing at so late an hour. Wasn’t his residence as comfortable as the one he had arranged for her? Makeda was the virgin queen of Ethiopia, her throne pending on that condition. Solomon swore to take nothing from her by force on terms that she would take nothing of his by force. Sheba slept in Solomon’s tent, and awakened in the middle of the night thirsty and craving water. All the water founts accessible to the public were shut off. The queen went to Solomon’s chambers to procure a cup of water, but was only able to find a water in a jar by Solomon’s bed. Solomon had, of course, asked his servants to hide all other sources of water. Believing him to be asleep, she reached across his bed for water, but he opened his eyes, seized her hand and said: “Why hast thou broken the oath that thou hast sworn that thou would not take by force anything that is in my house?” And she answered and said unto him in fear, “Is the oath broken by my drinking water? Be free from thy oath, only let me drink water.” Solomon replied: “As you see, nothing is more valuable than water. Release me from my vow and be released from yours and I will give you all that you desire.” And he permitted her to drink water, and after she had drunk water she gave herself into his embrace willingly. Sheba may have been Solomon’s lover, but she did not become his wife or remain with him much longer. After she had visited him for six months, she chose to return to her own country. Before she left, she gave Solomon 120 talents of gold (10 million dollars), precious stones and spices in great abundance, and highly prized sandalwood for his temple. In the Biblical story, “Solomon gave to the queen of Sheba all her desire, whatsoever she asked…besides that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty.” Likewise, Josephus states, “Solomon also repaid her with many good things…bestowing upon her what she chose of her own inclination, for there was nothing that she desired which he denied her; and as he was very generous and liberal in his own temper, so did he show the greatness of his soul in bestowing on her what she herself desired of him.” Unlike the Bible and Josephus, the Kebra Negast provides details of Solomon’s gifts—beautiful apparel, 6000 camels, wagons laden with luxurious goods, and vessels for travel over desert, air, and sea. Because she was now pregnant with his child, he also gave her a ring, for he hoped that she would bear him a son, who might in time visit Jerusalem and prove his identity to Solomon. And the Queen departed and came into the country of Bala Zadisareya nine months and five days after she had separated from King Solomon. And the pains of childbirth laid hold upon her, and she brought forth a man-child, and she gave it to the nurse with great pride and delight. And the child grew and she called his name Bayna-Lehkem (Menelik), which means “son of the wise man.”When he was twenty-two years old he was skilled in the art of war and horsemanship, in the hunting and trapping of wild beast, and in every thing that young men desire to learn. And he said unto the Queen: “I will go and look upon the face of my father, and I will come back here by the will of God, the Lord of Israel.” When King Solomon saw his son, he rose up and moved forward to welcome him, and he embraced and kissed him, and said unto him: “Behold, my Father David hath renewed his youth and hath risen from the dead.” And Solomon the King turned around to those who had announced the arrival of the young man, and said unto them: “Ye said unto me, ‘He resembleth thee,’ but this is not my stature, but the stature of David my father in the days of his early manhood, and he is handsomer that I am.” And Solomon the King rose up and went into his chamber, and he arrayed his son in apparel made of cloth embroidered with gold, and a belt of gold, and he set a crown upon his head, and a ring upon his finger. Having arrayed him in glorious apparel, which bewitched the eyes, he seated him upon his Throne that he might be equal in rank to himself. Then he said unto the nobles and officers of Israel: “O ye who treat me with derision among yourselves and say that I have no son; look ye, this is my son, the fruit from my body, whom God, the Lord of Israel hat given me when I expected it not.” And his nobles answered and said unto him: “Blessed be the mother who hath brought forth this young man, and blessed be the day wherein thou hath union with the mother of this young man. For there hath risen upon us from the root of Jessse a shining man who shall be king of the posterity of his seed. And concerning his father none shall ask questions for verily he is a Israelite of the seed of David, fashioned perfectly in the likeness of his father’s form and appearance; we are his servants and he shall be our King.” And they brought unto him gifts each according to his greatness. Menelik along with the Elders of Israel took the Ark of the Covenant and established the Kingdom of David in Ethiopia, this Kingdom remained up till the time of Haile Selassie I, the Last Solomonic King of Kings of the Earth

Conclusion

The paper I have presented today is for entertainment and enlightenment. Remember this is a light-hearted compendium of tales, stories and legends from various sources. It may not be factually correct. Nonetheless, I hope it has given you some insight into the life and times of King Solomon, our first Grand Master. It was natural that imaginative stone masons long before speculative masonry should have felt a kinship with the great builders of all ages. It was natural that they should have acknowledged a peculiar attraction to the most famous and glorious of all building enterprises, King Solomon’s temple. Without a doubt, King Solomon’s temple was the grandest most costly structure ever erected. Thus it follows that Solomon’s temple should come to be regarded as the ideal prototype of a spiritual temple, which explains its prominence in our ritual. However, it is better to pattern ourselves after the building than after Solomon himself. After the departure of the Queen of Sheba, the completion of his luxurious Temple became more important to Solomon than the practice of his religion. Then his luxurious Palace “built for personal rather than collective use” took precedence over the Temple. Finally, his writing and preaching of wisdom became increasingly divorced from experience. Solomon no longer lived by the humane principles for which he had become respected and honoured. Some historians even view him as a tyrant who became devoted to his own glory, and whose greed and extravagance led him to build his kingdom on injustice, oppression and misery. All this for the love of a woman?

Bibliography and related reading

Solomon and Sheba. Faye Levine. Richard Marek Publishers, New York, 1980

Colliers Encyclopedia

Encyclopedia Americana

Great People of the Bible and How They Lived. Reader’s Digest Assoc., Inc. Pleasantville, NY, 1979

Deceptions and Myths of the Bible

International standard Bible Encyclopedia

The Geography of the Bible. Denis Ably. Harper and Rowe, New York 1974

King Solomon. Fredric Thinne. East and West Library, New York, 1947

The Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries. Charles William Heckthorn

The First Book of Kings. J. Robinson. Cambridge at the University Press 1972 Holy Bible, Authorized (King James) Version

The story of the Queen of Sheba is recorded in the Old Testament in I Kings 10:1-13; a similar version also appears in II Chronicles 9:1-12. Other references to the Queen of Sheba are: Psalms lxxii, 15, and in the New Testament, Matthew 12:42 and Luke 11:31

The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek: the Kebra Nagast. Budge, Sir Ernest A. Wallis, translator. Oxford University Press, London, 1932

Solomon and Solomonic Literature. Conway, Moncure Daniel. Haskell House, NY, 1973, pp.59-65 All of the Women of the Bible. Dean, Edith. Harper and Row, San Francisco, 1955

The Lore of the Old Testament. Gaer, Joseph. Little-Brown, Boston, 1951, pp. 242-44

Legends of the Bible. Ginzberg, Louis. Simon and Schuster, NY, 1956, pp. 560-64

Appendix

Although I could not find a detailed account of one of Solomon’s feasts, the following account of King Ashurnasirpal’s Banquet gives some idea of the enormity of preparation and quantity of foodstuffs required for a royal feast: When Ashurnasirpal, king of Assyria, inaugurated the palace of Calah, a palace of joy and erected with great ingenuity, he invited into it Ashur, the great lord and the gods of his entire country. He prepared a banquet of 1,200 fattened head of cattle, 1,000 calves, 11,000 stable sheep, 16,000 lambs, 1,000 spring lambs, 500 stags, 500 gazelles, 1,000 ducks, 1,000 geese, 2,000 indigenous birds, 20,000 doves, and 10,000 other assorted small birds. Also 10,000 assorted fish, 10,000 jerboa (small, rabbit like rodents) 10,000 assorted eggs, 10,000 loaves of bread, 10,000 jars of beer, 10,000 skins of wine, 10,000 small bottom vessels with seeds in sesame oil, 10,000 small pots of condiments, 1,000 wooded crates with vegetables, 300 containers of oil, 300 containers of salted seeds, 300 containers of grapes, 100 mixed zamru fruits, 1700 pistachio cones, 100 jars with “mixture”, 100 with arsuppu grain, ten homer of shelled luddu nuts (one homer = 75 gallons or 11 bushels), ten homer of shelled pistachio, ten homer of the uru tree, ten homer of fruits of the habbaququ tree, ten homer of dates, ten homer of the fruits of the titip tree, ten homer of cumin, ten homer of sahhunu, ten homer of uriana. ten homer of andahsu bulbs, ten homer of sisanibee plants, ten homer of the fruits of the simburu tree, ten homer of thyme, ten homer of perfumed oil, ten homer of sweet smelling matters, ten homer of the fruits of the nasubu tree, ten homer of zimzimmu onions, ten homer of olives. When inaugurated, the palace treated for 10 days with food and drink 47,074 persons, men and women, who were bade to come from across the entire country, also 5,000 important persons, delegates from the country Suhu, from Hindar, Hattina, Hatti, Tyre, Sidon, Gurguma, Malida, Hubuska. Gilzana, Kuma, Musasir, also 10,000 inhabitants from Calah, 1,500 officials of all the royal palaces, altogether 69,574 invited guests from all the mentioned countries including the people of Calah. They were furthermore proved with the means to clean and anoint themselves.

The First Muezzin – Bilal ibn Rabah, an Ethiopian

Written by Barry Hoberman
http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/198304/the.first.muezzin.htm

This article appeared on pages 2-3 of the July/August 1983 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.

One of the most characteristic – and stirringly evocative – symbols of Islam is the adhan, the Arabic call to prayer, dramatically intoned by a muezzin from high atop a lofty minaret. Heard once, it is never forgotten.

The use of the adhan goes back to the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad, and is mentioned once in the Koran, in connection with the Friday assembly:

O believers, when proclamation is made for prayer on the Day of Congregation, hasten to God’s remembrance and leave trafficking aside; that is better for you, did you but know. – Sura 62:9

Muslim tradition supplies the story of how the adhan came to be used to announce the times of the five daily prayers. After the emigration of Muhammad and his followers from Makkah (Mecca) to Medina-which is called the Hijra – a believer named Abd Allah ibn Zaid had a vision in which he tried to buy a wooden clapper to summon people to prayer. But the man who had the clapper advised him to call out to the people instead and to cry:

God is most great! God is most great!

I testify that there is no god but God.

I testify that Muhammad is the Apostle of God.

Come to prayer! Come to prayer!

Come to salvation! Come to salvation!

