The large circle shows ancient Greece and the Aegean, the small circle, the location of the Alexandrian library.

Alexandria, being the center of Greek thought and reason for the 'Golden Age' of Greek enlightenment unfortunately for racists historians, sits inconveniently on the continent of AFRICA. 

 

The obvious conclusion that ANY academician would come to is that it was here, only for the reason that it needed to be here, in Africa, where the Greeks were feeding their intellect by learning from Africans.

The logical answer has always been bothersome for people so steeped in racial bigotry that even whilst beholding the overtly African features of much of the Kemetic artwork, they will swear blind that African's have never contributed anything of meaning to global history.

 

In reality, logic has never been an advocate of Western Historians, reality, too has been a concept far removed.

 

The manipulation of history to suit an unbroken continuum of 'western' civilisations, beginning with the Ancient Greeks and proceeding to present day Europe (and US), is in actuality, not only an exaggeration, but an absolute fabrication of history.

 

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the 'Western Model' of history, is the complete disregard of Eastern contribution (namely Africa and, to a lesser degree, Asia) in the development of the great, so-called, 'Western' civilisations.

Hippocrates the Greek. 

Hailed as the 'Father of Medicine, yet much of the works attributed to him are in no ways connected to him.

Whereas G.M. James drew our attention to the training of Socrates, Plato, Pythagorus and Aristotle on the African continent as philosophers, the origins of other disciplines attributed to the Greek intellectuals (namely medicine) also need to be investigated, as the evidence points towards an African genesis of these disciplines also.

 

Whereas academicians of the 'Western' model advocate the beginnings of scientific medicine to the Greek physician Hippocrates at some time in the 5th century BC, Dr. Charles S. Finch proposes an African invention of medicine that predates this by some 4000 years.

 

In fact the Ancient Egyptian text named 'The Edwin Smith Papyrus' in many ways outperforms the knowledge of the Greek manuscripts in that it mentions modern disciplines such as 'pulse taking' and identifies functional cortex's of the brain.

Like all of the other Greek philosophers, Hippocrates have been bestowed with titles (i.e. The Father of Medicine), and been associated with a multitude of written works, but only very few are directly attributable to him. This begs the question of origin. Finch argues:

"...it becomes glaringly evident through a study of Egyptian medical papyri that Hippocrates and his followers drew heavily upon the theory and practise of Ancient Egyptian medicine"

Two (of many) notable examples of the Greek inheritance of Egyptian medicine are found in the Hippocratic method of 'setting clavicular fractures' and also the method of 'reducing a dislocated mandible'; both methods are virtually identical to their Egyptian counterpart, with the Egyptian method being recorded AND practised at least 3500 years earlier (as evidenced by the Ebers and Smith medical papyri). 

 

At this point, it would be pertinent to note the convention of naming Egyptian papyri after the 'Western' archaeologist that found them, as opposed to giving them a more meaningful name linked to their content; this convention unfortunately serves to further obfuscate the excellence of the content of these papers. 

The Greek debt to Ancient Kemet in the field of medicine (amongst other disciplines) cannot be overstated.

 

Finch further argues:

Imhotep: An African multi-intellectual of the Egyptian old kingdom. Architect of Djoser (the Saqqara step pyramid) and hailed medical physician. Brilliant doctors and surgeons like Imhotep were not uncommon in Ancient Kemet.

"This idea is given greater weight when we examine the Alexandrian school of Greek medicine, of which Galen was the greatest exponent. In fact, the Alexandrian period represents the Golden Age of Greek Medicine in which startling discoveries in anatomy and physiology were made. 

This rather sudden efflorescence of Greek medicine at Alexandria can be attributed to one major cause: the collection of ALL available Egyptian scientific papyri by the early Ptolemies under the roof of the Library of Alexandria. This justly-famous library at its height contained over 700,000 volumes and made the city the intellectual centre of the classical world.

 

The scientific renaissance of the Alexandrian period was therefore due to the Greek world's unlimited access to the learning of ancient Egypt.

 

The famous "discoveries" by the Greek scientists of that time were, for the most part "re-discoveries" of ancient Egyptian learning and thought. Herophilus, an Alexandrian Greek of the 4th Century B.C. is ordinarily credited with the discovery of the diagnostic applications of pulse-taking though we know that this was described in both the Ebers and Smith medical papyri 35 Centuries before his time! It seems likely that Herophilus had access to the ancient Egyptian 'Book of the Heart and Vessels', the same source of information used by the ancient Egyptian authors of the Smith and Ebers medical papyri."

Not only is it likely, in actuality, the only conceivable reason for a sudden flowering of Greek thought in medical advancements is the knowledge from centuries of study by African intellectuals that the Greeks were collated into a monumental Greek library on African soil.

 

However, rather credit the Ancient Egyptians with the respect and adulation that they are so obviously deserving of, modern Western Historians since the 18th Century have embarked on an arrogant and unrealistic standpoint placing the origin of intellectual and philosophical thought with Ancient Greece, and not their African counterparts who, as demonstrated, held identical (or feasibly, more advanced) knowledge of medicine (and other intellectual disciplines).