TUE OCT 30, 2007 AT 02:29 PM PDT
Ancient African Math/Science Shatters Stereotypes
Finally, more physical proof against the racist notion that Africans are culturally not all that science/math oriented, the old "dark Africa", "song-&-dance" routine. Thousands of books and manuscripts uncovered in what is now Mali, especially around Timbuktu, called the Timbuktu or Mali Manuscripts, are just now being studied, with stunning results: African scholars in an unfathomably wealthy civilization independently developing sophisticated math, astronomy, and other sciences, even while Europe was still crawling out of the Middle Ages...
From the world's oldest astronomical observatory to Timbuktu scholar Abul Abbas, who commented in 1723 on much earlier scholars' work in the same city - thus showing they were building an independent body of work (and whose conclusions show his lack of contact with, hence independence from, Europe), African mathematical and science achievements have heretofore been largely kept in the dark. All this, and so far only 14 out of more than 18,000 manuscripts have been translated and examined.
Let the racists read it and weep...
It has only been recently reported on the subject of these documents:
The Timbuktu Manuscripts - or Mali Manuscripts - reams of written manuscripts dating as far back as the 13th century, are ancient Arabic texts that hark back to the Malian city of Timbuktu's glorious past, when it existed 500 years ago as a gold trading port and centre for academics and scholars of religion, literature and science.
The manuscripts provide a written testimony to the skill of African scientists, in astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, medicine and climatology in the Middle Ages.
An article in the New Scientist (unless you subscribe, you can't get the full article though) describes in more detail the discovery and recent (2006+) restoration and study project involving thousands of ancient manuscripts in/around Timbuktu, the site of an unfathomably wealthy, sophisticated civilization. The manuscripts are extremely fragile, so the researchers must race against time to study and preserve them, but the rewards are immediate.
"In just a handful of the documents translated so far they have overturned the received wisdom about early African science and astronomy. The scholars of Timbuktu, they have discovered, were way ahead of their time."
In 1591, Moroccan invaders destroyed many documents and raided schools and universities in the city, mainly after their wealth. Much was lost, but there are still thousands of documents, many of them hidden in walls and tombs, which are only recently being restored and studied, in large part thanks to the renowned astrophysicist from S. Africa, Thebe Medupe.
In the 2003 documentary film Cosmic Africa, Medupe travels throughout Africa, visiting various indigenous societies seeking to find out their knowledge and understanding in the field of Astronomy. More recently, he has been working on the Timbuctu Manuscript project, teaming with other scientists to study the texts for knowledge of science and math. The results are astounding.
"We can now say with confidence that sub-Saharan Africans were studying math and science over 300 years ago," says Dr. Medupe.
Medupe himself is the motivating power behind what has become a rather sudden and stunning revelation of African intellectual achievement and advanced civilization, long buried under what he calls "Eurocentric" history. As he said in an interview,
"...when I was 15, I started to question why everything was Eurocentric. Textbooks were using European things and so on. So I used to ask myself whether it was because there was nothing Africa can offer. I refused to believe that. It remained a very big question for me for a long time, until I came across a review on African ethnoastronomy. I was very excited."
In making the film Cosmic Africa, he says:
We decided to select remote communities, where contact with the outside world was minimal, but also living communities where you could clearly and graphically show that astronomy was an important part of their lives. That's why we selected the Bushmen, who live on the border of Botswana and Namibia, and the Dogon people of Mali, West Africa. The Dogons still live the way they did 500 years ago. They were dignified, and very hospitable. At the beginning, it was not easy to get information from them — that's how they protect their culture from being eroded. But once we won their trust, it was very pleasant to live among them.We also read about a stone observatory—stone structures in the Sahara desert in southern Egypt that were erected more than 6000 years ago; that's more than a thousand years before the Pyramids. The stones were erected to mark the directions of north and of the summer solstice sunrise.
One evening with the Dogons, I went with two old people to look at the stars. I asked them what was the most important constellation for them. They said the Pleiades, a star cluster, which is very important throughout the whole of Africa, actually. The stars are used for planting and agriculture. I asked this guy [for] positions of the stars, and he gave me the rising times and positions at different times of the year. I checked with my laptop, and he was very much correct. To me that proved he knew what he was talking about.
The Egyptian stones apparently contain alignments similar to those done a thousand or so years later at Stonehenge in Great Britain, but they are smaller in size. The Bushmen made out constellations just like the ancient Greeks and other peoples. To me, it shows the commonality between Africa and the rest of the world.
Medupe just discovered the tip of the great civilizations that were Africa, full and rich civilizations with original advancements in all fields.
Timbuktu ... was one of the major cities of West Africa from 800 until just over 400 years ago. It was very prosperous, and had many learning centers, with people collecting and writing books on law, poetry, astronomy, optics, mathematics. This history of scholarship in Africa extended over large parts of the continent. Ancient manuscripts are found all over West Africa and even in East Africa. They are written in Arabic and in local African languages. ...In Mali alone, there are around 200 private libraries, and literally hundreds of thousands of books.
One of the sites featured in the film, Nabta Playa, is believed to be the world's earliest astronomical site, some estimating it to be as old as around 4800 B.C.
The potential significance of Nabta as a ceremonial site was further strengthened by the discovery of an arrangement of stone megaliths (large free standing stones) on the western edge of the Nabta basin. Some of these stones had been carefully shaped, and weighed up to one and a half tons. They appeared to radiate out from a central point.
Yet the Timbuktu Manuscript restoration and study project, which has been ongoing since 2006, remains the most impressive display of "Afrocentric" advancement in fields too long considered "out" of Africa. For example, 600-year-old precise and beautiful drawings of the planets and their orbits in a geocentric universe show advanced knowledge of mathematics. Later works show that in order to determine the exact location of Timbuktu and Mecca in order to pray, the scholars of Timbuktu being Muslim, they invented trigonometry as well as algorithms that are as accurate as any we use today. And since the volume of unresearcheddocuments is itself nearly astronomical, one can only imagine how much remains to be discovered.
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