In the four earlier texts of this series, I described the bilateral needs that Egypt and China have to urgently address, therefore entering in an advantageous, multileveled and grand alliance, which will not only consolidate Egypt’s national security and boost China’s expansion in Africa, but also help drastically transform, pacify and unify the Black Continent’s northeastern corner, notably Sudan and Libya. All previous parts (titles, contents and links to the publications) are to be found at the end of the present article.
In the present, last article of the series, I will focus on the final targets that the Egyptian-Chinese alliance should set in view of Africa’s complete decolonization, de-Westernization, and rehabilitation. These issues are relevant to educational, cultural and political-military affairs; to eliminate the curse that fell on the Black Continent, Africans should
a) remove English and French as foreign languages,
b) interrupt the educational, academic and scientific links that almost all the African countries have been forced (through means of colonial interference) to maintain with England, France, Belgium, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the US,
c) terminate the economic subordination of almost all the major African private companies, corporations and state institutions or organizations to the above mentioned countries and to the international schemes that the Western countries have established (IMF, World Bank), and
d) minimize if not obliterate the presence of Western diplomats, military or tourists on Africa.
And China must help the Black Continent do exactly this. Africa was never part of the Western World, and no African needs to be part of this corrupt and ailing part of the Mankind.
Contents
Introduction
I. Chinese as the First Foreign Language in Egypt
II. Systematic Dissociation and Separation from Western Europe and North America
III. The Egypt – Sudan – Libya Confederation
IV. How the Chinese-Egyptian Alliance will reshape Africa into Five Mega-States
Introduction
For China to achieve an irrevocable breakthrough in Africa, it is essential that the Chinese statesmen, diplomats, administrators, military advisers, academics and businessmen envision their presence and activities on the African soil in a long term perspective.
Any short term perspective vision of China’s presence in Africa will fail exactly as it happened with the USSR. For some time, several African countries became the allies of Soviet Union; later, in different moments and for variant reasons, they broke their relations with the USSR or Russia and started unfortunately being again dependent on their former colonial masters, namely France and England, and/or America, which has ceaselessly tried to substitute itself for the traditional colonial powers. I presented this topic in brief, in an attempt to identify the reasons; my article was first published in 2008 and then republished recently here:
The article was translated into Russian by the Russian News Agency INOSMI, and it was widely read, quoted, discussed, mentioned in the bibliography of Ph.D. dissertations, and republished;
In that article, I explained why other superpowers or great powers will always fail when expanding influence on earlier colonized lands. The reason is simple; Western colonization involved the establishment of an enormous infrastructure at the mental, educational, academic, scientific, intellectual, religious, spiritual, socio-behavioral and cultural levels. As this extensive infrastructure has been dictatorially imposed, intensively propagated, incessantly reasserted, highly documented and greatly deep, it generates a new ‘world’ for the misfortunate, colonized individual, clan, tribe and/or nation. This is apparently an alien, undeserved and execrable ‘world’ -or a prison if you prefer- and consequently it does not / cannot subside with a simple regime change, military coup or superficial economic infiltration. Even more so, since it also appears to be advantageously rewarding with the colonial slave’s promotion, namely the perspective of being a rubbish collector or a sexual tool in the colonial metropolis!
The complete failure of the USSR in Africa: Western rationalism and materialism in Africa help only perpetuate the Anglo-Saxon and French colonialism.
The colonized nations were thus turned to altered beings, automatons or subaltern populations; they were made to think, reflect and act according to patterns invented by the colonial powers as per their own interests. Africa’s colonized nations were not properly westernized; their colonial masters did not want them to be like them. They wanted them to become functional tools of the Western supremacy, and this is what most of the Africans have become without even understanding it and irrespective of religion, ethnic background, and origin. Certainly, several anti-colonial intellectual forces were formed and socio-political reactions expressed in Africa; all the same, they mostly formulated their rejection of the colonial powers in colonial languages and terms. As it can be easily understood, this situation has highly jeopardized their chances to bring forth tangible results.
Consequently, one could safely conclude that only a long term vision of the Chinese-African partnership can be possibly beneficial to both, Chinese and Africans. Egypt’s position, background, identity and colonial experience are extremely helpful in this regard. That’s why Kemet (or Masr) is by definition China’s gateway to Africa.
I. Chinese as the First Foreign Language in Egypt
Inaugurated before 20 years (in 2004), during the early period of the first tenure of President Hu Jintao, the Confucius Institutes are non-profit educational institutions affiliated with the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China; more specifically, they are operated by Hanban (namely the Office of Chinese Language Council International, which became known as Center for Language Education and Cooperation in 2020). They are established jointly in a great number of countries and they always operate in cooperation with local partners. As of 2019, there were more than 500 Confucius Institutes all over the world. The stated aims are the promotion of Chinese language and culture, the support of local Chinese teaching, and the facilitation of bilateral cultural exchanges.
Basically, there are two Confucius Institutes in Egypt; the first is associated with Cairo University and the second with Suez Canal University. More recently, in 2015, an agreement was signed between Pharos University in Alexandria and Confucius Institute – Cairo University, thus creating the first Confucius unit to teach Chinese in Alexandria. As it happens in numerous other cases, professors from the largest Chinese universities teach in the Alexandria-based Confucius unit. Background:
Quite interestingly, NATO StratCom (Strategic Communication Center of Excellence) considered it necessary to meticulously spy on Confucius Institutes and to publish the following document, thus demonstrating their deep and awful fears that the days of the Western hegemony are numbered. https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/confucius_institutes.pdf
Although the aforementioned beginning was quite successful and well-done, by now it is not anymore sufficient. Focusing on the bright future of the Chinese-Egyptian cooperation, the administration of Confucius Institutes should set up a committee to study the ways needed to intensify the process of Chinese language penetration and to suggest a plan as to how Chinese will replace English as first foreign language in Egypt – in a mid-term perspective.
China has to deploy all the necessary resources in order to systematically, resolutely and comprehensively terminate the 2-century long, colonial period of predominance of French and English languages at all costs. In this great endeavor, Beijing should bring its influential allies into the game; Russia, India, Brazil, Iran and Turkey must also develop their Africa-de-Westernization policies, opening cultural institutes, establishing partnerships, promoting their languages, and founding bilingual universities. Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Russian, Portuguese, Farsi and Turkish are far more useful for Africans than English and French.
One thing must be made clearly understood to all Africans: the ‘easiness’ of the ‘already known’ (namely English and French) is the curse that plunged Africa into darkness, slavery, corruption and evilness, while also enabling the colonial gangsters to develop plans providing for Africa’s depopulation. It is as simple as that:
– Learn English and French, so that the Western colonial gangsters kill you all and repopulate the Black Continent with White supremacists!
Chinese language penetration in Egypt will then serve as a model and as a success story to implement in other African countries; while developing stronger bilateral relations with every state in the Black Continent, Beijing should dedicate special interest to help increase sound bilateral relationships among all African lands and nations. There are many speaking about ‘peace in Africa’, but there will never be peace in the Black Continent, as long as between an Sudanese and a Somali stands English as a means of communication, while a Malian and an Algerian converse in French.
When Nigerians and Egyptians communicate in English or Algerians and Malagasy speak to one another in French, problems appear always. In my proposals for the establishment of the first Afrocentric University in Africa, I made it clear that the proper end of the colonial period will never take place before 20 major African languages are regularly taught, each in a separate department of university, in at least all the major states of the Black Continent. See (notably Unit 4):
Western languages are parasitic plants in Africa. Mande, Fulani, Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Tuareg, Oromo, Somali, Berber, Malagasy, Zulu, Shona, Sidama, Afar, Arabic and several other languages should become the official languages of a truly non-colonial African Union with duly de-Westernized member states. Consequently, by supporting African languages’ international status upgrade, China will demonstrate Beijing’s good will and readiness to contribute to Africa’s de-Westernization. At any given moment, China should not become and should not look like a colonial or neocolonial power. This will be the ultimate success of Confucius Institutes in Africa.
II. Systematic Dissociation and Separation from Western Europe and North America
China’s role in Africa will never be effective and fruitful without a complete de-Westernization at all levels; the Chinese-African partnership depends on extensive exchange of experience, study of colonial examples common and repugnant to both partners, quest for national heritage, re-affirmation of cultural identity, and defense of moral integrity. In striking opposition to the racist, colonial practices, Chinese and Africans should reciprocally identify the exact correspondence between the moral-behavioral values of their respective cultures and civilizations and examine how every single of their values is differently contextualized in China and in Africa. The ensuing cultural interexchange and mutual understanding of the ‘other’ will then help form the foundations of the Chinese Africology and the African Sinology.
Chinese and African academics, intellectuals, and scholars should then undertake the common, bilateral rejection and refutation of the Western model and the Eurocentric pseudo-historical dogma at a worldwide stage, also involving their partners in India, Russia, Iran, Turkey and many other Asiatic and Latin American countries. World History should therefore be written in an unbiased, trustful, and honest manner for the first time in the History of Mankind.
This is what anti-Western Chinese and African scholars, academics, intellectuals, scholars and explorers should understand deeply and up to the point of making it the foundation of their common description of the deeds, the thoughts, and the faiths of the humans: to be perfectly anti-Western and to constitute the full refutation of the racist Eurocentric model of historiography, one does not need to be either Sinocentric or Afrocentric; on the contrary, he must be humanocentric.
Afrocentric approaches and substantive criticism of the colonial academics, although positive and necessary, have not yet helped people grasp even a tiny portion of the Ancient Oriental Spirituality, Science, Moral, Wisdom, Universality, and Divinity. The Assyrian-Babylonian (Mesopotamian) and the Egyptian heritage has only been profaned within the barbaric, ignorant and dark periphery of the so-called Hebrews, Greeks and Romans. The Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Quran have only a reminiscence of the Sacred as revealed in the Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian, and Iranian scriptures.
Not even one king among the Ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Macedonians and Romans managed to attain the sacredness and the spiritual force of Thutmose III.
Within the context of the fallacious Eurocentric model of historiography, which was based on the aberration of ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ and the absurdity of ‘Greco-Roman civilization’ (that the colonials imposed worldwide), Africa occupies a truly marginal, subordinate position, as if the entire Black Continent depended on the developments that took place in South Balkans and in Rome. This racist construct consists in total distortion of the History of Mankind; it was established as a mere reflection of the 19th c. colonial invaders’ disdain of the African nations that they colonized at the time. They narrated as ‘History’ what they viewed as their own African subjects whom the Europeans never bothered to truly and deeply study as per the local African, standards and measures, thus erroneously, unjustly and undeservedly evaluating them after the worthless, malignant and utterly racist European criteria.
The correct, Chinese view over, and version of, the Silk Road
The false, Eurocentric view of the Silk Road
Within the context of the fallacious Eurocentric model of historiography, which was based on the aberration of ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ and the absurdity of ‘Greco-Roman civilization’ (that the colonials imposed worldwide), China occupies a really peripheral position ‘at the very end of the world’, somewhere in the East. The History of the Silk Road is not the same for Western and for Chinese academics, scholars and explorers – let alone diplomats, politicians and statesmen. Within the Western bogus-narrative, China has always been depicted as if it has been a faraway country only periodically, slightly and occasionally connected with the Mediterranean World, which was erroneously presented as the supposed center of the world or the axis around which the History of Mankind revolved.
China, Egypt and all the other African countries should work systematically to totally dismantle and obliterate the Eurocentric Western fallacy. There will never be decolonization without complete de-Westernization, and this apparently demands a major effort of full de-Mediterraneanization of the World History, which is a racist, false and poisonous product made in the West. Over the last six millennia, all the humans lived in a great variety of locations and lands, often developing different cultures and civilizations, but contact has always been maintained; so, the criminal conquistadors of the barbarian and pseudo-Christian Pope of Rome never ‘discovered’ anything.
More importantly, the axis of World History revolved always around the arc that links Egypt -through Mesopotamia, Iran and Central Asia- with China, involving also concavities and convexities that end in the African Atlas, in the Horn of Africa, in Yemen, in India, in Anatolia and the Balkans, in the Caucasus region, and in Siberia. On these basic lines took place all the major events of World History.
That is why it is essential that China, India and Egypt launch together a major anti-colonial project named ‘歷史 – इतिहास- تاريخ’ (Lishi Itihaas Tarih/’History’ in Chinese, Hindi and Arabic respectively) and involve in it their numerous Asiatic and African partners in order to genuinely compose -for the first time in World History- a truly unbiased, multilateral and comprehensive History of the Mankind, plainly reveal the importance of the major lands of History (as stated in the previous paragraph), and irrevocably reduce the role of European peoples to their true proportions, secondary dimensions and negative impact. This collective work should then be translated to all the Asiatic, African and Latin American languages and subsequently serve as the fundamental documentation which all the school manuals and the textbooks will reproduce, thus eliminating the hitherto prevailing false, colonial Eurocentric historiography. About the three terms:
Even the notion of ‘Europe’ must be deleted; actually, it does not truly exist. It never did – for the overwhelming majority of the world population. The lands located west of the plains of Russia, of the Black Sea, and of the Anatolian plateau are also parts of Asia. As a matter of fact, what Westerners called ‘Europe’ is the most western and the most troublesome peninsula of Asia. The undeniable fact that Ancient Greek and Latin texts make this distinction does not concern Africans, Caucasians, Turkic nations, Iranians, Arabic-speaking people, Indians, Siberians, Chinese and other Asiatic nations, because those sources are alien, unknown, unimportant, indifferent and useless to them. Europe does not have the status of a continent by any means.
Working together at the academic, scientific, intellectual, and cultural levels, China and Egypt will thus put an end to the colonial links that have been imposed on Asia and Africa over the past 250 years. The campaign motto for China, Egypt, and their partners should be: “No Oriental student in Occidental universities”.
III. The Egypt – Sudan – Libya Confederation
After re-establishing the national unity and sovereignty of Sudan and Libya due to full scale military intervention and political pacification processes, China and Egypt should work hard with local authorities in Khartoum and Tripoli as to how to best interconnect and bind all three nations. In the third article of the series (see below; units IV and V), I offered few examples in this regard, stressing particularly the sector of Transport. High-speed railways will certainly bring closer the three capitals, the three elites, and the three nations. With ca. 175 million people and an area of about 4.6 million km2, the three lands make the 7th state of the world in terms of surface and the 8th largest country by population.
As it can be surmised, the desire for a concerted unification of Egypt, Sudan and Libya does not reflect a delusional target like going higher in the list or just looking bigger; it addresses the common need of all the local societies and governments to acquire greater economic depth and have a faster rhythm of development. With the help of China, mega-projects similar to those I proposed in the fourth article of the series (see below: units I-V) have to be launched also in Sudan and Libya. With interconnected systems of canals and associated irrigation plans that carry water from the Nile, parts of the Butana desert in the eastern part of Sudan can become cultivated lands, thus exponentially increasing the agricultural production of the country. About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butana
The three countries will always have three seats in the UN General Assembly, also maintaining independent governments and separate parliaments; however, they can launch a one-year long rotating presidency and engage in several unification projects at the political, military, economic and educational levels. With full respect for all the existing ethnic groups, their languages, traditions and cultures, with concertation and synergy among the respective private sectors, with a unitary vision as regards their common vast territory and past, and with the strong support of China, the three countries can engage in the path of reunification on a purely secular basis. This will finally be the beginning of the end of the colonial era in Africa.
