UNEARTHING THE LOST CITY OF HELIOPOLIS (IGBO OKWU) – THE LOST CELESTIAL CAPITAL OF THE GODS OF EGYPT AND DRAVIDIAN INDIA
SUMMARY
In 1950, Thurstan Shaw, a British Archaeologist excavated Igbo Ukwu, the bastion of ancient Igbo civilization and unearthed what could easily fill an entire museum from only three pits. Igbo Ukwu goods proved to be an enigma because it had no relationship with any other goods excavated in other parts of Nigeria or Africa. To add to the puzzle, it was found to relate more to India and this was stated in all studies done at the time. Since 1990, Professor Catherine Acholonu has been conducting field and library research on African Pre-history. In the process she has discovered that ancient Africans wrote
inscriptions on stone, pottery and metal, and that most of the items found in Igbo Ukwu carry symbols also found in ancient Egypt, India and throughout the Middle East. Based on these Acholonu took her research team to Igbo Ukwu to conduct interviews and found out that random ‘excavation’ of buried metal, pottery and piles of beads have been going on for as long as the town has been in existence (continuing even after Shaw’s excavation), yet no one within living memory knows who left them. She concluded that Igbo Ukwu is standing on a lost city of time immemorial – a Pre-Historic civilization!
inscriptions on stone, pottery and metal, and that most of the items found in Igbo Ukwu carry symbols also found in ancient Egypt, India and throughout the Middle East. Based on these Acholonu took her research team to Igbo Ukwu to conduct interviews and found out that random ‘excavation’ of buried metal, pottery and piles of beads have been going on for as long as the town has been in existence (continuing even after Shaw’s excavation), yet no one within living memory knows who left them. She concluded that Igbo Ukwu is standing on a lost city of time immemorial – a Pre-Historic civilization!
INTRODUCTION
The Catherine Acholonu Research Center is announcing the completion of its third and concluding ground-breaking volume of the Adam Trilogy, under the title - The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam – Unearthing Heliopolis/Igbo Ukwu - The Celestial City of the Gods of Egypt and India.
The first two volumes were -
2. The Gram Code of African Adam, Reconstructing 450,000 Years of Africa’s Lost Civilizations (2005)
3. They Lived Before Adam: Pre-historic Origins of the Igbo – The Never-Been-Ruled (2009). They Lived Before Adam won the
2009 International Book Awards in USA under the Multi-Cultural Non-Fiction category. It also won two Awards at the 2009 Harlem Book Fair in New York and was presented/aired thrice on C-Span Book TV in July and August, 2009 in USA.
The first two volumes were -
2. The Gram Code of African Adam, Reconstructing 450,000 Years of Africa’s Lost Civilizations (2005)
3. They Lived Before Adam: Pre-historic Origins of the Igbo – The Never-Been-Ruled (2009). They Lived Before Adam won the
2009 International Book Awards in USA under the Multi-Cultural Non-Fiction category. It also won two Awards at the 2009 Harlem Book Fair in New York and was presented/aired thrice on C-Span Book TV in July and August, 2009 in USA.
AFRICAN ROCK-ART/SYMBOLS AS A LOST WRITING SYSTEM
The Catherine Acholonu Research Center has been carrying out break-through cultural, linguistic and anthropological research since 1990 on African Pre-History. Most of its findings, published under various titles have brought new, ground-breaking information to change globally accepted, but erroneous notions that indigenous Africans had no history, no form of writing, no organized technology and no part in the making of human civilization. In 2005, the Catherine Acholonu Research Center published the first in what it calls The
African Adam Series, under the title The Gram Code of African Adam – Stone Books and Cave Libraries: Reconstructing 450,000 Years of Africa’s Lost Civilizations. That book won for Dr. Catherine Acholonu, the award of Professor of African History and Philosophy from Pilgrims University and Theological Seminary, Africa Campus, Aba, Nigeria.
The Gram Code was an attempt at understanding African Rock Art and traditional symbols as means of expression, communication and information storage. Co-authored with Dr. Ajay Prabhakar, an Indian software technology engineer, the 480-page book was an analysis of pre-historic inscriptions on the ancient monoliths, located in the forests and village-squares in Ikom local community in Cross River State, Nigeria. It was also an analysis of cave art, paintings and inscriptions located in North, West, East and Southern Africa. Our findings and conclusions based on these studies and analyses, were that Pre-Historic Africans used cave art and rock inscriptions as means of expression, communication and information storage, most of which were embedded in ritual practices of indigenous peoples.
Our findings were presented at several international forums in Nigeria and abroad. In partnership with the United Nations Forum of Arts and Culture, the Catherine Acholonu Center nominated Ikom monoliths of Cross River State for listing in the World Monument Fund Watch List of endangered sites. The monoliths were sub-sequently listed in the 2008 WMF Watch List of 100 Most Endangered Sites, and since then the monoliths have generated and gained greater global and local interest, so much so that that they are now listed under the UNESCO World Heritage Website as displaying ancient inscri-ptions of mathematical and archaeological symbols and an unknown writing system, all thanks to the research findings and publications of the Catherine Acholonu research team. Our work is the first serious study of African Rock Art as a writing system and the first publication of an elaborate study on the subject.
FINDING LOST LINKS BETWEEN ANCIENT NIGERIA; THE MIDDLE EAST AND INDIA THROUGH IGBO UKWU ARTEFACTS
The success of The Gram Code buoyed our researchers to the potential immanent on the African continent and in indigenous African artefacts, local symbols, rituals and of course the folk traditions and folklore that have been preserved with them through the ages. Accordingly in our second book They Lived Before Adam: Pre-Historic Origins of The Igbo, The Never-Been-Ruled (2009) co-authored with Ajay Prabhakar and Eddy Olumba, we took a closer look at the oral traditions of Nigerian peoples, comparing them with written traditions from other parts of the world.
We also conducted deeper comparative analyses of words and expressions from various continents which were found to be cognates of Igbo language. This was necessary because, as noted in The Gram Code, we had found similarities between Ikom monoliths inscriptions and Sumerian Proto-Cuneiform, but also with Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Dravidian Malayalam.
We had actually discovered an unknown inscription made up of parts of known inscriptions from several ancient languages, such as those already mentioned. This unknown inscription, which was very akin to Dravidian Indian Malayalam writing system, was found, not only on the monoliths, but especially on the Igbo-Ukwu archaeological finds made by British archaeologist Thurstan Shaw in the 1950s. In fact it was thanks to matching inscriptions/symbols which we found both on the Igbo Ukwu bronzes and on the monoliths that we were able to break the code of the monoliths.
This implied that the monoliths and the bronzes of Igbo Ukwu might have a common origin/culture or range of meanings. Our studies revealed that one particular form of writing found on the bronzes of Igbo Ukwu involves using the curves of a serpent to form letters. This form of orthography was known in very early times in India, and was called Snake Science .
It was also known that the Phoenicians were taught Snake Science writing by Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, and that the most basic letters of the Phoenician alphabet (the mother of the Greek Alphabet) were written in the form of the curves of a serpent, e.g. the Phoenician letter theth, which stands for the name of Thoth and for his sacred number – nine – is written like a serpent curling itself up. These discoveries raise questions as to the link between Igbo Ukwu and Egypt as well as with India.
The presence of elements from the Indian Malayalam, Phoenician and Egyptian elements and writing systems in Igbo-Ukwu and on the monoliths, draw an undeniable connection between ancient Nigeria and India, Phoenicia, the Middle East and with Thoth’s Egypt. This discovery began to open a new perspective on African history, providing a window into the question posed by Thurstan Shaw, the British archaeologist who excavated Igbo Ukwu sixty years ago as to why the artefacts excavated at Igbo-Ukwu were Indian in style, imagery and craftsmanship.
It became obvious that there was a Pre-historic cultural and historical link between Igbo Ukwu, India and Egypt in particular and the Middle East in general. In They Lived Before Adam, our researchers pursued these questions, and in The Lost Testament, we answered them. We also answered the million dollar question posed by Thurstan Shaw which no one has been able to answer since he excavated Igbo Ukwu, namely, Who was the royal personage buried at Igbo Ukwu whose bones were found lying in the midst of a whooping 110,000 coloured carnelian-beads, and who wore a copper crescent crown or a tiara, a whirling sun disc on both sides of the temple, and also a copper breast-plate?
Our discovery in this regard, which will forever change modern history, will not be revealed in this paper, but can only be read in our book – The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam: Unearthing Helio-polis/Igbo Ukwu – The Celestial City of the Gods of Egypt and India. We also pursued the question of Igbo origins, because in all our studies, we had consistently encountered foreign words of similar sounds and meanings with Igbo words, in most of the languages and cultures we studied from various continents such as Asia, Europe, Middle East and the Americas. This phenomenon is called cognate by linguists.
