THE TRUE ORIGIN OF EGYPT by Onyeji Nnaji

   Copied from Reality as Myth by Onyeji Nnaji

The civilization of ancient Egypt became very relevant among other reasons by its attempts to reunite the sole races of the entire human population by creating a link for the first meeting of these different races for the first time after the deluge. Egyptian civilization was the reason for the Black to meet with their western brethren, the Arabs; who had been paddled away into a distant land in the days of the Noah’s flood. This reunion made Egypt more influential and more prominent among all the nations in the African continent. 

Ethiopia, of course, should wear this colossal prominence among the nations in the Black world because of their earliest involvement with the populations on the other shore of the Red Sea, but the earliest population of Ethiopia was rather amorous and self-conscious; sharing union just for business sake. We may however say that Egypt made this prominence due to providence, economic and political organization notwithstanding. If anyone should have this line of expression, he may be correct in one sense and perhaps, wrong in another sense.

Through this influence, it became very difficult for the other side of the human population to understand the Black world beyond Egypt. Of course, we all know that it took about twelve dynasty of kingship in Egypt before the Arabs who settled in Egypt in their handful population came to have but a little information about the existence of other Black population known as Nubia. To this early population of the white race, Egypt was Africa and anything beyond Egypt could be taken a sub perennial population of people who, perhaps, are savages or quasi-Black with no mystic relevance and meta-political consciousness. To this view, all that should be known about the Black population should not go beyond Egypt and her neighbours. 

This sense of assessment continued till late twentieth century when it became apparent that the very civilization which flung Egypt to her optimal level of fame was engineered by a set of people whose origin was not Egypt. This was the biggest shock the global history had ever encountered. With the evidences unearthed by Flinders Petrie, more surprise had continued to emerge even hitherto.

Before the unveiling of these evidences, many parts of Africa had looked for several means of associating themselves with the ancient Egypt. Egypt became a compass for the trace of the history of many nations in Africa. The worst was experienced among the Nigerian Yoruba population who bemusedly intoned that they had travelled from Egypt to the ancient city of Ile Ife, ignoring the irrevocable voice of the Yoruba oral tradition. We found this loss of self in the suggestion By Olumide Lukas that the ancient Egypt was the ancestral home of the Yoruba nation. I covered my face in shame the day I read another ignorant historic acclamation made by certain scornful writers who shamelessly decided to design an origin for the Igbo nation in their trace of the origin of Onitsha. I saw the work as loosing every credence of provable research for he who claimed to be of Onitsha origin to have claimed that the Obi kingship title of the ancient Onitsha had originated from Benin. Another claim is that Benin originated from Egypt. I may not blame him too much because there is hardly any genuine representation of African history from a mulatto. 

It does not matter how long he may have spent in the African region. The Igbo race is even too hard for many home born Igbo population, let alone someone who was born in the west, though having Igbo parent, to think of conjecturing a fashionable origin for a people whose origin is beyond the ordinary. He would rather end up confusing himself and realizes his buffoonery the very day he returns home to see that the tree that serves as a pointer to his father’s compound has been hewed down.  

I took time to study the UNESCO publication series on the African history titled, General History of Africa, apart from the 2004 publication titled, The Origins of Iron Metallurgy in Africa, edited by Hamady Bocoum; virtually all the series gave due concentration on Egypt on the areas the origin of Africa was concerned. It all boils down to this centralized concept that for the definition of the African continent, the communities in the northern Africa should be used as the yardstick for measurement. It was in this light that Diop Anta, in the book, African Origin of Civilization, centred his concentration on the glory of Egypt in its heyday and concluded Egypt to be the origin of civilization. 

Had he given thoughts to the development of iron and reconcile his thought with the fact that iron production had lasted for over three centuries before the civilization of Nubia which was older than the Egyptian civilization, he would have reasoned along the possibility of a decayed civilization that predates the Egyptian civilization. On the contrary, he who claimed that Egypt had the first civilization was the same person, in the same book, who intoned that “Nubia civilization was probably the oldest” (179). Who is fooling who? I would ask. We do not expect to discuss this here since the detail of the origin of Egyptian civilizers has been discussed in Reminiscence.