God is most great! God is most great!

There is no god but God.

According to Ibn Ishaq, the eighth-century biographer of the Prophet, Ibn Zaid went to Muhammad with his story and Muhammad, approving, told him to ask an Ethiopian named Bilal, who had a marvelous voice, to call the Muslims to prayer. As Ibn Ishaq told the story (in Albert Guillaume’s translation):

When the Apostle was told of this he said that it was a true vision if God so willed it, and that he should go to Bilal and communicate it to him so that he might call to prayer thus, for he had a more penetrating voice. When Bilal acted as muezzin, ‘Umar I, who later became the second caliph, heard him in his house and came to the

Apostle… saying that he had seen precisely the same vision. The Apostle said ‘God be praised for that!’

Though slightly different versions of the story exist, all agree that Islam’s first muezzin was Bilal. But who was this man whom the sources credit with such a key role in the nascent Muslim community?

Actually, very little is known. Bilal ibn Rabah, an Ethiopian, was born in Makkah sometime in the late sixth century, of very humble parentage, and was one of the first inhabitants of Makkah to accept the religion that a local merchant named Muhammad – the Prophet – began to preach there around the year 610.

According to Ibn Ishaq, Bilal suffered for his immediate acceptance of Muhammad’s message. In fact Bilal’s master, Umayya ibn Khalaf reportedly, “would bring him out at the hottest part of the day and throw him on his back in the open valley and have a great rock put on his chest; then he would say to him, ‘You will stay here till you die or deny Muhammad and worship al-Lat and al-‘Uzza” (pre-Islamic goddesses).

Bilal, however, would not renounce Islam and eventually Abu Bakr, later the most distinguished of the Prophet’s Companions and the first Caliph, rescued him.

In 622, the year of the Hijra, Bilal also migrated to Medina and over the next decade accompanied the Prophet on all military expeditions, serving, tradition says, as the Prophet’s mace-bearer and steward, but also as a muezzin revered by Muslims for his majestically sonorous renditions of the adhan .

Bilal’s finest hour came in January, 630, on an occasion regarded as one of the most hallowed moments in Islamic history. After the Muslim forces had captured Makkah, the Prophets muezzin ascended to the top of the Ka’ba to call the believers to prayer – the first time the call to prayer was heard within Islam’s holiest city.

There is confusion about what happened to Bilal after the death of the Prophet in 632. Abu Bakr succeeded the Prophet as head of the Muslim community, and some sources say that Bilal acted as Abu Bakr’s muezzin but subsequently declined to serve his successor, ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, in the same capacity. Other authors say the Prophets death signaled the end of Bilal’s career as a muezzin, and that he called the faithful to prayer only twice more in his life – once in Syria, to honor the visiting ‘Umar, and a second time, in Medina, when he was specifically asked to do so by the Prophet’s grandsons.

What seems clear is that at some point Bilal accompanied the Muslim armies to Syria and that he died there between 638 and 642, though the exact date of death and place of burial are disputed.

Yet if there is some disagreement concerning the hard facts of Bilal’s life and death, his importance on a number of levels is incontestable. Muezzin guilds, especially those in Turkey and Africa, have traditionally venerated the original practitioner of their noble profession, and African Muslims as a whole feel a special closeness and kinship to him; he was an Ethiopian, after all, who had been exceptionally close to the Prophet, and is a model of steadfastness and devotion to the faith. The story of Bilal, in fact, remains the classic and most frequently cited demonstration that in the Prophet’s eyes, the measure of a man was neither nationality nor social status, but piety.

Barry Hoberman studied Islam at Harvard and Indiana Universities.

Ethiopian Astronomy/Zodiac

———

Ethiopia and the Origin of Civilization Part 2
By John G. Jackson (1939)

In the study of ancient affairs, folklore and tradition throw an invaluable light on historical records. In Greek mythology we read of the great Ethiopian king, Cepheus, whose fame was so great that he and his family were immortalized in the stars. The wife of King Cepheus was Queen Cassiopeia, and his daughter, Princess Andromeda. The star groups of the celestial sphere, which are named after them are called the ROYAL FAMILY (the constellations: CEPHEUS, CASSIOPEIA and ANDROMEDA.) It may seem strange that legendary rulers of ancient Ethiopia should still have their names graven on our star maps, but the voice of history gives us a clue.

A book on astrology attributed to Lucian declares that: “The Ethiopians were the first who invented the science of stars, and gave names to the planets, not at random and without meaning, but descriptive of the qualities which they conceived them to possess; and it was from them that this art passed, still in an imperfect state, to the Egyptians.” The Ethiopian origin of astronomy is beautifully explained by Count Volney in a passage in his Ruins of Empires, which is one of the glories of modern literature, and his argument is not based on guesses. He invokes the weighty authority of Charles F. Dupuis, whose three monumental works, The Origin of Constellations, The Origin of Worship and The Chronological Zodiac, are marvels of meticulous research. Dupuis placed the origin of the zodiac as far back as 15,000 B.C., which would give the world’s oldest picture book an antiquity of 17,000 years. (This estimate is not as excessive as it might at first appear, since the American astronomer and mathematician, Professor Arthur M. Harding, traces back the origin of the zodiac to about 26,000 B.C) In discussing star worship and idolatry, Volney gives the following glowing description of the scientific achievements of the ancient Ethiopians, and of how they mapped out the signs of the zodiac on the star-spangled dome of the heavens:

Should it be asked at what epoch this system took its birth, we shall answer on the testimony of the monuments of astronomy itself, that its principles appear with certainty to have been established about seventeen thousand years ago, and if it be asked to what people it is to be attributed, we shall answer that the same monuments, supported by unanimous traditions, attribute it to the first tribes of Egypt; and reason finds in that country all the circumstances which could lead to such a system; when it finds there a zone of sky, bordering on the tropic, equally free from the rains of the equator and the fogs of the north; when it finds there a central point of the sphere of the ancients, a salubrious climate, a great but manageable river, a soil fertile without art or labor, inundated without morbid exhalations, and placed between two seas which communicate with the richest countries; it conceives that the inhabitant of the Nile, addicted to agriculture from the facility of communications, to astronomy from the state of his sky, always open to observation, must have been the first to pass from the savage to the social state; and consequently to attain the physical and moral sciences necessary to civilized life.

It was, then, on the borders of the upper Nile, among a black race of men, that was organized the complicated system of the worship of the stars, considered in relation to the productions of the earth and the labors of agriculture. Thus the Ethiopian of Thebes named stars of inundation, or Aquarius, those stars under which the Nile began to overflow; stars of the ox or bull, those under which they began to plow, stars of the lion, those under which that animal, driven from the desert by thirst, appeared on the banks of the Nile; stars of the sheaf, or of the harvest virgin, those of the reaping season; stars of the lamb, stars of the two kids, those under which these precious animals were brought forth. Thus the same Ethiopian having observed that the return of the inundation always corresponded with the rising of a beautiful star which appeared towards the source of the Nile, and seemed to warn the husbandman against the coming waters, he compared this action to that of the animal who, by his barking, gives notice of danger, and he called this star the dog, the barker (Sirius). In the same manner he named the stars of the crab, those where the sun, having arrived at the tropic, retreated by a slow retrograde motion like the crab of Cancer. He named stars of the wild goat, or Capricorn, those where the sun, having reached the highest point in his annuary tract, imitates the goat, who delights to climb to the summit of the rocks. He named stars of the balance, or Libra, those where the days and nights being equal, seemed in equilibrium, like that instrument; and stars of the scorpion, those where certain periodical winds bring vapors, burning like the venom of the scorpion.
(Volney’s Ruins of Empires, pp. 120-122, New York, 1926)

The traditions concerning Memnon are interesting as well as instructive. He was claimed as a king by the Ethiopians, and identified with the Pharaoh Amunoph or Amenhotep, by the Egyptians. A fine statue of him is located in the British Museum, in London. Charles Darwin makes a reference to this statue on his Descent of Man which is well worth reproducing: “When I looked at the statue of Amunoph III, I agreed with two officers of the establishment, both competent judges, that he had a strongly marked Negro type of features.” The features of Akhnaton (Amennhotep IV), are even more Negroid than those of his illustrious predecessor. That the earliest Egyptians were African Ethiopians (Nilotic Negroes), is obvious to all unbiased students of oriental history. Breasted’s claim that the early civilized inhabitants of the Nile Valley and Western Asia were members of a Great White Race, is utterly false, and is supported by no facts whatsoever. A similar racial bias is shown by Elliot Smith in his work, The Ancient Egyptians and Their Influence Upon the Civilization of Europe, p. 30, New York & London, 1911. “Not a few writers,” says he, “like the traveler Volney in the 18th century, have expressed the belief that the ancient Egyptians were Negroes, or at any rate strongly Negroid. In recent times even a writer so discriminating as Ripley usually is has given his adhesion to this view.” (The writers referred to here, are Count Volney, the French Orientalist and Professor William Z. Ripley, of Harvard University, an eminent American Anthropologist.) Professor Smith is convinced that these men are wrong, because he holds that there is a “profound gap that separates the Negro from the rest of mankind, including the Egyptian.” (Ancient Egyptians, p. 74.) Another English scholar, Philip Smith, is far more rational in discussing this point:

No people have bequeathed to us so many memorials of its form complexion and physiognomy as the Egyptians. If we were left to form an opinion on the subject by the description of the Egyptians left by the Greek writers we should conclude that they were, if not Negroes, at least closely akin to the Negro race. That they were much darker in coloring than the neighboring Asiatics; that they had their frizzled either by nature or art; that their lips were thick and projecting, and their limbs slender, rests upon the authority of eye-witnesses who had traveled in the country and who could have had no motive to deceive. The fullness of the lips seen in the Sphinx of the Pyramids and in the portraits of the kings is characteristic of the Negro. (The Ancient History of the East, pp. 25-26, London, 1881.)

We read of Memnon, King of Ethiopia, in Greek mythology, to be exact in Homer’s Iliad, where he leads an army of Elamites and Ethiopians to the assistance of King Priam in the Trojan War. His expedition is said to have started from the African Ethiopia and to have passed through Egypt on the way to Troy. According to Herodotus, Memnon was the founder of Susa, the chief city of the Elamites. “There were places called Memnonia,” asserts Professor Rawlinson, “supposed to have been built by him both in Egypt and at Susa; and there was a tribe called Memnones at Moroe. Memnon thus unites the eastern with the western Ethiopians, and the less we regard him as an historical personage the more must we view him as personifying the ethnic identity of the two races.” (Ancient Monarchies, Vol. I, Chap. 3.)