Cognates are proof of language relationship, common origin of languages, or borrowing from one language by another, possibly across vast distances. As such, our discovery of Igbo cognates in languages spoken on several continents of the globe suggested that Igbo was likely originated from some Mother Language of humanity, or that she was herself that Mother language.
IGBO UKWU – A LOST CITY AND A LOST CIVILIZATION; WHAT THUSRTAN SHAW DID NOT TELL FROM THE WORLD
Another area of concern was the puzzle of Igbo Ukwu and the enigmatic artefacts found there, which according to Thurtan Shaw, are Indian in style. Igbo Ukwu was a puzzle which no one could solve because it was not in any way related to any other civilization in or around Nigeria. Igbo Ukwu bronzes stood alone in method of manufacture, technique and style, yet Thurstan Shaw’s dating of Igbo Ukwu placed it close to Ife and Oyo as belonging to a period dating from 800 to 900 AD.
This dating created more problems for the study of Igbo History because the Igbo Ukwu excavated goods had no relationship with any known Igbo historical experience, and yet Shaw’s dating placed it too close to contemporary history, thus discouraging the mythological approach to its analysis. Yet the events that produced the artefacts of Igbo Ukwu clearly belonged to time immemorial, for no one within living memory knew anything about buried artefacts in the city, nor who made them and for what purpose!
None of the folklore of the Igbo said anything about those artefacts buried in Igbo Ukwu. It is important to mention that The Lost Testament was co-authored with an Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics Alex Animalu of University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Professor Animalu has co-authored a number of articles with the research team of the Catherine Acholonu Research Center, published in the African Journal of Physics. He claims that our analyses of Igbo Ukwu geometric symbols and their relationship to Egyptian pyramids is making a highly persuasive case for an African revolution in Theoretical Physics.
To solve the puzzle of Igbo Ukwu, our research team went to Igbo Ukwu to conduct
interviews. On reaching there, we made a very shocking discovery. We were made to understand that ‘finding of buried treasure’ had been going on in Igbo Ukwu as long as anyone could remember. And that the finds were usually sold to buyers from Northern Nigeria. Some of our informants remembered their parents and grandparents finding treasure (usually in the form of grooved pottery, piles of strung and unstrung beads, bronze and copper goods) while digging for
a cistern or digging graves.
We discovered from the natives that every house and farmland in Igbo Ukwu was standing on buried treasure. This of course meant that the town was standing on a LOST CITY, and a lost city meant A LOST CIVILIZATION! Thurstan Shaw had actually discovered a lost city and a lost civilization in the African rain forest, and had kept this most revolutionary piece of History to himself! As Shaw claimed in his book Unearthing Igbo Ukwu (see above), one of ruins he excavated was a temple with over three thousand tiny pots for votive offerings and a dried cistern that supplied the temple with spring water.
A temple with such an enormous amount of offerings suggested a city with a vast spiritual influence, comparable with that of Delphi if not larger. Was it a cover up or a human error that Thurstan Shaw failed to tell the world what he
found when he excavated Igbo Ukwu over sixty years ago – that indeed a city and a lost civilization lay buried in the forests and villages of Igbo Ukwu? Whether a mistake or a cover-up, our discovery also meant that Shaw’s dating could no more be trusted.
ANCIENT PYRAMIDS IN IGBO LAND SUGGEST A WEST AFRICAN ORIGIN OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION
Wrong and false dating of Nigerian artefacts have been the norm since the dawn of Archaeology in Nigeria. As a matter of fact the British colonialists had also found ten step pyramids in the area of Nsukka, each the size of a single storeyed building, when they first arrived in Igbo land!
Certainly it was not an accident of History, but a well orchestrated plot aimed at extinguishing Igbo links with Egyptian civilization, that the pyramids which were located in the village of Abaja in Nsude town, near Nsukka in Northern Nigeria disappeared without a trace and without any official entry being made of them in any archive or historical record by the otherwise very meticulous British anthropologists, colonialists and missionaries.
Since the discovery of the Nsude pyramids, black and Afro-centric scholars all over the world have seen them as the long sought-after missing link to a Black African origin of Egyptian civilization.
THOTH AND THE HOLY CITY CALLED BIAFRA/IFE/UHE
AN IGBO NATION CALLED BIAFRA EXISTED AROUND 11,000 B.C. A CITY OF THE GODS. THE ASSERTION IS SUPPORTED BY ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDINGS
Returning to the issue of the Indian Snake Science writing taught by Thoth to the Phoenicians, we conducted a comprehensive study of the Igbo Ukwu inscriptions in our third book The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam – Unearthing Heliopolis/Igbo-Ukwu – The Celestial City of the Gods of Egypt and India. What we found, as recorded in The Lost Testament was that Igbo Ukwu was indeed a lost city of mythology. Our comparative analysis of Igbo Ukwu inscriptions with those of most ancient Middle Eastern languages easily revealed very close links, so much so that one is tempted to conclude that Igbo Ukwu might have been the mother of these other writing systems.
The obvious question was, who taught whom? To answer this question was also to ask, who was the creator of the lost civilization and the lost city buried in Igbo Ukwu and to what period did it belong? To track down a West African civilization outside living memory, one had to look into the mythologies of West Africans, but also beyond West Africa, because civilizations and cities were never private ownerships – they usually made their impact far beyond their borders, and often seeded other cities and civilizations when their life-spans come to an end. The mythologies of the Yoruba (as recorded in Ifa), the Bini/Benin (index 3) and of the Igbo (see index 3) all confirmed that there was an ancient city with world-wide influence that was situated in Eastern Nigeria.
They confirm that this city was constructed in the period of the Deluge (Archaeologists have dated the Deluge to 11,000 B.C. according to recent discoveries). The Igbo called this city Biafra. The Benin called it the Holy City of Uhe in Idu Kingdom, while the Yoruba called it Ife. All the mythologies under reference say that the city was constructed by a god called Eri (in Igbo), Idu (Igbo/Bini), Obatala (in Yoruba). We found that the oldest epic of the Dravidian Indians, Ramayana, written by Valmiki insisted that Rama was a king in Atlantis who was induced by filial rivalry to abandon his kingdom, and that he retreated into the deep forest and built there a city in the middle of the rainforest where annual harvest festivals were held to honour the ancestors .
It was a city of international renown and the festival was attended by masters from around the world. In They Lived Before Adam, we identified this Annual Harvest Festival as Ahiajoku the Igbo New Yam festival dedicated to honouring the ancestors, based on similar claims in Nigerian mythologies about the landmarks marking the location of this forest city. All three mythologies of Nigerian tribes named above, say that a Post-Deluge city was raised up in the African rain forest through an artificial land-reclamation project whereby the god in question piled up sand from the sea onto an otherwise swampy terrain of the area. Igbo Nri mythology says the project was connected with Omambala River (now called Anambra River, a tributary of the River Niger) which then used to flood the whole area.
The mythology says that the god who undertook this land reclamation project did so by raising a plateau – a hilly terrain with a flat surface – and then built on it a Holy City of international renown, a forbidden city which only the gods and the priests could enter. Great Benin says that this city was the only inhabited place in the Post-Deluge world, because every other part of the world had been submerged by the Deluge. It further maintained that after the world dried up, it was repopulated from this Holy City from where groups of colonists were sent forth by the resident gods to repopulate the earth!These Nigerian myths are confirmed in the highly sought after but only recently released esoteric book, The Emerald Tablet of Thoth, The Atlantean, supposedly written on stone by Thoth, the Egyptian god of letters and of Wisdom and Knowledge.
In The Emerald Tablet, Thoth reveals his life history and his origins in the sub-continent of Atlantis before the Deluge. The book tells of the events leading onto the inundation of the world by water, the sinking of Atlantis and the instruction by God that Thoth should save a remnant of the Atlantean population in an Ark and carry them to “the Land of Khem” and there begin a new civilization. Thoth narrates how he “flew” off in the Ark and landed it in “the land of the hairy Barbarians” and there built a city with the workforce of the natives. Igbo Nri mythology confirming The Emerald Tablet maintains that the god Eri arrived in Igbo land in the time when the land was under water and swampy; that he flew into Igbo land, then populated by cave men (autochthons) in a flying ship (the Ark), raised a plateau over the waters, and there began the Nri system of professional priesthood.
He taught the natives agriculture, metal-working and basic technologies as well as commerce. Angulu Onwuejeogwu and Lawrence Emeka in two separate studies on the subject, confirmed that this god, who was called Eri, conquered the people’s resistance through his mystical powers. In The Emerald Tablet Thoth actually boasted that he used mystical powers to overcome the resistance of the natives and that he thereafter dwelt among them and inaugurated a civilization which gave the Khemites an edge over all other humans at the time.