Now, having this bold picture of deformed history on our minds, it becomes almost impossible to think about the existence of another population in Africa prior to the existence of the ancient Egypt. In our search for the origin of Egypt down page, it would be obvious that even Egypt; her writers and Egyptology all know that their father had migrated  from a distant place which they had never deemed fit to find. They have all read from the ancient tablets excavated in the land, especially the populous Egyptian Book of the Dead. Egypt sits on the land, Northern part of Nubia. The region referred to as Lower Egypt is the northern portion of Nubia. Sharing in the blessing accruing from the Nile River, Egypt sits on the amalgam of the blue and white Nile. It is actually a land of crescent blessed by the alluring flow of the Nile and the Red Sea. Egypt was a centre of influenced. Being dully overtaken by the glory bestowed on Egypt via the riches economic and military strength at that time, Egyptology did not deem it pressing to seek for the origin of the land, Egypt.

Attempts towards Deciphering the Peopling of Ancient Egypt 

The general acceptance, as a sequel to the work of Professor Leakey on the hypothesis of mankind’s monogenetic and African origin, makes it possible to pose the question of the peopling of ancient Egypt and even of the world in completely new terms. More than 150,000 years ago, beings morphologically identical with the man of today were living in the region of the great lakes at the sources of the Nile and nowhere else. This notion, and others which it would take too long to recapitulate here, form the substance of the last report presented by the late Dr. Leakey at the Seventh Pan-African Congress of Pre-History in Addis Ababa in 1971. It suggests that the whole human race had its origin, just as the ancients had guessed, at the foot of the mountains of the Moon. Against all expectations and in defiance of recent hypotheses, the suggestion holds that it was from this place that men moved out to people the rest of the world.

Two main results achieved by the conference were that:

(1) It restated the view that the earliest men were ethnically homogeneous and Negroes in their nature.

(2) It directly opposed the Gloger’s law, which says that warm-blooded animals evolving in a warm humid climate will secrete a black pigment. It held to the view that hence if mankind originated in the tropics around the latitude of the great lakes, he was bound to have brown pigmentation from the start and it was by differentiation in other climates that the original stock later split into different races.

By this notion, there were only two routes available through which these early men could move out to people in other continents, namely, the Sahara and the Nile valley.  From the Upper Palaeolithic to the dynastic epoch, the whole of the river’s basin was taken over progressively by these early Negroes.

From the evidence of Physical Anthropology on the Race of the Ancient Egyptians it might have been thought that, working on physiological evidence, the findings of anthropologists would dissipate all doubts by providing reliable and definitive truths. This is by no means so: the arbitrary nature of the criteria used, to go no farther, as well as abolishing any notion or conclusion acceptable without qualification, introduces so much scientific hair-splitting that there are times when one wonders whether the solution of the problem would not have been nearer if we had not had the ill luck to approach it from this angle. 

Nevertheless, although the conclusions of these anthropological studies stop short of the full truth, they still speak unanimously of the existence of a Negro race from the most distant ages of prehistory down to the dynastic period. It is not possible in this paper to cite all these conclusions; instead they will be summarized in the next subheading down page.

Robert Bauval and Thomas Brophy were of the suggestion, in their much later publication compared to when Diop Anta had written his suggestion on the peopling of ancient Egypt, that the community of bones scattered all over Yam and Nabta Playa could be the original home from where the ancestors of Egypt may have descended. The community of bones instead suggested evidence of a certain population who were overtaken by drought dropped dead in a large population. 

If the presence of the bone suggests origin for the ancient Egypt population, then what would one say over Miss Fawcett idea by considering that the Negadah skulls form a sufficiently homogeneous collection to warrant the assumption of a Negadah race. In the total height of the skull, the auricular height, the length and breadth of the face, nasal length, cephalic index and facial index this race would seem to approximate to the Negro; in nasal breadth, height of orbit, length of palate and nasal index it would seem closed to the Germanic peoples. 

Accordingly, the Pre-Dynastic Negadians are likely to have resembled the Negroes in certain of their characteristics and the white race in others. It is worth noting that the nasal indices of Ethiopians and Dravidians would seem to approximate them to the Germanic peoples, though both are black races. These measurements, which would leave an open choice between the two extremes represented by the Negro and the Germanic races, give an idea of the elasticity of the criteria employed.