The ancient peoples of Mesopotamia are sometimes called the Chaldeans, but this is inaccurate and confusing. Before the Chaldean rule in Mesopotamia, there were the empires of the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians. The earliest civilization of Mesopotamia was that of the Sumerians. They are designated in the Assyrio-Babylonian inscriptions as the black-heads or black-faced people, and they are shown on the monuments as beardless and with shaven heads. This easily distinguishes them from the Semitic Babylonians, who are shown with beards and long hair. From the myths and traditions of the Babylonians we learn that their culture came originally from the south. Sir Henry Rawlinson concluded from this and other evidence that the first civilized inhabitants of Sumer and Akkad were immigrants from the African Ethiopia. John D. Baldwin, the American Orientalist, on the other hand, claims that since ancient Arabia was also known as Ethiopia, they could have just as well come from that country. These theories are rejected by Dr. II. R. Hall, of the Dept. Of Egyptian & Assyrian Antiquities of the British Museum, who contends that Mesopotamia was civilized by a migration from India. “The ethnic type of the Sumerians, so strongly marked in their statues and reliefs,” says Dr. Hall, “was as different from those of the races which surrounded them as was their language from those of the Semites, Aryans, or others; they were decidedly Indian in type. The face-type of the average Indian of today is no doubt much the same as that of his Dravidian race ancestors thousands of years ago. And it is to this Dravidian ethnic type of India that the ancient Sumerian bears most resemblance, so far as we can judge from his monuments. And it is by no means improbable that the Sumerians were an Indian race which passed, certainly by land, perhaps also by sea, through Persia to the valley of the Two Rivers. It was in the Indian home (perhaps the Indus valley) that we suppose for them that their culture developed.  On the way they left the seeds of their culture in Elam. There is little doubt that India must have been one of the earliest centers of human civilization, and it seems natural to suppose that the strange un-Semitic, un-Aryan people who came from the East to civilize the West were of Indian origin, especially when we see with our own eyes how very Indian the Sumerians were in type.” (The Ancient History of the Near East, pp. 173“174, London, 1916.) Hall is opposed in his theory of Sumerian origins by Dr. W. J. Perry, the great anthropologist, of the University of London. “The Sumerian stories or origins themselves tell a very different tale,” Perry points out, “for from their beginnings the Sumerians seem to have been in touch with Egypt. Some of their early texts mention Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha. Dilmun was the first settlement that was made by the god Enki, who was the founder of Sumerian civilization. Magan was famous among the Sumerians as a place whence they got diorite and copper, Meluhha as a place whence they got gold. Dilmun has been identified with some place or other in the Persian Gulf, perhaps the Bahrein Islands, perhaps a land on the eastern shore of the Gulf. In a late inscription of the Assyrians it is said that Magan and Meluhha were the archaic names for Egypt and Ethiopia, the latter being the south-western part of Somaliand that lay opposite.” (The Growth of Civilization, pp. 60“61, 2nd Edition, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1937, Published by Penguin Books, Ltd.)

Ethiopia and the Origin of Civilization

A Critical Review of the Evidence of Archaeology, Anthropology, History and Comparative Religion: According to the Most Reliable Sources and Authorities

By John G. Jackson (1939)

SOURCE: https://archive.org/stream/EthiopiaAndTheOriginOfCivilization/EOC_djvu.txt

 

Much more could be said on this subject, but since this essay is addressed mainly to readers who have little time for the study of history, it must be made as concise as possible. The numerous citations from standard scientific and historical works, it is hoped, will be of some benefit to students who are out of reach of large public libraries, or who lack the leisure time necessary for reading and research along these lines.

 

“It is pretty well settled that the city is the Negro’s great contribution to civilization, for it was in Africa where the first cities grew up.” E. Haldeman-Julius

“Those piles of ruins which you see in that narrow valley watered by the Nile, are the remains of opulent cities, the pride of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia. … There a people, now forgotten, discovered while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe.” Count Volney

“The accident of the predominance of white men in modern times should not give us supercilious ideas about color or persuade us to listen to superficial theories about the innate superiority of the white-skinned man. Four thousand years ago, when civilization was already one or two thousand years old, white men were just a bunch of semi-savages on the outskirts of the civilized world. If there had been anthropologists in Crete, Egypt, and Babylonia, they would have pronounced the white race obviously inferior, and might have discoursed learnedly on the superior germ-plasm or glands of colored folk.” Joseph McCabe

 

The late Professor George A. Dorsey noted that “H. G. Wells’ heart beats faster in nearly every chapter of his Outline of History, because he cannot forget that he is Nordic, Aryan,
English British, white, civilized.” (Why We Behave Like Human Beings, p. 40.) This patriotic zeal of Mr. Wells’ has, in truth, caused him to suppress certain facts that do not
fit into his pet theories. In the latest edition of his Outline of History, Mr. Wells ends his
chapter on The Early Empires with the following remarks: “No less an authority than Sir
Flinders Petrie gives countenance to the idea that there was some very early connection
between Colchis (the country to the south of the Caucasus) and prehistoric Egypt. Herodotus remarked upon a series of resemblances between the Colchians and the
Egyptians.” (Wells’ New and Revised Outline of History, p. 184, Garden City, 1931.) It
would have been proper for Wells to have quoted the remarks of Herodotus, so as to give
us precise information on the series of resemblances between the Cholchians and the
Egyptians. Why he did not do so we shall now see. In Book II, Section- 104, of his
celebrated History, Herodotus states: “For my part I believe the Colchi to be a colony of
Egyptians, because like them they have black skins and frizzled hair.” (See any English
translation of The History of Herodotus. The translation by Professor George Rawlinson
is the best. See also W.E.B. DuBois, The Negro, p. 31, and Count Volney’s Travels in
Egypt and Syria, Vol. I. pp. 80-81.) After discussing the civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia and India, Wells had already referred to them as a “triple system of white man
civilizations.” (Outline of History, Chap. XIII, Sect. 5, p. 175) On concluding that the
civilization of Egypt was a white man civilization, he naturally would be careful not to
quote the above passage from Herodotus.

Most history texts, especially the ones on ancient history, start off by telling us that there
are either three, four or five races of man, but that of those races only one has been
responsible for civilization, culture, progress and all other good things. The one race is of
course the white race, and particularly that branch of said race known as the Nordic or
Aryan. The reason for this is obvious; the writers of these textbooks are as a rule Nordics,
or so consider themselves. However, prejudice alone will not account for this sort of
thing. There is a confusion among historians and anthropologists concerning the proper
classification of races, and this confusion is used by biased writers to bolster up their
preconceptions. It is therefore necessary that we discuss the subject of race classification
in a rational manner before proceeding further.

The early scientific classifications of the varieties of the human species were geographical in nature. The celebrated naturalist, Linneaus (1708-1778), for instance, listed four races, according to continent, namely: (1) European (white), (2) African (black), (3) Asiatic (yellow), and (4) American (red). Blumenback, in 1775, added a fifth type, the Ocieanic or brown race. This classification is still used in some grammar school Geographies, where the races of man are tabulated as: Ethiopian (black), Caucasian (white), American (red), Mongolian (yellow) and Malayan (brown). During the year 1 800, the French naturalist, Cuvier, announced the hypothesis that all ethnic types were traceable to Ham, Chem and Japhet, the three sons of Noah. After that date race classification developed into an amazing contest; a struggle which still rages. By 1873, Haeckel had found no less than twelve distinct races of mankind; and to show the indefatigable nature of his researches, he annexed twenty-two more races a few years later, bringing the grand total of human types up to thirty-four. Deniker, in 1900, presented to the world a very imposing system of race classification. He conceived of the human species existing in the form of six grand divisions, seventeen divisions and twenty-nine races. And despite all this industry among anthropologists, ethnologists and the like, there is yet no agreement on the classification of races. Where one anthropologist finds three racial types, another can spot thirty-three without the least difficulty.

The Classifiers of race, however, regardless of how abundantly they disagreed with each
other as to the correct groupings of human types, were of unanimous accord in the belief
that the white peoples of the world were far superior to the darker races. This opinion in
still very popular, but modern science is making it hard for intelligent people to accept
the fallacy. Many years ago the German philosopher, Schopenhauer, remarked that,
“there is no such thing as a white race, much as this is talked of, but every white man is a
faded or bleached one.” Schopenhauer possessed keen and sagacious foresight on this
point. For example, the English scholar, Joseph McCabe, expresses the following view as
the consensus of opinion among modern anthropologists: “There is strong reason to think
that man was at first very dark of skin, woolly-haired and flat-nosed, and, as he wandered into different climates, the branches of the race diverged and developed their characteristics.” (Key to Culture, No. 11, p. 10.)

Professor Franz Boas, the nestor of American anthropologists, has divided the whole
human race into only two divisions. This classification of Boas’ is admirably explained
by Professor George A. Dorsey:

Open your atlas to a map of the world. Look at the Indian Ocean: on the west, Africa; on the north, the three great southern peninsulas of Asia: on the east, a chain of great islands terminating in Australia. Wherever that Indian Ocean touches land, it finds dark-skinned people with strongly
developed jaws, relatively long arms and kinky or frizzly hair. Call that the Indian Ocean or Negroid division of the human race.

Now look at the Pacific Ocean: on one side, the two Americas; on the other, Asia. (Geographically, Europe is a tail to the Asiatic kite.) The aboriginal population of the Americas and of Asia north of its southern peninsula was a light-skinned people with straight hair, relatively short arms, and a face without prominent jaws. Call that the Pacific Ocean or Mongoloid division. (Why We Behave Like Human Beings, pp. 44-45.)

Professors A. L. Kroeber and Fay-Cooper Cole are of the opinion that the peoples of
Europe have (been) bleached out enough to merit classification as a distinct race. This
would add a European or Caucasoid division to the Negroid and Mongoloid races of the
classification proposed by Professor Boas. If we accept this three-fold division of the
human species, our classification ought to read as follows: the races of man are three in
number; (1) the Negroid, or Ethiopian or black race; (2) the Mongoloid, or Mongolian or
yellow race; and (3) the Caucasoid or European or white race. This is the very latest
scheme of race classification.