As it is well known, borders anywhere in Africa do not reflect ethnic territories and national realities, as they should have, but remind us of aspects of the colonial past. They are all false, and that’s why the criminal colonial gangsters, namely the English, the French and the Americans, want still to preserve the present, impermissible and untenable, borders in Africa. The reason for this vicious, insidious and inhuman policy is simple; practically speaking, there are no proper borders among nations throughout the Black Continent. There are only limits between the graves into which all the African nations have been buried by the guilty White Man.
Because the colonial powers want to preserve these illegal borders, these lines of sin, shame and hatred must be abolished. China should not have any illusion in this regard; the very existence of the colonial borders, the terrible absence of substantive infrastructure, and the imposed historical distortion, which is taught in the schools as an undisputed dogma, constitute the three major hindrances to Africa’s liberation and to Beijing’s perspectives in Africa. Of course, it will not be an easy thing to abolish the colonial borders in the Black Continent.
The effort should start with the formation of regional alliances and small unions of few states in several zones. Thus, the establishment of a confederation among Egypt, Sudan and Libya will mark a critical step in this regard. It is important for Beijing to methodically conceive and gradually carry out this project, because a successful union of three major African states will certainly stimulate many others to undertake similar efforts in other parts of Africa.
For this project, China should dedicate dozens of thousands of specialists, explorers, scholars and advisers; first, Beijing should create them. It is essential for the Chinese leadership to understand that, despite their good will and all the hitherto deployed efforts, China still does not truly know Africa; at least, not up to the level the colonial powers do. That is why China will urgently need 20000 Africanists, departments of African Studies in at least 50 Chinese universities, a plethora of linguists specializing in all the African languages, and researchers in Ethnography. A true Chinese army of explorers must disembark in Africa.
Similarly, in striking opposition to the highly ideologized, extremely biased, and utterly insidious Western academic policy against the Northern African Hamites and the Eastern African Cushites, China should become the worldwide center of Hamitic, Berber, Tuareg, Hausa, Cushitic, Oromo and Somali Studies.
Last but not least, China will certainly need 2000 Egyptologists and Coptologists with parallel background in Phoenician-Carthaginian, Latin and Ancient Greek in order to help present and future Egyptian and African scholars overwhelmingly refute the Eurocentric bogus-historical dogma, which prevails in the propagandist pseudo-universities of Western Europe and North America. They will have to plainly demonstrate to the world academic community the fact that the African Genius of the Hamitic Kemetians (Egyptians), Berbers and Cushites-Meroites and the Asiatic-Semitic Intelligence of the Carthaginians brought civilization to the islands of the Mediterranean Sea and to the southern extremities of the Balkan, the Italian and the Iberian peninsulas.
The topic is certainly interrelated with the urgent need of the Chinese academia to undertake a real overhaul of the Western disciplines of Orientalism, but this topic demands a new series of articles about the development of the Chinese disciplines of Assyriology, Hittitology, Iranology, etc. on entirely anticolonial and anti-racist basis. Establishing parallels between the Chinese Hundred Schools of Thought and Ancient Oriental (Assyrian-Babylonian, Egyptian, Iranian, Aramaean, Phoenician) schools of wisdom, universalism, spirituality and science or the Gnostic systems of Northern Africa or Western Asia would help all the people better perceive and fully assess the enduring interconnectedness of Asiatic and African cultures and civilizations. About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Schools_of_Thought
IV. How the Chinese-Egyptian Alliance will reshape Africa into Five Mega-States
It may be a long process, but an early vision and a correct approach always matter. In order to totally change Africa, effectively block the presence or the return of the colonial powers, and instinctively trigger pro-Chinese feelings among all Africans, thus permanently consolidating Beijing’s leading role in the Black Continent, China must totally undo everything that the Western colonials did in Africa.
Taking into consideration the ethnic identity, the cultural integrity, the historical heritage of all the African and non-African nations that currently live in Africa, and taking into account the demanded conditions of socioeconomic development and international life, one can come to the conclusion that Africa should be re-organized in five great confederate states:
1- Kemet/Egypt, Cush/Sudan, and Rebu-Libu/Libya
This confederate state will be made out of the three ancient lands of civilization and modern countries, as briefly described in the present article. About:
2- Cush/Ethiopia, Punt/Somalia, and Eastern Africa (with a small enclave for Amhara-Tigray Abyssinia)
This confederate state will be established out of lands, which are currently parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia (Somaliland being not a state but a local MI6 office), Kenya, and most of the Swahili-speaking Muslim inhabitants of the coast of Tanzania. Apparently, the Cushitic nations of the Oromos and the Somalis will be the largest entities within the confederacy, which will comprise Cushitic, Nilotic and Bantu people.
Taking into consideration the fact that the Semitic Amhara and Tigray tribes (: the Abyssinians) have had a most tumultuous and very negative relationship with the regional Cushitic majority, repeatedly made war upon them, and persistently persecuted them, it will be wise to envision an Abyssinian enclave within the confederacy; this will be formed out of lands belonging to the Eritrean North and to the Tigray and Amhara regions of today’s untenable Ethiopia. About:
3- Carthage-Tunisia/Algeria, Berber Atlas, and Hamitic Sahara
This confederate state will be formed out of several NW African states that draw on the Carthaginian, Berber, Tuareg, Hausa and Saharan Muslim heritage and tradition of the wider region, i.e. Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, and the northern half of Nigeria. An ominous and excessive colonial project of linguistic Arabization and extremist Islamization (based on disastrous, pseudo-Muslim and Anti-Islamic theologies) has been carried out in this region for long in order to totally transform the identity of the indigenous nations, eliminate the originality of their heritage, destroy their cultural integrity, divide the local societies, trigger divisions, split the families, and produce useless bloodshed only for the benefit of the colonial powers of the West.
The paramount target achieved due to the Western (mainly French) colonization concerned the establishment of a fake dilemma that was imposed on all the local societies (since the 19th c.), namely to
– either imitate the French and get intoxicated with Western lies and pseudo-science
– or become an extremist and die for a fake Islam that did not reflect the well-known historical civilization, culture and religion.
It is within this abominable divide that the traditional popular religion, wisdom, and culture have been sidestepped by the fanaticism of the ferociously anti-African and deeply anti-Islamic Hanbali, Ibn Taimiyyah, and Wahhabi theologies and forgeries.
By bringing to surface and reviving old traditions, forgotten identities, and moral integrity, and by interconnecting them with modern Afrocentric trends, China will be able to help permanently uproot extremism and obliterate French, English and American presence from the vast region which can certainly unite in a powerful, wealthy and progressive African confederacy.
Carthage, 218 BCE
For Chinese scholars and diplomats to see the hidden reality of the African Atlas and the wider Sahara region, four major academic fallacies have to be totally disregarded, refuted and dismantled by them first, notably
a- the false construct of ‘Afro-Asiatic languages’ (a fabrication that enables Western scholars to occasionally change their earlier conclusions as per the political needs of their criminal governments);
b- the colonial promotion of Arabic, which was never an identitarian element or a national language in Africa (it was basically a lingua franca for Muslims, and it was promoted by the French in order to deliberately destroy the Berber identity of the vast region);
c- the systematized effort to discredit the ethno-linguistic Hamitic group (by calling it ‘Hamitic hypothesis’), which is due to Western colonial biases against the Hamitic-Cushitic ethnic-linguistic-cultural unity that can help bring together the northern half of Africa (namely parts 1, 2 and 3 of the present unit) in just one state; and
d- the vicious attempt of the racist French colonials to uproot the national Berber identity of all the North African populations that have been deceitfully categorized by the colonial gangsters into Berber speaking people, bilinguals and Arabs. There were never Arabs in North Africa; today’s Arabic-speaking populations from Sudan to Morocco are Cushites and Hamites who have been gradually Arabized because they accepted Islam as religion. However, they remained culturally and ethnically African (Hamitic and Cushitic); consequently, in the Atlas region, there are only Arabic speaking Berbers, bilinguals, and Berbers who do not speak Arabic at all. We have therefore to conclude that Arabic can have only status of religious language throughout Northwestern Africa. About:
4- Manding, Atlantic Congo, Volta-Congo and Central Africa
This confederate state will consist of numerous ethnic groups and coastal nations of Western Africa that speak Manding, Atlantic Congo, Volta Congo and Central African languages, notably Wolof, Mende, Bambara, Dogon, Dyula, Yoruba, Igbo, Gbaya, Zande, etc. Including states like Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, the southern half of Nigeria, parts of Cameroon, and the Central African Republic, this confederation will also incorporate the Fula (Peul) people, who live in the southern part of their lands and have not therefore been comprised within the borders of the confederate state no 3 (see above). About:
This confederation will constitute the southernmost of Africa’s five mega-states. It will comprise Bantu people from coast to coast, therefore uniting all African lands south of a hypothetical line going from Equatorial Guinea to Uganda and thence to Tanzania and Mozambique. A Khoisan enclave should be instituted in order to gather together these ethnic-linguistic groups. About:
By helping set up five mega-states in Africa, Beijing will not only bring unity, concord and cooperation to the Black Continent, but it will also make it sure that peace is no further endangered due to the interests of the Western White Man, his heinous mentality, and his anti-Black stance. The absence of the divisive and merciless American, English and French colonial gangsters, racist missionaries, and plotting diplomats from Africa will certainly enable African nations to establish major states the size of Brazil or Russia and thus acquire the main prerequisite to socioeconomic development, namely economic depth. Empowered by China, India and Russia, the aforementioned five African mega-states will then be able to throw the barbarians of England, France and America into the dustbin of World History.
This will certainly constitute China’s greatest revenge for the Opium Wars.
Bantu languages
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Previous articles of the series (titles, contents, and links to the publications):
A Special Military Alliance with China is Egypt’s Only Chance for Survival – I
I. Western Hatred against Egypt and Plans against Mankind
II. The End of Egypt may be very close
III. Egypt and the Pulverization of Sudan and Libya
IV. The Renaissance Dam in the light of the Abyssinian ‘Prophecy’ against Egypt and Sudan
I. Ancient, Christian, and Muslim historiographers
II. Oversights and errors attested in the existing bibliography
A. ‘Battle techniques’
B. ‘Two great empires exhausted and weakened’
———- EXCURSE I: HISTORICAL FOCUS —————-
Borders, fronts, rebellions, divisions and fights
1- Post-conquest Iran
2- Eastern Roman Empire
3- Upper Egypt and the Sudan (: historical Ethiopia)
4- Internal conflicts transported from Hejaz to Syria and Mesopotamia
——————————————————————————-
C. ‘History of states’ and not of peoples and cultures
D. Poor conceptualization of the early Islamic conquests by modern scholars
—— EXCURSE II: ETHNO-LINGUISTIC & RELIGIOUS FOCUS ———
Ethno-linguistic groups
Religious groups
i- the Christian Aramaeans of the Syriac Orthodox Church (Monophysites)
ii- the Christian Aramaeans of the Great Church of the East (Nestorians)
iii- the Gnostic Aramaeans
iv- the Manichaean Aramaeans
v- the Copts (Monophysitic Christian Egyptians)
vi- the (Aramaic-speaking) Jews, followers of Rabbinical Judaism
vii- the Persians and other Iranians followers of various Iranian religions
viii- the Eastern Roman Orthodox Christians, who sided with the Patriarchate of Constantinople
———————————————————————————
E. The demographic structure of the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire and of the Western Iranian provinces: the Aramaeans
F. The central provinces of the Islamic Caliphates: the lands of the Aramaeans.
G. Lack of historical criticism in Islamic Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies
III. The astounding scarcity of contemporaneous sources
IV. Critical incidents during the Battle of Yarmouk
V. The true dimensions of the Battle of Yarmouk and of its outcome
An early 7th c. drawing on a 5th c. biblical manuscript: the unusual and unnecessary representation of Job and his family is correctly viewed by modern scholars as a cryptographic representation of Heraclius and his family, notably his second wife Martina, his sister Epiphania, and his daughter Eudoxia. There is a clear reason for this allegory; by associating Heraclius with Job, the calligrapher and painter interpolated the concept of the Righteous Suffering and projected it onto Heraclius. The apparently Monotheletist artist wanted to praise the Monotheletist emperor for his patience and tolerance toward the Orthodox extremists among the Constantinopolitan clergy, who incessantly insulted the basileus. He therefore identified him with the Biblical person that embodies the concept of the Righteous Suffering, which is of entirely Assyrian-Babylonian origin as the illustrious epic Ludlul bel nemeqi – https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1189&context=cop-facbooks
The battle that led to the withdrawal of the Eastern Romans (‘Rum’ – therefore not ‘Greeks’) from Syria, Palestine, and North Mesopotamia has been the object of numerous studies, essays, chapters of books, and treatises. Modern Orientalist historiographers distorted and/or concealed the historical realities that determined the fact. They impacted their writings with unnecessary astonishment, unsolicited admiration, bizarre bewilderment, and at times childishly subjective descriptions. It is as if they are either blind or predetermined to disorient readers from the historical truth. It is most unfortunate that this situation prevails, despite numerous military experts delving into historical texts, many philologists scrutinizing posterior sources, and several historians publishing the corpus of the textual evidence as regards the event.
The confusion of the average reader and learner is completed with the modern, definitely unscholarly, Islamist pamphleteering as per which ‘the faith in the only true God’ gave the victory to the less-experienced, numerically inferior, and surely ill-equipped and poorly armed (if compared with the Eastern Romans) Muslim armies. I will not expand on this nonsense, because it would only prove that all victors and conquerors were true believers and all the defeated armies belonged to disbelievers – which is absurd.
I. Ancient, Christian, and Muslim historiographers
At this point, I have to highlight that, when it comes to the attitude toward History and historiography, there is a deep chasm between our modern world (after 1500) and past generations that lived in the Antiquity or during the Christian and Islamic times. The modern theories that History can ‘teach’ and that, by studying History, one can avoid past mistakes did not exist before the modern world; these theories are wrong, insane, inhuman and disastrous.
‘History’ does not ‘teach’, and not one Muslim, Christian, Manichaean, Gnostic, Zoroastrian, Babylonian or Egyptian ever thought or expected that History could possibly ‘teach’ him anything. In their perception of the world, there was clarity whereas modern minds are terribly confused about a critical issue: recording facts (historiography) is not History. History is what happened. No one can reconstitute it in its entirety, except by living in the past and being present in the events.
Historiography, i.e. simple recording of facts, did indeed happen for more than five millennia, but not for the purpose of ‘teaching’ or being ‘taught’. This reality determined all ancient historical records, be they Ancient Egyptian Annals, Babylonian Chronicles, Assyrian Annals, Greek and Roman history writing, Christian and Muslim Chronography or other. And for the purpose of objectivity, in most of the cases, the authors eliminated their personal views and considerations; and this is quite normal, as we all understand that a fact is always a fact per se, irrespective of the author’s (or narrator’s or historian’s) personal favor and/or understanding.