An attempt was made by Thompson and Randall MacIver to determine more precisely the importance of the Negro element in the series of skulls from El’Amrah, Abydos and Hou. They divided them into three groups:

(1) Negro skulls (those with a facial index below 54 and a nasal index above 50, i.e. Short broad face and broad nose);

 (2) Non-Negro skulls (facial index above 54 and nasal index below 50, long narrow face and narrow nose),

(3) Inter- mediate skulls (assignable to one of the two previous groups on the basis of either the facial index or on the evidence of the nasal index, plus individuals’ marginal to either group). The proportion of Negroes would seem to have 24% of men and 19% of women in the early Pre-Dynastic and 25% and 28% respectively in the late Pre-Dynastic.

Kieth has disputed the value of the criterion selected by Thompson and Randall MacIver to distinguish the Negroes from the Non-Negroes’ skulls. His opinion is that, if the same criteria were applied to the study of any series of contemporary English skulls, the sample would be found to contain approximately 30% of Negroes’ types. (pp. 420-1) The converse of Kieth’s proposition could also be asserted, namely, that if the criterion were applied to the 140 million Negroes now alive in black Africa a minimum of 100 million Negroes would emerge whitewashed. It may also be remarked that the distinction between ‘Negroes, non-Negroes’ and intermediary is unclear; the fact is that ‘non-’Negroes’ does not mean of white race and ‘intermediary’ still less so. ‘Falkenburger reopened the anthropological study of the Egyptian population in a recent work in which he discusses 1,787 male skulls varying in date from the old, Pre-Dynastic to our own day.

He distinguishes four main groups. The sorting of the predynastic skulls into these four groups gives the following results for the whole predynastic period: "36% ‘Negroes, 33% Mediterranean, 11% Cro-Magnoid and 20% of individuals not falling in any of these groups but approximating either to the Cro-Magnoid or to the ‘Negroes’. The proportion of ‘Negroes is definitely higher than that suggested by Thomson and Randall MacIver, though Kieth considers the latter too high. Whether or not Falkenburger’s figures reflect reality is yet to be confirmed in the later pages. Of course, if they are accurate, the Pre-Dynastic population, far from representing a pure bred race as Elliott-Smith has said, comprised at least three distinct racial elements - over a third of ‘Negroess, a third of Mediterraneans, a tenth of Cro-Magnoids and a fifth of individuals crossbred - to varying degrees.

The point about all these conclusions is that despite their discrepancies the degree to which they converge proves that the basis of the Egyptian population was Negro in the Pre-Dynastic epoch. Thus they are all incompatible with the theories that the Negro element only infiltrated into Egypt at a late stage. Far otherwise, the facts prove that it was preponderant from the beginning to the end of Egyptian history, particularly when we note once more that Mediterranean is not a synonym for ‘white’, Elliott-Smith’s ‘brown’ or Mediterranean race being nearer to the mark’. ‘Elliott Smith classes of these Proto-Egyptians gave rise to a branch of what he calls the “brown race”.’

The term ‘brown’ in this context refers to skin colour and is simply a euphemism for Negro. It is thus clear that it was the whole of the Egyptian population which was Negro; barring an infiltration of white nomads in the proto-dynastic epoch. Of all these attempts, it is very clear that even the researchers themselves had never gone closer to the root of the matter.

Origin of Ancient Egypt

It is clear that these researchers were spontaneously unintended to finding out the Egyptian origin by focusing on other parts of Africa and avoiding the more inconsiderate parts where history, in the view of the Egyptians, may term negligible. At least, the detailed comparative work of Olumide Lukas should have provided certain insightful zest on the Egyptians to think along western part of Africa, even when Lukas himself had written in a relative disillusionment which to me was a self-denigration. He downgraded the Yoruba race by suggesting that his ancestors may have migrated from Egypt. Egyptian researchers in their ego still could not realize that, for such a colossus, the book had provided them with reasons for a rethink. In the paper, “The Peopling of Ancient Egypt”, published in General History of Africa Studies and Documents 1, Jean Vercoutter revealed the problem that befuddled the deciphering of the origin of ancient Egypt as follow:   

The problem of the population of ancient Egypt is one of the most complex problems of all. It has been, and is still, clouded and obscured by ‘sentimental’, or at least irrational attitudes. To solve it, we must go back to the original sources, which have been subjected to so much ‘interpretation’, not to say distortion (usually unconscious), that they now need to be brought together and studied afresh (P. 15 emphasis are mine).

