Black History Series
World History Revisited
The American approach to history starts with the present and travels back in time. In the words of Phillip Curtin:
Instead of trying to explain the modern world in terms of its past, or even tracing the rise of human civilization, the older history began with the United States. It then searched for the roots of American civilization. It was, in effect, "history taught backward"—back to the colonial period on this continent, then back to Europe, and still farther back to the Western Middle Ages, Rome, Greece, and the ancient civilizations of the Near East.
If history starts instead with the earliest roots of man and human culture as disclosed by archaeologists, a different story is told, and it begins on the continent of Africa.
Early Hominids
Knowledge of human ancestry has been enriched by the rapidly accumulating archaeological discoveries at the Olduvai Gorge. Midway between Lake Victoria and the legendary Mount Kilimanjaro, some 150 miles southwest of Nairobi, at the edge of the Serengeti, cuts a gorge into the west wall of the great African Rift Valley. This gorge, the Olduvai, which lies in an arid canyon, has been called the "Grand Canyon of human evolution" because of the fresh insight it has yielded into our knowledge of prehuman life and of Australopithecines. Australopithecine is an upright ape-man, a primitive type of hominid, who is thought to have evolved toward bipedalism 8-5 million years ago. His fossil remains have been found in Ethiopia, at Lake Turkana in Kenya, at the Olduvai in Tanzania, and in Southern Africa. Two lower jaw fragments were found in Java at Sangiran, indicating that hominids similar to Australopithecine may have existed in Southeast Asia during the same epoch as those in Africa.
Two species of Australopithecus are recognized: Australopithecus africanus and Australopithecus robustus. Neither of these hominid branches endured, but they did flourish for a time in equatorial Africa. The genus was confirmed in 1924 by Professor Raymond A. Dart of the University of Witwatersrand who found a nearly perfect juvenile primate skull in quarries near Taung, Rhodesia. Other africanus fossils were found at diverse locations in Southern Africa.
Professor Dart found evidence that Australopithecus africanus had a culture. Africanus had a taste for meat, an important catalyst in hominid evolution because this predilection probably led to his use of tools as extensions of the arm. He slayed wild game and he used the thighbone of an antelope as a bludgeon. This early use of tools and weapons nudged his ancestors toward methodical cultural adaptation.
Evidence of Australopithecus robustus, the second species, was found in Southern Africa at Sterkfontein by Broom. Robustus is bigger, bulkier, more muscular, and he has larger molar teeth than africanus. His size accounts for the name robustus.
Some 2.5 to 3 million years ago, following closely upon the heels of the australopithecines, came the first hominids that scientist agree were men, the group known as Homo erectus, or very upright men. The predecessors of Homo erectus, the australopithecines, ate as they roamed, consuming what they found as they found it. Homo erectus established base camps from which they dispersed to hunt small game and to search for food. They may have used containers, perhaps interwoven leaves, in which they transported nuts, fruits, or scavenged meat they found on expeditions undertaken specifically to find food. They became systematic hunters and gatherers. Then, as Richard Leakey points out, they did something that no other primate line has ever done to any important degree: they SHARED food. “The sharing of food by Homo erectus had deep significance in the social and cultural makeup of early man and is an essential feature of what can be seen as humanness. Without this food-sharing economy and social organization, man may not have evolved as he did nor been able to stray so far out of Africa and venture into Eurasia one half million years ago.”1
Homo erectus, though briefly contemporary with Australopithecus, survived Australopithecus and continued to evolve until Homo sapiens displaced him. It is fairly certain that Homo erectus was a predator because he had the teeth of a meat-eating hominid. Homo erectus also learned to use stones as tools and weapons, thereby ushering in the cultural period known as the Old Stone Age or Paleolithic Age. The earliest of the Lithic or Stone Industries was in the Oldowan tradition, which consisted of the creation of simple chopping tools. Examples of basic Oldowan tools that date from about 2.5 million years ago have been found in the OMO Valley in Ethiopia. Tools about 1.8 million years old found have been found at sites near Lake Rudolf in Kenya and in the Olduvai of Tanzania.
Oldowan Stone Tradition The earliest of the stone industries was in the Oldowan tradition that consisted of simple chopping tools such as the one shown here. Oldowan tools that date from 2.5 million years before present have been found in Ethiopia.
