THE KWA AS GLOBAL MASTER-SMITHS OF PRE-HISTORY
In the beginning mankind was one family, but as time passed and human population increased, the need arose for long range migrations to found new living places and hunting grounds as well as farm lands. With these migrations also came the need for families to identify themselves through family symbols. Family symbols gave way to clan symbols, then tribal symbols, racial symbols and so on. Writing must have arisen out of the need to protect family secrets, cult (religious) secrets and then occupational secrets of guild members, of clans and tribes. An example is the forehead concentric circle which as we gather from Greek mythology, was the secret identification mark for the world’s only existing guild of master smiths, especially bronze-smiths. Robert Graves in Greek Myths 1, (p. 32) writes of “a guild of early … bronze-smiths … tattooed with concentric circles on their forehead in honor of the sun, the source of their furnace fires … Concentric circles are part of the mystery of smith-craft. [These pre-historic tattooed smiths] were at home in Thrace, Crete, Lycia … and Sicily”. This geographical area – which later became Greece and Rome - was the cradle of European civilization! The forehead concentric circle tattooed man represented among the Igbo Ukwu artifacts (plate 2) links the Igbo Ukwu bronzes (plates 22,4, 4b) to the Pre-historic bronze smiths described here, and suggests, as we shall demonstrate in this work, that Igbo Ukwu and other Kwa smiths were members of the world’s earliest guild of bronze smiths whose influence reached as far as the Aegean and the Levant.
The impact of Black Africans in the making of the first civilizations known to man is linked to the fact that Black Africans were the world’s first metallurgists – the first to discover metal and to work it to perfection. The world’s first iron workers, bronze smiths, copper smiths and gold smiths were Black Africans, and research has consistently pointed to the Kwa people of West Africa as the people who fit into this mould – they and their Kushites brethren. Tracing the word Kwa/Qua/Qa through prehistory and the scriptures, we stumble on two important pieces of information in the Old Testament and the Cabbala. Oriental Scholar Zecharia Sitchin writes in Stairway to Heaven (p. 200) that “the Quenites are mentioned in the Old Testament as inhabitants of southern Sinai, and their name literally meant ‘smiths and metallurgists’”. Sitchin cited R.J. Forbes - The Evolution of the Smith which pointed out that the term Qa-in meant ‘smith’ and stemmed from Sumerian KI-N meaning ‘fashioner’. Sumerian Ki means ‘to cleave’, ‘to cut decisively’, ‘to create by cleaving apart or by division’. It shares this meaning with Igbo word kie ‘to cleave apart’, ‘to create by cleaving asunder’, ‘to fashion’, and nka - ‘the art of fashioning’ which has the exact same meaning with Hebrew Qa-in or In-qa (read from right to left). In-qa (Nkwo) is the name of the father of the Igbo nation, which is why the Igbo are called Igbo-Nkwo.
What is most intriguing in this discovery is the fact that the etymology of the Sumerian word Ki goes right back to the very moment when according to Sumerian epic of creation of the heavens and the planets - Enuma Elish - the earth was created when the Primordial Planet Tiamat also known as Gaia, was cleaved asunder by a straying heavenly body from outside the solar system, called Marduk. The myth which describes astronomical events that took place millions of years before life appeared on earth, describes the events that gave rise to the Asteroid Belt that still circles one half of the solar system – the broken pieces of the second half of Tiamat. Ki is the Sumerian word for Earth - ‘the cleaved planet’ – and an eternal reminder of the process by which she got her deep wound now covered by the waters of the Pacific Ocean. The fact that this event, this myth, which is also a scientific fact by the way, is also recorded in Igbo language in the etymon kie, suggests that the Igbo language and the Sumerian language might have shared the same cosmological roots. And Sumer is said to be the cradle of human civilization!
Before we continue with the Qa/Ka/Kwa phenomenon, we take some time out to dwell on the African origins of Sumerian civilization. Sumerians wrote a linear form of writing. Wallis Budge wrote that “Sumerians … taught the rest of mankind their letters”. He and other Oriental scholars described the Sumerian language as “Chaldean”, “Hamitic”, and “Akkadian” and placed it between the African languages and Proto-Turanian! (Wallis Budge, Babylonian Life and History, 2005, p. 10) By the way there is a Turanian tribe in Benue State, Nigeria. Budge wrote that Sumerians came from somewhere quite remote and lost to History, but that they brought “their system of (pictorial) writing with them when they occupied Babylonia”. Similar pictorial characters were also used by Dravidian Indians (Mohenjo-Daro) at the same period. (Budge, Ibid., p. 144-145) Pictorial writing is another word for ‘writing in symbols’ or ‘symbol writing’. Budge’s description of the customs, social, religious and family lives of the people of Babylon in Sumer in Prehistoric times as gleaned from Archaeological discoveries, sounds like the description of a native African village. And they too were metallurgists! They built mud and reed houses, wove reed mats, used clay utensils, practiced juju magic, practiced early and arranged marriage, wore loin cloths and (later on) wrappers hung over the left shoulder, drank palm wine and used potash (ngu) and oil to make soap, just as the Igbo and other Kwa peoples have done since pre-history and still do today. They practiced Animism and offered livestock to their gods in small shrines. (Budge, Ibid., p. 104-143) There is no doubt, from the foregoing, that a cultural link does exist between the early Sumerians and the people of West Africa and that these ancient Babylonians might have been Black Africans. In fact the Sumerians were most likely of the same stock as the Kwa people of West Africa.