The attempts towards deciphering the origin of Egypt had been hampered by “sentiment” and “irrational attitudes” on the part of the researchers who had had their minds beclouded by the fact that Africa, as long as history is concerned, must have an initial spel thus, EGYPT. Turning to Flinders Petrie who started his excavations with the single notion that, for a nation whose prominence grew high as that of the Egyptian civilization, there must be a strange hand behind it, we are introduced to a possible classification element in great abundance which cannot fail to surprise the reader. Aided by Petrie’s excavations was an earlier statement by Ivan Van Setimer who noted that the Kemmiu (ancient Egyptians) used the term “Af-Rui-Ka to designate beginnings, referring to inner Africa, the place the ancestors of the ruling class came from”. Egyptology would not read this book because it provided solution to their problem in a disparaging way. Of course, I believe that it was disparaging to say that Egypt of all people was ruled by strangers. Petrie’s publications made it obvious that the pharaohs of Egypt strangers (peasants) who settled in the Nile region, the same later went up to unite the Upper and Lower Egypt and ruled them as Pharaohs.

Petrie published a study of the races of Egypt in the Pre-Dynastic and Proto- Dynastic periods working only on portrayals of them. Apart from the steatopygian race, he distinguishes six separate types: an aquiline type representative of a white- skinned Libyan race; a ‘plaited beard’ type belonging to an invading race coming perhaps from the shores of the Red Sea, a ‘sharp-nosed’ type almost certainly from the Arabian Desert: a ‘tilted-nose’ type from Middle Egypt; a ‘jutting beard’ type from Lower Egypt; and a ‘narrow-nose’ type from Upper Egypt. Going on the images, there would thus have been seven different racial types in Egypt during the epochs. But when Petrie became concise, we found that these people assumed to have come from different races rather represents a race different stature from inner Africa. Petrie’s personal explanations gave insight to who these people were.

Human Images of the Protohistoric Period: Their anthropological value to the study of human images made by Flinders Petrie on another plane shows that the ethnic type was black. According to Petrie, these people were the Anu whose name, known to Egyptians since the protohistoric epoch, is always written with three pillars (in hieroglyphics) on the few inscriptions extant from the end of the fourth millennium before our era (8000 BC.). He described the people in the following way:

The natives of the country are always represented with unmistakable chiefly emblems for which one looks in vain among the infrequent portrayals of other races, who are all shown as servile foreign elements having reached the valley by infiltration (Peopling, 17).

One of the features of the founders is that “the native of the country is always represented with unmistakable chiefly emblems”. The Nag Hammadi related the same information about the race of people who first settled on earth. “… They are kings. They are the immortal within the mortal,” (p. 219). Northrop Thomas, after caring a detailed anthropological research in Igbo land in 1913, chose to title his work, The King Is Everyone. Among the Igbo race, everyone is a king. The kingly emblem is represented through the Igbo traditional cap with which everyone is equal. We have found that the pharaohs of Egypt wore this Igbo cap from the first to, at least, the seventh kings. It became undisputable when Petrie notes that Pharaoh Narmer belonged to the race of the Anu.

The Scorpion king whom Petrie groups together thus: “The Scorpion King . . . belonged to the preceding race of Anu, moreover he worshipped Min and Set.” Pharaoh Narmer, often expressed as the scorpion king, is said to belong to the race of Anu. Min was like the chief gods of Egypt, and it was called by the tradition of Egypt itself “the great Negro”. The image of Narmer is shown below.   
                  

Narmer was the first king of Egypt. Petrie went further to say that,

Besides these types, belonging to the North and East, there is the aboriginal race of the Anu, or Annu, people (written with three pillars) who became a part of the historic inhabitants.

The matter ramifies too doubtfully if one includes all single pillar names, but looking for the Anu written, with the three pillars, one finds that the same sect occupied southern Egypt and Nubia. The name is also applied in Sinai and Libya. As to the southern Egyptians, the most essential document remains one portrait of a chief, Tera Neter, roughly modelled in relief in green glazed faience found in the early temple at Abydos. Preceding his name his address is given on this earliest of visiting cards, “Palace of the Anu in Hemen city, Tera Neter”. Hemen was the name of the god of Tuphium, Erment, opposite to it, was the palace of Anu of the south, Annu Menti. The next place in the south is Aunti (Gefeleyn), and beyond that Aunyt-Seni (Esneh). Amelineau lists in geographical order the fortified towns built along the length of the Nile valley by the Anu blacks.