OSIRIS/OBATALA/KHEM/KUSH/HAM/RAMA; MANY NAMES FOR THE SAME AFRICAN GOD
Edgar Cayce, America’s sleeping prophet gave readings confirming that mythological Egypt was an off-shoot of Atlantis, and that cave-men were its original inhabitants. In They Lived Before Adam, we amassed plenty of evidence, based on similarities of character and deeds between the various gods mentioned in the mythologies we were studying, that indeed the god entity whom the Yoruba called Obatala, the ancestor of the Igbo nation, was the same person whom the Egyptians called Khem, the founder of Khemet (Egypt), the Bini called Idu and the Hebrew Bible called Ham.
This entity was known as Rama/Yama among the Indians and as Osiris by the Greeks and latter-day Egyptians. As Kush, this god was the founder of Hindu Kush – another name for India, as well as the Ethiopian and Sumerian civilizations. The discovery of the identity of this god and his role in the global dissemination of an indigenous African culture that created the Ikom monoliths, Nok and Igbo Ukwu, with Igbo Ukwu as its capital was fundamental.
Indeed Egyptian and other global mythologies had noted that a hero “whom a local African god had made immortal” had travelled round the world bringing writing and civilization . The name of this world hero was Kush. Kush was the founder of both the Nubian civilization, the Egyptian civilization and the Hindu Kush civilization of India. Later civilizations called him Rama, but the word Kush actually emanated from an ancient Nigerian word Akwa Nshi/Kwa Nshi (Egyptian Ikwush - a name for the Sea Peoples who were followers of Kush and latter settled in the Aegean).
Akwa nshi was the name of the monoliths of Ikom and of the dwarfs (Igbo Nwa Nshi) who wrote them. Cayce said that just before the sinking of Atlantis, this hero had some writings made on stone and hidden in forests to preserve Atlantean knowledge. Those stone writings were, as revealed through linguistic analyses and through historical records, the monoliths of Ikom. When we made these connections, we were also able to see the Indian style of the Igbo Ukwu artefacts from a new light.
We were thus induced to study Indian mythologies as recorded in the world-famous epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. In Ramayana, authored by Valmiki, it is written that Rama was a king in Atlantis who left the continent because of filial rivalry which caused him to go into exile in the jungle for several years. In the jungle, he built a city in the rain-forest which became the pride of the ancient world, a pride of gods and men.
Again, a city in the jungle! Rama’s story sounded too familiar, for it was the same story told in Ifa and in Great Benin, but also in Egyptian mythology about filial rivalry between Obatala and Oduduwa, Idu and Oduduwa, Osiris and Seth leading to Obatala/Osiris going into exile. Ifa says that Obatala went into exile among the Igbo forest dwellers, and thus earned for himself the title Obatala Osere Igbo, which according to our studies means ‘Obatala the Sun King and Son of Igbo’.
According to Euba, Ifa says that Obatala was the incarnation of the First Son of God, whose other name was Ela. Ifa says that Igbo is the name of the God whose might destroyed Atlantis. Accordingly, the Yoruba name for ‘Almighty God’ is Igbo Olodumare. The discovery that Khem who founded Egypt, was the same West African god who founded Igbo Ukwu and related civilizations of ancient Nigeria, meant that mythological Egypt ruled by the gods was located in ancient Nigeria, and that the Nubian hero, Menes, who founded latter-day Egypt in North Africa might have been a Nigerian.
CHUKWU/OLODUMARE/ELE: THE IGBO GOD WHO SANK ATLANTIS
According to Euba’s reading of Ifa, the Almighty Olodumare was the God who fought the great cosmic war between Good and Evil, a war which Ifa calls “the Great Igbo Battle”, as a result of which the word Igbo became an awe-inspiring word which strikes fear and trepidation whenever it is spoken. This God is the same entity whom Thoth claims in The Emerald Tablet was the Great God who sank Atlantis for their sins against humanity. Thoth was a servant of this God. And it was this God that commanded Thoth to leave Atlantis and go and take refuge in the land of Khem in order to escape being drowned by the Deluge.
The Igbo call this God Chukwu. Thoth says in The Emerald Tablet that this God lives under the earth in a place called Amenti or the Duat. Thus Thoth’s claim in The Emerald Tablet that while in the Land of Khem he (Thoth) “blasted then a path to Amenti” can be understood as a reference to the Long Juju of Arochukwu – a cave route to the underground residence of the god whom the Aro call Ukpabi or Chukwu (Almighty God). They call this underground residence Ubini Ukpabi, which translates as ‘Tomb Palace of God’ - (Obi ini Ukpabi) – an underground route which was instrumental in the advancement of the Slave racket when it was latter abused by the Aro priests.
Information revealed by Euba, indicates that Ifa agrees with the Hindu epics to the effect that ‘the great cosmic war’ was the same war fought between Rama and the Atlanteans over the ownership of the city in the jungle. This battle involved the Igbo cave-men, with ‘God Almighty’ fighting on the side of Rama and the Igbo cave men. Ramayana and Mahabharata provide evidence that the leader of the cave men was a god most powerful, who was literate and wrote verses on stone (the monoliths), and that the battle involved the use of nuclear weapons by Atlanteans, which ultimately decimated a number of cities in West Africa, but also Atlantis, bringing about a mass migration from Africa to other continents.
The land-marks by which this forest city of Rama was known, were the same characteristics by which the ancient Egyptian city of Heliopolis (City of the Sun) and Ifa Holy City of Ife, were known. Igbo Ukwu shared the exact same attributes with Ifa Holy City ‘Old Ife’, and Benin Holy City ‘Uhe’. Heliopolis of Egypt was also called Yebu i.e. Igbo – the original name of Igbo Ukwu, as well as Abydos. All were jungle cities. All were built on a plateau. All were referred to as the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’. All were build by a god, raised from a flooded area and called ‘City of Light’.
DRAVIDIAN INDIANS HAVE WEST AFRICAN ORIGIN
Nigeria’s oldest mythologies speak of a migration from a sunken city to the present day location of Nigeria, the construction of a city on a hill-top, dedicated to a Great God, the eventual repopulation of the planet from the inhabitants of this forest city and transmittance of culture, language and writing to other parts of the world from this nucleus remnants of the plateau land. It was this mass migration from ancient Nigeria and Igbo land that led to the Black Dravidian population of Southern India.
Wayne Chandler in “The Jewel in the Lotus...” noted that “the Black race is by far the oldest” race in India; and quoting Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Indian historian and anthropologist, he says that these Black original inhabitants of India “appear to have come from Africa through Arabia and the coastlands of Iran ...” . Runoko Rashidi says that “India taken as a whole ... is a combination of Egypt and Ethiopians”, Ethiopia being a word used to describe ‘East and West’ Africa in ancient texts.
In They Lived Before Adam, we gave evidence from the works of Basil Davidson and Medieval Arab historians that Indian Naga tribes sojourned in East Africa before continuing to the land of their present habitation.These revelations lend credence to our thesis that Dravidians were the original inhabitants of Igbo Ukwu; that Igbo Ukwu was the lost African city of Rama and that it was Dravidianswho left behind the “Indian” artefacts unearthed by Shaw.
In fact Dravidians are actually known as the Igbos of India. Our findings as confirmed by recent research findings by molecular Geneticists, Clyde Winters, of Governors State University, Illinois, USA, is that Dravidians of India are of West African origin. The study concludes, as have a number of
other studies before it, that several cultural, linguistic and genetic threats among the Dravidians of India suggest that they are of African origin. It further concludes that many traditional Dravidian crops are of indigenous African origin, and bear indigenous African names, already used in Africa before the Dravidian migrations.
We quote Clyde Winters:
The presence of African millets in India along with archaeological and linguistic evidence suggests that the Dravidians originated in Africa and carried these genes with them to India as a result of an overland migration. This view is supported by the fact that the Dravidian tribal groups are believed to be the most pristine Dravidians.
Given the fact that it is among the Dravidian tribal groups who share the most genomic material with Africans, is further confirmation of …African origin for Dravidian speakers in India. This is highly suggestive of an African and Dravidian relationship since the Tribal groups are believed to be among the original settlers of India. This genetic, biotic, linguistic, anthropological and archaeological evidence is congruent with a probable connection between these populations.
According to Wayne Chandler in “The Jewel and the Lotus”, archaeological research by German scholars revealed that the skulls found in the lowest layers of the ruins of the oldest Indian cities of Mohenjo Daro “are Hamitic”. Our study as, published in The Lost Testament, reveals farreaching linguistic, cultural, ethnographic and mythological evidence between the Igbo and the
Dravidians.
The connection is not limited to present-day people of Igbo extraction, but rather to the so-called Proto- (or Mega) Igbo stock which includes Benin, Yoruba and other sub-ethnic groups, all of who belong to the so-called Kwa linguistic family otherwise called Old Idu by the Benin and Nkwo by the ancient Igbo (Kwa being a coinage by the European linguists for a more or less Mega-Igbo linguistic phenomenon, which we have identified as the Igbo Nkwo pheno-menon).