Now that we have straightened out ourselves on the issue of the classification of races,
we may property turn to the main subject matter of this essay, i.e., the ancient Ethiopians
and their widespread influence on the early history of civilization. In discussing the origin
of civilization in the ancient Near East, Professor Charles Seignobos in his History of
Ancient Civilization, notes that the first civilized inhabitants of the Nile and Tigris-
Euphrates valleys, were a dark-skinned people with short hair and prominent lips; and
that they are referred to by some scholars as Cushites (Ethiopians), and as Hamites by
others. This ancient civilization of the Cushites, out of which the earliest cultures of
Egypt and Mesopotamia grew, was not confined to the Near East. Traces of it have been
found all over the world. Dr. W. J. Perry refers to it as the Archaic Civilization. Sir
Grafton Elliot Smith terms it the Neolithic Heliolithic Culture of the Brunet-Browns. Mr.
Wells alludes to this early civilization in his Outline of History, and dates its beginnings
as far back as 15,000 years B.C. “This peculiar development of the Neolithic culture,”
says Mr. Wells, “which Elliot Smith called the Heliolithic (sun-stone) culture, included
many or all of the following odd practices: (1) Circumcision, (2) the queer custom of
sending the father to bed when a child is born, known as Couvade, (3) the practice of Massage, (4) the making of Mummies, (5) Megalithic monuments (i.e. Stonehenge), (6)
artificial deformation of the heads of the young by bandages, (7) Tattooing, (8) religious
association of the Sun and the Serpent, and (9) the use of the symbol known as the
Swastika for good luck. . . . Elliot Smith traces these associated practices in a sort of
constellation all over this great Mediterranean / Indian Ocean-Pacific area. Where one
occurs, most of the others occur. They link Brittany with Borneo and Peru. But this
constellation of practices does not crop up in the primitive home of Nordic or Mongolian
peoples, nor does it extend southward much beyond equatorial Africa. … The first
civilizations in Egypt and the Euphrates-Tigris valley probably developed directly out of
this widespread culture.” (Outline of History, pp. 141-143).

This ancient civilization is called NEOLITHIC by Wells. This is a mistake; for we have
overwhelming evidence that these ancient peoples had long passed out of the New Stone
Age stage of culture, and were erecting edifices which could only have been constructed
by means of hard metal tools. Iron is the very backbone of civilization, and the Iron Age
began very anciently in Africa. The researches of scholars like Boas, Torday and DuBois
would lead us to believe that the art of mining iron was first developed in the interior of
Africa, and that the knowledge of it passed through Egypt to the rest of the world. (See
W.E.B. DuBois, The Negro, pp. 114-116, Home University Library, New York and
London, 1915.)

In modern geography the name Ethiopia is confined to the country known as Abyssinia,
an extensive territory in East Africa. In ancient times Ethiopia extended over vast
domains in both Africa and Asia. “It seems certain,” declares Sir E. A. Wallis Budge,
“that classical historians and geographers called the whole region from India to Egypt,
both countries inclusive, by the name of Ethiopia, and in consequence they regarded all
the dark-skinned and black peoples who inhabited it as Ethiopians. Mention is made of
Eastern and Western Ethiopians and it is probable that the Easterners were Asiatics and
the Westerners Africans.” (History of Ethiopia, Vol. I., Preface, by Sir E. A. Wallis
Budge.) In addition Budge notes that, “Homer and Herodotus call all the peoples of the
Sudan, Egypt, Arabia, Palestine and Western Asia and India Ethiopians.” (Ibid., p. 2.)
Herodotus wrote in his celebrated History that both the Western Ethiopians, who lived in
Africa, and the Eastern Ethiopians who dwelled in India, were black in complexion, but
that the Africans had curly hair, while the Indians were straight-haired. (The aboriginal
black inhabitants of India are generally referred to as the Dravidians, of whom more will
be said as we proceed.) Another classical historian who wrote about the Ethiopians was
Strabo, from whom we quote the following: “I assert that the ancient Greeks, in the same
way as they classed all the northern nations with which they were familiar as Scythians,
etc., so, I affirm, they designated as Ethiopia the whole of the southern countries toward
the ocean.” Strabo adds that “if the moderns have confined the appellation Ethiopians to
those only who dwell near Egypt, this must not be allowed to interfere with the meaning
of the ancients.” Ephorus says that: “The Ethiopians were considered as occupying all the
south coasts of both Asia and Africa,” and adds that “this is an ancient opinion of the of
the Greeks.” Then we have the view of Stephanus of Byzantium, that: “Ethiopia was the
first established country on earth; and the Ethiopians were the first who introduced the
worship of the gods, and who established laws.” The vestiges of this early civilization have been found in Nubia, the Egyptian Sudan, West Africa, Egypt, Mashonaland, India,
Persia, Mesopotamia, Arabia, South America, Central America, Mexico, and the United
States. Any student who doubts this will find ample evidence in such works as The Voice
of Africa, by Dr. Leo Froebenius; Prehistoric Nations, and Ancient America, by John D.
Baldwin; Rivers of Life, by Major-General J. G. R. Forlong; A Book of the Beginnings by
Gerald Massey; Children of the Sun and The Growth of Civilization, by W. J. Perry; The
Negro by Professor W.E.B. DuBois; The Anacalypsis, by Sir Godfrey Higgins; Isis
Unveiled by Madam H. P. Blavatsky; The Diffusion of Culture, by Sir Grafton Elliot
Smith; The Mediterranean Race, by Professor Sergi; The Ruins of Empires, by Count
Volney; The Races of Europe, by Professor William Z. Ripley; and last but not least, the
brilliant monographs of Mr. Maynard Shipley: New Light on Prehistoric Cultures and
Americans of a Million Years Age. (See also Shipley’s Sex and the Garden of Eden Myth,
a collection of essays, the best of the lot being one entitled: Christian Doctrines In Pre-
Christian America.) These productions of Mr. Shipley, have been issued in pamphlet
form in the Little Blue Book Series, published by Mr. E. Haldeman- Julius, of Girard,
Kansas.

The efforts of certain historians to classify these ancient Cushites as Caucasoids does not
deceive honest historical students any longer. This may well be illustrated by a passage
from the pen of our scholarly friend Bishop William Montgomery Brown: “For the first
two or three thousand years of civilization, there was not a civilized white man on the
earth. Civilization was founded and developed by the swarthy races of Mesopotamia,
Syria and Egypt, and the white race remained so barbaric that in those days an Egyptian
or a Babylonian priest would have said that the riffraff of white tribes a few hundred
miles to the north of their civilization were hopelessly incapable of acquiring the
knowledge requisite to progress. It was southern colored peoples everywhere, in China,
in Central America, in India, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt and Crete who gave the
northern white peoples civilization.” (The Bankruptcy of Christian Supernaturalism, Vol.,
p. 192.)

Quite a few Egyptologists have defended the idea that the ancient Egyptians
originally came from Asia. There never was any evidence to back up this view; and the
only reason it was adopted, was because it was fashionable to believe that no African
people was capable of developing a great civilization. Geoffrey Parsons refers to
Egyptian civilization in his Stream of History, p. 154, New York & London, 1932, as
“genuinely African in its origin and development.” Herodotus came to the same
conclusion over 2,000 years ago, but he is not taken seriously by the majority of modern
historians, except where his facts agree with certain theories of said historians. Theories
are more precious to some scholars than facts, even when the facts flatly contradict their
theories. Dr. Froebenious, the great German anthropologist, has examined the ruins of
ancient cultures in southern, eastern and western Africa, of an antiquity rivaling those of
Egypt and Sumer. Sir John Marshall and Dr. E. Mackay have uncovered the remains of a
great Dravidian civilization in India, which rose to its peak over 5,000 years ago. The
newspaper generally report these discoveries as startling and unexpected. They tell us
that nobody ever dreamed that these ancient nations ever existed. This novelty, however,
does not exist for real students. Anyone familiar with the works of G. Elliot Smith, W. J. Perry, Sir Godfrey Higgins, Dr. H.R. Hall, Sir Henry Rawlinson, John D. Baldwin,
Gerald Massey and General Forlong, will not be surprised at the very novel
archaeological discoveries announced by the press. Since we are dealing with historical
sources and authorities, a study of the researches of Sir Henry Rawlinson, the Father of
Assyriology, on the Ethiopians in the ancient East, is in order. The following extract is
condensed from an essay entitled: On the Early History of Babylonia:

1 . The system of writing which they brought with them has the closest
affinity with that of Egypt — in many cases indeed, there is an absolute
identity between the two alphabets.

2. In the Biblical genealogies, Cush (Ethiopia) and Mizraim (Egypt) are
brothers, while from the former sprang Nimrod (Babylonia.)

3. In regard to the language of the primitive Babylonians, the vocabulary is
undoubtedly Cushite or Ethiopian, belonging to that stock of tongues
which in the sequel were everywhere more or less mixed up with the
Semitic languages, but of which we have probably the purest modern
specimens in the Mahra of Southern Arabia and the Galla of Abyssinia.

4. All the traditions of Babylonia and Assyria point to a connection in very
early times between Ethiopia, Southern Arabia and the cities on the lower
Euphrates.

5. In further proof of the connection between Ethiopia and Chaldea, we must
remember the Greek tradition both of Cepheus and Memnon, which
sometimes applied to Africa, and sometimes to the countries at the mouth
of the Euphrates; and we must also consider the geographical names of
Cush and Phut, which, although of African origin, are applied to races
bordering on Chaldea, both in the Bible and in the Inscriptions of Darius.

(Essay- VI, Appendix, Book-I, History of Herodotus, translated by
Professor George Rawlinson, with essays and notes by Sir Henry
Rawlinson and Sir J. G. Wilkinson.)

The opinions of Sir Henry Rawlinson are reinforced by the researches of his equally
distinguished brother, Professor George Rawlinson, in his essay On the Ethnic Affinities
of the Races of Western Asia, which directs our attention to: “the uniform voice of
primitive antiquity, which spoke of the Ethiopians as a single race, dwelling along the
shores of the Southern Ocean from India to the Pillars of Hercules.” {Herodotus, Vol. I.,
Book. I., Appendix, Essay XL, Section-5.) Rawlinson adds an explanatory note to this
section of his essay, which we here reproduce: “Recent linguistic discovery tends to show
that a Cushite or Ethiopian race did in the earliest times extend itself along the shores of
the Southern Ocean from Abyssinia to India. The whole peninsula of India was peopled
by a race of their character before the influx of the Aryans; it extended from the Indus
along the seacoast through the modern Beluchistan and Kerman, which was the proper
country of the Asiatic Ethiopians; the cities on the northern shores of the Persian Gulf are
shown by the brick inscriptions found among their ruins to have belonged to this race; it
was dominant in Susiana and Babylonia, until overpowered in the one country by Aryan,
in the other by Semitic intrusion; it can be traced both by dialect and tradition throughout
the whole south coast of the Arabian peninsula.”

