ETHIOPIANS FIRST LIVING MEN
To revert to Herodotus. This ancient historian was a great traveler, the first, perhaps, to visit the region of the blacks and their empire.
He says, somewhere in his history: “The Ethiopians were the first men who ever lived.”
There is more astounding evidence of the civilization of the black men to be found in recent excavations.
Lying north of Egypt and a little southeast of Greece, in the Mediterranean Sea, is the famous Island of Crete, or Candia, embracing 3,326 square miles, and at the present time it has a population of about 300,000 people all told.
This island was anciently regarded as the spot where Jove himself was cradled, and it became the center or reservoir of the highest forms of ancient civilization. All the ancient Greek and Roman gods had their origin or birthplace on this island, and under the famed King Minos, nothing disgraceful or monstrous was permitted to find a resting place. It has always been a mysteriously unknown island, and the great aim of delvers into antiquities.
Within the last ten years, there has been dug out in this island of Crete, the remains of a civilization two thousand years more ancient than any hitherto known in Europe.
THEATRES, PALACES AND TEMPLES
There are actual buildings, theatres, palaces, and temples that existed in 3,000 B. C., and were mere guess work in Homer’s time. What has been unearthed shows that there was communication between Crete and Egypt 2,000 years before Christ. One of the frescoes found shows some religious ceremonial in the Egyptian style. Some of the priestesses are black, others white, and the connection between African and Cretan civilization as to dates will soon be settled.
Enough appears to show that there were two great civilizations at a very early time, that in the Nile country begun and maintained by black men, and the other in Crete. The Cretans seem to have been a dark race, rather small, with regular, almost Greek profiles and full lips.