Onwuchekwa Jemie
Having exhaustively demonstrated that the Pharaonic Egyptians were black, Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop argued that “the moral fruit of [Egyptian] civilization is to be counted among the assets of the Black world. Instead of presenting itself to history as an insolvent debtor, that Black world is the very initiator of the ‘western’ civilization flaunted before our eyes today.” —[Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, p. xiv]
This essay presents a sampling of culture items (concepts, techniques, tools, symbols, artefacts, etc.) which the Greeks and Hebrews learned, borrowed or plagiarized from Black Egypt (Kemet) and passed on to modern Europe. IV: Plagiarisms in the Bible of the Hebrews (contd.) C) Other plagiarisms: Quite a few other plagiarisms have been documented, but the Eurocentric documentors have studiously avoided calling the thefts by their true name. For example: “A comparison with . . . many passages in the Old Testament Scriptures . . . suggests the presence of Egyptian influence; . . . Among these Psalms, too, i.e. those which partake of a Wisdom character, there are also parallels; to a less extent, but also noticeably, in the book of Deuteronomy. . . . Other parallels occur, but these must suffice. Unfortunately, space forbids our dealing with the many points of contact between Egyptian love-poems and the Song of Songs.” 66 [66 W.O.E. Oesterley, “Egypt and Israel”, in S.R.K. Glanville, ed., The Legacy of Egypt, London: Oxford University Press, 1942, pp. 246-248.] These examples should suffice to vindicate the following statement by Breasted:
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“The ripe social and moral development of mankind in the Nile Valley, which is three thousand years older than that of the Hebrews, contributed essentially to the formation of the Hebrew literature which we call the Old Testament. Our moral heritage, therefore, derives from a wider human past enormously older than the Hebrews, and it has come to us rather through the Hebrews than from them.” 67 [67 James H. Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience, quoted in Ivan Van Sertima, ed., Egypt Revisited, pp. 275-276.]
What accounts for such an extensive borrowing? When the Hebrews were becoming civilized under Solomon and his successors, they looked especially to Egypt and Babylonia for instructions in the arts of life.68 [68 F. L. Griffith, “The Teachings of Amenophis”, Journal of Egyptian Archeology, XII (1926), pp. 191-231.]
Even so, why were the borrowings unacknowledged? Was it national vanity? Was it also racial vanity – an unwillingness by the neophyte Whites, who were just emerging from primitivism and barbarism, to admit their enormous debt to the civilized Blacks? These passages and their dates suffice to prove the charge of plagiarism against the authors of the Hebrew Old Testament. One can imagine the derision that would be aroused today were some blacks to compile an anthology, including much earlier works from the white world, — such as fragments of Shakespeare — and present it as their national literature inspired by God!
On the matter of inspiration by God, suffice it to say that “Contrary to unconscious assumptions of the popular mind, God had inspired other prophets and man had discovered enduring moral laws long before the beginnings of Hebrew Palestine.” 69[69 J.V.B. Danquah, “Ancient Egyptian Systems of Thought”, in Joseph Okpaku et. al., eds, The Arts and Civilization of Black and African Peoples, Vol. 2., Lagos: CBAAC, 1986, pp. 43 Now, if the Bible of the Hebrews and the Christians was inspired by God, by the one-and-only true God, then the parts cribbed from Kemetic works must also be deemed to have been originally inspired by the same God. Which makes nonsense of the Christian denunciation of Kemetic and African religion for the alleged sin of paganism, when they too had been inspired, on this evidence, by the God of the Christians.
What really was it about Kemetic religion that gave offense to the white-supremacist founders of Christianity? It was this: Kemetic religion was the parent of a white-supremacist Christianity which was politically determined to hide and even destroy all traces of its Black origins. In as much as a general knowledge of the Kemetic originals of the key elements of Christianity (e.g. the suffering, death, resurrection and ascension of Ausar; the Ise-Heru Black-madonna-and-child; the anointed corpse or Karast/Kristos/Christ; the Annunciation and other aspects of the Nativity of the Pharaoh as the Son of God) would undermine the Christian claim of the uniqueness of Jesus, such knowledge had to be suppressed.