In the study of ancient affairs, folklore and tradition throw an invaluable light on
historical records. In Greek mythology we read of the great Ethiopian king, Cepheus,
whose fame was so great that he and his family were immortalized in the stars. The wife
of King Cepheus was Queen Cassiopeia, and his daughter, Princess Andromeda. The star
groups of the celestial sphere, which are named after them are called the ROYAL
family — (the constellations: cepheus, CASSIOPEIA and ANDROMEDA.) It may seem
strange that legendary rulers of ancient Ethiopia should still have their names graven on
our star maps, but the voice of history gives us a clue. A book on astrology attributed to
Lucian declares that: “The Ethiopians were the first who invented the science of stars,
and gave names to the planets, not at random and without meaning, but descriptive of the
qualities which they conceived them to possess; and it was from them that this art passed,
still in an imperfect state, to the Egyptians.” The Ethiopian origin of astronomy is
beautifully explained by Count Volney in a passage in his Ruins of Empires, which is one
of the glories of modern literature, and his argument is not based on guesses. He invokes
the weighty authority of Charles F. Dupuis, whose three monumental works, The Origin
of Constellations, The Origin of Worship and The Chronological Zodiac, are marvels of
meticulous research. Dupuis placed the origin of the zodiac as far back as 15,000 B.C.,
which would give the world’s oldest picture book an antiquity of 17,000 years. (This
estimate is not as excessive as it might at first appear, since the American ast5ronomer
and mathematician, Professor Arthur M. Harding, traces back the origin of the zodiac to
about 26,000 B.C) In discussing star worship and idolatry, Volney gives the following
glowing description of the scientific achievements of the ancient Ethiopians, and of how
they mapped out the signs of the zodiac on the star-spangled dome of the heavens:

Should it be asked at what epoch this system took its birth, we shall answer on the testimony of the monuments of astronomy itself, that its principles appear with certainty to have been established about seventeen thousand years ago, and if it be asked to what people it is to be attributed, we shall answer that the same monuments, supported by unanimous traditions, attribute it to the first tribes of Egypt; and reason finds in that country all the circumstances which could lead to such a system; when it finds there a zone of sky, bordering on the tropic, equally free from the rains of the equator and the fogs of the north; when it finds there a central point of the sphere of the ancients, a salubrious climate, a great but manageable river, a soil fertile without art or labor, inundated without morbid exhalations, and placed between two seas which communicate with the richest countries; it conceives that the inhabitant of the Nile, addicted to agriculture from the facility of communications, to astronomy from the state of his sky, always open to observation, must have been the first to pass from the savage to the social state; and consequently to attain the physical and moral sciences necessary to civilized life.

It was, then, on the borders of the upper Nile, among a black race of men, that was organized the complicated system of the worship of the stars, considered in relation to the productions of the earth and the labors of agriculture. … Thus the Ethiopian of Thebes named stars of inundation, or Aquarius, those stars under which the Nile began to overflow; stars of the ox or bull, those under which they began to plow, stars of the lion, those under which that animal, driven from the desert by thirst, appeared on the banks of the Nile; stars of the sheaf, or of the harvest virgin, those of the
reaping season; stars of the lamb, stars of the two kids, those under which these precious animals were brought forth. … Thus the same Ethiopian having observed that the return of the inundation always corresponded with the rising of a beautiful star which appeared towards the source of the
Nile, and seemed to warn the husbandman against the coming waters, he compared this action to that of the animal who, by his barking, gives notice of danger, and he called this star the dog, the barker (Sirius). In the same manner he named the stars of the crab, those where the sun, having
arrived at the tropic, retreated by a slow retrograde motion like the crab of Cancer. He named stars of the wild goat, or Capricorn, those where the sun, having reached the highest point in his annuary tract, . . . imitates the goat, who delights to climb to the summit of the rocks. He named stars of the balance, or Libra, those where the days and nights being equal, seemed in equilibrium, like that instrument; and stars of the scorpion, those where certain periodical winds bring vapors, burning like the venom of the scorpion. (Volney’s Ruins of Empires, pp. 120-122, New York, 1926)

The traditions concerning Memnon are interesting as well as instructive. He was claimed
as a king by the Ethiopians, and identified with the Pharaoh Amunoph or Amenhotep, by
the Egyptians. A fine statue of him is located in the British Museum, in London. Charles
Darwin makes a reference to this statue on his Descent of Man which is well worth
reproducing: “When I looked at the statue of Amunoph III, I agreed with two officers of
the establishment, both competent judges, that he had a strongly marked Negro type of
features.” The features of Akhnaton (Amennhotep IV), are even more Negroid than those
of his illustrious predecessor. That the earliest Egyptians were African Ethiopians
(Nilotic Negroes), is obvious to all unbiased students of oriental history. Breasted’s claim
that the early civilized inhabitants of the Nile Valley and Western Asia were members of
a Great White Race, is utterly false, and is supported by no facts whatsoever. A similar
racial bias is shown by Elliot Smith in his work, The Ancient Egyptians and Their
Influence Upon the Civilization of Europe, p. 30, New York & London, 1911. “Not a few
writers,” says he, “like the traveler Volney in the 18 th century, have expressed the belief
that the ancient Egyptians were Negroes, or at any rate strongly Negroid. In recent times
even a writer so discriminating as Ripley usually is has given his adhesion to this view.”
(The writers referred to here, are Count Volney, the French Orientalist and Professor
William Z. Ripley, of Harvard University, an eminent American Anthropologist.)
Professor Smith is convinced that these men are wrong, because he holds that there is a
“profound gap that separates the Negro from the rest of mankind, including the
Egyptian.” (Ancient Egyptians, p. 74.) Another English scholar, Philip Smith, is far more
rational in discussing this point:

No people have bequeathed to us so many memorials of its form complexion and physiognomy as the Egyptians. … If we were left to form  an opinion on the subject by the description of the Egyptians left by the Greek writers we should conclude that they were, if not Negroes, at least
closely akin to the Negro race. That they were much darker in coloring than the neighboring Asiatics; that they had their frizzled either by nature or art; that their lips were thick and projecting, and their limbs slender, rests upon the authority of eye-witnesses who had traveled in the country and who could have had no motive to deceive. . . . The fullness of the lips seen in the Sphinx of the Pyramids and in the portraits of the kings is characteristic of the Negro. (The Ancient History of the East, pp. 25-26, London, 1881.)

We read of Memnon, King of Ethiopia, in Greek mythology, to be exact in Homer’s Iliad,
where he leads an army of Elamites and Ethiopians to the assistance of King Priam in the
Trojan War. His expedition is said to have started from the African Ethiopia and to have
passed through Egypt on the way to Troy. According to Herodotus, Memnon was the
founder of Susa, the chief city of the Elamites. “There were places called Memnonia,”
asserts Professor Rawlinson, “supposed to have been built by him both in Egypt and at
Susa; and there was a tribe called Memnones at Moroe. Memnon thus unites the eastern
with the western Ethiopians, and the less we regard him as an historical personage the
more must we view him as personifying the ethnic identity of the two races.” (Ancient
Monarchies, Vol. I, Chap. 3.) The ancient peoples of Mesopotamia are sometimes called
the Chaldeans, but this is inaccurate and confusing. Before the Chaldean rule in
Mesopotamia, there were the empires of the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and
Assyrians. The earliest civilization of Mesopotamia was that of the Sumerians. They are
designated in the Assyrio-Babylonian inscriptions as the black-heads or black-faced
people, and they are shown on the monuments as beardless and with shaven heads. This
easily distinguishes them from the Semitic Babylonians, who are shown with beards and
long hair. From the myths and traditions of the Babylonians we learn that their culture
came originally from the south. Sir Henry Rawlinson concluded from this and other
evidence that the first civilized inhabitants of Sumer and Akkad were immigrants from
the African Ethiopia. John D. Baldwin, the American Orientalist, on the other hand,
claims that since ancient Arabia was also known as Ethiopia, they could have just as well
come from that country. These theories are rejected by Dr. II. R. Hall, of the Dept. Of
Egyptian & Assyrian Antiquities of the British Museum, who contends that Mesopotamia
was civilized by a migration from India. “The ethnic type of the Sumerians, so strongly
marked in their statues and reliefs,” says Dr. Hall, “was as different from those of the
races which surrounded them as was their language from those of the Semites, Aryans, or
others; they were decidedly Indian in type. The face-type of the average Indian of today
is no doubt much the same as that of his Dravidian race ancestors thousands of years ago.
. . . And it is to this Dravidian ethnic type of India that the ancient Sumerian bears most
resemblance, so far as we can judge from his monuments. … And it is by no means
improbable that the Sumerians were an Indian race which passed, certainly by land,
perhaps also by sea, through Persia to the valley of the Two Rivers. It was in the Indian
home (perhaps the Indus valley) that we suppose for them that their culture developed. . . On the way they left the seeds of their culture in Elam. . . . There is little doubt that India
must have been one of the earliest centers of human civilization, and it seems natural to suppose that the strange un-Semitic, un-Aryan people who came from the East to civilize
the West were of Indian origin, especially when we see with our own eyes how very
Indian the Sumerians were in type.” {The Ancient History of the Near East, pp. 173-174,
London, 1916.) Hall is opposed in his theory of Sumerian origins by Dr. W. J. Perry, the
great anthropologist, of the University of London. “The Sumerian stories or origins
themselves tell a very different tale,” Perry points out, “for from their beginnings the
Sumerians seem to have been in touch with Egypt. Some of their early texts mention
Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha. . . . Dilmun was the first settlement that was made by the
god Enki, who was the founder of Sumerian civilization. … Magan was famous among
the Sumerians as a place whence they got diorite and copper, Meluhha as a place whence
they got gold. Dilmun has been identified with some place or other in the Persian Gulf,
perhaps the Bahrein Islands, perhaps a land on the eastern shore of the Gulf. … In a late
inscription of the Assyrians it is said that Magan and Meluhha were the archaic names for
Egypt and Ethiopia, the latter being the south-western part of Somaliand that lay
opposite.” {The Growth of Civilization, pp. 60-61, 2 nd Edition, Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, England, 1937, Published by Penguin Books, Ltd.)