For the above reasons, serious, decent and valuable ancient authors did not include in their narratives what was evident to all: the historical context. Contextualization would be tantamount to self-devaluation for an historian like Tabari or Theophanes or the anonymous, 7th c. CE, Aramaean author of the Syriac Chronicle of Kirkuk, which is mainly known as ‘History of Karka de Beth Selok’. About:
(Throughout the present article links to the Wikipedia are included only for further research and access to historical sources and bibliography – not for the contents of the entries that are often impertinent and biased and the ensuing conclusions misplaced)
Ka’ba-ye Zardosht (Zoroaster’s Kaaba): one of the holiest shrines of the Sassanid Empire of Iran at Naqsh-e Rustam, ancient Achaemenid necropolis; it is to be noted that there were several pre-Islamic times’ holy buildings in rectangular shape. They were located in Iran and in Yemen. The Kaaba of Najran was the Christian cathedral in Yemenite Najran (currently under Saudi occupation).Saint Sophia: the Eastern Roman Empire’s greatest cathedral was not a holy shrine for the Monophysitic and Nestorian Aramaeans and the Copts (Egyptians), because they viewed the Patriarchate of Constantinople as heretic. This played an enormous role and impacted the historical developments back in the 630s.
II. Oversights and errors attested in the existing bibliography
Contrarily to Ancient, Christian and Muslim authors and people, who did not expect ‘History’ (but their holy books) to teach them the correct path in life and who did not repeat past mistakes by delving into moral depths (and not into useless historical manuals), we need extensive contextualization to accurately perceive and correctly understand epochs that totally differed from ours. This is what is terribly missing from the studies of almost all the scholars who were interested in the Battle of Yarmouk.
Yarmouk battlefield in Jordan today
A. ‘Battle techniques’
Many scholars focused on the battle techniques of Khalid ibn al-Walid (592-642 CE). But however successful these techniques may have been, military dexterity does not explain why the bulk of the indigenous populations of the eastern provinces (North Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Cyrenaica) of the Eastern Roman Empire did not rebel against the early Muslim rule. The battle of Yarmouk may have been won by the Muslims, but 10 or 20 years later a violent local rebellion could have eventually terminated the foreign rule. But this did not happen.
Typical samples of worthless bibliography and lectures:
One of the wrong diagrams that one can find in the Internet nowadays; suffice it that you read Tabari and you will understand the mistakes.This type of diagrams can never explain historical processes; it is therefore wrong, confusing and disorienting.
B. ‘Two great empires exhausted and weakened’
Several authors explained the early Islamic victories by referring to the exhaustion of the then known world’s two greatest empires, namely the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran. This is correct and true, but still it does not help us understand why the outright majority of populations of the western provinces of Iran and the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire did not rebel against the foreign invaders in the first 2-3 decades of Islamic rule. However, this fantasy is reproduced even in serious UNESCO documentation on the Silk Road: https://fr.unesco.org/silkroad/sites/default/files/knowledge-bank-article/vol_III%20silk%20road_the%20arab%20conquest.pdf
The Sassanid Empire of Iran and the Eastern Roman Empire at the time prophet Muhammad was bornMain movements of Eastern Roman and Sassanid Iranian armies
———- EXCURSE I: HISTORICAL FOCUS —————-
Borders, fronts, rebellions, divisions and fights
In this regard, it is noteworthy to point out a quadruple phenomenon that took place in the first decades of Islamic rule in the Caliphate’s central provinces:
1- Post-conquest Iran
The first rebellions against the new rule started early in Iran, but they occurred in remote provinces (Gilan, Mazandaran, Azerbaijan) that were inhabited by nations other than those living in the former western provinces of Iran. In any case, both great empires, the Eastern Romans and the Iranians, were multi-ethnic imperial structures.
2- Eastern Roman Empire
The first line of Eastern Roman defense against the Islamic Caliphate was created alongside the Taurus and Anti-Taurus mountains, whereas the upper flow of Euphrates became the border between the two empires. This is the location where the formidable Akritai appeared to fight and stop every advance of the Omayyad or Abbasid armies to the West, apparently coordinating with the Islamic opposition to the pseudo-Islamic rule of the caliphs.
3- Upper Egypt and the Sudan (: historical Ethiopia)
Upper Egypt totally escaped the Islamic rule, as Nobatia was incepted as Christian Coptic kingdom with capital at Faras (almost on the present Egyptian-Sudanese borderline). The Islamic rule in Masr (Egypt) did not exceed beyond the region between Al Minya and Assiut (ca. 350 km south of Cairo), and while Seville, Cordova, Sicily, Crete, Samarqand and the Delta of Indus belonged to the Islamic Caliphate, Coptic monasticism flourished in Thebes of Egypt (today’s Luxor; from Al Uqsur, ‘the military camps’) where all ancient Egyptian temples and antiquities, notably Deir al Bahri and Deir al Madina, had become monastic cells. Two other Christian Sudanese kingdoms rose further in the South: Makuria and Alodia, limiting the Islamic presence in Eastern Africa to the Red Sea coastland.
4- Internal conflicts transported from Hejaz to Syria and Mesopotamia
The only conflicts that took place in the early Islamic Caliphate’s central provinces (i.e. the lands that belong today to Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, SE Turkey, Iraq, SW Iran, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar and the northern parts of Saudi Arabia) were those related to the ‘new’ faith, prophet Muhammad’s preaching, and the interpretation of this faith’s prescriptions as regards the governance of the state. This means, in other words, that the Arabs of Hejaz, brought with them to Syria-Mesopotamia the deep divisions that characterized their society (acceptance, rejection and/or distortion of prophet Muhammad’s religious revelation) even before prophet Muhammad’s death (632 CE). These divisions were ferocious and the bloodshed tarnished irrevocably the History of Islam, although it really paled if compared with the bloodshed caused after the official imposition of Constantinopolitan-Roman Christianity as the sole religion throughout the Roman Empire. And the early converts from the newly occupied lands that earlier belonged to the Eastern Romans and to the Sassanid Iranians vividly participated in these divisions, debates, polarizations, conflicts and civil wars.
This quadruple phenomenon was never studied per se until now, and to duly investigate it one needs to delve in the ethnic and religious/theological conflicts that took place in the two great empires (the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran) for about 300-400 years before the Battle of Yarmouk. This clearly demonstrates that not one specialist of the Early Islamic History can be taken seriously without the knowledge of at least two among the following languages and religious/literary traditions: Coptic, Syriac Aramaic, Middle Persian, Medieval ‘Greek’ (‘Roman’: the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire), Manichaean, and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (: the language of Rabbinical Judaism).
——————————————————
C. ‘History of states’ and not of peoples and cultures
Numerous authors write on the topic, while focusing on State History (Eastern Roman, Sassanid Iranian, Omayyad and Abbasid Islamic); this is one way ticket to misperception, misunderstanding, and distortion. States are not representative of subject nations and peoples, but of ruling elites and their doctrines; in their effort to secure their interests, states destroy all historical, literary, religious or theological documentation that would challenge them. States are to some extent the reason for the scarcity of documentation that characterizes the 7th and the 8th centuries CE (or, to put it otherwise, the first 100-150 years AH/anno Hegirae).
D. Poor conceptualization of the early Islamic conquests by modern scholars
Most researchers failed to contextualize the early Islamic conquests, because they were unable to properly conceptualize the historical developments in the first place. Battles are undertaken by social groups or eventually states, but socio-cultural processes and historical developments are generated by peoples and nations. So, the proper manner to approach the topic is to view it as an affair of various nations and ethno-linguistic and religious groups that lived in the wider region between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, from the Taurus Mountains to the Indus River Delta, and in-between the Nile and Syr-Darya (Iaxartes River) in Central Asia.
——– EXCURSE II: ETHNO-LINGUISTIC & RELIGIOUS FOCUS ————
In this regard, it is essential to conclude from the aforementioned that the only pertinent manner to tackle the topic is via interdisciplinary studies. Until now, no effort was displayed in this direction; and yet, there can be many combinations of interdisciplinary studies applying to this case.
Ethno-linguistic groups
During the 6th–7th c. CE, the main nations which lived in the lands that, after the Islamic conquests, became the central provinces of the Islamic Caliphate were:
i- the Aramaeans,
ii- the Copts,
iii- the Persians and other Iranians, who manned the imperial administration at Tesiphun (Ctesiphon) and controlled the Iranian military outposts,
iv- the (Aramaic-speaking) Jews, and
v- the Eastern Romans, who were organized in small communities living in the major cities of the eastern provinces of the empire, notably around the Chalcedonian patriarchates of Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria.
This means that at those days the outright majority of the populations living in lands belonging to today’s SE Turkey, Syria, Iraq, SW Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and the North of Saudi Arabia were Aramaeans.
And the outright majority of the populations living in the Nile Valley were Copts.
Urhoy-Edessa of Orhoene-Urfa (SE Turkey): a major Aramaean cityNasibina-Nisibis-Nusaybin (SE Turkey): a major Aramaean city Hatra (NW Iraq): a major Aramaean city Dura Europos on Euphrates (Eastern Syria): a major Aramaean cityTadmur-Palmyra (Central Syria): a major Aramaean city Bosra (Southern Syria): a major Aramaean city Rekem (Petra, Jordan): a major Aramaean city of the Nabataean dynastyHegra, the necropolis of the Aramaean Nabataean kingdom, at 350 km distance north of Yathrib (Madina)Charax Spasinu (South Iraq): a major Aramaean city
Religious groups
When it comes to ethno-religious and linguistic groups existing at those days (6th–7th c. CE) in the aforementioned region, we enumerate the following:
i- the Christian Aramaeans of the Syriac Orthodox Church (Monophysites) Although entirely anti-Constantinopolitan, the Christian Aramaeans were divided into Miaphysitic (Monophysitic) anti-Chalcedonian Christians and Nestorian anti-Ephesine Christians (see below no ii).
Christian Aramaeans of the Syriac Orthodox Church (Monophysites) formed the outright majority of the populations living in the Eastern Roman provinces of Syria, North Mesopotamia, and Palestine.
The term Monophysitic (Monophysitism/Monophysites) being quite pejorative, it is currently replaced by Miaphysitic (Miaphysitism/Miaphysites). The most common appellation of the church is Jacobite, after St. Jacob Baradaeus (also known as Jacob bar Addai).
Deir Zafaran (also known as Mor Hananyo) Monastery, near Mardin (SE Turkey): a high place of Syriac Jacobite (Miaphysitic/Monophysitic) Christianity
It is also necessary to underscore that the noun/adjective ‘Syriac’ is totally unrelated to the land of Syria (in such case the adjective is ‘Syrian’), but denotes a late phase of Aramaic that survived down to our days, being one of the main liturgical languages in the History of Christianity. Syriac alphabet derived from Aramaic alphabet (in the 1st c. CE) and, similarly, Arabic alphabet derived (in the 4th c. CE) from Nabataean Aramaic alphabet; Aramaic and Hebrew were the two original languages in which the Old Testament was written.
Syriac Aramaic in Serto writingSyriac Aramaic in Estrangelo writing
Monophysitic Aramaeans were essential for the formation and the diffusion of historical Islam. Their overwhelming rejection of the Constantinopolitan theology and of the anti-Aramaean policies of the Eastern Roman Empire totally alienated the Aramaeans from the authorities that ruled them. For Monophysitic Aramaeans, the Eastern Roman Empire was ruled by heretics. And as the illustrious Aramaean theologian, historian and erudite scholar Tatian (112-185 CE) demonstrated in his magnificent opus Oratio ad Graecos (Address to the Greeks), the enormous cultural gap between Aramaeans and Greeks played a considerable role in the destabilization of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire (and subsequently of the Eastern Roman Empire), because the Constantinopolitan authorities cooperated basically with the Greek-speaking minority.
The determinant role played by the Monophysitic Aramaeans in the formation and the diffusion of historical Islam is highlighted by the case of Sergius Bahira, the Syriac Jacobite (Monophysitic) monk, who encountered prophet Muhammad in young age, when he accompanied his uncle Abi Taleb ibn Abd el Muttalib to Syria and other provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire.
ii- the Christian Aramaeans of the Great Church of the East (Nestorians)
These Aramaeans followed Nestorius in his doctrine that was a radical form of what is called Diophysitism (belief in two natures/hypostases of Jesus); they are called Nestorians, although the term is not regarded as correct (being tantamount to calling the Muslims ‘Muhammedans’). Nestorians rejected the Council of Ephesus (431 CE), pretty much like the Monophysites/Miaphysites rejected the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE).
h ttps://news.assyrianchurch.org/category/education/english-articles/
Dair Mar Eliya (Monastery of St. Elijah) in North Iraq: Nestorian monastery of the 6th c.Nestorian Gospel in SyriacThe Anikova plate: representation of the Siege of Jericho; masterpiece of Sogdian Nestorian Art from Semirechie (southeastern Kazakhstan and northeastern Kyrgyszstan). Probable date: 8th-9th c.Ecclesiastical provinces of the Nestorian Church in the 10th c.Nestorian communities in the 10th-11th c.
Christian Aramaeans of the Great Church of the East (Nestorians) formed the outright majority of the Sassanid Iranian provinces of Central and South Mesopotamia, South Transtigritane, and Arabia, namely Huzistan, Meshan, Asurestan, Nodshiragan (Adiabene), and Arabestan.
Nestorian Aramaeans were essential in the formation and diffusion of historical Islam. Their staggering rejection of both, Constantinopolitan Christianity and Sassanid Mazdeism (the official Iranian imperial religious dogma that consisted only in a later form of the Achaemenid Zoroastrianism), was highly determinant for the early success of the caliphs. At this early point, I only state the well-known (but not deeply understood) fact that, for ca. 180 years before the arrival of the Islamic armies in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia, the Nestorians called Virgin Mary ‘Mother of Christ’ and not ‘Mother of god’, in striking opposition to the Constantinopolitan theologians, monks and courtiers. In this manner, Nestorian Aramaeans proved to be the real precursors of prophet Muhammad and his teachings. As a matter of fact, at the beginning of the 7th c. CE, the Nestorians were closer to the early Quranic text, which may have reached them through hearsay (before the early Islamic armies), than to the Nicene Creed.
Constantinopolitan theology and the anti-Aramaean religious and economic policies of the empire totally alienated the Aramaeans from the ruling authorities. Even worse, in Iran, the Nestorian Aramaeans were persecuted in definitely crueler manner than the Monophysitic Aramaeans were in the Eastern Roman Empire. And the ceaseless Eastern Roman – Sassanid Iranian wars devastated -more than any other territories- the lands inhabited by the Aramaeans.
Their surviving remnants are nowadays the Mandaeans. There are about 100000 Mandaean Aramaeans worldwide, but due to the ongoing persecution and oppression, most of them live currently in the Diaspora, and not in their historical land, i.e. Central and South Mesopotamia (Iraq) and South Transtigritane (SW Iran).