The word Proto-Igbo is actually a misnomer because the Igbo genetic strain appears to have existed from the time of Homo Erectus, Early Man and even before. Our research into cognates shows that the Kwa/Nkwo language family was the mother of Canaanite and its child languages Semitic, Sumerian and Akkadian. It is also the mother of Egyptian. This study is delineated in They Lived Before Adam.
Alternatively, the Kwa etymon is derived from the word Akwa Nshi which is the name of the ‘First people’ (mostly dwarfs) who populated early Igbo land. This word occurs consistently in the clan names of the earliest migrants (6,000 - 4360 B.C.) to Asia and the Middle East, especially in China, as in the words Kwangsi, Kwangtung, Hshi, Shansi, Shensi, etc.
IGBO - THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGES?
Our findings as illustrated in They Lived Before Adam through Comparative Linguistics, demonstrated that Igbo language has cognates in languages as far flung as Canaanite, Hebrew, Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Chinese, Sanskrit (in The Lost Testament) and so on, even in Turkish, and some languages of Western and Eastern Europe . This is congruent with the discovery that Igbo Ukwu inscriptions as shown in the artefacts unearthed by Thurstan Shaw had striking similarities in near-Eastern writing systems such as Proto-Phoenician, Cretan Hiero-glyphics, Linear A and B, Proto-Sinaitic, Indic, Hittite, Elamite, etc. (plate 2).
Clearly the Igbo myth of the Pre-historic landing of a god in an Ark and Thoth’s narrative of his own Atlantean voyage to bring civilization to the cave men of the land of Khem was not without surviving evidence, for Thoth was the god of writing. All the surviving ‘linguistic’ evidence found in Igbo Ukwu speak of a writing culture nurtured in Igbo land’s forest city of Rama/Osiris/Khem and disseminated all over the world across the world’s oceans in the same pre-historic Post-Deluge project that repopulated the earth after the deluge.
Our study has demonstrated the importance of mythology and oral traditions in the reconstruction of the Pre-History of Indigenous peoples, but more importantly the fact that symbols and so-called rock art are forms of linguistic expression and information storage systems in use among prehistoric Africans. So also are ritual expressions. Analyses showed that inscriptions used in Igbo Ukwu and still visible on the excavated artefacts were in use especially in Cretan hieroglyphics and Linear A & B, which later formed from it (plate 2).
We found to our amazement that many objects excavated at Igbo Ukwu were depicted in Cretan Hiero-glyphs (plates 3/3b) – these include vases, pots, animal heads, horned heads, parts of the human body, such as the mouth, eyes, hands, legs, etc. Igbo Ukwu symbols such as zigzag, spiral, whirling sun, cross-hatching, concentric circles, crescents, crosses, X-shaped cross, lines and triangles and palm-frond symbols found on Igbo Ukwu pottery and bronzes.
Cretan letters found at the palace of king Minos by Archaeologist Arthur Evans reflect inscriptions found at Igbo Ukwu and confirm our already expressed theory (see They Lived) that Cretan civilization was influenced/founded by the Igbo-speaking family of Canaan and his ‘moon-faced’ daughter ‘Europa’, who gave her name to Europe. According to Greek mythology her name, ‘Europa’ means ‘moon-face’ or ‘round face’, which is the same thing it means in Igbo: Iruopa.
It was her sons, Phoenix and Kadmus, who founded most of the great nations of the Aegean and the Middle East, especially Phoenicia and Crete. At Delphi, Europa functioned as the goddess, Hera, and ruled the Aegean through her priestesses until she was overthrown by Zeus through the latter’s sons. This greatest of all matriarchs and founding mothers of Europe still survives to this day as the powerful Black Madonna of Europe.
IGBO UKWU AS THE LOST CITY OF HELIOPOLIS – CITY OF THE SUN
As is to be expected, we undertook a deeper analysis of ancient Egyptian literature, mythologies, linguistic expressions and hieroglyphic system, and what we found was that the origins of Egyptian hieroglyphics lay in concepts located to a large extent in and around Kwa- Igbo land, Niger Delta and the Cameroons.
For example, Egyptologists have recently discovered that when the ancient Egyptians speak of the Land of the Rising Sun, they actually looked towards West Africa as the place from where their Sun or Sirius rises and to which she sets every 70 days. Accordingly they also regarded West Africa as the land where their gods resided.
That land was called Punt in Egypt and Panchea in Greece. Our findings reveal that that ancient city in the forests of West Africa was the capital of Punt. It was indeed the mythical ‘Land of the Rising Sun’ otherwise known as Heliopolis or Yebu (pronounced ‘Eboe’) by the latter-day ancient Egyptians of North Africa or as Biafra by the ancient West Africans.
In fact we were humbled to discover that ancient Egypt of mythology was actually located in ancient Nigeria, and in The Lost Testament we listed piles of evidence to demonstrate this assertion. Heliopolis was the capital of Punt, and Heliopolis was no other place but the lost city of ‘Igbo/Yebu’, now called ‘Igbo Ukwu’ – the city which Thurstan Shaw had excavated!
THE EGYPTIAN BENBEN/PRIMEVAL MOUND IN IGBO UKWU
The Primeval Mound (plateau), which God raised up, and on which he stood while
commanding creation, was thereafter known as ‘the Covenant Mound’ in Egyptian mythology. Early Egyptians commemorated it with a small mound of sand with a flat surface as noted by Laird Scranton in a 2006 publication. It was a symbol of the Covenant which God made with his creation that he will always support what he made.
The Egyptians call the Mound the Benben. The Benben mound cannot be found in Egypt because it is actually located in Nigeria, in Igbo Ukwu. As in the case of the Benben, the Igbo Ukwu covenant mound is also believed to be the spot where God Stepped Down. Accordingly, it is called Oda, which means ‘Place of Stepping Down’. Oda is the Primeval Covenant Mound of all Ndi Igbo, and functions as the Judgement Seat of God – and as such is also called Ebe – which means ‘Place of Judgement’.
As the Highest Arbiter of all Ndi Igbo, this Mound is the Ebe of all Ebes in Igbo land, or Ebe Ebe, which sounds like the Egyptian word Benben. It appears that it was Igbo Ukwu Primeval Mound which gave rise to all the mound habitations created by early men mound-builders around the world. In fact in They Lived Before Adam, we had shown that ancient mound builders in the British Isles (3,000 B.C.) had left behind artefacts still in use in Igbo land such as ichi and craved ivory horns – Igbo symbols of royalty and authority.
Our work gave a relatively extensive illustration of the fact that Afa, a language of nature still in use by the Igbo Shaman, is the origin of words that cut across several languages in the world including Sanskrit. Igbo language spoken today originated directly from Afa, which in itself is a cosmic language, and, as we demonstrated in The Lost Testament, the bearer of the Sirian linguistic, cultural and genetic bloodline, which we find to have been handed down to humankind through the Igbo cosmos. This explains the use of Igbo language in the Hebrew Torah version of the story of Creation.
RIVER NIGER/YAM SUFF: THE BEARER OF ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS
The River Niger was known as Yam Suff (or Stream of Osiris) to the Egyptians, because Osiris was Yama, a local variation of the name Rama. Yama was the name of the god of Death in India, a position occupied by Osiris in the Egyptian pantheon. Yam Suff according to the Hebrew Torah was the River of Moses’ Exodus Crossing from Egypt with the Israelites. Zecharia Sitchen noted that the Stream of Osiris (Niger) was located on the way to the underground Duat which we have identified as being located in West Africa and precisely in the Cameroon Mountain range, not too far from Arochukwu where the Igbo entrance to the underground Duat is located.
We have conclusively confirmed Hebrew origins in ancient Nigeria, from Abraham and his Edomite children to Joseph’s origins in Panchea. Several chapters devoted to the concept of Panchea in They Lived Before Adam, show that it was located in the Nigeria/Cameroon axis in West Africa, and was actually called ‘Biafra’ empire in mythical times.
The Kwa population in the world-famous Hyksos Exodus of the Semites from Egypt and their role in fertilizing Middle Eastern civilization including setting up settlements in Palestine and the Levant, the rise of the Hittite, Minoan, Cretan, Greek, Trojan and other Middle Eastern civilizations as a result of the Hyksos migrations from Egypt; the West African origins of the Hyksos and the centrality of Igbo Ukwu and the River Niger in the seeding the Middle East with a ‘Made in West Africa’ writing system, language and mystical culture, is the subject developed among other equally engaging issues in The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam.