Another great nation of Ethiopian origin was Elam, a country which stretched from the
Tigris River to the Zagros Mountains of Persia. Its capital was the famous city of Susa,
which was founded about 4,000 B.C., and flourished from that date to its destruction by
Moslem invaders about the year 650 C.E. (Christian Era). In speaking of the Elamites, H.
G. Wells H. H. Johnston, to have been Negroid in type. There is a strong Negroid strain
in the modern people of Elam.” {Outline of History, p. 166.) Archaeological evidence
favors this view. Reginald S. Poole, the English Egyptologist noted that: “There is one
portrait of an Elamite (Cushite) king on a vase found at Susa; he is painted black and thus
belongs to the Cushite race.” (Quoted by Professor Alfred C. Haddon, in his History of
Anthropology, p. 6, London, 1934. Thinker’s Library Edition, published by Watts & Co.,
5 & 6 Johnson’s Court, Fleet St., London, E. c-4, England.)

We cannot devote much space to the early inhabitants of India, though they were beyond
all doubt an Ethiopic ethnic type. They are described by Professor Lynn Thorndike as
“short black men with almost Negro noses.” {Short History of Civilization, p. 227, New
York, 1936.) Dr. Will Durant pictures these early Hindus as “a dark-skinned, broad-nosed
people whom, without knowing the origin or the word, we call Dravidians.” {Short
History of Civilization, Part I, p. 396, New York, 1935.) The student is advised to consult
pp. 650-666, of the new edition of Sir John A. Hammerton’s Wonders of the Past, in
which there is an instructive article, with fine illustrations, by S. G. Blaxland Stubbs,
entitled: Wonder Cities of Most Ancient India. That Mr. Stubbs is a candid writer may be
seen from the following excerpt:

The early Aryan literature of India, the Hymns of the Rigveda, which, it is commonly agreed, date from about 1,000 B.C., speak of the people whom the proud Aryan invaders found in India as black-skinned barbarians, Dasas or slaves. But Aryan pride of race has received something of a shock from archaeological investigations carried out by Sir John Marshall and, more recently, by Dr. E. Mackay in the valley of the Indus. Here ample evidence has been found of a race whose complex civilization and high culture were equal, and in some respects superior to those of early Mesopotamia and Egypt.

These Asiatic black men were not confined to the mainland, for we are informed by no less an authority than Sir Harry H. Johnston, that:

In former times this Asiatic Negro spread, we can scarcely explain how, unless the land connections of those days were more extended, through Eastern Australia to Tasmania, and from the Solomon Island to New Caledonia and even New Zealand, to Fiji and Hawaii. The Negroid element in Burma and Annam is, therefore, easily to be explained by supposing that in ancient times Southern Asia had a Negro population ranging from the Persian Gulf to Indo-China and the Malay Archipelago.
(See An Introduction to African Civilizations, by Willis N. Huggins. Ph.D. and John G. Jackson, pp. 188-190, New York, 1937.)

Most readers of history know about the Celts, ancient inhabitants of Europe, whose
priests were known as the Druids. It is generally thought that these Celts were
Caucasoids, but Sir Godfrey Higgins, after much study came to the conclusion that they
were a Negroid people. Higgins wrote a ponderous volume entitled The Celtic Druids. In
the following passage from his Anacalypsis he modestly refers to it as an essay: “In my
essay on the Celtic Druids, I have shown that a great nation called Celtae, of whom the
Druids were the priests, spread themselves almost over the whole earth, and are to be
traced in their rude gigantic monuments from India to the extremity of Britain. The
religion of Buddha of India is well known to have been very ancient.” (Higgins is here
referring to the first Buddha, who is supposed to have lived between 5,000 and 6,000
years ago, and not to Gautama Buddha who lived about 600 years B.C. There were at
least ten Buddhas mentioned in the sacred books of India.) “Who these can have been but
the early individuals of the black nation of whom we have been treating I know not, and
in this opinion I am not singular. The learned Maurice says Cuthies (Cushites), i.e. Celts,
built the great temples in India and Britain, and excavated the caves of the former; and
the learned mathematician, Reuben Burrow, has no hesitation in pronouncing Stonehenge
to be a temple of the black curly-headed Buddha.” {Anacalypsis, Vol. I, Book I, Chap.
IV, New York, 1927.)

Though it is generally believed that Columbus discovered America, it is now definitely
known to students of American archaeology that Columbus came late. Professor Leo
Weiner has written a three volume work, Africa and the Discovery of America, in which
he argues that the New World was discovered by Africans long before the time of
Columbus. Professor Weiner was led to this conclusion partly from the following
evidence:

1. African works in American Indian languages.

2. Vases and pipe-bowls found in the ruins of the Mound-Builders, showing
Negro faces on their surfaces.

3. The presence of African foods in America, such the peanut and the yam.

4. The totemic organization of the Amerindians tribes, very similar to
African totemism. (Totemism is a sort of primitive theory of evolution.
For instance, certain tribes are divided into clans, and each clan is, as a
rule named after some species of animal. Let us suppose a tribe is divided
into four clans, bearing the following names: (1) eagle, (2) Bear, (3) Crow
and (4) Wolf. A member of the Bear Clan will consider himself as
descended from bears, a member of the Wolf Clan will tell you that he is a
wolf and that all of his ancestors were wolves, and so on; this clan
ancestor being known as the Totem. There are numerous definitions of
totemism, the best I have come across being the following one by
Professor A. VB. Haddon: “Totemism, as Dr. Frazer and I understand it in
its fully developed condition, implies the division of a people into several
totem kins, or as they are usually termed, totem clans, each of which has
one or sometimes more that one totem. The totem is usually a species of
animal, sometimes a species of plant, occasionally a natural object or
phenomenon, very rarely a manufactured article. . . . The totems are
regarded as kinsfolk or protectors of the kinsmen, who respect them and
refrain from killing and eating them. There is thus a recognition of mutual
rights and obligations between the members of the kin and their totem.
The totem is the crest of symbol of the Kin.” We see vestiges of totemism
in our political organizations; for example, the Democratic DONKEY and
the republican ELEPHANT. Baseball clubs present an even better example
of totemistic atavism; for instance, who has not heard of baseball teams
bearing such names as: tigers, cardinals, bears, bees, bisons, etc.)
Weiner’s theories have not been kindly received by his colleagues.
Professor H. J. Spinden sneers sarcastically in the following condensed
extract from Culture, the Diffusion Controversy, pp. 53-54, New York,
1927:

“Professor Weiner solves the riddle of old American civilizations with an Arabico-Mandingo lexicon and derives everything of importance in the New World from the highly civilized coast of
Gambia and Sierra Leone. From brightest Africa came the principal American food plants, the Mayan calendar and the Mexican religion. It may be added that Professor Weiner swarms
his Negroes across the Atlantic in no less than fifty voyages before Columbus.”

The Indian was not the original American. Professor Ales Hrdlicka of the Smithsonian Institution, as authority on the Amerinds, contends that the ancestors of the Indians came from Asia via Bering Strait 10,000 years ago. American civilization is older than that. The ruins of Tiahuanaco, in Bolivia, according to Dr. Rudolph Muller, a noted German astronomer, are between 10,000 and 14,000 years old. The remains of this ancient city show that it was inhabited by a highly civilized people. (See an article entitled “The
Oldest City in the World,” by A. H. Verrill, in the N. Y. Herald-Tribune Magazine, July 31, 1932.) Excavations in Mexico have produced equally startling results. Dr. Maximus Neumayer, a distinguished Brazilian archaeologist, in cooperation with a group of Mexican archaeologists, has made a very thorough study of the pyramids and monuments in the vicinity of Mexico City. He estimates the monument of Cuicuilco to be about 13,000 years old. An interesting feature of this structure is that it resembles the Assyrio-Babylonian type of architecture, bearing a striking resemblance to the Tower of Babel as it has been restored by the Assyriologists. Dr. Neumayer also examined the pyramids of Teotihuacan, which he estimates to be 4,500 years of age. He thinks that these pyramids were built by a people akin to the Egyptians; and from their arrangement, suggests that they form a sort of model of the solar system, with a pedestal in the center, representing the sun. We must also mention the discoveries of Professor Ramon Mena, Curator of the Department of Archaeology of the Mexican Government. This scientist explored the ruins of the great city of Palenque, and concluded that the ancient metropolis was built over 10,000 years ago. He also found that the inhabitants of the city were familiar with the manufacture and use of Stucco. The celebrated French archaeologist, Desiree Charnay, unearthed statues around Mexico City, more than fifty years ago, with faces showing Negroid features. Pictures of some of them may be seen in Ignatius Donelley’s Atlantis, pp. 174-175. Donnelly also has illustrations of two similar statues, one from Palenque and the other from Vera Cruz. Finding that the Indians show both Mongoloid and Negroid ethnic traces, Charnay justly concluded that the Amerinds were a mixed race of both Asiatic and African ancestry. (See The Ancient Cities of the New World, by Desiree Charnay.) We have perfectly reliable proof of the presence of men of the Ethiopian race in pre-Columbian America. Father Roman, one of he first Catholic missionaries to arrive in the New World, records that a tribe of black men came from the south and landed in Haiti, and that they were armed with darts of guanin (a composition of gold, silver and copper), and were known as the black Guaninis. “These might have been the Negroes of Quareca, mentioned by Peter Martyr d Angleria, or some other American Negro nation,” asserts De Roo, “the like of which there were many, as we may see in Rafinesque’s Account of the Ancient Black Nations of America. Such are the Charruas of Brazil, the black Carabees of St. Vincent in the Gulf of Mexico, the Jamassi of Florida, the dark complexioned Californians who are perhaps the dark men mentioned in the Quiche traditions and by some old Spanish adventures. Such, again, is the tribe of which Balboa saw some representatives in his passage of the Isthmus of Darien in the year 1513. It would seem from the expressions made use of by Gomara, that these were Negroes.” {History of America Before Columbus, pp. 306-307, by P. De Roo, Philadelphia and London, 1900.) Spanish and Portugese explorers found colonies of black men on the eastern coasts of South and Central America, and in Yucatan and Nicaragua. De Roo quotes John T. Short, author of The North Americans of Antiquity, New York, 1880, on the similarity of African and American languages, as follows — “It is worthy of note that several eminent scholars have observed the remarkable similarity of grammatical structure between the Central American and certain transatlantic languages, especially the Basque and some of the languages of Western Africa.” {History of America Before Columbus, pp. 164-165.)