The impact of Black Africans in the making of the first civilizations known to man is linked to the fact that Black Africans were the world’s first metallurgists – the first to discover metal and to work it to perfection. The world’s first iron workers, bronze smiths, copper smiths and gold smiths were Black Africans, and research has consistently pointed to the Kwa people of West Africa as the people who fit into this mould – they and their Kushites brethren. Tracing the word Kwa/Qua/Qa through prehistory and the scriptures, we stumble on two important pieces of information in the Old Testament and the Cabbala. Oriental Scholar Zecharia Sitchin writes in Stairway to Heaven (p. 200) that “the Quenites are mentioned in the Old Testament as inhabitants of southern Sinai, and their name literally meant ‘smiths and metallurgists’”. Sitchin cited R.J. Forbes - The Evolution of the Smith which pointed out that the term Qa-in meant ‘smith’ and stemmed from Sumerian KI-N meaning ‘fashioner’. Sumerian Ki means ‘to cleave’, ‘to cut decisively’, ‘to create by cleaving apart or by division’. It shares this meaning with Igbo word kie ‘to cleave apart’, ‘to create by cleaving asunder’, ‘to fashion’, and nka - ‘the art of fashioning’ which has the exact same meaning with Hebrew Qa-in or In-qa (read from right to left). In-qa (Nkwo) is the name of the father of the Igbo nation, which is why the Igbo are called Igbo-Nkwo.
What is most intriguing in this discovery is the fact that the etymology of the Sumerian word Ki goes right back to the very moment when according to Sumerian epic of creation of the heavens and the planets - Enuma Elish - the earth was created when the Primordial Planet Tiamat also known as Gaia, was cleaved asunder by a straying heavenly body from outside the solar system, called Marduk. The myth which describes astronomical events that took place millions of years before life appeared on earth, describes the events that gave rise to the Asteroid Belt that still circles one half of the solar system – the broken pieces of the second half of Tiamat. Ki is the Sumerian word for Earth - ‘the cleaved planet’ – and an eternal reminder of the process by which she got her deep wound now covered by the waters of the Pacific Ocean. The fact that this event, this myth, which is also a scientific fact by the way, is also recorded in Igbo language in the etymon kie, suggests that the Igbo language and the Sumerian language might have shared the same cosmological roots. And Sumer is said to be the cradle of human civilization!
Before we continue with the Qa/Ka/Kwa phenomenon, we take some time out to dwell on the African origins of Sumerian civilization. Sumerians wrote a linear form of writing. Wallis Budge wrote that “Sumerians … taught the rest of mankind their letters”. He and other Oriental scholars described the Sumerian language as “Chaldean”, “Hamitic”, and “Akkadian” and placed it between the African languages and Proto-Turanian! (Wallis Budge, Babylonian Life and History, 2005, p. 10) By the way there is a Turanian tribe in Benue State, Nigeria. Budge wrote that Sumerians came from somewhere quite remote and lost to History, but that they brought “their system of (pictorial) writing with them when they occupied Babylonia”. Similar pictorial characters were also used by Dravidian Indians (Mohenjo-Daro) at the same period. (Budge, Ibid., p. 144-145) Pictorial writing is another word for ‘writing in symbols’ or ‘symbol writing’. Budge’s description of the customs, social, religious and family lives of the people of Babylon in Sumer in Prehistoric times as gleaned from Archaeological discoveries, sounds like the description of a native African village. And they too were metallurgists! They built mud and reed houses, wove reed mats, used clay utensils, practiced juju magic, practiced early and arranged marriage, wore loin cloths and (later on) wrappers hung over the left shoulder, drank palm wine and used potash (ngu) and oil to make soap, just as the Igbo and other Kwa peoples have done since pre-history and still do today. They practiced Animism and offered livestock to their gods in small shrines. (Budge, Ibid., p. 104-143) There is no doubt, from the foregoing, that a cultural link does exist between the early Sumerians and the people of West Africa and that these ancient Babylonians might have been Black Africans. In fact the Sumerians were most likely of the same stock as the Kwa people of West Africa.