Note: The image of the three members of Anu race is modelled in Enugu metropolis; near the State Judiciary, and around the      University of Nigeria Nsukka Enugu Campus (UNEC) junction. This image and that of Terra Neter are found in chapter three. 

In the very words of Cheik Anta Diop,

The common ancestor of the Annu settled along the Nile was Ani or An, a name determined by the word [hieroglyphics] (khet) and which, dating from the earliest versions of the "Book of the Dead" onwards, is given to the god Osiris.

Ani is a common name to the Igbo. And to all the people that bear the name, there is always an association with the earth goddess, Ani. In fact, the reality is that such a bearer is named after the goddess as it is the nature of the Igbo to name children after ancestors, parents, gods, friends and relatives. Now, Ani who was the earliest teacher of the cosmic knowledge in Egypt was associated with Osiris, the god who reigned most in Egypt. It apparently means that Osiris itself, a god, must have been the child of Ani; for he was addressed thus, “Osiri Ani”. The connotation therefore is that of Surname showing father-son relationship.

                                      The Home of Osiris

                                   

The study is brought home without further obscurity through the analysis of Cheik Anta himself when he related that both pharaoh Narmer (the scorpion king) and the predynastic people, represented by Tera Neter, are of the same race as Petrie had earlier noted. It invariably means that the rulers of Egypt had the same ancestry with the earliest race of Anu that founded Egypt. We can by all these provable facts say that the founders of Egypt had migrated from the old Nsude/Nsukka civilization of 500,000 BC., and above. Several emblem of associated with the Egyptian gods derived their origin in Nsukka. Most striking is the fact that the home of the Egyptian god Osiris, called Tuat, was found in Nsukka.    
  

A vital pointer to the home of the Egyptian Tuat is revealed in the Book of the Dead in the following ways,

Round in a circle; the space enclosed by it represents the Tuator Egyptian underworld, wherein dwelt the gods of the dead and the departed souls. This view is supported by the scene from the sarcophagus of Seti I. (Fig. 1). In the watery space above the bark is the figure of the god bent round in a circle with his toes touching his head, and upon his head stands the goddess Nut with outstretched hands receiving the disk of the sun.[2] In the space enclosed by the body of the god is the legend, "This is Osiris; his circuit is the Tuat."[3] Though nearly all Egyptologists agree about the meaning of the word being "the place of departed souls," yet it has been translated in various ways, different scholars locating the Tuat in different parts of creation. Dr. Brugsch and others place it under the earth,[4] others have supposed it to be the space which exists between the arms of Shu and the body of Nut,[5] but the most recent theory put forth is that it was situated neither above nor below the earth, but beyond Egypt to the north, from which it was separated by the mountain range which, as the Egyptians thought, supported the sky.[6] The region of the Tuat was a long, mountainous, narrow valley with a river running along it; starting from the east it made its way to the north, and then taking a circular direction it came back to the east. In the Tuat lived all manner of fearful monsters and beasts, and here was the country through which the sun passed during the twelve hours of the night; according to one view he traversed this region in splendour, and according to another he died and became subject to Osiris the king, god and judge of the kingdom of the departed (P.88).

One useful information found in the citation above is the fact that the Tuat was not situated above the earth or beneath the earth, but beyond Egypt. The Tuat was given different pages of the Book of the Dead, but all the explanations are captured in the excerpt above as we shall discuss in detail pointing at the different pages. We may summarize the abode of Tuat through the highlighted parts of the excerpt.

Round in a circle; the space enclosed by it represents the Tuat or Egyptian underworld, wherein dwelt the gods of the dead and the departed souls… His (this) circuit is the Tuat… It was situated neither above nor below the earth, but beyond Egypt… The region of the Tuat was a long, mountainous, narrow valley with a river running along it.

The fact that the Tuat is circular in form and that it is situated beyond Egypt: not above or below the earth, shows that it points to a place not well known to Egyptology. The Heart of the Tuat, called Restau, is translated to mean “underworld”. It is located on the south of Naarutf, and it is the northern door.

