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The history of Africa is like an iceberg.
Only 10% of an iceberg is visible above the surface.
90% of it remains hidden beneath the water. The same can be said about African history.
We don’t even know African history, and most of us don’t even know that we don’t know African history.
Cheikh Anta Diop said:
‘The history of black Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt’
and I want to add to what Diop said:
‘The history of Egypt will remain suspended in a until it is connected with the history of Kemet, Kush, the Nile Valley, Africa and the diaspora’
To Understand African History, You Must First Understand Four Frameworks
To truly understand African history—not the whitewashed version they push in schools and the media—you must first understand four critical topics:
These four ways of seeing Africa and the world are crucial if we’re truly going to understand this continent and the culture that sprang from it.
Let me break each one down for you.
Geography: The River That Flows Down North
The Nile Valley is 4,160 miles long and fundamentally shaped how African people oriented themselves to the world.
What’s important to note—and I want you to get this—is that the Nile River is the only river in the world that flows from south to north. Water follows gravity, so this means the south is at a higher elevation than the north.
This natural reality created a profound truth:
The people along the Nile Valley oriented themselves to the south—toward the land of their ancestors.
Our entire world as we know it has literally been turned upside down!
Why?
Because the maps we’ve seen in every classroom were created by a Flemish cartographer in the 15th century.
Europeans made the maps, so Europeans put Europe at the top of the world and everybody else at the bottom.
When you make the maps, when you have the power, and you can do whatever you want to do. You can change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of whatever you want to call it.
Things have not changed.
All history is a current event, and all it does is repeat itself over and over and over again.
The Nile Valley has two branches:
These two rivers meet in Khartoum and form the single Nile River that flows through Sudan and Egypt, eventually creating the Mediterranean Sea.
As Dr. Clark often told us, “The Nile River was the world’s oldest cultural highway.”
People followed the flow of the Nile bringing themselves and their cargo of knowledge down north with them.
Once you have that context, it sets things into greater context: Nile Valley civilization began up south and migrated down north.
Terminology: The Power of Original Names
Names are everything.
The name of a person, place, or thing means much more than we’ve ever been taught.
Let me do a quick survey:
Right…but wrong. Why do I say that?
Because these are all Greek words.
And these things were built before Greece even existed.
If you don’t know the original name of a person, place, or thing, you don’t know squat. And the more you defend your indefensible position, you show those with a little wisdom how ignorant you really are.
The Truth About the word “Pyramid”
“Pyramid” is a Greek word meaning “little flat cake”—like a pancake.
This building does not look like a pancake!
And I want you to get this — despite what you’ve heard on National Geographic or the Discovery Channel:
Pyramids, or Mirs, are NOT tombs.
There are 118 Mir in ancient Egypt, and no physical bodies have ever been buried in any of them. Zero.
None.
When anyone tells you these structures are tombs, either they’re lying to you or they’re ignorant.
Either way, they’re dangerous.
The word Mir means “Place of Ascension.”
In contemporary language, we might refer to an object that’s placed over a tomb as a tombstone or grave marker. That’s all that structure is. The tombs were buried in the ground underneath. The bodies were buried underground.
None were put inside these buildings.
The mir was designed to facilitate the ascension of the soul buried in the tomb underneath it, into heaven, where that soul would be reborn.
There is a text, erroneously referred to as a pyramid text, that was found inside of a tomb, which describes where souls go to be resurrected and the process of the judgment of the soul.
All of this was documented in Africa hundreds of years before Abraham was born.
Before the creation of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, African people had already identified the process for the salvation of the soul and where souls go to be reborn.
So knowing your history allows you to understand what God is.
And how significant a relationship with the Creator can be, for your life and your afterlife.
The Sphinx Is Not The Sphinx
The word “Sphinx” is a Greek word which means “to strangle” or “to hold.”
The African word is “Her-em-Akhet,” which means “Heru on the horizon.”
Who is Heru? Heru was the son of God.
Before Napoleon’s soldiers shot the nose and lips off of the statue, one would have seen what was obvious—the image of the Son of God was the image of a Black man.
Egypt Is Not Kemet
“Egypt” is a Greek word—a Greek word that was used to describe one temple in one part of the country.
The original name for the country is “Kemet.”
I keep referencing National Geographic because they’ve been responsible for miseducating millions of people every single year. They know better, but they choose not to do better.
Kemet means “the nation of the black people,”
Just as the word Sudan means “the nation of the black people,”
Just as the word Ethiopia means “the nation of the black people.”
So there’s consistency in how these people in these ancient civilizations saw themselves and identified themselves, but we’ve been disconnected from this history for obvious reasons.
Chronology: The Four Golden Ages of African Civilization
Chronology is important because anytime anybody talks about a particular important time in history, you have to ask yourself: Where does it fall on the timeline? What’s the chronology?