Gnostic Aramaeans were essential in the formation and diffusion of historical Islam. Their participation in Muslim spiritual life is at the origin of the formation of groups like the legendary Ikhwan Safa, whose rituals have been later reproduced by numerous Islamic mystics, spiritualists, occultists and scholars from the Qarmatians and the Isma’ilis to all types of Batiniyya (‘esoterism’) wise elders and great spiritual scientists, like Muhammad al Fazari, Al Ghazali, Abu ‘l Qassim ibn al Saffar, Maslam al Majriti, and Muhyieldin ibn Arabi.
Rasa’il Ikhwan al-Safa, (‘Epistles of the Brethren of Purity’), Book I – on the mathematical sciences; Western Iran, ca. 14th c.
Even the communication manners and literary style of the Ikhwan Safa’s treatises and manuals appear to be Gnostic in their essence. What is nowadays erroneously called ‘Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity’, which is in fact the compendium of their wisdom, consists of letters or ‘messages’ (رسائل), being thus a reminiscence of the typically Gnostic manner of sharing knowledge, wisdom and spiritual practices.
The religion composed, proclaimed and propagated by Mani was displayed in 242 CE in front of the formidable Sassanid shah Shapur I to whom the prophet of Manichaeism dedicated one of his books, titled Shabuhragan. Shapur I did not adhere to the new religion, but he realized its imperial importance for the Sassanid state and supported the young prophet (born in 216 CE) in his mission. It is not wrong to consider Manichaeism technically as a type of Gnosticism, but it was indeed a Gnostic system apart from the rest.
Aramaeans, Persians, Iranians, Sogdians, Turanians, Mongolians, Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Romans, Armenians and many other nations wholeheartedly accepted Manichaeism, which was the first religion in the world to have adepts from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The last Manicheans performed their rites in China’s eastern coastland before 150-100 years. Following the rise of Mazdeism (a later form of Iranian Zoroastrianism) and the prevalence of Kartir among the Sassanid courtiers, Manichaeism was persecuted and Mani was tortured to death, but the diffusion of Manichaeism was not impacted; quite on the contrary! Mani’s faith spread and many Manichaean communities existed at the times of the Islamic conquest in both, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran. Aramaean Manichaean communities in Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine greatly impacted Islam in many dimensions.
Almost 400 years before prophet Muhammad postured to be the last of the prophets, the prophet of Manichaeism claimed to be the ‘seal of the prophets’. Manichaean hierarchy seems to have been diffused among many Muslim esoteric spiritual orders. Some of the greatest historians and chronographers of Islamic times, like Tabari, al Biruni, and al Nadim, expanded on Mani and the Manicheans. The five prayers that a Muslim must perform daily seem to have been a compromise between the four daily prayers of the Manichaean ‘hearers’ (laymen) and the seven daily prayers of the elects (ecclesiastical hierarchy). Prophet Muhammad’s discussions with earlier prophets, during the Isra and Mi’raj nocturnal voyage to the Celestial Jerusalem, seem to exactly reflect similar considerations. Furthermore, the ablutions before the prayer appear to be a repetition of Manichaean practices. In addition, the Ebionite and Elcesaite impact on Manicheans seems therefore to have been passed on to the Muslims.
Was Mani crucified? The question remains unanswered, as several Islamic sources reported a dire end following a terrible persecution unleashed by the Sassanid imperial priesthood against the prophet of Manichaeism.The diffusion of Manichaeism eclipsed that of any other religion before the Modern Times; but Manichaeism was state religion only once: among the Uyghur nation of Central Asia.
The religion of Mani may have by now gone extinct, but its impact on Islam was tremendous. Many scholars tried to retrace fundamental concepts of Islam to the beliefs of several Jewish or Christian groups and notably the Nazarenes, but it would make more sense to closely examine how some of Mani’s innovative concepts found their way into prophet Muhammad’s cardinal tenets and world conceptualization.
Although Christianity accepted the Ancient Hebrew prophets as such, Islam is characterized by a definitely different approach, as it makes of Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isma’il, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, David and Solomon prophets as well (also extending the status of prophet to John the Baptist and Jesus). Furthermore, it is noticeable that Islam’s position on prophethood is flexible enough to encompass other historical figures or outstanding persons not directly known to the small Meccan community of the times of Muhammad ibn Abdullah. However, this fresh approach to World History, which is a novelty for Christianity and Judaism, was absolutely Manichaean or origin. Mani first introduced the concept by accepting Zoroaster, Buddha and Jesus as earlier prophets and by thus giving to his religious system a universal-imperial dimension that was badly needed for a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious empire.
Manichaean Aramaeans were systematically persecuted in both, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Empire of Iran; it was therefore quite normal for them to support the replacement of the double yoke with an Arab state and administration that they would be able to fully staff and operate (along with other Aramaeans who were followers of other religions, notably Christianity), taking into consideration the fact that the uneducated, uncultured and primitive Arabs of Hejaz, who had never formed any kind of proper state, would be definitely and absolutely unable to face such a challenge.
In the early Islamic times, there have been many notable Manichaean scholars, who prospered in the Islamic Caliphate; as Abbasid Baghdad became a center for either Manicheans or Manichaean converts to Islam, many Manicheans of other origin flocked there to contribute to the illustrious Beit al Hikmah (بيت الحكمة/House of the Wisdom) university, library, archival organization, academic center of translations, research center, botanical garden, and observatory. Abu Hilal al-Dayhuri, a Berber from Maghreb, was one of them. On the other hand, elements of the criticism that Abu Isa al Warraq addressed to Islam and to prophet Muhammad seem to be Manichaean of nature.
However, one must admit that, despite similarities, loans and impact, Islam and Manichaeism soon became rival systems and most of the Islamic erudite scholars portrayed Mani in a rather negative manner. This approach made of Muslims the major opponents of the Manicheans, after the Christians and the Jews; but this situation is attested in rather later periods (9th–10th c.). However, this is not quite strange, if we take into consideration the fact that the Old Testament god Yahweh was portrayed as the Demiurge (i.e. the Satan) by Mani.
v- the Copts (Monophysitic Christian Egyptians)
As close allies of the Monophysitic Aramaeans (see above unit i-), they were ferocious enemies of the oppressive Constantinopolitan administrative hierarchy and Patriarchate. Similarly with the Monophysitic Aramaeans, who belonged to the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and rejected the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch (which sided with Constantinople), the Monophysitic Copts followed the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria and rejected the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria.
Coptic manuscript with illuminationsCoptic manuscriptCoptic Gospel with illumination representing the four Evangelists.Coptic manuscript with illuminations
Similarly with what happened in North Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine where the followers of the Constantinopolitan doctrine-related patriarchates (in Antioch and Jerusalem) were not numerous, as they constituted the Greek-speaking minority of those regions, in Egypt, the followers of the Constantinopolitan doctrine-related patriarchate (in Alexandria) were few, and they constituted the Greek-speaking minority of Egypt.
This leads to a detrimental conclusion as regards the Eastern Roman Empire and its chances to maintain control across its eastern provinces, namely North Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Cyrenaica; both, the Constantinopolitan authorities and their local stooges were loathed and reviled by the outright majority of the local populations that would certainly do all that it took to get rid of the heretical rulers at Constantinople. All they needed was an opportunity, and prophet Muhammad’s preaching in Hejaz was apparently more important for them (as a tool) than to Arabs (as a faith).
vi- the (Aramaic-speaking) Jews, followers of Rabbinical Judaism
After the destruction of Jerusalem (70 CE) and the failure of the Bar Kokhba (136 CE) rebellion, the Sadducees, the Essenes and the Zealots did not have a chance to survive as religious-spiritual-intellectual systems among the Judaic Jews. Ever since, Judaism has revolved around the Pharisees, who thus formed what is now known as ‘Rabbinical Judaism’. As Ancient Hebrew was already a dead language, all Jews were already speaking Aramaic. Expelled from Aelia Capitolina (former Jerusalem), Jews could stay in Palestine or preferably settle in Arsacid (and after 224 CE, Sassanid) Iranian Mesopotamia.
They then (and over several centuries) elaborated a new religious book that marks a clear line of separation between their ancestors’ religion (Ancient Hebrew religion based exclusively on the Old Testament) and their new religion; this book is the Talmud, which is the product of the criminal priests who never repented for having killed the ancient prophets of Israel. Today, most scholars hide the critical fact that Judaism (i.e. Rabbinical Judaism or Talmudic Judaism) is totally different from and diametrically opposed to the Ancient Hebrew religion. As priestly literature and theological exegesis, the two different Talmud collections, namely the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalemite Talmud, were written in Aramaic.
Manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud with text from the tractate KiddushinManuscript of the Babylonian Talmud with text from the tractate Rosh ha-shannah
Contrarily to the Judaic Jews, who were marked by the composition and the diffusion of the Talmud among them, the Aramaean Jews in their totality turned to Early Christianity; this concerns the Samaritans of the time of Jesus and many other Aramaean Jewish communities that prospered in Syria and Mesopotamia, notably in Dura Europos where the Synagogue fully reveals the impetus and the magnificence of Aramaean Art. By the time of prophet Muhammad there was no Aramaean Jew.
Although late 6th c. and early 7th c. CE Jews wholeheartedly supported the Sassanid Iranians in their wars against the Eastern Roman Empire (in striking contrast with the early Muslims of the period 610-628/629, who clearly regretted the early Iranian advance and conquests, and later rejoiced with the final Eastern Roman victories) and in spite of many unfortunate incidents that occurred between the early Muslims and the Hejaz Jews (during prophet Muhammad’s lifetime), the early (634-651 CE) Islamic conquests were enthusiastically accepted by the Jews of the wider region, who found their ally and protector in the ominous figure of Omar ibn al Khattab, as he allowed them to enter Jerusalem, no less than 568 years after they were kicked out of there by the Romans. Jews actively supported the early Islamic Caliphates, notably the Umayyad state of Damascus, the Abbasid Empire of Baghdad, and the Umayyad caliphs of Córdoba (Andalus).
vii- the Persians and other Iranians followers of various Iranian religions
Being only one of the Sassanid Empire’s nations, the Persians lived in the province of Fars, which in Ancient Greek was translated as Persia; there cannot be confusion between ‘Persian’ and ‘Iranian’. Persians were/are only one of the Iranian nations.
The Persians controlled the administrative machine of the Iranian Empire during the Achaemenid times (550-330 BCE) and during the Sassanid times (224-651 CE), whereas the Parthians, another Iranian nation of Turanian origin, controlled the administrative machine of the empire during the Arsacid times (250 BCE-224 CE).
The Iranian Empire had always many imperial capitals, notably Pasargadae, Persepolis, Susa, Babylon, Ecbatana, Nisa (Mithradatkirt/Parthaunisa), Qumis (Hecatompylos), Ray (Ragae), Tesifun (Ctesiphon), and Istakhr; on the other hand, Praaspa (Adur Gushnasp/Takht-e Suleyman), at an elevation of 3000 m, in the northern part of Zagros Mountains, was permanently the Zoroastrian religious capital of the empire.
In the Mesopotamian provinces of the Sassanid Empire of Iran, there were few and rather small Persian communities; in these western provinces of Iran were also settled people originating from other Iranian nations that were indigenous in the central, eastern and northern provinces of the empire. They were dispatched to the imperial administration at Ctesiphon and they served in the army. But they were a minority among the indigenous Aramaeans of Central and Southern Mesopotamia, Transtigritane, and the Persian Gulf’s southern coastlands.
This reality has not been either assessed or revealed by any type of specialists who studied and wrote about the topic of the early Islamic conquests. Yet, it is uniquely determinant and utterly explanatory. It changes drastically our scholarly approach to the topic (see below unit E).
Another critical dimension that impacted greatly the fate of the Sassanid Empire of Iran was its religious multi-division. If we leave the Nestorian Aramaeans, the Gnostic Aramaeans, the Manichaean Aramaeans, other Manichaean Iranians (notably the Sogdians), and the Aramaic-speaking Jews aside, the Persians and the other Iranian nations of the Sassanid Empire were spiritually and religiously divided. Among them, there were adepts of the following religious systems:
1- Mazdeism: the imperial religion and Zoroastrian doctrine established by Kartir;
2- Mithraism: the popular religion that made of Mithra a god of polytheistic features;
3- Zurvanism: Mithra broke away from Zoroastrianism and Zurvan from Mithraism;
4- Mazdakism: the subversive socio-religious system of rebellious mobedh (priest);
5- Gayomardism: an offspring of Mazdeism and Mithraism, with monotheistic traits;
If one adds to the numerous aforementioned religions, several religious systems prevailing among nations of the Iranian periphery and border regions, notably Buddhism, Turanian Tengrism, and other Central Asiatic and Indus River valley religions, one gets a complete picture of the internal divisions that existed in the Sassanid Empire of Iran and finally lef to its destruction.
Sassanid Iranian relief with representation of the high priest, mystic and reformer of Zoroastrianism Kartir, a primary initiate who can be viewed as the founder of Mazdeism, i.e. the late form of Zoroastrianism that was instituted as official dogma in Sassanid Iran. Possibly Turanian (Turkic) of origin, Kartir (or Kerdyr) can be held as main responsible for the execution of Mani and the persecution of Manicheans in Iran until the end of the Sassanid times. Long before the Arabs of Hejaz heard of the Mi’raj story (prophet Muhammad’s nocturnal, transcendental travel to the Temple Mount and thence to the Celestial Jerusalem), the Iranians learned about Kartir’s celestial journey in the Heaven. There is also another (parallel?) Middle Persian story about the celestial journey of the sublime initiate Arda Viraf in the Heaven; however, the Middle Persian manuscripts of Arda Wīraz namag seem to date back to the 9th c., although the entire narrative echoes Sassanid traditions. About: https://iranicaonline.org/articles/kartir / https://www.academia.edu/37850211/The_nature_of_spiritual_journeys_in_Zoroastrianism_based_on_Kartir_and_Arda_Viraf_tripsThe Mithraic temple of Anahita at Bishapur near KazerunThe heroic elements of the Sassanid times’ Mazdeism were preserved in the Iranian epics of Islamic times, thus leading to a very different form of Islam than what Muhammad preached in Mecca; Esfandiyar faces Simurgh. Without Iranian epics composed 300 years after the death of prophet Muhammad, one cannot possibly identify correctly the cultural-spiritual-intellectual-artistic-educational environment of Iranian, Turanian, Central Asiatic, Caucasus and Indian Muslim societies. In fact, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh became the second Quran for Ottoman sultans, Mughal emperors, Iranian shahs and Eurasiatic Muslims.Gayomard (Keyumars) fighting evil spirits; a reminiscence of Gayomardism of the Sassanid times was preserved in the Iranian epics of Islamic times.The execution of Mazdak, the preacher of the world’s first religion which evangelized a communist social structure without property, as represented in Islamic times’ miniatures of manuscriptsRepresentation of Zurvan, the all-consuming ‘god’ of time
viii- the Eastern Roman Orthodox Christians, who sided with the Patriarchate of Constantinople
As I already said, the few Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Orthodox Christian communities, settled in Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria and several other cities in North Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Cyrenaica, supported the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Constantinopolitan imperial administration, but they were largely outnumbered by the local Aramaean (in Asia) and Coptic (in Africa) populations (which rejected the Patriarchate of Constantinople and its local stooges). That is why the few Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Orthodox Christian communities were greatly loathed: they ultimately functioned as tools of the imperial oppression and persecution of all those who disagreed with the Constantinopolitan theologians.