Naarutf, (also called An-rutf) is a section or door of the Tuat which lies to the north of Re-stau; the meaning of the word is "it never sprouteth." (Dead 110-111)

NaarutforAn-rutf means ‘It never Sprouteth’ or Place where there is neither Sprouting of Seeds nor of growth. Apart from the two words being cognates of Igbo words ana erutefu and Naerutefu which mean “Land that Supports no Growth” and which Cannot Sprout, respectively, there is an obvious instance of the place in Nsukka till date. Looking at the Igbo equivalents of the word, Naarutf, a conscious user of the language would deduce two different phrases that have the same/similar ideas. An erutefu (also Ani Erutefu; for in Egypt, another word for Ani is An) directly means “less sprout land”, means “at less spout.” In the fouth chapter bove, we discussed issues connected to Enunu-Ebe tree in Nsukka; the tree of the gods which forbids birds from perching and grass growing under it. Round about the position of the tree and within the boundary of its shed, no living plant grows. The tree is shown below:

This is an obvious reference to the plane of no sprout. The northern door of the place where the sun rises implies in this case the northern area of Igbo land, which is Nsukka. Nsukka is located in Northern Igbo land. Particularly, the position of the tuat is directly opposite to the forest of Enunu-Ebe which lies at the northern part of the land.

Waddell in his comparative study of Sumerian symbol-writing and Egyptian hieroglyphics found that the Egyptian word for ‘desert’ occurs in Sumerian inscriptions under the name Du or Dun, which is written in Egypt with the three hills and two hills hieroglyphic letters. He stressed that, over the years, the Three Hills and Two Hills hieroglyphics letters have been read by Egyptians as ‘Desert’. He noted that the actual Sumerian meaning for ‘desert’ is “mound, earthworks or sand hills (in other words, these hills were piled up sand)” (P.320). On the road to Nsukka University town, one is shocked to actually see on both sides of the road, one after the other, the actual Two Hills and Three Hills illustrated above, looking every inch with no trees and high foliage on any of them. This confirms the Sumerian explanation for the Three Hills and Two Hills as “sand mounds”, is in the ancient Igbo of the Nsude/Nsukka civilization.

                    

 
                   

                                                @ OZALLA, A BORDER TOWN WITH DUNU OKA.

The Egyptian City of the Sun was known by the ancient name An.Egyptian texts used three phrases to explain An. They are:

          - The mouth of the earth.

          - The eastern door of heaven.

          - The Gateway to Heaven.

The Igbo word for ‘Hole’ is Onu. There is a hole in the ground in the Lejja shrine at Dunu Oka. The hole is covered with a mound of black iron slag. The villagers claim that the hole is endless and thatritual offerings are made to it at annual festivals to the Dead ancestors. A similar explanation of this tuat by the Egyptian Book of the Dead (P.88) maintains that the tuat is,

Round in a circle; the space enclosed by it represents the Tuat or Egyptian underworld, wherein dwelt the gods of the dead and the departed souls.

This of course is “the mouth of the earth” that leads into the home of the ancestors known in Egypt as Tuat. On the same page, the book revealed that the Egyptian tuat is not above the world or under the world; it is within the earth planet. But, amazing enough, the place is beyond Egypt (i.e it is not in Egypt). The image of the tuat is shown below.

 

The Egyptian Book of the Dead reveals that,

Egyptian tradition made the sun to end his daily course at Abydos, and to enter into the Tuat at this place through a "gap" in the mountains called in Egyptian peq. These mountains lay near to the town; and in the XIIth dynasty it was believed that the souls of the dead made their way into the other world by the valley which led through them to the great Oasis, where some placed the Elysian Fields (P. 110).

This idea was borrowed to give explanations to the bowel of the earth as shown above, a concept which ancient Egypt referred to as Amenta. “The Christian Egyptians or Copts used the word Amend to translate the Greek word Hades, to which they attributed all the ideas which their heathen ancestors had associated with the Amenta of the Book of the Dead.” In Greek mythology, Hades was the king of the underworld and god of the dead. He presided over funeral rites and defended the right of the dead to do burial. Hades was also the god of the hidden wealth of the earth, from the fertile soil with nourished seed-grain, to the mined wealth of gold, silver and other metals. The deciphering of Peq or Hades in Lejja proves Nsukka the home of the gods.