What I’ve done is build on something that Asa Hilliard talked about, and that is he divided Kemet into four Golden Ages:
The work that we’ve been doing with the ASA Restoration Project—the excavation and restoration of tombs—has been focused on the tombs of the 25th Dynasty.
I also want to share with you images of the people who lived during these four Golden Ages so that you can be clear about who they were, but more importantly, you can be clear about who they are not.
Pharaoh Narmer – 1st Dynasty
Pharaoh Djoser – 3rd Dynasty
Mentuhotep II – 11th Dynasty
Pharaoh Amenhotep III – 18th Dynasty
Pharaoh Taharqa – 25th Dynasty
From Kemet to Egypt: A Timeline
Here’s another illustration that shows you pictorially the differences between Kemet and Egypt:
Kemet is African. There’s no question about that.
Egypt? Not so much.
We have to remember—civilization of Kemet started up south in Africa, and all the invasions of Kemet came from the north, from Europe or the Arabic world.
Historiography: Sacred Science and Mythology
Historiography is also important.
It’s about mythology, symbolism, and understanding Nile Valley sacred science.
There’s a myth that is the foundational myth of Kemet, and this myth has served as the foundational mythology of other religions.
The story centers around Asar, who is said to be the mythological figure responsible for uniting the two lands and establishing Kemet as a nation-state.
Ausar was killed by his brother Set.
This story precedes the story of Cain and Abel, and in many respects. If you understand this story, you’ll realize the people who wrote the story about Cain and Abel, copied that story from the original story of Ausar and Set.
And I mean that literally—they copied that story because the Kemetic Story is older than Biblical story.
The story about Asar and Set is tied to another historical or mythological personality named Heru. What’s important to understand is that myths are not true, but they contain truth. Myths are not about personalities but concepts and ideas that transcend personalities and provide us with lessons—lifelong lessons that everyone can benefit from.
What’s the lesson from this Trinity? The lesson is about:
If you really drill down to the mythology, you’ll find that the base of this lesson is about life, death, and rebirth.
Ancient Astronomy and Sacred Science
It’s also about sacred science—sacred science rooted in astronomy.
This recreation here is a recreation of a site that was discovered in the 1970s found near the Egyptian and Sudanese border—a site known as Nabta Playa.
Nabta Playa is the oldest astro-archaeological calendar in the history of the world.
It was created around 7500 BCE—3,500 years before Stonehenge.
This calendar is oriented to the heliacal rising of the star that we know as Sirius and the constellation that we know as Orion.
These two star systems were associated with Asar and his wife Aset, and they also were associated with the natural event that happens every year in Kemet in the Nile Valley—the annual flooding of the Nile.
The people who created this culture and civilization:
They saw a relationship—a relationship that has been identified as “As Above, So Below.”
Things on earth parallel things that are happening in the sky.
When you document what happens in the heavens and you identify the cycles and the time frame for the appearance and disappearance of these celestial objects, it allows you to create a calendar.
They were responsible for creating the first calendar known to mankind—the first calendar of 365 and a quarter days was used in the Nile Valley as early as 4,230 BCE.
Once they codified this scientific information, they built structures in their country where this information could be taught.
We call them temples, but they were actually universities where priests and priestesses studied the knowledge of the universe, documented it, and passed it down to future generations.
Anyone who travels to Kemet will visit these historical sites, but if you don’t go to Kemet with the right guide, you’ll only get the tip of the iceberg—you won’t get the good stuff that’s below the surface.
If you go to Egypt and you’re not part of a study tour, it’s like going to your favorite museum with a blindfold on in darkness.
You won’t see any of the greatness that is there to be seen.
I have taken many study tours to Kemet, but this year I am taking a group to Pari and London to visit the museums and to view original Egyptian artifacts. Find out more here
Context Is Everything
Context is everything.
People talk about Cleopatra. Well, to be honest with you, Cleopatra ain’t squat if you understand the history of Kemet.
I found this meme online this year, and it kind of puts things into correct historical perspective:
“Cleopatra ruled Egypt closer in time to the invention of the iPhone than to the construction of the Great Pyramids of Giza.”
And that’s real.
Cleopatra died in 30 BCE. That’s closer to when the iPhone was created in 2007. The Pyramids of Giza were built around 2400 BCE.
Context is everything. Chronology is everything.
Once you have the correct chronological perspective, you can begin the process of reclaiming your history and reclaiming your mind.
Thank you for reading
Anthony T. Browder
Founder of IKG Cultural Resource Center
PS.
If liked this newsletter and you want to find out more about the history of Kemet, check out my book Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization
You can also join me on my Tour to London and Paris in July 2025
And on my field Trip in Washington DC: Egypt on the Potomac
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A recent article highlighting the ASA Restoration Project 16th Anniversary:
If you have any questions, please send an email to IKGCRC@gmail.com.
