The Genius of Colored Americans in Literature; The Arts and Sciences Inherited From the Ancient Ethiopians
Read, Study, and Educate up to Opportunities—A High Racial Type Appears in Modern Times—A Cause for Pride and an Incentive to Action, Energy and Efficiency.
Men of learning, wisdom, and honest, without prejudice, take the standard of a race of men from his primitive type.
That type is sought for in the most excellent productions of the race, their achievements and their position among civilized nations that were the founders of our present civilization.
He who grovels in the worst human elements of any race, knows nothing about that race, and opens the door to the degeneracy of all the nations and races on earth, by advocating them as the evidences of degeneracy.
Since the world began there have been good and bad elements among the peoples that inhabited it, but the good elements alone have survived, the bad or the evil has gone down into ruin. Nations that sought to waylay and throttle progress for their own selfish ends, and immoral purposes have been forced out into the world’s Gehenna, and in the garbage heap there are still rummaging many of the split races of the earth, and many individuals bury themselves in its reek refusing to emerge into the clear sunlight.
It is, as it always has been, the great, the high hope and aim of men of intellect, and higher aspirations than the luxuries of life which kill the soul, to lift the evil in mankind out of the category of civilization, and develop mind and intellect as the only adjunct toward universal unity and peace.
To cure all the evil which afflict men of every race and people, is an impossibility so long as the earth exists for the use and benefit of mankind. Force has been tried, but even the death penalty does not stay crime and disorder. The Crucified One gave up his life and took upon himself all the sins of men, and pointed out the way for them to follow if they would be saved. But even this Majestic, this Divine Sacrifice has not stayed the evils afflicting man when left to his own devices, to his own ill-regulated freedom. We know the way, indeed, and whoso refuses to follow it, must be classed with the evils we suffer. Every man must lift himself out of the slough.
There is food for thought in the past, which hinges much upon the present and the future, and if it is taken in the proper spirit, it can not fail to develop the mind, the soul, and put men on the high road toward the accomplishment of the designs of God.
THE QUEEN OF SHEBA AND SOLOMON
It was related in another article, that the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon, but we shall give a further account of this great queen because it will lead to the reason why Ethiopia reached a high state of development.
Open the Bible at 1st Kings, 10, verses 6 to 10 and read:
“6. And she said to the king, it was a true report that I heard in mine own land of thy acts and thy wisdom.
“7. Howbeit I believed not the words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it: and, behold, the half has not been told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard.
“8. Happy are the 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 the king, to do judgment and justice.”
Here was an Ethiopian Queen who was clearly desirous of benefiting her great empire and uplifting her people, traveling in pursuit of the best way to do it, just as our modern men are now doing.
This, it should be remembered, occurred more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ, or to bring the years down to date, it was two thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight years ago—nearly thirty centuries.
THE ETHIOPIANS CONQUERED EGYPT
To diverge a few lines: Napoleon Bonaparte was a deep student, and when attempting the conquest of Egypt, he pointed his soldiers to the great Pyramids saying: “Soldiers of France, forty centuries are looking down upon you,” he uttered a truth of history, and established an Ethiopian empire a thousand years before Solomon. The reason is this: The Ethiopians conquered Egypt, or erected it into a province, and built the great Pyramids that still exist.
But to return to the Queen of Sheba.
She found a knowledge of God in her visit and carried it back to her people, because we find His worship beginning to make its appearance upon the monuments and inscriptions.
Now a singular circumstance is presented by the claim of Ethiopian kings and princes after the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon.
It was claimed by the princes of Axoum, in Ethiopia, which was evangelized by the Empress Helena, consort of the Roman Emperor Constantine, in the year 324 of the Christian era, that the Queen of Sheba bore a son to King Solomon, and that he was the founder of a dynasty, the annals of the kingdom giving a long list of the kings descended from him, and relating that they governed for centuries without interruption. Pieces of their money still in existence and the inscriptions on recently unearthed monuments furnishing evidence of this fact.
In a history of Alexander the Great, translated from the Ethiopian, it is related of another Queen of Sheba, who, in the year 332 before the Christian era, resisted that mighty conqueror with so much vigor, that he capitulated to her charms, as she was a most beautiful woman, and left her kingdom in peace. She laughingly reproached him for his weakness, so the story goes: “You, the mighty conqueror who have never been defeated by man, have been captured and defeated by a woman.”
BLACK QUEENS WHEN CHRIST WAS BORN
The reign of the Sheban dynasty was followed by that of the queens of Candace, who were ruling Ethiopia at the date of the birth of Christ, indeed, one of them is mentioned in the New Testament, Matthew 12:42, and her story is related in another chapter of this book.
Among the many evidences of high civilization in Ethiopia, are its literary productions. There are several hundred books in the various public libraries of Europe which show a remarkable condition of development.
In the way of history, there are the annals of ancient chronology by Georges Ibn-al Amid, which follows the genealogy of David from Adam, and a list of the kings of Israel and Judea, together with the principal events of their reigns. To this is added a chronology of the reigns of the Roman Emperors, and the Consuls.