All this is in sync with the claim by Herodotus that the Niger was the original source of the Nile. Herodotus had noted equally that “the names of all the gods of Greece came from Egypt (and) this statement was never chall-enged in Antiquity”. Igbo influences affected the Aegean through Egypt whose original capital was Igbo Ukwu. In fact the ancient Egyptians and Dravidians and their civilizations were all products of Pre-historic Igbo land. James Brunson who studied the Cretan civilization of Mycenae and the artefacts and wall paintings excavated by Arthur Evans in the palace of Knossos noted without equivocation that “the civilization belonged to an African people”, an observation which confirms that of Evans himself.
In They Lived Before Adam we drew parallels between some of images from Knossos and those from the Igbo environment. In their study of megalithic cultures of Europe R.M. De Longe and Jay Wakefield (a Dutch and an American) have discovered an ancient stone map in a megalithic grave in France showing the precise entry to the River Niger , thus adding wight to our thesis that the Niger was the bearer of ancient civilizations and culture-bearing migrations. Indeed the answer as to whether the Igbo were the first people, takes us back to excavations carried out in the early 1970s by a team of archaeologists from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka led by Prof. F.N. Anozie.
These archaeologists found evidence of Prehistoric habitations of Early Stone Age people in Igbo land dating back to before 500,000 B.C. Their excavations carried out in Ugwuele, Isiukwuato in Old Okigwe (present day Abia State), makes a case for an Igbo-based earliest habitation of Homo Erectus in the world and that Igbo land was the global industry of Stone Age tools that might have supplied other parts of the world with hand-axes. More than that, the peripheral findings of the archaeologists suggest that Igbo land holds answers to human evolution, answers which future research will determine.
The Catherine Acholonu Research Center has been carrying out break-through cultural, linguistic and anthropological research since 1990 on African Pre-History. Most of its findings, published under various titles have brought new, ground-breaking information to change globally accepted, but erroneous notions that indigenous Africans had no history, no form of writing, no organized technology and no part in the making of human civilization. In 2005, the Catherine Acholonu Research Center published the first in what it calls The
African Adam Series, under the title The Gram Code of African Adam – Stone Books and Cave Libraries: Reconstructing 450,000 Years of Africa’s Lost Civilizations. That book won for Dr. Catherine Acholonu, the award of Professor of African History and Philosophy from Pilgrims University and Theological Seminary, Africa Campus, Aba, Nigeria.
The Gram Code was an attempt at understanding African Rock Art and traditional symbols as means of expression, communication and information storage. Co-authored with Dr. Ajay Prabhakar, an Indian software technology engineer, the 480-page book was an analysis of pre-historic inscriptions on the ancient monoliths, located in the forests and village-squares in Ikom local community in Cross River State, Nigeria. It was also an analysis of cave art, paintings and inscriptions located in North, West, East and Southern Africa. Our findings and conclusions based on these studies and analyses, were that Pre-Historic Africans used cave art and rock inscriptions as means of expression, communication and information storage, most of which were embedded in ritual practices of indigenous peoples.
Our findings were presented at several international forums in Nigeria and abroad. In partnership with the United Nations Forum of Arts and Culture, the Catherine Acholonu Center nominated Ikom monoliths of Cross River State for listing in the World Monument Fund Watch List of endangered sites. The monoliths were sub-sequently listed in the 2008 WMF Watch List of 100 Most Endangered Sites, and since then the monoliths have generated and gained greater global and local interest, so much so that that they are now listed under the UNESCO World Heritage Website as displaying ancient inscri-ptions of mathematical and archaeological symbols and an unknown writing system, all thanks to the research findings and publications of the Catherine Acholonu research team. Our work is the first serious study of African Rock Art as a writing system and the first publication of an elaborate study on the subject.
FINDING LOST LINKS BETWEEN ANCIENT NIGERIA; THE MIDDLE EAST AND INDIA THROUGH IGBO UKWU ARTEFACTS
The success of The Gram Code buoyed our researchers to the potential immanent on the African continent and in indigenous African artefacts, local symbols, rituals and of course the folk traditions and folklore that have been preserved with them through the ages. Accordingly in our second book They Lived Before Adam: Pre-Historic Origins of The Igbo, The Never-Been-Ruled (2009) co-authored with Ajay Prabhakar and Eddy Olumba, we took a closer look at the oral traditions of Nigerian peoples, comparing them with written traditions from other parts of the world.
We also conducted deeper comparative analyses of words and expressions from various continents which were found to be cognates of Igbo language. This was necessary because, as noted in The Gram Code, we had found similarities between Ikom monoliths inscriptions and Sumerian Proto-Cuneiform, but also with Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Dravidian Malayalam.
We had actually discovered an unknown inscription made up of parts of known inscriptions from several ancient languages, such as those already mentioned. This unknown inscription, which was very akin to Dravidian Indian Malayalam writing system, was found, not only on the monoliths, but especially on the Igbo-Ukwu archaeological finds made by British archaeologist Thurstan Shaw in the 1950s. In fact it was thanks to matching inscriptions/symbols which we found both on the Igbo Ukwu bronzes and on the monoliths that we were able to break the code of the monoliths.
This implied that the monoliths and the bronzes of Igbo Ukwu might have a common origin/culture or range of meanings. Our studies revealed that one particular form of writing found on the bronzes of Igbo Ukwu involves using the curves of a serpent to form letters. This form of orthography was known in very early times in India, and was called Snake Science .
It was also known that the Phoenicians were taught Snake Science writing by Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing, and that the most basic letters of the Phoenician alphabet (the mother of the Greek Alphabet) were written in the form of the curves of a serpent, e.g. the Phoenician letter theth, which stands for the name of Thoth and for his sacred number – nine – is written like a serpent curling itself up. These discoveries raise questions as to the link between Igbo Ukwu and Egypt as well as with India.
The presence of elements from the Indian Malayalam, Phoenician and Egyptian elements and writing systems in Igbo-Ukwu and on the monoliths, draw an undeniable connection between ancient Nigeria and India, Phoenicia, the Middle East and with Thoth’s Egypt. This discovery began to open a new perspective on African history, providing a window into the question posed by Thurstan Shaw, the British archaeologist who excavated Igbo Ukwu sixty years ago as to why the artefacts excavated at Igbo-Ukwu were Indian in style, imagery and craftsmanship.
It became obvious that there was a Pre-historic cultural and historical link between Igbo Ukwu, India and Egypt in particular and the Middle East in general. In They Lived Before Adam, our researchers pursued these questions, and in The Lost Testament, we answered them. We also answered the million dollar question posed by Thurstan Shaw which no one has been able to answer since he excavated Igbo Ukwu, namely, Who was the royal personage buried at Igbo Ukwu whose bones were found lying in the midst of a whooping 110,000 coloured carnelian-beads, and who wore a copper crescent crown or a tiara, a whirling sun disc on both sides of the temple, and also a copper breast-plate?
Our discovery in this regard, which will forever change modern history, will not be revealed in this paper, but can only be read in our book – The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam: Unearthing Helio-polis/Igbo Ukwu – The Celestial City of the Gods of Egypt and India. We also pursued the question of Igbo origins, because in all our studies, we had consistently encountered foreign words of similar sounds and meanings with Igbo words, in most of the languages and cultures we studied from various continents such as Asia, Europe, Middle East and the Americas. This phenomenon is called cognate by linguists.
Cognates are proof of language relationship, common origin of languages, or borrowing from one language by another, possibly across vast distances. As such, our discovery of Igbo cognates in languages spoken on several continents of the globe suggested that Igbo was likely originated from some Mother Language of humanity, or that she was herself that Mother language.
IGBO UKWU – A LOST CITY AND A LOST CIVILIZATION; WHAT THUSRTAN SHAW DID NOT TELL FROM THE WORLD
Another area of concern was the puzzle of Igbo Ukwu and the enigmatic artefacts found there, which according to Thurtan Shaw, are Indian in style. Igbo Ukwu was a puzzle which no one could solve because it was not in any way related to any other civilization in or around Nigeria. Igbo Ukwu bronzes stood alone in method of manufacture, technique and style, yet Thurstan Shaw’s dating of Igbo Ukwu placed it close to Ife and Oyo as belonging to a period dating from 800 to 900 AD.
This dating created more problems for the study of Igbo History because the Igbo Ukwu excavated goods had no relationship with any known Igbo historical experience, and yet Shaw’s dating placed it too close to contemporary history, thus discouraging the mythological approach to its analysis. Yet the events that produced the artefacts of Igbo Ukwu clearly belonged to time immemorial, for no one within living memory knew anything about buried artefacts in the city, nor who made them and for what purpose!
None of the folklore of the Igbo said anything about those artefacts buried in Igbo Ukwu. It is important to mention that The Lost Testament was co-authored with an Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics Alex Animalu of University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Professor Animalu has co-authored a number of articles with the research team of the Catherine Acholonu Research Center, published in the African Journal of Physics. He claims that our analyses of Igbo Ukwu geometric symbols and their relationship to Egyptian pyramids is making a highly persuasive case for an African revolution in Theoretical Physics.