The improved Acheulean stone culture, in which simple chopping tools were replaced by biface tools, came into being in East Africa some 1.5 million years ago. The Acheulean tradition spread eventually into Europe and beyond but in many places, including in Africa, these advanced tools coexisted along with those of the Oldowan tradition throughout the Mesolithic period or Middle Stone Age up until the Neolithic period about 10,000 years ago. Acheulean artifacts dating from 700,000 years ago at 'Ubeidiya in Israel constitute the oldest known occurrences of bifaces outside of Africa.
From the neck down, the skeleton of Homo erectus is nearly identical to that of modern man except that Homo erectus had a somewhat primitive brain. The evolution of man's postcranial skeleton, the skeleton below the skull, was therefore completed 500,000 years ago; evolutionary changes since then have been mainly in the brain and skull.
The Heidelberg jaw found in 1907 in first interglacial sands is the first evidence of Homo erectus in Europe. The chinless mandible has modern teeth, but is a singular find for that time and place.
Acheulean Stone Tradition: The improved Acheulean stone culture came into being in East Africa where chopping tools were replaced by biface tools such as the one shown here. Tools of this type were used 1.5 million years ago.
Early Humans
One half million years ago, man, the animal, was on his way to becoming man, the human being, Homo sapiens, by way of the evolutionary process called speciation. DNA chains are sufficiently complex and varied that it is improbable that two individuals other than biological twins will ever have identical biological makeup. Descendants in a biological line inherit genetic characteristics from dissimilar parents and also acquire random genetic variability that distinguishes them from siblings. Each individual in this way differs somehow from all others before and after. If a group becomes physically isolated from its biological relatives, successive generations in both parent and sibling groups acquire and perpetuate DNA patterns characteristic of themselves, making each group increasingly unique. When differences become so great that descendants of the sibling group and descendants of the parent group cannot successfully interbreed, a new species has formed. Speciation thus occurs when two or more isolated groups, in adapting to their environments, go through sufficient genetic modifications that their genetic molecules are incapable of interacting on one another. A species, in other words, consists of a population whose members can breed among themselves and are incapable of breeding with members of other species.
About 500,000 years ago, during the middle of the second glaciation, man became sufficiently differentiated from other animals that he is seen as being a new form of life. Key features in this evolution were the larger brain and the sophisticated nervous system, advances that allowed man to represent his experiences symbolically. He acquired the ability to think and speak and communicate ideas—he became a human being: Homo sapiens. The ability to speak is of such significance to human evolution that it can be rightly called the first revolution in intellectual inquiry. By communicating ideas, man transfers knowledge from person to person with the outcome that every link in the cultural chain is potentially as strong intellectually as the strongest link.
As the glaciers in Europe retreated, man migrated out of Africa into Asia and Europe. The evidence is seen in interglacial deposits discovered in Steinheim, Swanscombe, and Fontechevade. The Steinheim fossil, Homo sapiens steinheimensis, was discovered in southwestern Germany near Stuttgart in second interglacial gravels. No other artifacts were found there. The Swanscombe fossil was found in a second interglacial terrace of the Thames River. Two skulls found at Fontechevade in southeastern France may be third interglacial. These large brained Homo sapiens fossils demonstrate that man had reached his modern level of evolution and had spread beyond Africa by the second glaciation. Homo erectus still roamed the earth, but the phenotype of modern man was becoming more widespread.
When the glaciers advanced southward in Eurasia, inhabitants of that region had regularly retreated to warmer climes, to Asia Minor or even back to Africa. During the fourth glacial, groups of Homo sapiens remained in the frigid wilderness of Europe from about 200,000 to 25,000 years before present and formed the line that would become the Neandertal subspecies, Homo sapiens neandertalensis. The first Neandertal skull was found on Gibraltar in 1848. The fossil for which the Neandertal is named was found in a cave in the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf, Germany in 1856. Neandertal men, women, and children have been found as far south as France, Spain, and North Africa, and as far east as Palestine. Neandertalensis in Europe, however, was a subspecies doomed to extinction; it does not represent a stage through which other forms of Homo sapiens have passed. While Homo sapiens was evolving toward neandertalensis in Europe, it was evolving toward Homo sapiens sapiens, modern man, in Africa and Asia.
