This classic presents historical, archaeological, and anthropological evidence to support the theory that ancient Egypt was a black civilization.
Cheikh Anta Diop, who was born in Dakar on the 29th of December 1923 and died on the 7th of February 1986. Diop was a historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race’s origins and pre-colonial African culture.
Though Diop is sometimes referred to as an Afrocentrist, he predates the concept and thus was not himself an Afrocentric scholar. However, “Diopian thought”, as it is called, is paradigmatic to Afrocentricity.
His work was greatly controversial and throughout his career, Diop argued that there was a shared cultural continuity across African peoples that was more important than the varied development of different ethnic groups shown by differences among languages and cultures over time.
Diop did his most significant work under the tutelege of Professor Frédéric Joliot in Paris. This culminated in (Diop’s) seminal work “The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974) is one of the seminal works on African proto history and history. It makes the case that both mankind and civilization started with black people. It argues that Ancient Egypt was largely Black African in race and culture during the first 2,000 years of its civilization. When Diop first put forward his thesis his work was resoundingly debunked by white Egyptologists and anthropologists, notably Bruce Trigger and other Europeans. But Diop was persistent and his theories were brilliantly defended by him.
Now in its 30th printing, this classic presents historical, archaeological, and anthropological evidence to support the theory that ancient Egypt was a black civilization.