These populations and their ecclesiastical authorities, namely the Patriarchate of Constantinople and its dependencies in the East, i.e. the three minor institutions at Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria that were unrepresentative (as they were accepted as ‘patriarchates’ only by the tiny local minority of the Greek-speaking populations of the respective cities), wanted to monopolize the term ‘Orthodox’, but this was merely their propaganda, against those whom they called ‘Monophysites’. It would be however wrong to imagine that there was concord within the sphere of influence of the Patriarchate of Constantinople; there was discord and division instead.
Caesarea of Cappadocia (Kayseri): the city walls erected by Justinian in the middle of 6th c. The early Islamic conquests were stopped in the Taurus and Anti-Taurus mountains beyond Cappadocia. The bulk of the Eastern Roman population was centered between Caesarea and Smyrna (Izmir) whereas Cappadocia was the holy land of Eastern Roman Christianity.The rupestrian Cappadocian Art: one of Christianity’s most stupendous contributions to ArtTypical sample of rupestrian Cappadocian ArtThe highland of Cappadocia where many hundreds of cells and churches have been built and hewn in the rock.Caesarea: The basis of the Eastern Roman defense against the Islamic Caliphate for more than 400 years
The new theological-Christological dispute revolved around the ‘energy’ and the ‘will’ (thelesis) of Jesus, in the sense of whether they were one or two (human and divine) and, if two, what the relationship of the two energies or two wills was. As a matter of fact, it was the resurgence of the old dispute (about the ‘nature’ (physis) of Jesus), which had given birth to what we now call Miaphysitism/Monophysitism.
This new division concerned mainly vast populations living in the central provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire, namely Anatolia (Turkey), Constantinople, the Balkan Peninsula, southern and eastern Italy, Sicily, and Carthage. The division had already reached the top of the imperial structure, as Emperor Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople were accused of Monoenergism and Monothelitism. And the fact that Heraclius got married with his niece Martina (as second wife) unleashed an abysmal hatred against him from the part of the uncompromising ‘Orthodox’ theologians, monks and priests, as they viewed the marriage as incestuous.
This, briefly presented, was the situation in which the two great empires, the Eastern Romans and the Sassanid Iranians, found themselves in the eve of the battles that ended with the loss of the eastern provinces of the former and the final dissolution of the latter. As I said in the last paragraph of the EXCURSE I: HISTORICAL FOCUS, there has to be an academic focus on interdisciplinary studies and research, which will certainly unveil many points and elements of common faith shared by Muslims and followers of other religions (notably Manicheans) or Christian denominations (notably Miaphysitic/Monophysitic and Nestorian). This will greatly impact our understanding of the Eastern Roman and the Iranian defeats, because it may reveal that these early battles (and the Battle of Yarmouk was only one) had been already won before they were fought; furthermore, it will also explain why the situation, which arose as a consequence of these battles, proved to be irreversible for many long centuries.
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E. The demographic structure of the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire and of the Western Iranian provinces: the Aramaeans
No scholar examined in detail the demographic structure of the populations that inhabited the central territories of the early Caliphate outside Hejaz and Yemen. This has much to do with the above EXCURSE II: ETHNO-LINGUISTIC & RELIGIOUS FOCUS. A detailed demographic study covering the period 224-750 CE would reveal that the bulk of the Aramaean populations living in the Western Iranian provinces and in the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire were
1- ethnically different from the nations that ruled both empires (the Greek-speaking Eastern Romans and the Persians);
2- religiously opposed to the official imperial religions of both empires;
3- systematically persecuted and marginalized by both imperial administrations and armies;
4- detrimentally devastated by the incessant wars fought between the two empires, because the ordinary battlefield was precisely located in their own lands, namely the Western Iranian provinces and the eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire (and consequently the bulk of the populations of the ruling nations, namely the Greek-speaking Eastern Romans and the Persians, was not significantly affected by these wars); and
5- linguistically very close to the Arabs of Hejaz, because in fact Arabic was a southern Syriac dialect and the Arabic writing derived from Syriac Aramaic.
Ctesiphon: the remaining part of the then world’s most magnificent palace. Taq-i Kisra (or Al Mada’in) was the Sassanid palace in Mesopotamia and the archway is the largest single-span vault of unreinforced brickwork in the world. One of the best samples of pre-Islamic Aramaean-Iranian Art.In fact, Ctesiphon (Tesifun) in today’s central Iraq was an enormous agglomeration involving four cities; one of them, Seleucia, known as Mahoze in Aramaic, was the worldwide center of Nestorian Christianity.The Great Mosque of Damascus is a masterpiece of Aramaean Art.
F. The central provinces of the Islamic Caliphates: the lands of the Aramaeans.
No scholar noticed that, in addition to the aforementioned points, for about five (5) centuries (661-1258), the central regions of the Islamic Caliphates (Umayyad or Abbasid) were exactly the lands of the Aramaeans. The first Islamic capital was at Madinah, but this was soon terminated, as the Umayyad dynasty was based in the Aramaean city par excellence: Damascus. The determinant impact of the Aramaean universities, academies, monasteries and scriptoria (notably those of Urhoy/Edessa, Nisibis/Nusaybin, Tur Abdin, Mahoze/Ctesiphon, and Kerkha/Kirkuk) on the formation of the Islamic educational, academic, intellectual and scientific life changed totally the backward, uncivil and primitive environment in which prophet Muhammad’s preaching was undertaken.
The Sassanid Empire of Iran in its greatest extent at 621 CEHeraclius’ campaigns’ 611-628
This historical process and development made of the early Arab fighters, the so-called Sahaba, a marginal element that played almost no role in the History of Islamic Civilization. In other words, the Islamic Civilization in its early stage was clearly an Aramaean – Iranian civilization with significant Coptic, Yemenite and Jewish contributions; at a later stage, Berber, Turanian, African and Indus River Valley contributions to the Islamic civilizations have also been attested. However, there was never an ‘Arab civilization’ or -as per the French Orientalist forgers- “une civilisation arabo-musulmane”.
This automatically cancels the theoretical importance of the early Islamic conquests that are absurdly amplified and incommensurately over-magnified by both Western scholars and Islamic terrorists; in fact, the real winners were the inhabitants of the central regions of the Islamic Caliphates, i.e. the Aramaeans, who saw others fighting for their cause (to get rid of the double, Eastern Roman and Sassanid Iranian, yoke), for the transfer of the imperial capital into their land, and for the establishment of an imperial elite manned basically by them. In addition to the Aramaeans, the Persians and other Iranians and Turanians managed also to make their way into the new imperial administration. But prophet Muhammad had never spoken about an … ‘Islamic’ empire….
G. Lack of historical criticism in Islamic Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies
Taking all the aforementioned determinant parameters into account, reading the historical sources from the viewpoint of historical criticism, and viewing the historical facts in the light of the hitherto unevaluated critical factors, modern scholars can come up with a totally different interpretation/interrelation of sources and a dramatically contrasting reconstitution of the historical past, which would be diametrically opposed to the nonsense of military experts, who focus exclusively on battle techniques, and to the absurd and paranoid, pseudo-religious belief, as per which ‘god’ was involved in the events that took place in the 630s and 640s and shook the world between the Mediterranean, the Indus River valley, and Central Asia. Historical criticism of all sources relating to these events is indispensable and inevitable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_criticism
Hadhrat Ali’s tomb in Najaf; Ali ibn abi Taleb (599-661) was designated as the first caliph, but after meeting fierce opposition, he was accepted as the fourth caliph. The early divisions of the small Muslim community after the death of Prophet Muhammad are an extra reason for historians to apply today extensive historical criticism and to reject the absolutely reconstructed and erroneous version of History.The tomb of the 3rd imam Hussein ibn Ali (626-680) at Kerbala. The sons of Ali had to become caliphs in his stead. But the grandson of prophet Muhammad (Hussein) was slaughtered by the son of prophet Muhammad’s worst enemy (Mu’awiya ibn Abī Sufyan / Muawiyah son of Abu Sufyan). If this situation does not impose extensive historical criticism, this means that today’s fake academics receive orders from the powers that be as regards what to study, what not to explore, and how to investigate the topics of their research. Yet, what happened in Kerbala (680 CE) illuminates very well what occurred after the Hudaybiyah treaty when Abu Sufyan rushed to Palestine to meet Emperor Heraclius and deceive him.
III. The astounding scarcity of contemporaneous sources
The first serious difficulty that every modern historian faces, when dealing with the early Islamic conquests, is the extreme scarcity of contemporaneous historical sources. A recent and highly commendable scholarly publication, titled ‘Seeing Islam as Others saw it: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam’ (by prof. Robert G. Hoyland), enumerates ca. 140 different authors, manuscripts, texts or inscriptions (categorized as a. sources; b. apocalypses and visions; c. martyrologies; d. chronicles and histories; and e. apologies and disputations) that involve various narratives in Syriac Aramaic, Coptic, Greek, Armenian, Middle Persian, Christian Arabic, Jewish Aramaic, Latin and Chinese primary sources, which date back to the period between 620 and 780 CE.
As it can be easily understood, most of the above mentioned texts were not written with the specific purpose to detail the battles and the events that took place in the area under study in the 630s and the 640s; consequently, their mention of facts and their references to episodes were rather brief, because the main scope of the narrative was other. The Eastern Roman chronicler and monk Theophanes the Confessor (758-817) presented the longest description of the events by an Eastern Roman author. His text is to be found in Medieval Greek and Latin translation: J. P. Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, cviii (vol.108, col.55-1009). But when Theophanes wrote his venerated Χρονογραφία (Chronographia), at least 150 years had passed after the Battle of Yarmouk was fought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophanes_the_Confessor
Still this is fine if compared with the Muslim Arabic sources; the scarcity of 7th c. CE Islamic sources is spectacular. The Islamic sources of that period are much scarcer than the non-Islamic sources. Even worse, as the Arabs of Hejaz were not civilized and kept no historical records of their otherwise primitive and therefore dreary societies, a long formative period had to first pass, until -under clear Aramaean, Persian, Coptic and Jewish guidance- some rudiments of historiography be formed.
Most of the first, important historians of Islamic times were of non-Arab origin:
1- Muhammad ibn Ishaq (704-767) was the grandson of an Aramaean young boy held captive in a Christian monastery in Shetata (Ayn al Tamr) in Mesopotamia;
2- Al Waqidi (747-823) was the son of a Persian lady of noble ancestry whose family introduced letters, arts and music to uncivil and primitive Hejaz;
3- Tabari (or rather Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari/ محمد بن جرير الطبري; 839-923) was an Iranian born in the southern coastlands of the Caspian Sea (Tabaristan), a location to which he owes the name by which he became widely known. Tabari’s Chronography was not different from the Eastern Roman historiographical tradition, as he started his narrative from the Creation. Tabari accumulated an enormous, unprecedented documentation, and he mentioned explicitly his sources for each and every part of his colossal text (a recent, unilingual English translation needed 40 volumes of ca. 300 pages each to be published), making it unattractive to the non-specialists. But Tabari wrote no less than 230 years after the Battle of Yarmouk was fought.
The situation is even worse, when it comes to Islamic religious, theological, biographical, and hagiographical literature. The earlier manuscripts that survived down to our days date back to the 8th, 9th and 10th c., while few existing exceptions are in truly fragmentary condition and cannot be taken as ‘proofs’ properly speaking.
The scarcity of the contemporaneous sources makes the interdisciplinary research imperative for the case of the early Islamic conquests and for the study of the first decades of caliphs’ rule. The contrast or the agreement between two different sources and the often divergent perspectives offered can help drastically stimulate the research orientation and push scholars toward hitherto unidentified areas, which may then grant a far better understanding of the historical facts than present-day clichés do.
The Teaching of Jacob (Διδασκαλία Ἰακώβου/Didaskalia Iakobou; Doctrina Jacobi) is an example in this regard; preserved partially in Medieval Greek manuscripts and integrally in Latin, Arabic, Ge’ez and Slavonic translations, the text consists in a debate among Jews as regards their eventual conversion to Christianity. It seems to be dated back to 634 CE, and it provides some of the earlier references to the Islamic conquests. In fact, it contradicts all Islamic sources, because it describes prophet Muhammad (without naming him) as waging wars in Palestine. However, the brief excerpt that concerns these facts makes state of an alliance between Palestinian Jews and the Arab armies. On the other hand, those among the Palestinian Jews, who had converted to Christianity (or rather were forced to), saw in the person of the ‘warrior prophet’ the Antichrist and even expected the imminent return of the Christ, also regretting that it took them long to identify Jesus with the Biblical Messiah.
The Syriac ‘Chronicle of 640’, written by Thomas the Presbyter, consists in a particular Christian Chronography down to the year 640 CE; the scribe, who copied the manuscript ca. 85 years later (724 CE), added an extra text containing the list of the Umayyad caliphs, who had reigned until that year. The Chronicle contains critical references to the early Islamic attacks and conquests, also stating that an enormous bloodshed followed the battle “between the Romans and the Tayyaye of Muhmd (the Arabs of Muhammad)”, which took place on 4th February 634 CE in Palestine, east of Gaza. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_the_Presbyter
Two years later (636 CE), the Syriac ‘Chronicle of 640′ mentions explicitly the Sassanid Iranian debacle (without however naming the Battle of Qadissiyyah) and the subsequent arrival of the Islamic armies in NE Mesopotamia and notably Mardin (today in SE Turkey), which was the religious capital of the Tur Abdin Aramaean Miaphysitic/Monophysitic monasticism; these events also caused great bloodshed there. However, by dating these events in 636 CE {year 947, indiction 9, of the Seleucid Era (starting 312-311 BCE)}, the author makes it impossible for us to date the Battle of Yarmouk in 636, which is nowadays the tendency of several scholars who rather follow Theophanes’ text. On the contrary, Tabari makes it very clear that the Battle of Yarmouk occurred days after the death of Abu Bakr in August 634 CE.
Another brief and fragmentary inscription written on a blank page of a 6th c. Syriac copy of the Gospel of Mark makes state of the failure of the Eastern Roman army to properly defend the eastern regions of the empire; the same expression is used in Syriac (Tayyaye of Muhmd), but the dating is arbitrary. The inscription may well have been written in the 630s, but we cannot specify when exactly. Modern scholars have the tendency to deliberately mistrust the historical authors in order to fabricate the version of historiography that pleases them, and that is why several specialists assumed that the inscription’s author mistook Gabitha for Yarmouk; the inscription mentions a battle between the Eastern Romans and the Muslims in Gabitha (Jabiyah, in Syria) and the modern scholars translate it as ‘Yarmouk’ (in Jordan). It would be however more interesting to focus on similarities and dissimilarities between Syriac and Arabic, because practically speaking the same noun (Gabitha, Jabiyah) ended up having two totally different meanings. If one applies Syriac reading to the Quranic text before vocalization, the surprises may be phenomenal.
