February 23, 2003

Black Athena, Afrocentrism, and the History of Science

These are the conclusions from Robert Palter's Black Athena, Afrocentrism, and the History of Science, in Black Athena Revisited (eds. Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers), pp. 255-256:


  1. The Egyptians never invented a mathematical astronomy in the sense that the Babylonians and Greeks did.
  2. Egyptian mathematics never approached the depth of understanding revealed in the most advanced Babylonian mathematics, which was in turn far surpassed by the Greeks, so that it is difficult to see how the peak Egyptian achievements - even generously extrapolated to hypothetical results lost to us - could ever have led to Greek mathematics with its clear conception of rigorous demonstration and its characteristic methods of formulating and solving problems.
  3. Although there seems little doubt that the Greek doctors enlarged their pharmacopoeia with Egyptian drugs, other types of influence of Egyptian medicine on Greek medicine are more difficult to document; and certain radical differences between the two medical traditions are very striking.

In other words, the Afrocentric notions of what might have been does not find any suppor in what actually was.

Posted by Dienekes at February 23, 2003 09:55 PM | PermaLink
Comments

I notice that the three Egyptian mummies whose faces were forensically reconstructed come out black Africa, and these include: King Tut, Nefertiti and the high prist Natsef-Amun!Of course these is no agreement on the authenticity of Nefertiti's mummy. However, even assuming that the mummy was not her's, it still seems to be of royal origins in the Kemetic society. And yet in all your arguments against the biological Africanity of the Kemetic civilisation you never bother to include these latest scientific outcomes, why?

Posted by: TLHABANE MOTAUNG at October 22, 2003 12:47 AM

Facial reconstruction is a nice tool to recreate faces of the past, but it has its limitations:

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With that said, Egyptian reconstructions are not Negroid, at most one might argue that they have a few negroid traits.

The Egyptians left us many depictions of themselves in fairly realistic art. These present a range of types which are mostly Caucasoid in race.

As for Nefertiti, we don't have to rely on unidentified mummies to see how she looked, her bust is there for anyone to see that she was a Caucasoid of the Mediterranean type.

Posted by: Dienekes at October 22, 2003 10:57 AM

It seems quite interesting that anyone could believe that Egyptians were anything other than light skinned negros. According to the first hand accounts of Herodotus and Diodorus they were "blackskinned" and had "wooly hair. If that does not describe a black person than I don't know what does. There is no need to try to take Egypt out of Africa when the geography speaks for itself. Anyone who has any hue to their skinned has always been associated with being Negroid, so it should not change just because Egyptians were an intellegent people.

Posted by: Chris at November 12, 2003 11:55 AM