To solve the puzzle of Igbo Ukwu, our research team went to Igbo Ukwu to conduct
interviews. On reaching there, we made a very shocking discovery. We were made to understand that ‘finding of buried treasure’ had been going on in Igbo Ukwu as long as anyone could remember. And that the finds were usually sold to buyers from Northern Nigeria. Some of our informants remembered their parents and grandparents finding treasure (usually in the form of grooved pottery, piles of strung and unstrung beads, bronze and copper goods) while digging for
a cistern or digging graves.
We discovered from the natives that every house and farmland in Igbo Ukwu was standing on buried treasure. This of course meant that the town was standing on a LOST CITY, and a lost city meant A LOST CIVILIZATION! Thurstan Shaw had actually discovered a lost city and a lost civilization in the African rain forest, and had kept this most revolutionary piece of History to himself! As Shaw claimed in his book Unearthing Igbo Ukwu (see above), one of ruins he excavated was a temple with over three thousand tiny pots for votive offerings and a dried cistern that supplied the temple with spring water.
A temple with such an enormous amount of offerings suggested a city with a vast spiritual influence, comparable with that of Delphi if not larger. Was it a cover up or a human error that Thurstan Shaw failed to tell the world what he
found when he excavated Igbo Ukwu over sixty years ago – that indeed a city and a lost civilization lay buried in the forests and villages of Igbo Ukwu? Whether a mistake or a cover-up, our discovery also meant that Shaw’s dating could no more be trusted.
ANCIENT PYRAMIDS IN IGBO LAND SUGGEST A WEST AFRICAN ORIGIN OF EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION
Wrong and false dating of Nigerian artefacts have been the norm since the dawn of Archaeology in Nigeria. As a matter of fact the British colonialists had also found ten step pyramids in the area of Nsukka, each the size of a single storeyed building, when they first arrived in Igbo land!
Certainly it was not an accident of History, but a well orchestrated plot aimed at extinguishing Igbo links with Egyptian civilization, that the pyramids which were located in the village of Abaja in Nsude town, near Nsukka in Northern Nigeria disappeared without a trace and without any official entry being made of them in any archive or historical record by the otherwise very meticulous British anthropologists, colonialists and missionaries.
Since the discovery of the Nsude pyramids, black and Afro-centric scholars all over the world have seen them as the long sought-after missing link to a Black African origin of Egyptian civilization.
THOTH AND THE HOLY CITY CALLED BIAFRA/IFE/UHE
AN IGBO NATION CALLED BIAFRA EXISTED AROUND 11,000 B.C. A CITY OF THE GODS. THE ASSERTION IS SUPPORTED BY ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDINGS
Returning to the issue of the Indian Snake Science writing taught by Thoth to the Phoenicians, we conducted a comprehensive study of the Igbo Ukwu inscriptions in our third book The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam – Unearthing Heliopolis/Igbo-Ukwu – The Celestial City of the Gods of Egypt and India. What we found, as recorded in The Lost Testament was that Igbo Ukwu was indeed a lost city of mythology. Our comparative analysis of Igbo Ukwu inscriptions with those of most ancient Middle Eastern languages easily revealed very close links, so much so that one is tempted to conclude that Igbo Ukwu might have been the mother of these other writing systems.
The obvious question was, who taught whom? To answer this question was also to ask, who was the creator of the lost civilization and the lost city buried in Igbo Ukwu and to what period did it belong? To track down a West African civilization outside living memory, one had to look into the mythologies of West Africans, but also beyond West Africa, because civilizations and cities were never private ownerships – they usually made their impact far beyond their borders, and often seeded other cities and civilizations when their life-spans come to an end. The mythologies of the Yoruba (as recorded in Ifa), the Bini/Benin (index 3) and of the Igbo (see index 3) all confirmed that there was an ancient city with world-wide influence that was situated in Eastern Nigeria.
They confirm that this city was constructed in the period of the Deluge (Archaeologists have dated the Deluge to 11,000 B.C. according to recent discoveries). The Igbo called this city Biafra. The Benin called it the Holy City of Uhe in Idu Kingdom, while the Yoruba called it Ife. All the mythologies under reference say that the city was constructed by a god called Eri (in Igbo), Idu (Igbo/Bini), Obatala (in Yoruba). We found that the oldest epic of the Dravidian Indians, Ramayana, written by Valmiki insisted that Rama was a king in Atlantis who was induced by filial rivalry to abandon his kingdom, and that he retreated into the deep forest and built there a city in the middle of the rainforest where annual harvest festivals were held to honour the ancestors .
It was a city of international renown and the festival was attended by masters from around the world. In They Lived Before Adam, we identified this Annual Harvest Festival as Ahiajoku the Igbo New Yam festival dedicated to honouring the ancestors, based on similar claims in Nigerian mythologies about the landmarks marking the location of this forest city. All three mythologies of Nigerian tribes named above, say that a Post-Deluge city was raised up in the African rain forest through an artificial land-reclamation project whereby the god in question piled up sand from the sea onto an otherwise swampy terrain of the area. Igbo Nri mythology says the project was connected with Omambala River (now called Anambra River, a tributary of the River Niger) which then used to flood the whole area.
The mythology says that the god who undertook this land reclamation project did so by raising a plateau – a hilly terrain with a flat surface – and then built on it a Holy City of international renown, a forbidden city which only the gods and the priests could enter. Great Benin says that this city was the only inhabited place in the Post-Deluge world, because every other part of the world had been submerged by the Deluge. It further maintained that after the world dried up, it was repopulated from this Holy City from where groups of colonists were sent forth by the resident gods to repopulate the earth!These Nigerian myths are confirmed in the highly sought after but only recently released esoteric book, The Emerald Tablet of Thoth, The Atlantean, supposedly written on stone by Thoth, the Egyptian god of letters and of Wisdom and Knowledge.
In The Emerald Tablet, Thoth reveals his life history and his origins in the sub-continent of Atlantis before the Deluge. The book tells of the events leading onto the inundation of the world by water, the sinking of Atlantis and the instruction by God that Thoth should save a remnant of the Atlantean population in an Ark and carry them to “the Land of Khem” and there begin a new civilization. Thoth narrates how he “flew” off in the Ark and landed it in “the land of the hairy Barbarians” and there built a city with the workforce of the natives. Igbo Nri mythology confirming The Emerald Tablet maintains that the god Eri arrived in Igbo land in the time when the land was under water and swampy; that he flew into Igbo land, then populated by cave men (autochthons) in a flying ship (the Ark), raised a plateau over the waters, and there began the Nri system of professional priesthood.
He taught the natives agriculture, metal-working and basic technologies as well as commerce. Angulu Onwuejeogwu and Lawrence Emeka in two separate studies on the subject, confirmed that this god, who was called Eri, conquered the people’s resistance through his mystical powers. In The Emerald Tablet Thoth actually boasted that he used mystical powers to overcome the resistance of the natives and that he thereafter dwelt among them and inaugurated a civilization which gave the Khemites an edge over all other humans at the time.
OSIRIS/OBATALA/KHEM/KUSH/HAM/RAMA; MANY NAMES FOR THE SAME AFRICAN GOD
Edgar Cayce, America’s sleeping prophet gave readings confirming that mythological Egypt was an off-shoot of Atlantis, and that cave-men were its original inhabitants. In They Lived Before Adam, we amassed plenty of evidence, based on similarities of character and deeds between the various gods mentioned in the mythologies we were studying, that indeed the god entity whom the Yoruba called Obatala, the ancestor of the Igbo nation, was the same person whom the Egyptians called Khem, the founder of Khemet (Egypt), the Bini called Idu and the Hebrew Bible called Ham.
This entity was known as Rama/Yama among the Indians and as Osiris by the Greeks and latter-day Egyptians. As Kush, this god was the founder of Hindu Kush – another name for India, as well as the Ethiopian and Sumerian civilizations. The discovery of the identity of this god and his role in the global dissemination of an indigenous African culture that created the Ikom monoliths, Nok and Igbo Ukwu, with Igbo Ukwu as its capital was fundamental.
Indeed Egyptian and other global mythologies had noted that a hero “whom a local African god had made immortal” had travelled round the world bringing writing and civilization . The name of this world hero was Kush. Kush was the founder of both the Nubian civilization, the Egyptian civilization and the Hindu Kush civilization of India. Later civilizations called him Rama, but the word Kush actually emanated from an ancient Nigerian word Akwa Nshi/Kwa Nshi (Egyptian Ikwush - a name for the Sea Peoples who were followers of Kush and latter settled in the Aegean).