Most of us are familiar with the Mayan civilization of Yucatan and Central America, since American archaeologists have devoted many years of intensive research to these territories. Among the speculations concerning the origin of this culture, those of LePlongeon and Raquena are the most valuable. Professor Rafael Requena, a Venezuelan archaeologist, holds that there was once an island in the Atlantic Ocean, of continental dimensions, known to the ancients as Atlantis, that this island was settled by Egyptians, who in turn established colonies in America before the submergence of Atlantis. The findings of Professor Augustus LePlongeon are of great interest. This Franco-American archaeologist discovered the ruins of a palace in Chichen Itza in 1 874. He found in this structure, known as Prince Coh’s Palace, pictographs and inscriptions which he was able
to decipher. The story, as unraveled by LePlongeon, may be read by the student in Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx, where the professor gives his interpretation of the inscriptions and reproductions of the pictographs. Mrs. LePlongeon’s work, Queen Moo’s Talisman, might also be consulted. The story runs roughly as follows:

About 1 1,000 years ago, two brothers Princes of Yucatan, sought the hand of the ruling monarch of the land, Queen Moo, in marriage. The brothers were named Coh and Aac, respectively. Prince Coh was the successful suitor; which so enraged Prince Aac that he stabbed his brother through the heart with a stone knife, which, needless to say, caused his death. Then Aac attempted to force Queen Moo to wed him. The Queen, rather than submit, decided to flee to Atlantis. On reaching the coast she learned that great earthquakes had submerged Atlantis beneath the sea; so she sailed for Africa instead, and ended her journey in Egypt. There she was hailed as Queen, and erected the Sphinx as a memorial to her slain husband.

The foregoing story sounds like a fable, but there is probably a core of fact in it. If the Sphinx, with its Ethiopian face, is a memorial to an ancient Mayan prince, it shows that the Mayas were of African origin.

Where flows the river Nile,
The queen found rest;

There once again her days
With peace were blessed.

Did Moo a giant Sphinx from
Out of the ground

Cause to arise, and
Thus Coh’s fame renew?

Did she immortalize
Her consort true?”
{Queen Moo’s Talisman, p. 65, by Alice D. LePlongeon.)

That Atlantis was connected with the history of ancient Ethiopia there can be little doubt. The Greek philosopher, Proclus, stated in his works that he could present evidence that Atlantis at one time actually existed. He cited as his authority The Ethiopian History of Marcellus. In referring to Ethiopian history to prove the existence of Atlantis, Proclus plainly infers that Atlantis was a part of Ethiopia. (See Cory’s Ancient Fragments of the Phoenician, Carthaginian, Babylonian, Egyptian and Other Authors, London, 1876. See also, Maynard Shipley’s New Light on Prehistoric Cultures and Bramwell’s Lost
Atlantis.) Although there is scientific evidence that an island of continental dimensions once existed in what is now the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, many students of the problem of Atlantis have located it in other parts of the globe, particularly in Central America and Africa. Count deProrok ways that Atlantis, in the dimness of antiquity, covered the region now occupied by the Sahara Desert. Kirchmaier placed it in South Africa and Froebenius in West Africa. In reviewing James Bramwell’s Lost Atlantis, Mr. Lewis Gannett states that: “The German anthropologist Frobenius definitely locates it in Nigeria, whose ancient civilization he relates to that of the Etruscans and the Assyrians.” {New York Herald-Tribune, Mar. 3, 1938.) Doctor Froebenius found ruins of palaces, terra cotta fragments and beautiful statuary in Jorubaland, a district in Nigeria between the Niger River and the Atlantic Ocean; and he heard among the Jorubians legends of an ancient royal city and its palace with walls of gold, which in the long ago had sunk beneath the waves. The German scholar, Eugen Georg, is a keen student of the Atlantis question, and the following remarks of his are worthy of our attention:

The new age that began after the disappearance of Atlantis was marked at first by the world-wide dominance of Ethiopian representatives of the black race. They were supreme in Africa and Asia . . . and they even infiltrated through Southern Europe. . . . During the present era — that is the last 10,000 years — the white race… has come to possess the world. According to the occult tradition, Semitic peoples developed wherever the immigrating white colonists from the north were subjugated by the black ruling class, and inter-mixture occurred, as in oldest Egypt, Chaldea,
Arabia and Phoenicia.” {The Adventure of Mankind, by Eugen Georg, pp.
121-122, New York, 1931.)

So far we have given little or no attention to the evidence of comparative religion. The study of ancient religious history is important, for religion, like philosophy, changes but slowly. Institutional religion, being conservative and static in its outlook, has preserved much ancient lore that would have otherwise been lost to the modern student. The Greek philosopher Xenophanes (572-480 B.C.), pointed out a profound truth when he observed that the gods men worship very closely resemble the worshippers. In the words of this ancient sage: “Each man represents the gods as he himself is. The Ethiopian as black and
flat-nosed the Thracian as red-haired and blue-eyed; and if horses and oxen could paint, they would no doubt depict the gods as horses and oxen.” This being the case; when we find the great nations of the world, both past and present, worshipping black gods, then we logically conclude that these peoples are either members of the black race, or that they originally received their religion in toto or in part from black people. The proofs are abundant. The ancient gods of India are shown with Ethiopian crowns on their heads. According to the Old Testament, Moses first met Jehovah during his sojourn among the Midianites, who were an Ethiopian tribe. We learn from Hellenic tradition that Zeus, king
of the Grecian gods, so cherished the friendship of the Ethiopians that he traveled to their country twice a year to attend banquets. “All the gods and goddesses of Greece were black,” asserts Sir Godfrey Higgins, “at least this was the case with Jupiter, Baccus, Hercules, Apollo, Ammon. The goddesses Benum, Isis, Hecate, Diana, Juno, Metis, Ceres, Cybele were black.” (Anacalypsis, Vol. I, Book IV, Chap. I.) Even the Romans, who received their religion mainly from the Greeks, admitted their debt to Egypt and Ethiopia. This may be well illustrated by the following passage from The Golden Ass or Metamorphosis, by Apuleius. The author, as an initiate of the Isis cult is represented as being addressed by that goddess: “I am present; I who am Nature, the parent of things, queen of all the elements . . . the primitive Phrygians called me Press imunitica, the mother or the gods; the native Athenians, Ceropian Minerva; the floating Cyprians, Paphian Venus … the inhabitants of Eleusis, the ancient goddess Ceres. Some again have invoked me as Juno, others as Bellona, others as Hecate, and others Rhamnusia; and those who are enlightened by the emerging rays of the rising sun, the Ethiopians, Ariians and Egyptians, powerful in ancient learning, who reverence by divinity with ceremonies perfectly proper, call me by my true appellation, Queen Isis.” (Doane’s Bible Myths, Note, p. 478.)

A study of the images of ancient deities of both the Old and New Worlds reveal their Ethiopic origin. This is noted by Kenneth R. H. Mackezie in T. A. Buckley’s Cities of the Ancient World, p. 180: “From the wooly texture of the hair, I am inclined to assign to the Buddha of India, the Fuhi of China, the Sommonacom of the Siamese, the Zaha of the Japanese, and the Quetzalcoatl of the Mexicans, the same, and indeed an African, or rather Nubian, origin.” Most of these black gods were regarded as crucified saviors who died to save mankind by being nailed to a cross, or tied to a tree with arms outstretched as if on a cross, or slain violently in some other manner. Of these crucified saviors, the most prominent were Osiris and Horus of Egypt, Krishna of India, Mithra of Persia, Quetazlcoatl of Mexico, Adonis of Babylonia and Attis of Phrygia. Nearly all of these slain savior-gods have the following stories related about them: They are born of a virgin, on or near Dec. 25 th (Christmas); their births are heralded by a star; they are born either in a cave or stable; they are slain, commonly by crucifixion; they descend into hell, and rise from the dead at the beginning of Spring (Easter), and finally ascend into heaven. The parallels between the legendary lives of these pagan messiahs and the life of Jesus Christ
as recorded in the Bible are so similar that progressive Bible scholars now admit that stories of these heathen Christs have been woven into the life-story of Jesus. (These remarkable parallels are discussed and interpreted in a pamphlet, Christianity Before Christ, by John G. Jackson, New York, 1938.)

The late Mr. Maynard Shipley, President of The Science League of America, made a very scholarly study of the various mythologies and religions of the world, and in the concluding passage of a brilliant essay, Christian Doctrines in Pre-Christian America, he offers a profoundly thought-provoking statement:

That the ancient pagan creeds, legends and myths — part of the universal mythos — should be found embodied in the religion of the ancient Mexicans, and that all these again are found to be but the original sources of the modern orthodox Christian religion, is by no means inexplicable, and need not be attribute to the subtlety of the Ubiquitous Devil. The explanation is that all religions and all languages of the civilized races of men had a common origin in an older seat of civilization.

Where that original center of culture was is another story.

The evidence seems to show that the “original center of culture,” referred to by Mr. Shipley, was that vast domain known to the classical geographers and historians as Ethiopia. A study of religious images throws much light on this early civilization. The tau (T-shaped) cross is thought by many Christians to be a unique emblem of their faith. The fact is that this cross is of ancient Ethiopian origin. In the words of an outstanding student of symbolism: “The Ethiopic form of the tau is an exact prototype of the conventional Christian cross; or, to state the fact in its chronological relation, the Christian cross is made in the exact image of the Ethiopian tau.” (Sex Symbolism. P. 9, by William J, Fielding, Little Blue Book No. 904.) The cross was known to all the great ancient nations, and was sometimes shown with the image of a man upon it. The Church Father, Minucius Felix, writing in the early part of the third century, severely rebukes the Pagans for their adoration of crosses: “I must tell you that we neither adore crosses nor desire them; you it is ye Pagans … for what else are your ensigns, flags and standards, but crosses gilt and beautiful. Your victorious trophies not only represent a cross, but a cross
with a man upon it.” Commenting on the preceding extract, the American scholar, T. W. Doane, notes that:

It is very evident that this celebrated Christian Father alludes to some Gentle mystery, of which the prudence of his successors has deprived us. When we compare this with the fact that for centuries after the time assigned for the birth of Jesus Christ, he was not represented as a man on a cross, and that the Christians did not have such a thing as a crucifix, we are inclined to think that the effigies of a black or dark-skinned crucified man, which were to be seen in many places in Italy even during the last century, may have had something to do with it. (Bible Myths, p. 197, 7 th
Edition.)

