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Topic subjectRE: You're all over the place...
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=22&topic_id=30351&mesg_id=30398
30398, RE: You're all over the place...
Posted by Akhenaten, Tue May-03-05 05:08 AM
I'm kind of confused by your last paragraph... Are you saying that Greek/KMT Ideologies were similar by coincedence? I apologize if I mis-understood.

"The first civilization of Europe was established on the island of Crete. It is called the Minoan Culture, after King Minos, an early legendary ruler of the island. The ancestors of the Cretans were natives of Africa, a branch of Western Ethiopians."

--John G. Jackson

Minoan Crete, the forerunner of Greek civilization, is the earliest known European high-culture. Although modest in size (170 miles east to west, thirty-five miles north to sourth), Crete exercised immeasurable influence on the Aegean archipelago, Western Asia and the Greek mainland. Throughout Crete the vestiges of
complex palaces, paved highways, aqueducts, terra-pipes for drainage, and irrigation canals provide plentiful proof of Minoan ingenuity in the areas of scientific and technical innovation. The Minoans possessed registed trademarks, uniform weights
and measures, calendrical systems based on precise astronomical observations and advanced writing systems. Interestingly enough, there were few fortifications on the island.

British archaeologist Arthur Evans (1851-1941), who conducted excavations on the island, was convinced of African migrations to ancient Crete and noted "the multiplicity of these connections with the old indigenous race of the opposite African coast." The late African-American cultural historian John G. Jackson (1907-1993) advocated the view the Minoan civilization was rooted in Africa, and believed that
the ancestors of the Minoans "dwelt in the grasslands of North Africa before that area dried up and became a great desert. As the Saharan sands encroached on their homeland, they took to the sea, and in Crete and neighboring islands set up a maritime culture."

The research team of C.H. and H.B. Hawes, the latter
of whom, like Evans, conducted important
archaeological excavations in Crete, support John
Jackson's argument, and noted that: "Anthropologists
are inclined to the view that the Neolithic people of
Crete were immigrants, and probably came from North
Africa."

Arthur Evans was convinced of North African migrations
to Neolithic Crete. He pointed out that:

"The multiplicity of these connections with the old
indigenous race of the opposite African coast, and
which we undoubtedly have to deal with in the pre
dynastic population of the Nile Valley, can in fact be
hardly explained on any other hypothesis than that of
an actual settlement in Southern Crete."

Historian H.R. Hall, also Oxford trained, shared
Evans' position on the early population of Minoan
Crete:

"While the majority of the original Neolithic
inhabitants of Crete probably came from Anatolia,
another element may well have come in oared boats from
the opposite African coast, bringing with them to the
southern plan of Messara the seeds of civilization
that, transplanted to the different conditions of
Crete, developed into the great Minoan culture, a
younger more brilliant, and less long-lived sister of
that of Egypt."

Whether the Minoan culture was more brilliant than
that of Egypt is highly questionable at best, but on
the other points Hall seems to just about to hit the
mark. Evans, again, indeed considered Egypt and Libya
as the springboards of Minoan civilization; so much so
that he structured his own Minoan chronology on that
of dynastic Egypt. He was particularly struck by the
similarities in the contents of the of the tombs of
the ancient Minoans and Egyptians:

"So numerous, in fact, are the points, of comparison
presented by the contents of these early interments
with those of pre dynastic Egypt that, far-fetched as
the conclusion might appear at first sight, I was
already some years since constrained to put forth the
suggestion that about the time of the conquest of the
lower Nile Valley by the first historic dynasty some
part of the older population had actually settled in
this southern foreland of Crete."

Gordon Childe also commented on the relations between
Crete and pre dynastic Egypt:

"At least on the Mesara, the great plain of southern
Crete facing Africa, Minoan Crete's indebtedness to
the Nile is disclosed in the most intimate aspects of
its culture. Not only do the forms of early Minoan
stone vases, the precision of the lapidaries'
technique and the aesthetic selection of variegated
stones as his materials carry on the the pre dynastic
tradition, Nilotic religious customs such as the use
of the sistrum, the wearing of amulets in the forms of
legs, mummies and monkeys, and statuettes plainly
derived from Gerzean `block figures,' and personal
habits revealed by depilatory tweezers of the Egyptian
shape and stone unguent palettes from the early tombs
and, later, details of costumes such as the
penis-sheath and loin-cloth betoken something deeper
than the external relations of commerce."

Cretan/Egyptian contacts pick up again in the
sixteenth and fifteenth centuries B.C. During the
reigns of Egyptian monarchs Makare Hatshepsut and
Thutmose III (1504-1447 B.C.) the people of Crete,
whom the Egyptians called Keftiu, were graphically
portrayed as tribute bearers on the walls of the tombs
of the Egyptian nobility.