Stone tools and rock drawings from the late Paleolithic period, 25,000 BC, show that the Nile Valley downstream from the Olduvai Gorge was inhabited by nomadic bands that lived close to the banks of the river. They survived by hunting giraffe, antelope, elephant and gazelle, and by fishing in the well-stocked Nile. Around 20,000 BC, Homo sapiens sapiens from Eastern Asia crossed the Bering Land Bridge between Russia and Alaska traveling along the Mackenzie River Valley to the Americas. A Homo sapiens sapiens skull about 18,000 years old was discovered in 1954 in Midland, Texas; there is evidence of a chopper-scraper Paleolithic complex of fourth glacial antiquity throughout the American West. By 10,000 years ago, man had spread into South America to the southern tip of the continent. Man could claim the world as his home.
Civilization and Warfare
Looking back 10,000 years one finds Homo sapiens sapiens occupied with the simple material technology of hunters and gatherers—societies of illiterate people without metals, domesticated plants, pottery, writing, permanent house structures, or public buildings. Such societies are described by the rubric savage. The term savage, as used in anthropology, carries none of the popular connotation of violent, ruthless, or aggressive behavior; it refers merely to the simplicity of social development.
In the next anthropological stage, in several parts of the world, one finds domesticated plants and animals, permanent housing, weaving, pottery, and settlement patterns that indicate an increase in the size of populations: The Agricultural Revolution is underway. Still there is no writing, no cities, and no monumental ceremonial centers. Such people are classed as barbarians. It was upon this change in way of life from hunting and gathering to farming that human history was first characterized by the kind of endemic conflict and strife in which humans slaughter humans in organized massacres. "The hunter-gatherer is part of the natural order," Leakey and Lewin speculate; "a farmer necessarily distorts that order. But more important, sedentary farming communities have the opportunity to accumulate possessions, and having done so they must protect them." This, Leakey and Lewin believe, is the key to the rise of human conflict and warfare.2 Another theory saw increasing population density as the problem. "Arable land would 'fill up', and conflict would then develop among the settlers and their neighbors. One group would be subdued, forming the lower class for the conquerors, who would assume the role of the elite."3
It was during the next anthropological level, called civilization, that human conflict and warfare were perpetuated as respectable, indeed heroic, methods of social interaction. Civilizations are societies whose culture includes the presence of cities, agriculture, craft specialties, including metallurgy, ceremonial or monumental structures, and writing. In anthropology, the word "civilization" refers only to a degree of complexity of culture. Civilized cultures may or may not be more "moral" than savage or barbarian cultures.
Advances toward civilized life were made in widely separated regions, most noticeably along the Nile River in Africa, the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Western Asia, the Indus River in India, and the Yellow River in China. The presence of arable land and a supply of water made these areas habitable but there were areas elsewhere in the world in which there was no advance toward complex society and in which food and water were more abundant than along these narrow strips of fertility. What these riverine locations have in common is that parched lands surround them. The scarcity of arable land and the abundance of desert may have forced riverine societies to band together to develop large-scale irrigation projects and this may have been the impetus that led to the creation of cities and a complex social order. In areas of abundance, where it was easy to subsist under the hunter-gatherer economy, there was no compelling reason to seek another means of subsistence. So the first civilized societies developed along the Indus, Nile, Yellow, Tigris, and Euphrates rivers and it is probably not coincidental that these were the centers of complex society around 4000 BC.
The Nile Valley: Unlike most rivers, the Nile flows from south to north, extending from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea. Early signs of modern man have been found in the region of the Olduvai near the source of the Nile in central Africa. Early signs of advanced culture have been found near Khartoum downstream from the Olduvai. The ancient civilizations of Nubia and Egypt originated further downstream.
As long ago as 10,000 BC, cemeteries along the Southern Nile Valley contain bodies pierced by stone arrow points, which suggests intercommunity warfare and complex interactions.4 Ceramics are first seen in the Khartoum and Shendi regions of the Nile Valley near the confluence of the Blue Nile and the White Nile toward 6000 BC in a culture known as the Khartoum Mesolithic.5
The first villages along the Indus River of India were in the foothills of the Afghan-Iranian Plateau on the western margins of that river's tributaries. The earliest and best studied of these villages is Mehrgarh, a collection of small, rectangular, multiroom houses on the Kachi Plain along the Bolan River; it was established before 6000 BC and survived until about 2000 BC. By 3500 BC, small towns had emerged along the Indus, occasionally fortified with stone walls, such as at Kot Diji, or mudbrick, such as at Rachman Dheri. Rachman Dheri, a city of several thousand population, was enclosed by massive defensive walls and was inhabited for a thousand years.