In the chronological book, there is an entire chapter giving the history of the kings of Ethiopia, from Ibn-al Hakim, son of Solomon by the Queen of Sheba, down to recent times.
There are also volumes of poems of great beauty and perfect meter, stories of wars, genealogical lists, biographies, commentaries, moral maxims, philosophy, anecdotes, astrologies, homilies, hymns, etc. All of these are contemporaneous.
In proof of this remarkable condition, reference is made to the “Catalogue des manuscripts Ethiopiens (Gheez et Amharique) de la Bibliotheque nationale de France, a Paris,” a copy of which may be found in any of our great public libraries.
ETHIOPIAN WOMEN HELD IN HIGH ESTEEM
In refinement, the Ethiopians held women in a superior position in the social scale, which says Dr. Reich, the historian, “Shows a higher point of delicacy and refinement than either their Eastern or Western successors. Colossal in art, profound in philosophy and religion, and in possession of the knowledge of the arts and sciences, the Ethiopian race exhibits the astounding phenomenon of an elevated civilization at a period when the other nations of the world were almost unknown.”
Referring to this question of psychology in civilization exhibited by the Ethiopians, the same Dr. Reich, in his “History of Civilization,” says:
“People, as a rule cherish the idea that nations are like individuals, and that accordingly nations have their childhood, their youth, and their old age, and their death just as we are used to see in individuals. This entire idea is utterly false. There is no such parallel development. A nation is a mental thing only.”
Dr. Scholes, in his “Glimpses of the Ages,” citing Heeren’s “Manual of Ancient History,” relative to the Ethiopians, says:
“It may be gathered from the monuments and records that Upper Egypt (Ethiopia) was the first seat of civilization, which originating in the South, spread by the settlement of colonies toward the North (Egypt).
“These migrations are proved by the representations, both in sculpture and painting found in the yet remaining monuments throughout Egypt.” “Glimpses of Ages,” p. 191. Heeren, p. 57.
There were tribes among the Ethiopians which were of a low grade of civilization, just as in the most civilized countries of the present times, there are peoples of a very low grade, not only in civilization but in intelligence. But, there existed a highly cultured and civilized Ethiopian people, who dwelt in cities, erected temples and other edifices, and who had good government and humane laws. Moreover, their fame and progress in knowledge and their social arts spread in the earliest ages over a considerable part of the earth.
Upon the authority of Heeren, already referred to, and upon their own investigations, Dr. Glidden and Dr. Morton, who are quoted in Scholes’ “Glimpses of the Ages,” made an examination of the Egyptian skulls, and gave it as their opinion that the Egyptians and the Ethiopians never came from Asia, but were indigenous or aboriginal inhabitants of the African Nile country, and were all of the “Negroid type.”
ANCIENT EGYPTIANS WERE NEGROES
Featherstone in his “Social History of the Races of Mankind,” goes still further, and confidently asserts that the ancient Egyptians were of the Negro race.
“This,” he adds, substantially, “is borne out on all the Egyptian paintings, sculptures, and mummies; the hair found, as well as that possessed by their descendants, the Copts, is the curly, or woolly variety, and the lips and nose the same.
“The fact that the ancient Egyptians were Negroes three thousand six hundred years before the Christian era is substantiated, and that their population in Egypt at that period amounted to seven millions.”
Admitting all these things to be true, it may be asked: “Well, what of it? What good will that do the Colored Americans?”
It has to do with Colored Americans as much as an ancient highly civilized ancestry has to do with the modern Jews. They know that their race is not extinct; that they are an integral part of the great movement of all mankind toward a unification of mind and intelligence. This fact burned into their minds must operate as an incentive of the greatest propelling force to urge them onward toward the high destiny that awaits all mankind.
That they are working out the plans of the Almighty by so doing, puts them in the vanguard of civilization, with opportunities at hand to avail themselves of all the advantages attached to such a high purpose. There is something to work for—something worth working for, and when the Colored American takes this high view of his destiny, it will be too small a thing to notice, even should he be denied the privilege of sitting beside a white man.
THE JEW AND THE COLORED MAN
A curious racial transformation is going on in the United States outside the two divisions of man, the Jew and the Colored man, which means much more to the ethnologist and lover of mankind than is apparent on the surface. The various nations, such as the English, French, German, Irish, Scotch, Spaniard, etc., are rapidly losing their identity of race or descent, and becoming American with new facial traits, as well as mental attributes. All these nations or tribes, will lose their identity and be merged into another and different stock distinctly American, perhaps revert to the parent Aryan stock. Thus we shall witness, the four primitive divisions of mankind, the Aryan, rehabilitated; the Jew or Semitic, with renewed wisdom; the Ethiopian, or Hamitic, still a distinct race, and the Turanian, or Chinese, working together to accomplish a unity of nations, one in thought and high purpose. Everything is apparently working in that direction, and there is no single nation, or union of nations of diverse civilization that will be able to stay the movement.