IV. Critical incidents during the Battle of Yarmouk
Tabari starts his narration of the events of the year 13 AH (634-635) with the Battle of Yarmouk; it expands on the illness and the subsequent death of Abu Bakr later. This cancels automatically the falsely reconstructed entry of the Wikipedia that dates the event back to 636 CE. Tabari’s two previous units are:
– Those who say Abu Bakr led the pilgrimage
– Those who say Umar led the pilgrimage
It is quite interesting that, in the introductory text for the events of the year 13 AH (before the description of the Battle of Yarmouk), Tabari states clearly that Abu Bakr, after his return from Mecca to Madina (when the hajj was completed), prepared the armies to be sent to Syria. Tabari narrates the developments, based on many different chains of earlier sources. There were many recruits of Yemen, because the Yemenites had recently accepted Islam (630 CE). So, even in these early battles, we cannot speak of ‘Arab armies’, but of Arab and Yemenite armies; the Yemenites are a Semitic nation, but as different from the Arabs as the Jews are from the Aramaeans, and pre-Islamic Yemenite languages and writings were very different from Arabic.
At this point, one has to point out that, before and after the death of prophet Muhammad (632), the early Islamic state in Hejaz, Yemen, Oman and the desert was in a tumultuous situation and incessant rebellions were exploding every now and then here and there, which means that the Islamic army units were in continuous readiness. However, despite this fact, the preparations for the dispatch of the army to the southern confines of Palestine and Syria, as narrated by Tabari, seem to have been rudimentary. In other words, I want to state that, for an event of so cataclysmic importance, the preparations were minimal.
This can only mean one thing: there were ongoing communications and coordination with Aramaeans based in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia as regards a) attrition activities that they would possibly undertake against the Eastern Roman armies, b) defection of Aramaean soldiers from the Eastern Roman armies, and c) public opinion preparation for the forthcoming arrival of the Islamic armies and for the acceptance of the early Islamic faith (which was not what people think today that Islam is). And these developments (in Syria, and not in Hejaz) are exactly what made the difference, irrespective of the battle outcome. Otherwise, an early Islamic victory and invasion could be met with local population resistance and then the dispatch of another imperial army from Constantinople or Cappadocia would demolish once forever the initial state structure that the Arab and Yemenite armies may have imposed for a year or two in Damascus, Emessa (Homs), Caesarea Maritima, and Jerusalem.
Four separate armies were dispatched from Madina at the same time and each of them took a different road, but when they reached the region of Yarmouk River, they decided to unite, because the Eastern Romans outnumbered them. The same tactic was followed by the Eastern Romans. In some early skirmishes a Muslim force under Khālid ibn Saʿīd was defeated. Tabari states that the two armies encamped at a relatively close distance from one another without fighting for several months.
At that point, Tabari gives the date of Abu Bakr’s death, namely in the middle of the month Jumadah al Akhirah of the Islamic calendar (16 August 634), and specifies that the event took place “ten days before the victory (in the battle of Yarmouk River)”. It is noteworthy that prophet Muhammad’s worst enemy and late convert to Islam Abu Sufyan bin Harb accompanied the army and was appointed as the ‘preacher’ (qass). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q%C4%81%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%A3
During the description of the battle, Tabari mentions the arrival of the messenger from Madinah, namely the rider who announced the death of Abu Bakr only to Khalid bin Walid, the army leader, keeping it secret from all the fighters for obvious reasons. Tabari narrates also discussions that took place in intervals between Khalid bin Walid and George (Jurjah bin Budhiyah; also mentioned as Jarajis), one of the commanders of the Eastern Roman armies, who finally accepted Islam, performed a brief Islamic prayer (only two prostrations; rak’atayn), and then fought with the Muslims against the Eastern Roman army.
At another point, Tabari mentions an incident between Al-Ashtar (Malik bin al Harith al Nakha’iy, also known as Malik Al-Ashtar; a Yemenite origin Muslim) and ‘a man of the Romans’, who suggested a single combat with any Muslim fighter – a challenge that Al-Ashtar accepted. After the two combatants exchanged many blows, Al-Ashtar said to the ‘Roman’ opponent: “Take that, because I am a youngster from the Iyad tribe”! The ‘Roman’ fighter responded: “May God increase the number of people like you among my people; because, by God, if you were not of my people, I would have supported the Romans (meaning the Eastern Romans), but now I will not help them”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malik_al-Ashtar
The hills around the Yarmouk riverYarmouk RiverMaps and diagrams about historical developments are useless, as they only offer information of one dimension; one grasps the reality as regards the Battle of Yarmouk only when understanding that the outright majority of the local Aramaean populations passionately desired and wished for an Eastern Roman defeat, expecting the Muslim warriors as liberators. This occurred not because these populations believed in the faith preached by prophet Muhammad, but due to their need to use the Muslim armies in order to get rid from the tyrannical Eastern Roman rule. This truth has been systematically obscured by Western historians who came up with cheap propaganda and empty rhetoric, in order to repeat the divisive clichés that are necessary to the criminal colonial regimes of the West.
Incidents like the aforementioned totally change the image that modern scholars have created as distortion of the historical reality. The Islamic army did not actually need to be numerous; the battlefront would not be the most critical location as regards the battle outcome. Even more so, because if the first battle had been lost, the second would have been victorious in any case!
V. The true dimensions of the Battle of Yarmouk and of its outcome
The linguistic affinity between Aramaeans and Arabs was such that we can easily infer that most of the Islamic fighters could easily communicate in the language of a sizeable part of the Eastern Roman army (the Aramaean soldiers recruited from the lands of today’s SE Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine). There is no doubt about the knowledge and use of Syriac Aramaic among Arabs, due to their long professional involvement across the frankincense and spice trade routes. Even more importantly, the well-documented diffusion of Christianity among the Arabs bears automatically witness to their great skills of Syriac Aramaic in terms of reading comprehension, listening comprehension, written composition, and usage. How close to prophet Muhammad may this situation have been? Extremely close!
The cousin of his first wife, a learned man named Warraqah (: lit. ‘paper’) ibn Nawfal was a Christian convert. The religiosity of those days was such that we can safely claim that Khadijah’s cousin was reading every day excerpts from the Peshitta (the Syriac Bible). To all those, who discuss issues pertaining to prophet Muhammad’s education, knowledge and familiarity with Christological disputes, although it is certain that Khadijah’s husband -in young age- traveled repeatedly to territories of the Eastern Roman Empire (where he may have had month-long discussions with monks, theologians and learned merchants), the easiest response would be:
– Already in Mecca, there were Peshitta copies of the Bible, in the small houses of prophet Muhammad’s relatives!
Peshitta manuscripts with miniaturesAramaean Art of the Book
Also many Aramaeans involved in the trade between Yemen and the Mediterranean could communicate in the provincial Hejaz dialect that we now call ‘Quranic Arabic’. Language issues are mentioned in the Quran, and not without reason. In fact, Arabic sounded like a rough and uncouth dialect to the Aramaeans of Damascus or Antioch, two great cities each of which had larger population than the totality of the (Hejaz and desert) Arabs. On the other hand, the lexicographical poverty of pre-Islamic Arabic, if compared to the treasure of Syriac Aramaic (which also contained loans from other languages), was viewed by the Hejaz Arabs as ‘linguistic purity’; this situation led them to the aberration that their dialect was more ‘ancient’ or more ‘original’, whereas in fact it was more ‘isolated’ and more arid than Syriac Aramaic. And this situation is reproduced nowadays when people, who are well versed in the Quranic text (which stays close to the pre-Islamic Arabic’s ‘purity’, although it is far more elaborate), try to read Ibn Sina’s Al-Isharat wa al-Tanbihat; they fail to grasp anything.
The religious-cultural similarity between the Arabs, who had just accepted prophet Muhammad’s preaching, and the Christian Aramaeans (either Nestorian or Miaphysitic/Monophysitic) was even more stupendous. Of course, when it comes to religion, tiny differentiations are known to have been reasons of terrible strives and wars, but in this case, there was a tremendously different issue. The Arabs had already rejected their idolatry and polytheistic concepts in order to adopt a faith that had a great number of common points with both, Nestorian and Miaphysitic / Monophysitic Christianity. In other words, they had made the first step in the direction of Miaphysitic/Monophysitic and Nestorian Christianity, and this was how the Christian Aramaeans viewed them; of course, to some Aramaean monks, the Arabs were perceived as heretic, but still this is far ‘better’ than just ‘heathens’.
The truly negative view of Islam was particular only to Constantinople and to Rome; but this detrimental judgment of Islam had basically imperial and material motives; in other words, Muhammad ‘was’ for the imperial ruling class the Antichrist, because his religious system was effective in seriously and irreversibly damaging their imperial posture, material benefits, and ecumenical appeal. Suddenly, the major challenges of 300 years of Christian imperial rule (namely Arius, Eutyches and Nestorius) that the Constantinopolitan theologians had managed to overcome appeared to be extremely weak and minor compared with the latest: Muhammad.
The difference was simple; the earlier challenges (namely Arius, Eutyches and Nestorius) emanated from within the Roman Empire, and the Constantinopolitan elite proved to be able to squelch them, oppressing and persecuting leaders and followers of the ‘heresies’. But Muhammad emanated from outside the Roman Empire. He early managed to secure an independent basis for his faith, and thence he attacked the Eastern Roman provinces that were inhabited by populations, which overwhelmingly rejected the Constantinopolitan doctrine; it was only normal for these populations to massively opt for the standard bearers of the new faith.
In fact, they perceived the arrival of the Muslim armies as liberation from the Roman – Constantinopolitan tyranny. The Anti-Muhammadan rhetoric of the Medieval Latin sources is merely an evil propaganda of the losers; the reality is simple: either they accepted Islam or remained Monophysitic, Nestorian, Gnostic or Manichaean, the Aramaeans, who constituted the quasi-totality of the local populations in Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and the southern coastland of the Persian Gulf, did not rebel against the rule of the Caliphate. And the Arab rulers accepted the importance of the lands of the Aramaeans, and that’s why they abandoned their marginal towns and sketchy villages in Hejaz and set up their capitals in the lands of the Aramaeans.
After all, this new doctrine appeared at the time as merely a new Christological dispute and heresy, and its followers were few and originated from lands that had never been historically important and which remained historically unimportant. But the loss for the theological elites of Constantinople and Rome was abysmal; in fact, pretty much like Constantinople was the New Rome, Damascus and Baghdad were meant to be the Final Rome. That is why Arius, Eutyches and Nestorius were never called ‘the Antichrist’, but prophet Muhammad was!
The Umayyad Mosque at Damascus: a masterpiece of Aramaean ArtGrand Mosque of Damascus: the spectacular mosaics in the arcade around the iwan reveal the splendor of the Aramaean Art.
At this point, I terminate the present, first article of the series; in a forthcoming article, I will reveal other critical points explicitly mentioned in the historical sources that modern Western scholars sulphurously disregard, conceal or misinterpret only to advance their historical forgery and intellectual fallacy; in this they are imitated and followed by the disreputable, ignorant and vicious, pseudo-Muslim sheikhs, imams, professors, muftis, qadis and preachers, who have been fabricated and put in place by the English and French colonials in full disruption of the Islamic historical continuity. Yet, these -widely unknown- points help us first achieve a deep and comprehensive understanding of the facts that took place in the 620s-630s and then get the real picture of the entire historical process without the smokescreen of today’s misplaced version of historiography.
In fact, what most people believe today as History of Islamic Conquests and Early Islamic History is entirely false. It is a fairy tale that turns a) most of the Westerners into absurd Muhammad-haters and Islam-deniers and b) most of the Muslims into useful-idiots and naïve believers of a pseudo-Islamic theological doctrine that has nothing in common with the religion preached by prophet Muhammad and ever since advocated by hadhrat Ali and his descendants. It is not a matter of Westerners accepting Islam and Muslims accepting Christianity as faith, but as historical process. Islam was not preached by prophet Muhammad in order to be imposed worldwide. That’s why both groups need to first interpret Emperor Heraclius’ evident reluctance to fight against the Islamic armies. This was the only man in the world who, before meeting with prophet Muhammad’s personal envoy Dahyah al Kalbi, encountered his worst enemy.
Excerpts from my correspondence with an ignorant Pan-Arabist Tunisian reader about Ancient Egypt, Punt (Somalia), and ‘Arabia’, a nonexistent land in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE
Question
Many thanks dear Friend for your long email,
I’m from Sfax, and by chance I worked about Ramsenites a kind of stories widely spread in north africa. You are specialized also in old languages and I have a question about the representation in old egypt about Amoon sun-rise coming from the east Arabia? with smell of perfume and myrrh, is it true that rulers of old egypt were from yemen? So by the way what is the new traduction of this word in hieroglyphic (Cf. enclosed)
Response
The picture that you sent me shows how vicious the colonial, Egyptological – Orientalist academics of France can be; they write a fake translation to confuse the readers and the students, and in the footnotes they try to say indirectly the truth, but end up in other lies! It is hypocritical, inane, inhuman and Satanic.
There is no ‘Arabia’ in any hieroglyphic text of the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st millennium BCE; and there is no Arabia in the text that you provide me with. The footnote includes another wrong word, e.g. Orient, but the vicious and criminal French pseudo-scholar writes ‘Arabia’ and ‘Orient’ in order to avoid the bitter truth. The word written in Hieroglyphics is not Arabia and is not Orient. It is Punt, and Punt is today’s Somalia. Exemplary dishonesty and premeditated confusion! I keep the document to include it in a denunciation of the Western pseudo-scholarship! Great example of viciousness!
If you want to familiarize with Classical Egyptian, please download the Pdf and use it extensively; there may be few minor amendments but the concise and systematic work is unmatched.
If you want to personally crosscheck the word, go the second section of the dictionary (English / Classical Egyptian) and turn on page 658 (of the Pdf document)!
The first mention of Arabs goes back to the Annals of the Assyrian Emperors of the 9th c. BCE, Same for the Sabaean (Sheba) Yemenites, who are not Arabs, but clearly distinct from them. As a matter of fact, the northern part of the peninsula belonged to the Assyrians and the Babylonians; as ‘Yathribu’ was on the mountains, the last Babylonian kings (6th c. BCE) had their summer palace there.
You also mention other topics; frankincense and myrrh were imported from the Red Sea coast and Somalia (Punt). There was strong Egyptian presence in 2nd BCE Somalia and the Hatshepsut’s Expedition to Punt highlights the importance of that land, which was also called Ta Netsheru (Ta Netjer), i.e. ‘the land of God’.
Some translate Netsheru as Gods, and the grammatical form is truly plural; but it does not mean ‘gods’ (except for the Egyptian polytheists like Queen Hatshepsut herself whose Satanic Theban high priests were the first in the world to conceive the evil theory of Theogamy); Netsheru means ‘the divine powers’.