The Yang-shao and Lung-shan cultures were established in China by 5000 BC but the Xia culture in Henan province was the only Late Neolithic culture that spread into the Yellow River floodplain. Its heyday was from 2000 BC to 1500 BC; archaeologists have uncovered bronze tools and artifacts of that period in Henan province as well as the remnants of large buildings on platformed foundations, some partially walled in, suggesting that they were public buildings, which is consistent with the existence of a state. Beyond the Yellow River plain, there were cultures along the eastern coast, in the Yangtze Valley and the Han River Valley to the south, and in the Sichuan Basin to the west.
A Neolithic settlement, Catal Huyuk, dating to 7500 BC has been found in Turkey, but the southern Tigris-Euphrates valley in Asia Minor, the land of Sumer, was virtually devoid of human occupants until about 5000 BC when settlers moved into the swamps at the head of the Persian Gulf and gradually spread northward. One of the earliest agricultural settlements in the region was Eridu, located in the extreme south; it dates from 3500 BC and is one of the best studied sites in the region. In the absence of natural timber strands, metal deposits, or even outcrops of rocks, the people of the southern Tigris-Euphrates Valley relied heavily on mud for their houses, pots, and tools, not having benefit of the lithic culture that existed in many regions of evolving civilization.
The best known of all ancient civilizations sprang up in the lower Nile Valley, the region in northeast Africa known today as Egypt. Most histories of Egypt date Egyptian civilization from 3100 BC when the delta region of the Nile was annexed by a southern kingdom to form the kingdom of "The Two Lands." This is the culture renowned for its awe-inspiring pyramids and funerary structures.
Around 2500 BC the City of Ur became the capital of Sumer. For several generations, factions in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley fought one another over land and water rights. Many short-lived empires in the region came into being as one faction conquered the other.
The tragic defect in the development of Sumerian civilization was the failure to live in peace—to resolve the bitter disputes between the city-states. For much of the third millennium, the plain between the rivers was ravaged by warfare. People who ought to have been united by a common language and culture instead hacked at one another with axes and maces, ran one another through with lances, pierced one another with daggers and arrows.6
This strife continued until Sargon the Great (b. 2335 BC) conquered all of the Sumerian city-states bringing them under a united empire.
Around 2400 BC in India, several Indus cultures merged into the Mature Indus civilization known as the Harappa culture. What is unique about the Harappa culture is that archaeologists have found no great funerary structures such as are seen in the Nile Valley of Africa and none of the monumental art or other trappings associated with royalty. Further, there is little evidence of a strong military influence such as is found in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and along the Nile. "The 'fortifications' at Harappa, Mohenjodaro, Kalibangan, and some other sites seem to have been intended to define social and functional spaces rather than to protect citizens from external enemies. The gateways at Harappa show no sign of planning for military defense."7 There are no particularly large houses that would be associated with a wealthy class.
The Roots of Religion
Pharaoh means "great house." The first pharaohs of Egypt laid claim to mystical powers in an attempt to establish spiritual and economic supremacy over other influential houses in the land. In doing so, they used a popular legend that accepted Horus, the son of Osiris, as the god of nature whose power was manifest in the ebb and flood of the Nile. Osiris, as the legend goes, aided by his wife and sister, Isis, had once ruled Egypt before he was brought down by his jealous brother Seth, who murdered and dismembered Osiris and scattered his body parts over the land. Isis went about faithfully collecting the pieces and patched them back together. The resurrected Osiris then retired from his earthly responsibilities to become lord of the afterworld. Horus and his uncle, Seth, struggled for dominion over Egypt and they ultimately met in epic combat. Horus lost an eye but succeeded in castrating Seth. In a subsequent hearing, the earth god, Geb, declared Horus the victor and pronounced him King of Egypt.
From this outcome the Egyptian pharaohs proposed that it was the intent of the gods that there be a single ruler over Egypt and that the pharaoh was the incarnation of Egypt's greatest gods. While the legend of Osiris provided the pharaohs a religious basis for seizing power it also helped fuel a royal obsession with death and mortuary rituals. "A great imperative was defined by the reconstruction of the dismembered Osiris. The body of the god-king had to be preserved intact in order for him to attain immortality."8 It was this compulsion to preserve the human shell, a compulsion that survives today in the practice of embalming the dead, that inspired the pharaohs of the First dynasty to build the tombs at Abydos in Upper Egypt, substantial structures known as mastabas, made of sun-baked mud bricks, having a flat roof and sloping sides, and meant to endure forever. Compartments inside were stocked with food, furniture, tools, and weapons to sustain the dead king in the hereafter. Beneath the structure was an underground chamber hewn from rock and lined with brick in which the pharaoh's body would rest. The mastabas at Abydos were surrounded by pits in which the king's concubines, court attendants, and pets were buried to accompany the king into the afterworld. "As many as 580 members of the court of King Djer, who ruled Egypt around 2900 BC, were put to death so that they might carry on in his service."9
The Step Pyramid of Djoser: The famous Step Pyramid designed by Imhotep was commissioned by the pharaoh Djoser around 2650 BC. The earliest stone structure in existence, it was 204 feet high and measured 413 feet by 344 feet at its base.