This was what motivated the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria by Christian mobs, and later on, the forcible closing of the Kemetic Temples by the emperors of Christian Byzantium. Thus, the rise of Christianity was predicated on acts of intellectual theft and culturecide: stealing the vital elements of its far more popular rival throughout the Roman Empire — the Ausarean and Black Madonna cults of the religion of Black Egypt (Kemet) — and making a white version of it all (an ancient precedent for white musicians “covering” Black musical originals); and then forcibly destroying Kemetic religion and its guardian Temples, so as to hide the grand theft! Christianity’s original sin was cultural parenticide — killing off Kemetic religion, its own parent.
As we have been forcefully reminded, “Never let us forget that the Roman Emperors Theodosius and Justinian were responsible for the abolition of the Egyptian Mysteries, that is the culture system of the Black people, and also for the establishment of Christianity for its perpetual suppression.”70 [70 George G. M. James, Stolen Legacy, p. 160] V: Greek plagiarism in science and philosophy This occurred wholesale, and was done by practically all of the great Greek thinkers—from Thales and Pythagoras all the way down to Plato, Aristotle and Archimedes. For three centuries before Alexander conquered Kemet, Greeks made a habit of going to Kemet to study, and upon their return home, presenting as their own discoveries and inventions what they had been taught by the priests of Kemet.
After Kemet fell under Greek rule, Greeks settled in Alexandria and turned it into their headquarters for grand plagiarism. They took over control of the accumulated knowledge of Kemet, and studied and reproduced them, and passed them off as Greek works. Thus, the period from 600 BC to 200 AD, the alleged great age of Greek science and philosophy, was actually the Great Age of Greek Plagiarism.
Documentation of some of these plagiarisms has been made in the 20th century, most notably by George G. M James in Stolen Legacy, and by Cheikh Anta Diop.72 [72 See C. A. Diop, “Africa’s Contribution to World Civilization: The Exact Sciences”, in Ivan Van Sertima, ed., Great African Thinkers, pp.74-88, and C. A. Diop, Civilization or Barbarism, chaps 16 and 17.]
Mathematics: Euclidean geometry, “Pythagorean” theorem Mensuration: Formulae for the area of a sphere S = 4pR2; Volume of a cylinder of height h: V = pR2h The Papyrus of Moscow and the Rhind Papyrus “show us that the Egyptians, two thousand years before the Greeks, studied the mathematics of the pyramid and of the cone, and that they even used the different trigonometric lines, the tangent, the sine, the cosine, the cotangent, in order to calculate their slopes. This would not keep Archimedes from writing to the geometrician Dasitheus that it is ‘Eudoxus of Cnidus to whom we owe the measurement of the pyramid and of the cone.’ Furthermore, Eudoxus and Plato were former pupils of the Egyptian priests at Heliopolis, but as the documents prove, the Egyptians had already proceeded, two thousand years before the birth of these two, with the study that is attributed to them.”—Diop, Civilization or Barbarism, p. 237
“This definition of the ‘double remen’ by itself, and its mathematical implications, clearly show that Pythagoras was neither the inventor of irrational numbers (incommensurability of the diagonal and of the side of the square) nor of the theorem that bears his name: he took all these elements from Egypt where he had been, as reported by his biographers (cf. Jamblichus), a pupil of the priests for twenty-two years”—[Diop, Civilization or Barbarism, p.260]
It was because of such rampant plagiarism among the Greeks that Clement of Alexandria, a Greek and a Christian apologist of the 2nd century AD, said: “A one thousand page book will not be long enough to cite the names of my fellow countrymen who have used and abused the Egyptian science.” [Quoted in C. A. Diop, “Africa’s Contribution to World Civilization: The Exact Sciences”, in Ivan Van Sertima, ed., Great African Thinkers, p. 87, n. 13.]