Last, the Egyptians as Hamites did not originate from Yemen. Of course, there is a time honored Ancient Egyptian tradition as per which the Egyptians originated from Northern Sudan and more specifically Karima, which was Napata, the capital of the Cushitic state. But I reject this; it is merely Theban, anti-Heliopolitan propaganda of the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE. You can’t find the idea earlier.
Answer
Many thanks for your mail,
The most important thing in your email is that in your point of view in old Egypt there was no geographic word for Arabia an eastern land at less than 200 km. Perhaps it can confort the hypothesis that actual Egypt and Arabia were the same land !
Salutations
Second Response
If you want, we can continue our conversation in French or Arabic (I am ashamed that my Berber is rudimentary) because I realize that to some extent you misread. I did not write that “in my point in Ancient Egypt (I never use the false term ‘Old Egypt’) there was no geographic word for Arabia”. I stated a fact. You cannot find any word in Hieroglyphic, Hieratic and early Demotic Egyptian about Arabia or Arabs. In late Demotic texts, you may find a few.
It seems that your ignorance of History matches your cluelessness in Geography! You make nonsensical considerations about distant lands. Basics in Historical Geography – which you also never studied – are enough for anyone to understand that people move to faraway places (like Somalia for 2nd millennium BCE Egypt), if there is an interest, whereas they don’t move to nearby places (like the arid, empty and useless mountains of Hejaz) when there is absolutely no interest.
As we know that the territory around Yathribu belonged successively to 1st millennium BCE Assyrians, Babylonians and Iranians, we realize that the Egyptians would have to make wars against greater powers in order to reach that land which for them was useless, whereas of the Asiatic empires it was merely an extra territory at their circumference. This covers the period 8th – 4th c. BCE.
As I told you, the first mention of tribes called ‘Aribi’ and known to be moving in Northern Hejaz dates back to the times of the Assyrian Emperor Shalmaneser III. At that time, there was no land called Arabia, and no text dating to those days or before mentions that name. It became later known as geographical term describing part of Hejaz, when those barbarians settled. Even Alexander the Great, who went as far as Siwah in the West, as far as Niwt / Thebes (Luxor) in the South, and as far as Central Asia and India in the East, did not give a damn to invade the useless, arid and cursed land of those barbarians.
Then the Ptolemies did not find any reason to act otherwise. In the Ptolemaic period, the geographical term by extension covered the entire peninsula but the northern part of the Hejaz belonged to the Aramaean Nabataean Kingdom of Rekem / Petra (down to the area which is today called Madain Saleh and whch was the great Aramaean Nabataean necropolis – nothing the contemporaneous Arab barbarians could ever build even in their wildest dream!), whereas from the whereabouts of Najran further to the South, Southeast, East, and Northeast were located the different Yemenite states, i.e. Qataban, Sheba (Sabaeans – not ‘Sabians’), Himyar, Awsan, Hadhramaut and Oman.
In the second half of the 1st c. CE, the famous text ‘Periplus of the Erythraean / Red Sea’ (at those days, ‘Red sea’ meant a) what we call now ‘Red Sea’, b) the Persian Gulf, and c) the entire Indian Ocean) describes extensively the chaotic and barbaric situation of central Hejaz (proper Arabia), offering warning to navigators and merchants to sail far from that cursed coast. You will find it translated and commented here:
Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis, Colonial Biases in Support of Barbaric Arabia, and Against Civilized Yemen https://www.academia.edu/23145558/Prof._Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis_Colonial_Biases_in_Support_of_Barbaric_Arabia_and_Against_Civilized_Yemen
The above explains what was difficult for a non-specialist like you to grasp.
As regards your last sentence, namely that Civilized Egypt, which has always been located in Africa, and Barbaric Arabia, which has always been Asia’s most worthless and useless spot, ‘were the same land’, I can guarantee to you that this is the world’s most ludicrous, most mendacious, and more Satanic sentence ever uttered, and I urge you to liberate yourself from this paranoia as soon as you can. Otherwise, from neuro-scientist you will turn to neuro-patient. It’s a pity!
This sort of distortions have been subtly diffused by Zionists among the idiotic, ignorant and uneducated masses of the colonial constructions in order to faster bring their dismemberment, destruction and ultimate elimination. As all these useless and fake countries were cut off the Ottoman Empire and created to prepare the elimination of their populations, their end comes now close. You surely need to go through the following: https://www.academia.edu/26064731/Why_Former_Ottoman_Provinces_cannot_become_Proper_States_-_By_Prof._Muhammad_Shamsaddin_Megalommatis
The following text is a response sent to an email dispatched to me by the Chairman of the exiled Oromo Parliamentarians who struggle for the Independence and Self-determination of the 5 millennia long Kushitic Ethiopian Nation of the Oromos.
The Hamitic – Kushitic Oromo Nation – due to criminal, inhuman and evil persecution conceived by the colonial powers (France, England and America) and executed by the colonially promoted barbaric and incestuous pseudo-Christian Abyssinians – lost their kingdoms and were engulfed within the Cemetery of Nations Fake Ethiopia, which consists in the world’s most tyrannical realm and the location of the world’s more abhorrent, more enduring, and more multifaceted genocides. There are more than 45 million Oromos in Abyssinia (Fake Ethiopia) and Kenya today, despite the notorious and pathetic falsehood propagated by Wikipedia.
The present text enumerates all the major points of historical distortion and falsification carried out and diffused by the colonial academia, mass media, and diplomats, as well as by their local agents and criminal executioners, i.e. the barbaric, incestuous and Anti-Christian tribes of Amhara and Tigray (: the Abyssinians), who usurped the fair name of Ethiopia, which historically denotes the land of North Sudan and the Kushitic Nation that prospered there either in the Antiquity or in the Christian Era. Both, the Oromos and the Arabic-speaking (but not Arab) populations of Northern-Central Sudan are the descendants of Ancient Sudan’s (i.e. Ancient Ethiopia’s) Kushitic populations.
Representative photographic documentation was herewith added to the text in order to better illustrate the topic.
Refutation of historical forgeries propagated by European colonials and incestuous Abyssinians
Dear Chairman,
Thank you for your email and news!
I never watch or hear anything produced by the BBC because I know quite well that they have systematically distorted History either they present programs about Asia or they feature Africa, Europe or America.
Thanks to your email, I noticed that this video is not the actual documentary but an announcement for mere publicity.
But it is true that Axum was an Abyssinian capital, and it had nothing to do with Kush/Ethiopia, which was located at the time in the area of today’s North Sudan.
Ancient Sudan, as the true Ethiopia (or Kush), and its great past
Kush/Ethiopia was a millennia-long civilization; its three main periods of rise cover the three main stages:
1) Kerma Civilization (2300-1500 BCE),
(Kerma Deffufa, North Sudan)
2) Napata/Karima Civilization (which is mainly called Kushitic Civilization: 800 – 400 BCE) and
Napata (Karima & Jebel Barkal, North Sudan)
3) Meroe/Bagrawiyah Civilization (which is mainly called Meroitic Civilization and corresponds to what Ancient Greeks & Romans called ‘Ethiopia’: 400 BCE – 350 CE).
Meroe, Capital of Ethiopia (Kush: North Sudan)
Mussawarat as Sufrah, a major city of the Meroitic Kingdom of Ethiopia in North Sudan
Wad ben Naga, a major city of the Meroitic Kingdom of Ethiopia in North Sudan
Naqa, a major city of the Meroitic Kingdom of Ethiopia in North Sudan
Kush/Ethiopia has ethnic, linguistic and cultural affinities with Kemet/Egypt, because both nations are Hamitic, like the Berbers (who are all the people living from Libya to Morocco), the Tuareg, the Haussa, and others. In fact, ancient Egyptian and Sudanese (:Ethiopian) civilizations were deeply intertwined and for the Ancient Egyptians the holiest place in the world was Napata (today’s Karima in North Sudan) as the original location of god Amon of Thebes (Luxor)!
((Beware! All Wikipedia articles contain truth and lies mixed in a sophisticated manner as per the French-English-American needs. Plus: there was never such thing as a “Nubian Civilization”; there were Nubians in both Kemet/Egypt and Kush/Ethiopia, but they never developed an independent civilization, nor did they form a separate state. Only in Christian times, there was a separate state called Nobatia, which existed for several centuries. When people speak of “Nubian pyramids” in today’s Sudan, either they are ignorant and uneducated or they forge History deliberately usurping the History that belongs to present day Sudanese and Oromos and which is Kushitic/Ethiopian of nature, and not Nubian))
Axumite Abyssinia: a late, tiny state of Yemenite settlers in Africa
Axum, Capital of the Kingdom of Abyssinia (covering Pre-Christian and Christian times)
Ancient blocks with Yemenite Sabaean inscriptions from Yeha
Totally unrelated to the above was the formation of a small state around Yeha and Axum (Abyssinia) from Semtic, Yemenite settlers, who crossed the Red Sea in later ages. Yeha must have been built around the 3rd-2nd c. BCE and Axum around the 2nd-1st c. BCE, so they belong to the third (3) stage of Ancient Kushitic Civilization as per above. Earlier dates given for these settlements are academic dishonesty due to extensive bribery of scholars, which is – as you already know – a regular practice among the various dictatorial governments, Amhara- or Tigray-led, of Addis Ababa. Example: this article contains numerous deliberate errors and falsehood – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%CA%BFmt
In fact, Axum was a Yemenite kingdom on African soil; they were not Africans and for their entire pre-Islamic History, they were more concerned with Yemen than with Africa. However, despite all the lies that the Abyssinian governments and agents diffuse, the ancient Axumites had nothing in common with the Queen of Sheba (who lived around the 10th c. BCE in Yemen, when no Yemenite was on African soil). Sheba (Sabaa / Sabaeans) was actually the name of one of the most important Yemenite states; other important states were Qataban, Himyar, Awsan and Hadhramaut.
Marib, Capital of the Yemenite Kingdom of Sheba / Sabaa (Sabaeans)
Awam Temple – Yemenite Kingdom of Sheba / Sabaa (Sabaeans)
Zafar, Capital of the Yemenite Kingdom of Himyar (Himyarites)
Antiquities from Timna, Capital of the Yemenite Kingdom of Qataban
Shabwah, Capital of the Yemenite Kingdom of Hadhramaut
Antiquities from Shabwah, Capital of the Yemenite Kingdom of Hadhramaut
The Abyssinians (Habasha), who crossed the Red Sea and settled in Africa, were already mentioned in the Ancient Yemenite (Sabaean) texts as a renegade tribe (Abasat), and we have every reason to understand that they were expelled from their country of origin due to their heresy and evilness.
The Axumite Abyssinians formed indeed a small state (limited between Axum and Adulis/near Massawa) and they never reached ever up to the area of Avalites (Assab) near the Red Sea straits. On the contrary, the two Yemenite states Sheba & Himyar merged and they controlled the entire Somali coast from the Horn of Africa down to today’s Daresalaam. This vast coast was a Yemenite colony for several centuries (perhaps up to a millennium at the times of early Islam), and it was named Azania (according to the Ancient Greek text Periplus of the Red Sea, which is also known as Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and was written in the middle of the 1st c. CE: around the years 70-75 CE).
Adulis (near Massawa, the only harbor of Axumite Abyssinia), Foundations of Christian Church
The same text gives details about Meroe, which was a big continental state with links across Sahara and with Roman Egypt, but did not control today’s Sudanese coast where – according to the same text – lived the ‘Berbers’ (Kushites who were rather independent from Meroe); for this reason that coast was called Berberia.
Same origin population lived in the coast from Avalites (Assab) to the Horn itself (so the area that today corresponds to Eritrea’s southernmost part, Djibouti, Somaliland, and a small part of Puntland); that’s why in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, the area from Assab to the Horn is named as “The Other Berberia” – something that also highlights the Kushite presence in that area. Beyond the Horn, the populations were Kushitic as well: the ancestors of today’s Somalis. Simply, the term ‘Azania’ (used within the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea) seems to have rather been a ‘political’ term to designate the Yemenite (Sheba/Himyar) colony across the East African coast.
Christian Ethiopian states on Sudan’s territory & Axumite Abyssinia
Axum accepted Christianity in the early 4th c. CE. According to vicious Amhara/Tigray propaganda, Axum was ‘the first Christian state in the world’; this is a lie. The first Christian state in the world was Osroene (an Aramaean state located on part of the territory of today’s Northern Syria and Southeastern Turkey): King Abgar the 9th of Osroene (179 – 214 CE) accepted Christianity as the official religion of his country – more than 150 years before King Ezana of Axum accepted Christianity after the Aramaean Syrian Frumentius (slave, missionary, bishop) preached Christianity there. The state of Osroene was indisputably the first Christian state in the world, and in addition to the above, there are discussions about King Abgar the 8th of Osroene being eventually the King to have Christianized Osroene earlier and about King Abgar the 5th of Osroene being eventually the King to have exchanged letters with Jesus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abgar_V).
After Ezana made Axumite Abyssinia a Christian country, in coordination with the Christian Roman authorities in Alexandria and Constantinople, he attacked Meroe/Ethiopia (around 360 CE) and destroyed its capital at today’s Bagrawiyah. He then retreated after annexing the occupied territory. He then claimed that he was king of Axum and king of Ethiopia, like every other king who after invading a new land was considered to be king of that land.
However, Meroe/Ethiopia was a vast state covering most of today’s Northern Sudan’s territory. Ezana attacked Meroe’s capital from the south (probably advancing alongside Atbarah river) but the territory of Ethiopia that was occupied by Abyssinia’s Ezana was less than 20% of Ethiopia’s total area.
The claim was ridiculous and it would be tantamount to Hitler claiming to be the ruler of Soviet Union in 1942, because he only invaded part of its western territory.
However, the Abyssinian annexation of 20% of Ethiopia’s (Kush’s) territory did not last for long, and as early as the beginning of the 5th c. CE (so around the period 400-450 CE) Christian Nobatia rose in the Kushitic / Sudanese / Ethiopian North. Slightly later, a second Christian state, Makuria was formed in the Kushitic / Sudanese / Ethiopian mainland of the old Meroitic kingdom. Not much later, Christian Alodia, the third Christian Kingdom of Kush / Ethiopia / Sudan, appeared in the area around today’s Khartoum.
((There are many correct and many wrong points here:
Archaeological evidence makes it clear that all Meroitic sites were vastly depopulated after Ezana’s invasion of the small southern portion of Meroe / Ethiopia. For the rest of the 4th c. and the 5th c. CE Kush’s (Ethiopia’s) mainland in today’s North Sudan was depopulated. I interpreted this phenomenon as the massive Exodus of the ancestors of Oromos, who wanted to avoid the forced Christianization of their land and therefore left that land to find safe shelter further in the South, until they finally reached – after several steps – the highlands of today’s Oromia:
However, when the Amhara / Tigray Abyssinians use the name ‘Ethiopia’ for the country that they formed after their colonial expansion and the genocides that they perpetrated in the period 1850-1950, they forget that Ezana’s claim was politically empty (since he did not invade but only a small portion of Ethiopia) and historically void, because ‘Christian Ethiopia’ as historical term defines the three Christian Kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia, and not the small kingdom of Axum, which collapsed after the arrival of Islam during the 7th c., whereas Christian Makuria survived until ca. 1400 CE and Christian Alodia existed until 1510-1520. This means that there was Christian continuity in Sudan / Ethiopia / Kush, but not in Abyssinia.
