The races to which agriculture was not native present the spectacle today of crowding their populations into cities.Įthiopians developed long staple cotton, millet, kaffir and Soudan grass. The melon and sweet potato produced there are far more delicious than ours. Ancient Ethiopians were wonderful agriculturalists. We are still reaping the fruits of the earlier zeal and genius that tamed the first plants. The first African explorers, found the country covered with cattle parks, in which the natives kept thousands and tens of thousands of cattle of remarkable breeds, rare skill being shown in their handling.Ī botanist of the, Smithsonian Institute recently traveled nine thousand miles through Africa, finding species from which valuable grasses, grains, forage, and fruit may be obtained. Reclus declares, “We are indebted to the African for sorghum, dates, kaffir, coffee and the banana, also for the dog, cat, pig, ferret, ass and perhaps for the goat, sheep and ox. Think how helpless we would be today without them. These indefatigable men domesticated wheat, barley, oats, rye and rice, in fact all the staple plants of our civilization were fully developed so far back in the distant ages, that their wild species have disappeared. Ancient sculptures show the African lion tamed. Africans subdued the elephant as early as the Cushites of Asia. This is why animals play such an important part in the old Cushite mythology.
In the light of these facts, is it helpful to our development, that we blazen forth the boast thatįrom later races has come the sum total of civilization? Ancient Africans yoked the wild ox, tamed the cow, the horse and sheep. He developed very early the art of smelting iron, which is found in the pyramids and gave knowledge of its manufacture to the world.ĭonnelly points out that in the thousands of years since the domestication of animals, the historic nations of our times have tamed one bird. The agricultural Ethiopian developed the idea of a settled hearth and home. The ancients said that Ethiopians first taught them the worship of the gods and sacrifice. All three of these were given to the world by the African. Joly calls the three significant factors of progress in the life of man: the hearth, the altar and the forge. Our masons tools are identical with those unearthed in Egypt. Before the dawn of history Cushites were working in metals and they had perfected the tools with which we conquer the forces of nature today. Nomadic races are fierce and impatient, they have a nature the opposite to habits that make for patient and perseverence, which are the steps to art and literature. The Cushite was the only race that could have performed this service, for the other races in historic times despised agriculture. With the same infinite patience, this race developed wild plants into tamed fruits and cereals. Some one civilized race of prehistoric times had tamed the domestic animals for when the curtain of history was raised we find them in attendance upon man.
The Hebrews learned agriculture and building from the Hamitic race of Canaan. Semites made no showings of culture until the rise of half barbarous Assyria, which copied its arts and sciences from CushiteĬhaldea. Going back only three thousand years we find these nations still very ignorant.
Without agriculture they could not advance to the handicraft stage. The Semitic and Japhetic races upon the more sterile lands of the east, and north, as nomadic shepherds, were slow to change to the more settled life, that developed naturally in the rich regions of Egypt and the Upper Nile. The African seems to have passed directly to the use of metals without intermediate steps. The Soudan shows no evidence of a stone age. In Africa we mud no evidences of this slow progress of man up from the barbaric state. Outside of Africa, we find over the earth the rude stone tools of the first barbaric inhabitants, that mark the evolution of these races, from savagery, through long stages of development to the civilized state. In western Europe and northern Asia the half-human Neanderthal lived in eaves under overhanging ledges and fed upon the untamed products of the wild. At the beginning of the historical period of Egypt most inhabitants of the earth were rude savages.
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