Another crucial aspect of Egyptian mystic emblems found in Nsukka is the original Benen which sits on a mound. Benben is associated with the sun god, basically that of fertility. According to the Book of the Dead,

Benbent, the name given to many sun-shrines in Egypt, and also to one of the places in the other world where the deceased (structure) dwelt (P.111).

There is an ancient dilapidated model of the Benben in Lejja. It is a conical structure made of mud, with huge round blocks of slag piled around its base in a graded step-pyramid style. The Lejja example of the Egyptian Benben is called Odegwoo. Inhabitants of Lejja related that Odegwoo is associated with fertility and procreation, and that all children born in the town are ritually registered and dedicated to it by the shrine priests. This in fact links the Lejja conical structure with the phallic sexual and procreative Benben of Egypt’s Heliopolis, for both are procreative and are associated with the process of sexual siring of children in both cultures! In both cases the Benben is understood to be a representative with conical structure.

 

                Odegwoo

The entry on Ancient Egyptian Heliopolis says its Egyptian vernacular name also meant “Place of Pillars”. We took special notice of the fact that almost every single slag at the Dunu Oka Shrine in Lejja is shaped like a pillar. This gave the immediate impression of a broken down fortress. We checked into this phenomenon in Sumerian records and got the information that by ca. 2900 B.C. Gilgamesh, the Sumerian king of the city of Uruk made a hazardous trip to the abode of the gods of Sumer, where Utu was lord: House of Darkness, the abode below the ground…the Land of the Living, the place where the gods had taken those humans who were granted eternal youth” (P.130-131). Gilgamesh had to enter into the territory of the sun-god. He was told the land lay in the joint territory of Adad and Utu/Shamash. There he entered and tried unsuccessfully to access “a tunnel … hidden by trees and bushes and blocked by soil and rock”. In two separate instances, Sitchen points out that the gateway to heaven is a “Place of pillars”. It does appear from these descriptions that the Oshuru celestial disk (mound) which covers the opening called “the mouth of the earth” was once surrounded by pillars which was later reenacted on a particular iron slag with other slags surrounding it in the form of supporting pillars.

Among the slags heaped together, there is a slag that has a seeming significant mark of a triangle on it. Round about it is surrounded by three slags at each side; right and left respectively. Two additional slags are kept, each above the apex of the triangle while the other was placed at the base. Look carefully at the position where the triangle lies, then examine the slags on the next page and you will see a triangle that looks as if it was intentionally calved to reflect certain mystic purpose.

    

The pillar was not broken in any way. It is either that the smelters inscribed the shape on it to contain such reasoning or that it was naturally so. With this symbol, it proved what Egyptians associated with ‘Heaven’. The Egyptian equivalent is shown below.

                       

Zechariah Sitchen insists that the Egyptian Heliopolis of modern times is an imitation of the ancient Heliopolis of antiquity called “the House of Shamash” located in a “Place of Palms”. Shamash was the Akkadian name of the sky god whom the Sumerians called Utu. His symbol was the Eagle for he was the god of the skies and of the Sun. The name of the Sumerian sky god Utu occurs severally in Lejja. The name of the first of the two magical Trees - Utu Udeleigwe means ‘Utu – the Vulture of the Sky’. The images of Utu are shown below.

       

This cannot be a coincidence, rather it implies that the sacred tree with that name is actually a totem representative of the god, Utu, himself.

The race of Anu whose Original home was the present day Udi in Enugu state, Nigeria were the first stream of population to arrive at Egypt. They came in a small number and inhabited Egypt first before the land was flooded by the latter group which came from the Yoruba tribe. The second group came into Egypt in lager population. They were the population whose encounter with the Nubian population gave rise to the name Nubia. Their gross number created the language impact on the middle age Egypt. This influence is highlighted by Olumide Lukas as he traced the relationship between Yoruba and Egypt.

The reason for having any thought about Egypt originating from the White race came through Greek reference of Egypt as belonging to the white race. ‘The Greeks call Africa “Libya”, a misnomer au initio since Africa contains many other peoples besides the so called Libyans, who belong to the whites of the northern or Mediterranean periphery and hence are many steps removed from the brown (or red) skinned whites (Egyptians).’ In a textbook intended for the middle secondary school we find the following sentence: A Black is distinguished less by the colour of his skin (for there are black-skinned “whites”) than by his features: thick lips, flattened nose.