Fresco from the Cathedral of Faras, Capital of the Christian Kingdom of Nobatia
Fresco from the Cathedral of Faras, Capital of the Christian Kingdom of Nobatia
Fresco from the Cathedral of Faras, Capital of the Christian Kingdom of Nobatia
Old Dongola (Dunqulah), Capital of the Christian Ethiopian Kingdom of Makuria, North Sudan
Old Dongola (Dunqulah), Capital of the Christian Ethiopian Kingdom of Makuria, North Sudan – Fresco of the Adoration of the Magi
Christian Ethiopian Art & Inscription from the Ethiopian Kingdom of Makuria, North Sudan
Major expansion of Alodia, the third (and southernmost) Kingdom of Christian Ethiopia (: Sudan)
Soba (Khartoum), Capital of the Christian Ethiopian Kingdom of Alodia – foundations of one of the main churches
Tombstone of the Christian Ethiopian King David, Soba (Khartoum) – Capital of Alodia
Axum Abyssinia, Agaw Kushite Kingdom, and Yekuno Amlak’s Satanic state
Almost 300 years after the disappearance of Axum, around 950 CE, in the northern part of today’s Abyssinia, the tiny Christian Agaw state was formed with Lalibela as capital and it lasted until 1270; however this was also a Kushite kingdom because the Agaw Nation is of Kushitic ethnic background. A lot of posterior traditions due to evil colonial motives have obscured the historical reality around the Agaw kingdom, but you can be sure for the following:
Lalibela, Capital of the Christian Kushitic Kingdom of Agaw in the southern extremities of the Old Abyssinian Kingdom of Axum
a. The Agaw Kingdom had no royal or ethnic connection with / continuity from Axum; all opposite claims and mentions of intermarriage are fake. The Semitic descendants of the Axum kingdom were surely among the Agaw kingdom’s subjects, but they did not belong to the ruling royal elite; they were one of the nations that lived under the Agaw scepter and we have reason to believe that they hated it too much.
Agaw kingship is totally unrelated to the posterior barbaric state launched by Yekuno Amlak. Pictorial documentation demonstrates the Kushitic identity of the Christian Kingdom of Agaw. The blood of the brave last King of the Agaw Kingdom is a curse for the Amhara & Tigray Abyssinians, heralding their total extinction.
b. The Agaw state was a small Kushitic Christian kingdom that never claimed royal or ethnic descent from the Semitic, Yemenite kingdom of Axum and never claimed to be ‘Ethiopia’ – because at those days the Ethiopian kingdoms were Nobatia, Makuria (which merged soon afterwards into one state), and also Alodia.
c. There was indeed a religious continuity between Axum and Agaw kingdoms.
d. There was never an Axumite Abyssinian text to support an eventual claim of royal Axumite descent from the Queen of Sheba & Solomon. Not one Axumite Abyssinian king ever made such a claim.
e. The Semitic Abyssinian Amhara state that was launched by Yekuno Amlak in 1270 has no royal connection with either the Axum or the Agaw kingdoms.
f. The Semitic Abyssinian Amhara state has indeed an ethnic connection with the Semitic descendants of the Axum kingdom; one part of them represents a rather direct descent from the Axumite population (Tigray), whereas the other part is characterized with a certain amalgamation with other populations (Amhara).
This state consisted in a racist entity and an oppressive mechanism against all the non-Amhara and non-Tigray subjects of its territory.
g. In striking contradiction with the Axum and the Agaw kingdoms, the barbaric state launched by Yekuno Amlak at 1270 was never a real kingdom (and much less, an empire, as the Amhara and Tigray Abyssinians have fallaciously pretended), because
i) there was not a dynastic continuity to properly ensure a real royal descent (if the so-called ‘king’ is not the son, grandson, brother, uncle, cousin or nephew of a king, if he does not even belong to the noble class, i.e. the peerage, but has a common or low descent, he can never be a king) and
ii) – more importantly – there is no notion of ‘family’ in the incestuous Amhara society, which means that there cannot be proper ‘royal’ family to offer heads of states possibly able be called ‘kings’ or ’emperors’. The sons of different lowly prostitutes who were ‘married’ to several men can never become ‘kings’ by any standards anytime anywhere in the world. That’s why the Oromo, the Hadiya, the Somali, the Kaffa and other real African kings never accepted those trashy, vulgar, incestuous Amhara or Tigray barbarians as ‘kings’ and never conceded to several demands for a ‘royal’ meeting (: a king never encounters a filthy trash like the Amhara – Tigray bogus-kings).
h. What is more unknown to most people worldwide is that there is not even religious continuity between the Axum and the Agaw kingdoms on one side and the state of Yekuno Amlak on the other side. Post-1270 ‘Christianity’ among the Amhara – Tigray incestuous tribes has nothing in common with either the Lalibela-centered Agaw Christianity or the Axum-based Old Abyssinian Christianity.
The reason is simple; with the proclamation of Yekuno Amlak’s villainous and atrocious state, a new text of fake royal propaganda appeared, ‘Kebra Negast’, which was accepted by the Abyssinians down to Haile Selassie as the epitome of the state’s nature, claims and aspirations. The book accepts Christianity in an heretic manner whereas it distorts all the basic principles of Christian morality. Furthermore, Kebra Negast propagates a great number of Anti-Christian concepts, Satanic theories, counterfeit ideas, historical fallacies, dynastic forgeries, and factual distortions that make it totally impossible for anyone accepting this text to properly be a Christian.
This is the reason the Amhara and the Tigray Abyssinian rulers never accepted Christian Catholic missionaries in their marginal, arid, tiny and ill-fated bogus-kingdom, and they always slaughtered them mercilessly. During the period 1300-1850, more Catholic priests were killed in the then tiny territory of Abyssinia than in any other part of the world, the Islamic Caliphate and other Islamic Empires included.
Two different Abyssinian claims to the Name of Ethiopia: Ezana’s and Haile Selassie’s
Finally, one must clearly make a distinction between Ezana’s claim to the title of ‘king of Ethiopia’ and the recent Abyssinian policies (that date back only to 1950s) and false pretensions that Abyssinia can be possibly called ‘Ethiopia’, which consist in sheer usurpation of a name that is totally unrelated to the Amhara and Tigray Abyssinians and their past.
King Ezana’s inscription – the Greek text
King Ezana’s claim was something normal as practice at those days. Example: Publius Cornelius Scipio was a Roman general and later consul who is often regarded as one of the greatest generals and military strategists of all time. His main achievements were during the Second Punic War (218 – 201 BCE) where he is best known for defeating Hannibal at the final battle at Zama, one of the feats that earned him the agnomen Africanus. Because he won over the African state of Carthage, he was called Scipio the ‘African’.
However, when the Abyssinian control of the small part of Ethiopian (Sudanese) territory ended few decades later and Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia rose to prominence as the three Christian states on the Ethiopian (e. g. North Sudanese) territory, any Axumite Abyssinian claim to the name of Ethiopia was purely void, fully insignificant, and practically meaningless.
As a matter of fact, the modern claim is rather relevant to Anti-Christian eschatological and messianic beliefs introduced among the Abyssinians only with the aforementioned forgery of Kebra Negast, a text that can be considered as Christian as the devious Jewish forgery of ‘Talmud’ can be described as Biblical Hebrew!
“Ethiopia shall hasten [to stretch out] her hand readily to God“
The eschatological and messianic beliefs introduced among the Abyssinians are based on a Biblical text of the Old Testament (Psalms, 67:32) in which the Septuagint Greek text reads “ἥξουσι πρέσβεις ἐξ Αἰγύπτου, Αἰθιοπία προφθάσει χεῖρα αὐτῆς τῷ Θεῷ”, which is translated in Modern English “Ambassadors shall arrive out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall hasten [to stretch out] her hand readily to God”. (http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/septuagint/chapter.asp?book=24&page=67)
{{Here I must add that you must never use the false English translation prepared by the evil, bastard and Freemason king of England James I (reign: 1603 – 1625), the so-called King James Version – KJV – because it is part of the same Satanic conspiracy that brought the Amhara and the Tigray Abyssinian invaders to your lands and provided for the 150-year long Oromo Genocide and many other genocides of subjugated African nations across Abyssinia and elsewhere. This extremely distorted translation (King James Version / KJV) serves only to diffuse confusion and falsehood and to promote the enslavement of all the nations of the world to Satan and all the filthy and evil spirits. King James I was an evil person and an accomplished Satanist, who took even the pain of writing a book titled “Daemonologie”, which is “a philosophical dissertation on contemporary necromancy and the historical relationships between the various methods of divination used from ancient Black magic. This included a study on demonology and the methods demons used to trouble men while touching on topics such as werewolves and vampires”. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemonologie) You understand, of course, that whoever diffuses the words of filthy spirits and evil demons cannot possibly be involved in the holy texts of any religion, except for the purpose of falsifying them as per the guidance given to him by the evil spirits which he serves. With reference to modern English translations of the Christian Bible, beware also of many other fake English translations that repeat the same mistakes of KJV which is not a correct and direct translation from the Ancient Greek text but from a late Jewish forgery, the so-called masoretic text of which the earlier manuscript dates back only to 9-10th c., namely more than 1000 years after the Greek text of the Hebrew Bible! More: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10035a.htm / But this is all mistaken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masoretic_Text}}
Now, why was the verse “Ambassadors shall arrive out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall hasten [to stretch out] her hand readily to God” thought to be of eschatological and messianic meaning?
A Kushitic Ethiopian Prince from Meroe & Ancestor of the Oromos speaks with Philip, one of Jesus’ disciples
This is due to the fact that there is a reference in the New Testament (Acts, 8:26-40) according to which there was an ‘Ethiopian’ prince, who while traveling in Palestine met and spoke with Philip, one of Jesus’ disciples (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_the_Apostle), and then accepted Jesus’ preaching and became Christian.
Here you have the entire narration: “26 And the angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, Arise, and go toward the south unto the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza, which is desert. 27 And he arose and went: and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship, 28 Was returning, and sitting in his chariot read Esaias the prophet. 29 Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to this chariot. 30 And Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the prophet Esaias, and said, Understandest thou what thou readest? 31 And he said, How can I, except some man should guide me? And he desired Philip that he would come up and sit with him. 32 The place of the scripture which he read was this, He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth: 33 In his humiliation his judgment was taken away: and who shall declare his generation? for his life is taken from the earth. 34 And the eunuch answered Philip, and said, I pray thee, of whom speaketh the prophet this? of himself, or of some other man? 35 Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus. 36 And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? 37 And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. 38 And he commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him. 39 And when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more: and he went on his way rejoicing. 40 But Philip was found at Azotus: and passing through he preached in all the cities, till he came to Caesarea”. (http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/new-testament/acts/8.asp)
An ancestor of the Oromos accepted Jesus centuries before the ancestors of the Amhara and Tigray Abyssinians
Miniature painting depicting Jesus’ disciple Philip and the Meroitic Ethiopian prince who accepted Jesus’ preaching and was baptized. From the Menologion of the Eastern Roman Emperor Basil II, which was compiled around the year 1000 – currently in the Vatican Library. (More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menologion_of_Basil_II)
So, the historical forgers interpret the earlier verse (Psalms, 67:32) as being a prophecy that was materialized in the person of the Ethiopian prince. As you can understand, this concerns Kush / Sudan, i.e. the Kingdom of Ethiopia with Meroe as capital which was located in today’s North Sudan. Even more so because the New Testament excerpt includes a typically Meroitic / Ethiopian word, namely Kandake (Candace), which is not a personal name, but the title itself (lit. ‘queen’) in Meroitic / Ethiopian language. This article is correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kandake
Meroitic/Kushitic/Sudanese/Ethiopian Candace: Unrelated to Abyssinians
The use of the term ‘Candace’ makes the proof even stronger that the earlier Biblical text (Psalms) prophesied indeed the Christianization of Sudan / Kush / Ethiopia, first in the form of the traveling prince, and second, few centuries after the travel of the Ethiopian Meroitic prince in Palestine, when Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia became the three Christian states of Sudan/Ethiopia.
Abyssinia in any form (Axum or posterior) is totally unrelated to this story, and tiny Axum at the time was a non Christian country and remained as such for another 300 years! No Axumite Abyssinian prince traveled to Palestine at the times of the Apostles (Jesus’ disciples) and of course, there was no Candace/Kandake in Axum at those days or any time later!
The Abyssinian claim may look absurd. But this is always the nature of forgery! When evil people and barbaric nations like the Amhara / Tigray Abyssinians try to usurp the Past and the History of civilized nations, they raise false claims and come up with incredible misinterpretations that only criminals or paranoids dare express.
Last but not the least, the whole affair of the recent claim (which started with Haile Selassie in the 1950s) involves Westerners (colonial French academia), who then convinced the fake king Haile Selassie about using the name of Ethiopia instead of Abyssinia. This has a lot to do with Freemasonic and Zionist plans and conspiracies regarding Eastern Africa; however this is rather politics and not History.
A Sudanese-Oromo alliance to overthrow the genocidal Abyssinian tyranny
The best chance for the Oromos to counterbalance and overthrow the colonial conspiracy against their nation is to
1. reach out to today’s Arabic-speaking people and rulers of Sudan,
2. help them realize that
a. they are not Arabs, but linguistically Arabized Kushites of Sudan
b. they are straight descendants of the Ancient Sudanese / Kushites / Ethiopians
c. as such they are the truly fraternal nation to the Oromos
d. the real offspring of the Ancient Sudanese / Kushites / Ethiopians are both, the Oromos (who left their land but preserved and saved their language) and the Arabic-speaking Sudanese (who preserved their land but lost their own language)
e. the real name of their land (Sudan) and of Oromia is Ethiopia / Kush and that you and they must take it back from the Abyssinians
f. the Arabization project across Africa and Asia was conceived by the three colonial powers (France, England and America) that are controlled by Freemasonry and Zionism in order to destroy the nations to which it was projected and on which it was imposed (from Morocco to Iraq), and this is the reason for all the problems and disasters that fell on each of those nations, and
g. the only means of survival of today’s Sudan is the detachment from the fallacy of Pan-Arabism and the return to the true historical identity (Kushitic – Ethiopian) that their land had for millennia, and
3. establish an Oromo – Sudanese alliance to overthrow the tribal tyranny of the Abyssinians who consist in a minority within the colonial state of Fake Ethiopia.
By Professor Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis (Μουχάμαντ Σαμσαντίν Μεγαλομμάτης)
Written on 27 1 2006 Fish Market Restaurant after 00:00 / Office after 14:00
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