The great library of Alexandria................was in Africa..............for a reason......scholarship came from Africa...........

There is a common belief among whites that philosophy originates with the Greeks. The idea is so common that almost all of the books on philosophy start with the Greeks as if the Greeks pre-dated all other people when it came to discussion of concepts of beauty, art, numbers, sculpture, medicine of social organization. In fact, this dogma occupies the principal position in the academies of the Western world, including the universities and academies of Africa. It goes something like this:

Philosophy is the highest discipline.

All other disciplines are derived from philosophy.

Philosophy is the creation of the Greeks.

The Greeks are white,

Therefore, whites are the creators of philosophy.

In the view of this dogma, other people and cultures may contribute thoughts, like the Chinese, Confucius, but thoughts are not philosophy; only the Greeks can contribute philosophy. The African people may have religion and myths, but not philosophy, according to this reasoning. Thus, this notion privileges the Greeks as the originators of philosophy, the highest of the sciences.

There is a serious problem with this line of reasoning. The information is false. As far as scholarship can reveal the origin of the word philosophy is not in the Greek language, although it comes into English from the Greek. According to dictionaries on Greek etymology the origin of the word is unknown. But that is if you are looking for the origin in Europe. Most Europeans who write books on etymology do not consider Zulu, Xhosa, Yoruba, or Amharic, when coming to a conclusion about what is known or unknown. They never think that a term used by a European language may have come from Africa.

There are two parts to the word philosophy as it comes to us from the Greek, “Philo” meaning brother or lover and “Sophia” meaning wisdom or wise. Thus, a philosopher is called a “lover of wisdom.”

The origin of “Sophia” is clearly in the African language, Mdu Ntr, the language of ancient Egypt, where the word “Seba,” meaning “the wise” appears first in 2052 BC in the tomb of Antef I, long before the existence of Greece or Greek. The word became “Sebo” in Coptic and “Sophia” in Greek. As to the philosopher, the lover of wisdom, that is precisely what is meant by “Seba,” the Wise, in ancient tomb writings of the Egyptians.

Diodorus Siculus, the Greek writer, in his On Egypt, written in the first century before Christ, says that many who are “celebrated among the Greeks for intelligence and learning, ventured to Egypt in olden times, that they might partake of the customs, and sample the teachings there. For the priests of Egypt cite from their records in the holy books that in the former times they were visited by Orpheus and Musaeus, Melampos, Daedalos, besides the poet Homer, Lycurgus the Spartan, Solon the Athenian, and Plato the philosopher, Pythagoras of Samos and the mathematician Eudoxos, as well as Democritus of Abdera and Oenopides of Chios, also came there.”

Obviously many Greeks who learned philosophy ventured to Africa to study. They came for many intellectual reasons. One can see that the Greeks appreciated the fact that in Egypt were men and women of great skill and knowledge just as the Egyptians appreciated the fact that there were men and women of greater knowledge in Ethiopia.