Collection of notes on African creativity worth pondering...From Van Sertima’s “Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern”, we have excerpts derived from findings of various authors or sources:
- The Dogon of Mali had an excellent understanding of the solar system and the universe 700 years ago. The Dogon had detailed knowledge of a white dwarf companion star to Sirius A which was not visible to the naked eye. Western scientists stated that there was no way that the Dogon could have uncovered this knowledge on their own and that it must have been supplied to them by a visiting European or an extra- terrestrial visitor.
- The Yoruba tribe had an exceedingly complex number system based on twenty.
- A 35,000 year old, fossilized baboon bone found in Zaire, the Ishango bone, is covered with a series of notches or tally marks, which makes it the oldest mathematical object in the world, and the world's earliest number system. The bone is also a lunar phase counter, which suggest that African women were the first mathematicians since keeping track of menstrual cycles requires a lunar calendar.
- There was a very accurate calendar system in Eastern Africa by the first millenium B.C. (Lynch & Robbins 1984).
- A megalithic site similar to Stonehenge dating to 300 B.C. was found in northwest Kenya. Its nineteen basalt pillars were aligned extremely accurately with the stars and constellations (Lynch & Robbins 1984).
- An iron-ore mine in Swaziland, the oldest found in the world, was dated as 43,000 years old. The ore specularite was used as a cosmetic and pigment (Zaslavsky 1984).
- Africans developed technology to build sea-worthy boats and the ability to navigate over long expanses of ocean . There is ample evidence to suggest that African explorers reached South and Central America long before Columbus made his journeys (Malloy 1984).
- *1500 to 2000 years ago near Lake Victoria, carbon steel was made in blast furnaces. The temperature achieved in the furnaces, 1,800C, was much higher than was managed in Europe until modern times (Van Sertima 1984).
- A model of a glider dated to the 4th or 3rd century B.C. was found in Egypt. The structure of the object was most definitely aerodynamically designed (Messiha et al. 1984).
- By the year 1000 AD, in the Middle East, Ibn al-Haytham, a Muslim mathematician and astronomer, was studying atmospheric refraction, and by the 1100s a fellow Muslim, geographer Abu Abdallah Muhammad al-Idrisi, divided the world into seven climatic zones. Climate changes have long since tuned vast savannas and grasslands bodering Africa’s Sahara into desert. Translations of Arabic texts into Latin help spread knowledge of such instruments as the astrolabe.
Concerning Steel production, * above denotes-> “Still, early sub-Saharan Africans developed metallurgy at a very early stage, possibly even before other peoples. Around 1400 BC, East Africans began producing steel in carbon furnaces (steel was invented in the west in the eighteenth century).”
Source: Civilizations in Africa
And notes from elsewhere (not from Sertima’s book) …
In reference to the Kemetians: “Mathematics in Africa started much earlier from the first written numerals of ancient Egypt around 3100 BC. Ancient African calendars made use of numbers and calculation at an early stage. Ancient Africans also discovered and use the concept of zero (see The Discovery of Zero), and wrote several texts on math and other subjects.”
“Meanwhile, in the West, the Romans repeatedly burned the Alexandrian library, which as early as 100 B.C. was reputed to have had 700,000 manuscripts containing the wealth of Greek intellectual achievements. The library was first set on fire in 47 B.C. during the war between Caesar and Pompey (40,000 volumes were burned), set ablaze in 272 A.D. by a Roman emperor, ignited in 391 A.D. by another Roman emperor, and finally completely destroyed by the Muslims in 642 A.D. Thus, before the zero could reach the Western world around 700 A.D. via the Moorish invasion of Spain, the intellectual soil wherein this remarkable concept could have borne fruit had been destroyed almost completely by the master neocheaters and their neocheating strategies. The Western world had entered the Dark Ages.”
Egyptian sign for zero: 
Egyptian "Pi"->
The Egyptian value of "pi" was 3.16, which is much closer to the modern 3.14 than the biblical value of 3.0. The Egyptian mathematicians probably used measurement, experimentation and a theoretical analysis of "squaring a circle" to obtain such an accurate value of "pi."
Kemetian Math texts:
Although there are many artifacts, not many Egyptian texts survived. Among the few texts which remain is the *Egyptian Book of the Dead. The two great mathematical texts that have survived, the Moscow and the Rhind papyri, come from the Middle Kingdom. Both texts contain sophisticated mathematical formulas and problems. However, there is a strong possibility that more sophisticated work was on other papyri which did not survive the passage of time.
Egyptian priests were secretive about their writings, and so not many copies of their work were made. Indeed, given the sophistication of the pyramids and Egyptian civilization, very few papyri of any kind have survived to inform how they achieved such accomplishments. Also, the papyrus as a material for preserving texts, is not as durable as clay tablets used by other civilizations. However, these texts were designed to be lightweight, portable, practical teaching aids - and were not designed to survive thousands of years. Nevertheless, the sparse clues left by scribes, when interpreted by unbiased scholars, reveal many mathematical achievements, including formulas for the summation of arithmetic and geometric series and the measurement of the area of a curved surface.