Akwa nshi was the name of the monoliths of Ikom and of the dwarfs (Igbo Nwa Nshi) who wrote them. Cayce said that just before the sinking of Atlantis, this hero had some writings made on stone and hidden in forests to preserve Atlantean knowledge. Those stone writings were, as revealed through linguistic analyses and through historical records, the monoliths of Ikom. When we made these connections, we were also able to see the Indian style of the Igbo Ukwu artefacts from a new light.
We were thus induced to study Indian mythologies as recorded in the world-famous epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. In Ramayana, authored by Valmiki, it is written that Rama was a king in Atlantis who left the continent because of filial rivalry which caused him to go into exile in the jungle for several years. In the jungle, he built a city in the rain-forest which became the pride of the ancient world, a pride of gods and men.
Again, a city in the jungle! Rama’s story sounded too familiar, for it was the same story told in Ifa and in Great Benin, but also in Egyptian mythology about filial rivalry between Obatala and Oduduwa, Idu and Oduduwa, Osiris and Seth leading to Obatala/Osiris going into exile. Ifa says that Obatala went into exile among the Igbo forest dwellers, and thus earned for himself the title Obatala Osere Igbo, which according to our studies means ‘Obatala the Sun King and Son of Igbo’.
According to Euba, Ifa says that Obatala was the incarnation of the First Son of God, whose other name was Ela. Ifa says that Igbo is the name of the God whose might destroyed Atlantis. Accordingly, the Yoruba name for ‘Almighty God’ is Igbo Olodumare. The discovery that Khem who founded Egypt, was the same West African god who founded Igbo Ukwu and related civilizations of ancient Nigeria, meant that mythological Egypt ruled by the gods was located in ancient Nigeria, and that the Nubian hero, Menes, who founded latter-day Egypt in North Africa might have been a Nigerian.
CHUKWU/OLODUMARE/ELE: THE IGBO GOD WHO SANK ATLANTIS
According to Euba’s reading of Ifa, the Almighty Olodumare was the God who fought the great cosmic war between Good and Evil, a war which Ifa calls “the Great Igbo Battle”, as a result of which the word Igbo became an awe-inspiring word which strikes fear and trepidation whenever it is spoken. This God is the same entity whom Thoth claims in The Emerald Tablet was the Great God who sank Atlantis for their sins against humanity. Thoth was a servant of this God. And it was this God that commanded Thoth to leave Atlantis and go and take refuge in the land of Khem in order to escape being drowned by the Deluge.
The Igbo call this God Chukwu. Thoth says in The Emerald Tablet that this God lives under the earth in a place called Amenti or the Duat. Thus Thoth’s claim in The Emerald Tablet that while in the Land of Khem he (Thoth) “blasted then a path to Amenti” can be understood as a reference to the Long Juju of Arochukwu – a cave route to the underground residence of the god whom the Aro call Ukpabi or Chukwu (Almighty God). They call this underground residence Ubini Ukpabi, which translates as ‘Tomb Palace of God’ - (Obi ini Ukpabi) – an underground route which was instrumental in the advancement of the Slave racket when it was latter abused by the Aro priests.
Information revealed by Euba, indicates that Ifa agrees with the Hindu epics to the effect that ‘the great cosmic war’ was the same war fought between Rama and the Atlanteans over the ownership of the city in the jungle. This battle involved the Igbo cave-men, with ‘God Almighty’ fighting on the side of Rama and the Igbo cave men. Ramayana and Mahabharata provide evidence that the leader of the cave men was a god most powerful, who was literate and wrote verses on stone (the monoliths), and that the battle involved the use of nuclear weapons by Atlanteans, which ultimately decimated a number of cities in West Africa, but also Atlantis, bringing about a mass migration from Africa to other continents.
The land-marks by which this forest city of Rama was known, were the same characteristics by which the ancient Egyptian city of Heliopolis (City of the Sun) and Ifa Holy City of Ife, were known. Igbo Ukwu shared the exact same attributes with Ifa Holy City ‘Old Ife’, and Benin Holy City ‘Uhe’. Heliopolis of Egypt was also called Yebu i.e. Igbo – the original name of Igbo Ukwu, as well as Abydos. All were jungle cities. All were built on a plateau. All were referred to as the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’. All were build by a god, raised from a flooded area and called ‘City of Light’.
DRAVIDIAN INDIANS HAVE WEST AFRICAN ORIGIN
Nigeria’s oldest mythologies speak of a migration from a sunken city to the present day location of Nigeria, the construction of a city on a hill-top, dedicated to a Great God, the eventual repopulation of the planet from the inhabitants of this forest city and transmittance of culture, language and writing to other parts of the world from this nucleus remnants of the plateau land. It was this mass migration from ancient Nigeria and Igbo land that led to the Black Dravidian population of Southern India.
Wayne Chandler in “The Jewel in the Lotus...” noted that “the Black race is by far the oldest” race in India; and quoting Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Indian historian and anthropologist, he says that these Black original inhabitants of India “appear to have come from Africa through Arabia and the coastlands of Iran ...” . Runoko Rashidi says that “India taken as a whole ... is a combination of Egypt and Ethiopians”, Ethiopia being a word used to describe ‘East and West’ Africa in ancient texts.
In They Lived Before Adam, we gave evidence from the works of Basil Davidson and Medieval Arab historians that Indian Naga tribes sojourned in East Africa before continuing to the land of their present habitation.These revelations lend credence to our thesis that Dravidians were the original inhabitants of Igbo Ukwu; that Igbo Ukwu was the lost African city of Rama and that it was Dravidianswho left behind the “Indian” artefacts unearthed by Shaw.
In fact Dravidians are actually known as the Igbos of India. Our findings as confirmed by recent research findings by molecular Geneticists, Clyde Winters, of Governors State University, Illinois, USA, is that Dravidians of India are of West African origin. The study concludes, as have a number of
other studies before it, that several cultural, linguistic and genetic threats among the Dravidians of India suggest that they are of African origin. It further concludes that many traditional Dravidian crops are of indigenous African origin, and bear indigenous African names, already used in Africa before the Dravidian migrations.
We quote Clyde Winters:
The presence of African millets in India along with archaeological and linguistic evidence suggests that the Dravidians originated in Africa and carried these genes with them to India as a result of an overland migration. This view is supported by the fact that the Dravidian tribal groups are believed to be the most pristine Dravidians.
Given the fact that it is among the Dravidian tribal groups who share the most genomic material with Africans, is further confirmation of …African origin for Dravidian speakers in India. This is highly suggestive of an African and Dravidian relationship since the Tribal groups are believed to be among the original settlers of India. This genetic, biotic, linguistic, anthropological and archaeological evidence is congruent with a probable connection between these populations.
According to Wayne Chandler in “The Jewel and the Lotus”, archaeological research by German scholars revealed that the skulls found in the lowest layers of the ruins of the oldest Indian cities of Mohenjo Daro “are Hamitic”. Our study as, published in The Lost Testament, reveals farreaching linguistic, cultural, ethnographic and mythological evidence between the Igbo and the
Dravidians.
The connection is not limited to present-day people of Igbo extraction, but rather to the so-called Proto- (or Mega) Igbo stock which includes Benin, Yoruba and other sub-ethnic groups, all of who belong to the so-called Kwa linguistic family otherwise called Old Idu by the Benin and Nkwo by the ancient Igbo (Kwa being a coinage by the European linguists for a more or less Mega-Igbo linguistic phenomenon, which we have identified as the Igbo Nkwo pheno-menon).
The word Proto-Igbo is actually a misnomer because the Igbo genetic strain appears to have existed from the time of Homo Erectus, Early Man and even before. Our research into cognates shows that the Kwa/Nkwo language family was the mother of Canaanite and its child languages Semitic, Sumerian and Akkadian. It is also the mother of Egyptian. This study is delineated in They Lived Before Adam.
Alternatively, the Kwa etymon is derived from the word Akwa Nshi which is the name of the ‘First people’ (mostly dwarfs) who populated early Igbo land. This word occurs consistently in the clan names of the earliest migrants (6,000 - 4360 B.C.) to Asia and the Middle East, especially in China, as in the words Kwangsi, Kwangtung, Hshi, Shansi, Shensi, etc.
IGBO - THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGES?
Our findings as illustrated in They Lived Before Adam through Comparative Linguistics, demonstrated that Igbo language has cognates in languages as far flung as Canaanite, Hebrew, Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Chinese, Sanskrit (in The Lost Testament) and so on, even in Turkish, and some languages of Western and Eastern Europe . This is congruent with the discovery that Igbo Ukwu inscriptions as shown in the artefacts unearthed by Thurstan Shaw had striking similarities in near-Eastern writing systems such as Proto-Phoenician, Cretan Hiero-glyphics, Linear A and B, Proto-Sinaitic, Indic, Hittite, Elamite, etc. (plate 2).