By the reign of the Third Dynasty's King Djoser, the pharaoh had assumed the status of a god-king whose power was absolute. The royal burial place was then transformed to show his exalted status. Around 2650 BC Djoser commissioned the construction of the world's first great stone structure at Saqqara, the famous Step Pyramid designed by Imhotep that rose 204 feet and measured 413 feet by 344 feet at its base—larger than two football fields side-by-side.
The Pyramids of Giza: The Great Pyramid commissioned during Khufu's reign is the most massive stone structure ever built.
The sheer magnitude of the complex at Giza has perplexed and astounded visitors throughout history. The Great Pyramid built during Khufu's reign (2590-67 BC) remains today the most massive edifice ever constructed by man and was the tallest stone structure on earth until the Washington Monument was erected in the nineteenth century. Khufu's nephew Khafre built the second great Pyramid as well as the Great Sphinx.
Egypt and Nubia
The presence of a blank roll of papyrus in the tomb of Hemka of Saqqara early in the first dynasty (2950 BC to 2770 BC) suggests that writing along the Nile was in widespread use at that time and perhaps much earlier. Clay tablets displaying cuneiform writing that date to 2500 BC have been found in Susa, a village east of Southern Babylon. Writing brought about a second revolution in human intellectual inquiry because it allowed knowledge to be accumulated and advanced beyond the capacity of individual memory. New generations of students, having access to all existing knowledge, elaborate upon and extend it.
The Egyptians are often credited with early achievements in astronomy and mathematics, both of which were necessary in predicting the flood of the Nile and in reestablishing land boundaries when the river receded. Such was the premise of Gay Robbins and Charles Shute in their book The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus: an ancient Egyptian text:
"Proclus in his Commentary on Euclid, following Herodotus, wrote that geometry had an Egyptian origin arising out of the necessity of resurveying the land after each inundation. Aristotle (Metaphysics I,i,16), on the other hand attributed the birth of mathematics in Egypt to the existence of a priestly leisured class."10
The early Egyptians had an maritime fleet capable of sea voyages. In 1991, archaeologists discovered 12 ships in an ancient burial ground at Abydos 280 miles south of Cairo. Dated at about 3000 BC they are the earliest boats thus far found on earth. In 1954 a 4,600 year-old, 132-foot gondola-shaped barge was found near the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza. This 35-ton vessel, which dates to 2600 BC, had ten oars used for rowing and two attached to the stern used as rudders.
Khufu's Barge: This barge found near the Great Pyramid of Khufu dates to 2600 BC; it weighs 35 tons and is 132 feet long.
In the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, Hammurabi began his reign as king of Babylon in 1792 BC. The Indus civilization began its decline at about this time and the Shang dynasty took roots in the Hwang Ho Valley in China. In 1674 BC, a time when Nubian culture was peaking under the banner of the Kingdom of Kush, the Egyptians were brought into disarray by the Hyksos takeover of the Delta region. The Hyksos were foreigners from Palestine and surrounding areas who immigrated into Egypt and gradually seized control. Taking advantage of the confusion in the delta, the Nubian Kushites extended their control northward, capturing the fortresses at the Second Cataract and occupying strategic sites as far north as Aswan. Pushed from the north by the Hyksos and pushed from the south by the Kushites, the center of Egyptian power, such as it was, shifted to the region surrounding Thebes. Kushite control of the southern trade routes was stronger than ever and the kingdom was able to trade with Egypt on unusually favorable terms.
Abraham, founder of Judaism and patriarch of the Muslim and Christian religions, is said to have been born around 1675 BC, a thousand years after the priests and pharaohs of Egypt had begun to design their system of religion and spirituality. Shortly thereafter, some seventy children of Israel came with Jacob into Egypt and became the kernel of a growing Hebrew presence along the Nile.