The same writer also refers to “the Mexican crucified god being sometimes represented as black,” and that “crosses were also found in Yucatan, as well as Mexico, with a man upon them.” (Ibid., p. 201.)

The numerous black madonnas and infants in European cathedrals are discussed in detail by Sir Godfrey Higgins in The Anacalypsis, Vol. I, Book JV, Chap. I, to which the interested student is referred. However, the remarks of Mr. Shipley on this point are worthy of our attention:

Very suggestive is the fact that representations of the virgin mother and infant savior are often black. This is true in the case of the paintings and images of Isis and Horus, of Devaki and Krishna, and in many cases of Mary and Jesus. The most ancient pictures and statues in Italy and other
parts of Europe, which are adored by the faithful as representations of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, reveal the infant draped in white, but with face black and in the arms of a black mother. . . . How does it happen that the Virgin Mother of the Mexican Savior-God so closely resembled the Black Virgins of Egypt and Europe? Had they not all a common origin?” (Sex and The Garden of Eden Myth, pp. 50-51, by Maynard Shipley, Little Blue Book No. 1 188.)

Mr. A. H. Verrill, an American archaeologist, visited an Indian shrine in a small town in Guatemala a few years ago, and found that on a special festival day Indians traveled to this
little church to bow down to the image of a Black Christ. From the attendant ceremonies, Verrill judged the rite to be of Mayan origin, (see Verrill’s Old Civilizations of the New World, New York, 1938.) The Mayas possessed knowledge of the arts and sciences equivalent to that of the ancients of the Old World, but upon that we cannot dwell, since
limitations of space forbid it. The reader is referred to Professor Paul Radin’s fine book on the American Indians, where after surveying the marvelous scientific achievements of the Mayas of Yucatan and Central America , Dr. Radin admits that: “No excavations have ever revealed to us any civilization of a simpler nature from which this very elaborate culture
could possibly have been developed.” (The Story of the American Indian, p. 77, Garden City, 1937.) Egypt and Western Asia tell the same story. “In each case we have a standard or measuring-rod of authentic historical record,” declares Samuel Laing, “of certainly not less than 8,000 and more probably 9,000 or 10,000 years, from the present time; and in each case we find ourselves at this remote date, in the presence, not of rude beginnings, but of a civilization already ancient and far advanced. We have populous cities, celebrated temples, an organized priesthood, an advanced state of agriculture and of the industrial and fine arts; writing and books so long known that their origin is lost in myth; religions in which advanced philosophical and moral ideas are already developed; astronomical systems which imply a long course of accurate observations. How long this prehistoric age may have lasted, and how many centuries it may have taken to develop such a civilization, from the primitive beginnings of Neolithic and Paleolithic origins, is a matter of conjecture. All we can infer is, that it must have required an immense time, much longer than that embraced by the subsequent period of historical record.”
(Human Origins, by Samuel Laing, p. 30, London, 1913.)

Much more could be said on this subject, but since this essay is addressed mainly to readers who have little time for the study of history, it must be made as concise as possible. The numerous citations from standard scientific and historical works, it is hoped, will be of some benefit to students who are out of reach of large public libraries, or who lack the leisure time necessary for reading and research along these lines.

Why were the Ethiopian Jews the last to arrive in Israel?

Israel only brought Ethiopian Jews to the country under duress; and since their arrival, it has treated them worse than any other Jews

Interview with Dr. Chen Tannenbaum-Domanovitz

“Bring Me the Ethiopian Jews”

Source: World Policy Blog

November 17, 2016
By Omri Bezalel

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin called the head of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, into his office in 1977 and said to him, “Bring me the Ethiopian Jews.” What followed were a series of missions by land, sea, and air that brought more than 56,000 Jewish Ethiopians through Sudan into Israel over eight years. It was a highpoint in Israel’s history, followed immediately by a massive failure to integrate Ethiopians into Israeli society—a failure that carries immense consequences for today’s young Ethiopian-Israelis who experience racial discrimination and sometimes feel as though they’re not part of Israeli society.

The scale of the calamity can be found in demographic statistics. There are about 140,000 Ethiopian-Israelis living in Israel, about 50,000 of whom were born in Israel. Sixty-five percent of Ethiopian children live in poverty and one-fifth are incarcerated in juvenile detention centers. Less than 11 percent of Ethiopian-Israeli high school students are eligible to graduate. One in five Ethiopian-Israelis—five times the number for the general population—are jailed during their military service, making up 12 percent of the military prison population but only 2 percent of the military. There are fewer than 40 Ethiopians (one out of 3,000) who practice law.

Today’s problems can be traced to the integration process Ethiopians went through when they first came to Israel. Addisu Masale, the first Ethiopian elected to the Knesset, remembers the segregation starting on arrival when he and others were put in permanent public housing. But these projects didn’t exist in prospering neighborhoods, which feared property devaluation; it was the neighborhoods lower on the socio-economic scale that were forced to take in the newcomers. Non-Ethiopian residents soon left, leaving the Ethiopian community isolated from the rest of Israeli society.

“In that way,” Massale said, “the schools and kindergartens, the offices, the neighborhoods, everything naturally became 100 percent Ethiopian with no connection to the rest of Israeli society, and no integration whatsoever.”

Masale, 63, was born in a Jewish village 500 miles north of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. He went to a Jewish elementary school where he heard fairytales about Israel as a place without death and illness. The communist regime in Ethiopia at the time had many citizens looking for asylum in neighboring countries, and Zionist Ethiopian Jews, including Masale’s family, escaped to Sudan in hopes of making it to Israel. As many as 4,000 people died during the journey.

Masale recalls a long history of discrimination in Israel that led him to organize protests. In 1985, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel questioned Ethiopians’ Judaism and decreed they all had to convert; in 1996, the Ethiopian-Israeli community found out the blood bank was throwing away any blood they were donating.

Pnina Tamano-Shata immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia in 1984 at the age of three. Even though she excelled in school, she was routinely taken out of class to attend reinforcement lessons with other Ethiopian children.

“The separatism starts with the basic misperception that Ethiopians are weaker, based on the old reality of Ethiopians from 30 years ago who came to Israel with little or no education,” Tamano-Shata said. “Educators have projected this view onto students, many of whom have been tracked down special educational programs that don’t necessarily fit their skills or ability, and that isolate them in a homogenous environment that hinders their development and integration with Israeli society.” This separation leads to isolation, hostility, frustration, and increasing differences between Ethiopian children and their peers.

Israeli society has also been unwilling to accept Ethiopian-Israelis. In a 2013 Ministry of Finance survey asking employers which demographic groups they most preferred hiring, Ethiopians came in last after women, people aged over 45, people with disabilities, immigrants from the former USSR, Orthodox Jews, and Arabs. A 2012 survey by Geocartographica said that less than half of non-immigrant Israelis supported mixed classrooms, and only a quarter would allow their children to marry Ethiopians.

In an opinion piece called “I’m Not Your Cleaning Lady” for Ynet News, Israeli-born Esther Bisur gave examples of society’s institutionalized racism through her day-to-day interactions. These included strangers offering her jobs as a housekeeper, constantly being asked “when did you immigrate to Israel,” and her non-Ethiopian boyfriend being commended for “volunteering with the Ethiopian community” when seen together with her and her family.

This ongoing discrimination—along with greater awareness of the situation, through means such as a viral video of an Ethiopian-Israeli soldier beaten by a police officer—led to massive protests in Tel Aviv last year. The demonstrations were organized by a new generation of Ethiopian-Israelis, most of whom were born and raised in Israel. They claim they’re treated like second-class citizens and refuse to carry on what they consider to be their parents’ generation’s passive mentality.

“The older generation was content in fulfilling the dream of coming to Israel, and then were too busy surviving,” Tamano-Shata said. “The younger generation is fighting for its place within Israeli society, navigating its way between their love for their country and the many blows they absorb based on their skin color.”

While the situation for Ethiopian-Israelis has improved in recent years, many in the community agree they should be more involved in decision making. Various government and civil society programs have attempted over the years to close the gap between Ethiopian-Israelis and the rest of the population, but program leaders have, in the past, mostly been non-Ethiopians. This has led many in the Ethiopian community to see these programs as another means of differentiating them from the general population.

Many in the Jewish community in the U.S. and abroad, out of true concern, have insisted the money they donate be used to help Ethiopians. This has led Israel to fund segregated programs that haven’t helped integrate Ethiopians. Tamano-Shata, who won a seat in the Knesset in 2013, pushed to pass a bill that said donors couldn’t dictate where their money went, allowing funds to be allocated in ways that meet the true needs of the community.

One of Tamano-Shata’s solutions is to have differential treatment in the budget, but integration in practice. For instance, instead of budgeting for Ethiopian youth centers, money would go toward providing Ethiopian children vouchers to attend community centers with the rest of the neighborhood children.

Masale believes there must be one authority in charge of all Ethiopian-Israeli matters, from policy regulation and distributing funds to publicity efforts that inform the public about the community’s history and culture in an effort to get rid of the stereotypes and ignorance that fuel discrimination.

On the one hand, things are better today than they once were. Two Ethiopian-Israeli female judges were recently appointed, the Ethiopian community is becoming more involved in decision-making processes, and there are many people, in and outside of government, who are working toward further improvements. This year, the prime minister signed a policy stating the Ethiopian National Project must spend its $130 million annual budget on programs that promote integration. But social media has also made the Ethiopian-Israeli community more aware of the injustices happening around the country as more cell phone footage, personal stories, and investigative journalism bring to light the harsh barrier of racism Ethiopian-Israelis face today.

“The flag of immigrants still waves in Israel,” Masale said. “People want immigrants in Israel, just not in their backyard.” Israel prides itself in being a beacon for Jews everywhere, and even has a Law of Return that promises citizenship to every Jew who wants it. But the true challenge of that promise isn’t in bringing Jews to Israel, but in what comes after.

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Omri Bezalel is an editorial assistant at World Policy Journal.

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