*->Note: BTW, The Book of the Dead entails :
The Book of the Dead was a collection of spells, hymns, and prayers intended to secure for the deceased safe passage to and sojourn in the other world. The title of the Book of the Dead and its method of use are stated :
"Beginning of the spells for going forth by day which raise the glorious ones (i.e., the dead) in the cemetery. To be said on the day of burial of entering in after going forth, by Osiris Yartiuerow, deceased."
What about the role of ancient African women?:
Alic relates that in the Kahun medical papyrus, women "...diagnosed pregnancy, guessed at the sex of the unborn child (if the mother's face was green it would be a boy), tested for sterility and treated dysmenorrhoea (irregular menstruation). Women surgeons performed caesarian sections, removed cancerous breasts, and set bones with splints."
Hypatia:
Beatrice Lumpkin (1988) and Margaret Alic (1986) have both described the life of Hypatia, " For fifteen centuries Hypatia was often considered to be the only female scientist in history. Hypatia is the earliest woman scientist whose life is well documented." Lumpkin provides evidence that Hypatia was not Greek and instead was an Egyptian and thus of African origin. It seems that contrary to the customs of educated women at that time, "Hypatia remained unmarried and moved freely and publicly in her scientific pursuits." Hypatia lectured on mathematics, philosophy, physics and astronomy. She wrote important treatises on Algebra and Conic sections. Hypatia is credited with designing an astrolabe, a water still, an instrument to measure water level and an hydrometer (Lumpkin 1988).
Hypatia wrote commentaries on Diophantus's Arithmetica , on Apollonius' Conics and on Ptolemy's astronomical works. In Apollonius' Conics, she wrote on dividing cones into different parts by a plane. In This concept developed the ideas of hyperbolas, parabolas, and ellipses. With Hypatia’s work on this important book, shemade the concepts easier to understand, thus making the work survive through many centuries. Hypatia was the first woman to have such a profound impact on the survival of early thought in mathematics. All Hypatia's work is lost except for its titles and some references to it. However no purely philosophical work is known, only work in mathematics and astronomy. Some letters of Synesius to Hypatia exist. These ask her advice on the construction of an astrolabe and a hydroscope.
Hypatia was a friend of Orestes. Cyril, a leader among the Christians, and Orestes, the civil governor, opposed each other. In 412 Cyril (later St. Cyril) became patriarch of Alexandria. A few years later, according to one report, Hypatia was brutally murdered by the Nitrian monks who were a fanatical sect of Christians who were supporters of Cyril. According to another account (by Socrates Scholasticus) she was killed by an Alexandrian mob under the leadership of the reader Peter. and it is believed that Cyril spread virulent rumors about her. Hypatia refused to convert to Christianity and in 415 AD. she was murdered brutally by Christian fanatics on Hypatia’s way home. A mob attacked her, stripped her and killed her with pieces of broken pottery. Later, the mob dragged her through the streets. Earlier, in AD 391, the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius I closed all "pagan" temples throughout the empire. This action terminated a four thousand year old tradition and the message of the ancient Egyptian language was lost for 1500 years, until the discovery of the Rosetta stone and the work of Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832).
Source of entire content above; courtesy of Saxakali:
History of Mathematics in Africa
Interesting snippets from elsewhere:
“But, let us start by looking at mathematics and aeronautics in Africa. Evidence has been preserved at NASA to the effect that Egyptians had experimented with glider planes over 2000 years ago. Drs. Khalil Messiha, Guirguis Messiha, Gamal Mohktar and Michael Frenchman have documented this from several related pieces of evidence. 46 And Beatrice Lumpkin’s discussion of “Africa in the mainstream of Mathematics history” is very detailed, regarding “the ancient Egyptian mathematics of the pyramids, obelisks, great temples, the African participation in classical mathematics of the Hellenistic period and the African participation in Muslim mathematics.” 47 The author acknowledged other periods which were not covered, such as “mathematical games so widespread in Africa, the systems of measurement used in the African forest kingdoms, and the mathematics used in building the great stone complex of Zimbabwe”. 48 She has painstakingly exhibited the depth of mathematical thought in ancient Africa, Egypt and the debt of gratitude due to these sources of mathematical and scientific development by humanity. It is obvious that the mathematicians of these periods used their languages and, where necessary, transcended the simplicity of natural language into notations and symbols, for example, consider the exactitude of the pi (p), even for the thought systems of those periods in human history.”-Courtesy of J. A. I. Bewaji
Source: http://www.africanphilosophy.com/vol1.1/bewaji.html
[This message has been edited by Super car (edited 13 February 2005).]
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