Clearly the Igbo myth of the Pre-historic landing of a god in an Ark and Thoth’s narrative of his own Atlantean voyage to bring civilization to the cave men of the land of Khem was not without surviving evidence, for Thoth was the god of writing. All the surviving ‘linguistic’ evidence found in Igbo Ukwu speak of a writing culture nurtured in Igbo land’s forest city of Rama/Osiris/Khem and disseminated all over the world across the world’s oceans in the same pre-historic Post-Deluge project that repopulated the earth after the deluge.
Our study has demonstrated the importance of mythology and oral traditions in the reconstruction of the Pre-History of Indigenous peoples, but more importantly the fact that symbols and so-called rock art are forms of linguistic expression and information storage systems in use among prehistoric Africans. So also are ritual expressions. Analyses showed that inscriptions used in Igbo Ukwu and still visible on the excavated artefacts were in use especially in Cretan hieroglyphics and Linear A & B, which later formed from it (plate 2).
We found to our amazement that many objects excavated at Igbo Ukwu were depicted in Cretan Hiero-glyphs (plates 3/3b) – these include vases, pots, animal heads, horned heads, parts of the human body, such as the mouth, eyes, hands, legs, etc. Igbo Ukwu symbols such as zigzag, spiral, whirling sun, cross-hatching, concentric circles, crescents, crosses, X-shaped cross, lines and triangles and palm-frond symbols found on Igbo Ukwu pottery and bronzes.
Cretan letters found at the palace of king Minos by Archaeologist Arthur Evans reflect inscriptions found at Igbo Ukwu and confirm our already expressed theory (see They Lived) that Cretan civilization was influenced/founded by the Igbo-speaking family of Canaan and his ‘moon-faced’ daughter ‘Europa’, who gave her name to Europe. According to Greek mythology her name, ‘Europa’ means ‘moon-face’ or ‘round face’, which is the same thing it means in Igbo: Iruopa.
It was her sons, Phoenix and Kadmus, who founded most of the great nations of the Aegean and the Middle East, especially Phoenicia and Crete. At Delphi, Europa functioned as the goddess, Hera, and ruled the Aegean through her priestesses until she was overthrown by Zeus through the latter’s sons. This greatest of all matriarchs and founding mothers of Europe still survives to this day as the powerful Black Madonna of Europe.
IGBO UKWU AS THE LOST CITY OF HELIOPOLIS – CITY OF THE SUN
As is to be expected, we undertook a deeper analysis of ancient Egyptian literature, mythologies, linguistic expressions and hieroglyphic system, and what we found was that the origins of Egyptian hieroglyphics lay in concepts located to a large extent in and around Kwa- Igbo land, Niger Delta and the Cameroons.
For example, Egyptologists have recently discovered that when the ancient Egyptians speak of the Land of the Rising Sun, they actually looked towards West Africa as the place from where their Sun or Sirius rises and to which she sets every 70 days. Accordingly they also regarded West Africa as the land where their gods resided.
That land was called Punt in Egypt and Panchea in Greece. Our findings reveal that that ancient city in the forests of West Africa was the capital of Punt. It was indeed the mythical ‘Land of the Rising Sun’ otherwise known as Heliopolis or Yebu (pronounced ‘Eboe’) by the latter-day ancient Egyptians of North Africa or as Biafra by the ancient West Africans.
In fact we were humbled to discover that ancient Egypt of mythology was actually located in ancient Nigeria, and in The Lost Testament we listed piles of evidence to demonstrate this assertion. Heliopolis was the capital of Punt, and Heliopolis was no other place but the lost city of ‘Igbo/Yebu’, now called ‘Igbo Ukwu’ – the city which Thurstan Shaw had excavated!
THE EGYPTIAN BENBEN/PRIMEVAL MOUND IN IGBO UKWU
The Primeval Mound (plateau), which God raised up, and on which he stood while
commanding creation, was thereafter known as ‘the Covenant Mound’ in Egyptian mythology. Early Egyptians commemorated it with a small mound of sand with a flat surface as noted by Laird Scranton in a 2006 publication. It was a symbol of the Covenant which God made with his creation that he will always support what he made.
The Egyptians call the Mound the Benben. The Benben mound cannot be found in Egypt because it is actually located in Nigeria, in Igbo Ukwu. As in the case of the Benben, the Igbo Ukwu covenant mound is also believed to be the spot where God Stepped Down. Accordingly, it is called Oda, which means ‘Place of Stepping Down’. Oda is the Primeval Covenant Mound of all Ndi Igbo, and functions as the Judgement Seat of God – and as such is also called Ebe – which means ‘Place of Judgement’.
As the Highest Arbiter of all Ndi Igbo, this Mound is the Ebe of all Ebes in Igbo land, or Ebe Ebe, which sounds like the Egyptian word Benben. It appears that it was Igbo Ukwu Primeval Mound which gave rise to all the mound habitations created by early men mound-builders around the world. In fact in They Lived Before Adam, we had shown that ancient mound builders in the British Isles (3,000 B.C.) had left behind artefacts still in use in Igbo land such as ichi and craved ivory horns – Igbo symbols of royalty and authority.
Our work gave a relatively extensive illustration of the fact that Afa, a language of nature still in use by the Igbo Shaman, is the origin of words that cut across several languages in the world including Sanskrit. Igbo language spoken today originated directly from Afa, which in itself is a cosmic language, and, as we demonstrated in The Lost Testament, the bearer of the Sirian linguistic, cultural and genetic bloodline, which we find to have been handed down to humankind through the Igbo cosmos. This explains the use of Igbo language in the Hebrew Torah version of the story of Creation.
RIVER NIGER/YAM SUFF: THE BEARER OF ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS
The River Niger was known as Yam Suff (or Stream of Osiris) to the Egyptians, because Osiris was Yama, a local variation of the name Rama. Yama was the name of the god of Death in India, a position occupied by Osiris in the Egyptian pantheon. Yam Suff according to the Hebrew Torah was the River of Moses’ Exodus Crossing from Egypt with the Israelites. Zecharia Sitchen noted that the Stream of Osiris (Niger) was located on the way to the underground Duat which we have identified as being located in West Africa and precisely in the Cameroon Mountain range, not too far from Arochukwu where the Igbo entrance to the underground Duat is located.
We have conclusively confirmed Hebrew origins in ancient Nigeria, from Abraham and his Edomite children to Joseph’s origins in Panchea. Several chapters devoted to the concept of Panchea in They Lived Before Adam, show that it was located in the Nigeria/Cameroon axis in West Africa, and was actually called ‘Biafra’ empire in mythical times.
The Kwa population in the world-famous Hyksos Exodus of the Semites from Egypt and their role in fertilizing Middle Eastern civilization including setting up settlements in Palestine and the Levant, the rise of the Hittite, Minoan, Cretan, Greek, Trojan and other Middle Eastern civilizations as a result of the Hyksos migrations from Egypt; the West African origins of the Hyksos and the centrality of Igbo Ukwu and the River Niger in the seeding the Middle East with a ‘Made in West Africa’ writing system, language and mystical culture, is the subject developed among other equally engaging issues in The Lost Testament of the Ancestors of Adam.
All this is in sync with the claim by Herodotus that the Niger was the original source of the Nile. Herodotus had noted equally that “the names of all the gods of Greece came from Egypt (and) this statement was never chall-enged in Antiquity”. Igbo influences affected the Aegean through Egypt whose original capital was Igbo Ukwu. In fact the ancient Egyptians and Dravidians and their civilizations were all products of Pre-historic Igbo land. James Brunson who studied the Cretan civilization of Mycenae and the artefacts and wall paintings excavated by Arthur Evans in the palace of Knossos noted without equivocation that “the civilization belonged to an African people”, an observation which confirms that of Evans himself.
In They Lived Before Adam we drew parallels between some of images from Knossos and those from the Igbo environment. In their study of megalithic cultures of Europe R.M. De Longe and Jay Wakefield (a Dutch and an American) have discovered an ancient stone map in a megalithic grave in France showing the precise entry to the River Niger , thus adding wight to our thesis that the Niger was the bearer of ancient civilizations and culture-bearing migrations. Indeed the answer as to whether the Igbo were the first people, takes us back to excavations carried out in the early 1970s by a team of archaeologists from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka led by Prof. F.N. Anozie.
These archaeologists found evidence of Prehistoric habitations of Early Stone Age people in Igbo land dating back to before 500,000 B.C. Their excavations carried out in Ugwuele, Isiukwuato in Old Okigwe (present day Abia State), makes a case for an Igbo-based earliest habitation of Homo Erectus in the world and that Igbo land was the global industry of Stone Age tools that might have supplied other parts of the world with hand-axes. More than that, the peripheral findings of the archaeologists suggest that Igbo land holds answers to human evolution, answers which future research will determine.