The Rhind papyrus, the earliest surviving mathematical text, dates to about 1650 BC. The city of Mycenae arose in Greece around 1600 BC, the time that the Ebers papyrus, which describes medical procedures in Egypt, originated.
It was around 1570 BC that the New Kingdom pharaohs began to build the Temple complexes at Karnak and Luxor. The Sun Temple at Karnak contains the largest colonnaded hall ever constructed comprising 136 columns in 16 rows. The English astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer discovered that the colonnaded hall was designed so that it funnels the rays of the sun between the two rows of columns as a telescope does and that the temple was so perfectly aligned to the summer solstice that a beam of light coming into the sanctuary would remain there a few minutes and pass away. The light begins with a crescendo and ends with a diminuendo peaking at the precise solstice. This phenomenon would have allowed the priests of the temple to determine the length of the solar year to within one minute, an arithmetic precision of four decimal places (365.2422 days).
There is trace evidence that southern Italy, the territory that would become Rome, was inhabited around 1500 BC, but archaeological evidence for continuity of settlement in Rome dates only to the 8th century BC. The Minoan civilization on Crete was overrun in 1450 BC by invaders from the Greek mainland and the Mycenaeans began to dominate the Aegean. The architectural form of the arch is seen in the Temple of Abydos along the Nile, built around 1300 BC.
Branches of Mankind: The Egyptians depicted four branches of mankind in their art: Egyptians, Asians, Nubians, and Libyans. Each branch is pictured with similar features except for the depth of tone in the skin.
There was no concept of racial supremacy, or indeed race in 1279 BC when the Branches of Mankind were depicted in the tomb of King Seti I (1291-1279 BC).11 The Egyptians depicted the Libyans as fair-skinned Caucasian. The Asians were of a beige hue. The Egyptians themselves were shown in a dark-brown pigment, and the Nubians were shown as black. Except for variations in skin tone and stylistic differences in attire, each branch of mankind had the appearance of the Egyptians themselves.
There is evidence in this period of an African presence in the Americas; colossal stone heads with Negroid features were being sculpted by the mother culture of Mesoamerica, the Olmecs, off the southeastern coast of Mexico. Evidence of the Olmec presence in southern Mexico goes as far back as 1200 BC. The first of the colossal heads, all of which archaeologists suspect are portraits of Olmec rulers,12 was discovered in 1862 near the village of Tres Zapotes, Mexico. Archaeologists report further that the Olmec culture was mature from its inception, as if it had emerged in the Yucatan fully developed.13
Colossal Olmec Head: This is one of the colossal heads found in Mexico, believed to be a ruler of the Olmec culture.
As the Olmecs settled in Mesoamerica, Moses was leading the Israelites from Egypt toward Canaan. The original seventy Hebrews had increased to hundreds of thousands and their social standing had reverted to that of slaves.
Note: Moses, the Jewish and Christian lawgiver (the first five books of the Old Testament of the Bible are the Books of Moses) spent his formative years in Egypt and was educated there. Acts 7:22 states, "Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians." The doctrines of Moses, especially the long-standing Hebrew belief in the coming of a Messiah, was probably influenced by the Hebrews having been enslaved in Egypt, according to the Book of Exodus, for some 430 years. Those who study Christian, Jewish, and Islamic monotheistic law must look to Egypt for the roots of that law.
NOTES:
1 Leakey, Richard E., and Lewin, Roger, Origins, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1977, 117.
2 ibid., p10-11.
3 Burenhult, Goran, Old World Civilizations, Harper, San Francisco, 1994, P20.
4 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia version 1pb, “Africa”, 1987
5 Taylor, op cit., P8.
6 Time-Life Books, The Age of God-Kings: Timeframe 3000-1500 BC, 1987, P31.
7 Burenhult, op cit., P69.
8 Time-Life Books, op cit., P59.
9 ibid.
10 Robbins, Gay and Shute, Charles, The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus: an ancient Egyptian Text, quoted in Browder, op cit., P128,129.
11 The four branches of mankind are shown in the tomb of King Sety I, Dynasty 19 (1291-1279 BC), Valley of Kings, Luxor, Hall E, left side, Book of Gates, fourth Division.
12 Coe, Snow, and Benson, Ancient America, Stonehenge, Alexandria, VA, 1987. p. 100.
13 Davies, Nigel, The Ancient Kingdoms of Mexico, Penguin Books, New York, NY, 1982, p. 55.