Short review: a UNO reverse card against white supremacy by asserting African origins for most of what is deemed as civilization.

Some will say all kinds of ancient wonders and civilizations all come from aliens.
Graham Hancock would have you believe ancient wonders and civilizations all come downstream from a lost advanced civilization pre-12,000 BCE.
In the 1920s, Houston endeavored to suggest the same trend but all stemming from the "Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire." Egyptian civilization? Really Cushite. Indian civilization? Cushite. Core ideas of Greeks? Cushite. Medes and Persians? Cushite.

To be fair to the work it is good to first consider it in terms of its time and then in terms of what has changed today.

Understood **in its time**, around a century ago, Houston did a marvelous, wonderful job of turning the arguments of the white supremacist historical and cultural establishment against itself. She lived in Oklahoma and never saw the lands of which she spoke; she was dependent on the resources to which she had access. Those resources were the standards of the time; the authorities she cites are the authorities of the day. She participates in the same kind of stereotyping cultural attitudes pervasive in the age. She thus did well to show, *from the same sources all the white people used and upon which they relied,* that the opposite argument which they wanted to advance could be made: it was not the white race which was superior and which brought forth civilization; instead it all came from the Ethiopian Cushites.

What can be said about the work today? In most respects her conclusions are inaccurate because the framework and evidence on which she has based them are inaccurate; yet in other respects she was more accurate than even she could have imagined.

Admittedly history, like science, is a circumstance in which confusion becomes ever more sophisticated in explanation. Nevertheless, great strides have been made in coming to a better understanding of relative chronology and events in antiquity. Yes, there was a powerful Kushite state and civilization which arose after Egyptian domination receded in the early first millennium BCE and endured until an Ethiopian Axumite state overcame them in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. The lack of interest and emphasis on Kush remains criminal and blatant evidence of white supremacy. The Ethiopians would then rule for hundreds of years; a Nubian state would arise to their north which would resist the Islamist expansion until the 1200s, and the Ethiopians have thus resisted to this day.

But Kush does not pre-date Egypt. There was a Kerma culture which pre-dated the Kushites and of which Houston would have been entirely unaware. The Kerma culture goes back to 2500 BCE. Yet Egypt's pharaonic era began around 3000 BCE.

It is very difficult to speak a word about ancient Egypt and its place vis-a-vis Africa and the Near East. Undoubtedly Egypt is in Africa and its people are African; yet Egypt has always been a meeting point of world, as Near Eastern as it is African, and they seemed to always understand themselves in that middle place.

We have discovered paleolithic remains from North Africa testifying to a very different Saharan world than the one we know now. But there is no space really there to suggest the core concept of civilization came from Cush/Ethiopia and spread north and east. Her evidence for Kushites to the north come from certain understandings of various Biblical passages and the speculation of later Greeks and is hard to sustain today. DNA evidence is more than sufficient to show that the people of the various ancient civilizations are not all Cushite, although it is worth nothing that Kush was well integrated into the ancient Near Eastern world and would have maintained a presence throughout.

Yet she was more accurate than she knew because all evidence now points to humanity coming forth out of Africa, yet well before anything she, or we, would call "civilization" existed. Such explains the nature of the Dravidians in India and the Aborigines of Australia (the latter of which, curiously, are not mentioned at all by Houston).

Most of the defects of Houston's work are the same socio-cultural attitudes which bedeviled her White contemporaries: the emphasis on race, a later social construct which was not the operative framework in times past; the gross stereotyping of people; the quest to have a singular point of origin for everyone and everything, and an unwillingness or inability to perceive or imagine how different people in different times and places could develop civilization and build mighty works.

The white supremacy of the 1920s was abominable. The appropriate response is to see the failings of the social construct, not to attempt to suggest black supremacy instead. For those interested in the very lively history of African culture and civilization there are many far more modern books which can tell the stories well.

Houston's work should be remembered in terms of its time; her efforts should remain a testimony how one can turn the flimsy arguments for white supremacy against itself. But it would not be appropriate to use this work as a basis upon which to understand Black history. ( )

I picked up this book because it was in Ta-Nehisi Coates's book "Between the World and Me", one of the many books he listed as having influenced and expanded his mind.

The book is clearly a product of its times (original publication: 1926), with lots of superlatives and generalizations and few concrete examples for many of the points. This created an interesting dilemma for me: I wanted to believe the book, but its old age and lack of substantiating facts held me back. For example:

"Their rulers were priest-kings and at death were deified. As the ages ensued this extended itself in ancestor worship, which was original with the Cushite [Ethiopian] race" (p. 39)

Regarding the domestication of animals and the development of agriculture: "The Cushite was the only race that could have performed this service, for the other races in historic times despised agriculture." (p. 37)

"The marriage of the Pharaohs to black princesses was frequent and seemed to establish the legality of the claim of descent from the black god Amen-Ra, whom the ancients represented as Cush of Ethiopia. " (p. 67)

What is true? What is wishful thinking? With so little knowledge of ancient African cultures it's hard for me to get a grasp on it all. Too much of the book seems to be pure boastfulness, and I have a hard time accepting the book's central idea that "many ancient peoples, who have been assigned to other races in the average historical books of modern times, were in reality Ethiopians" (p. 16).

So what is a reader to do with these radical and boastful claims? It's too easy to just dismiss the book out of hand since it doesn't jibe with our current perceptions of history; historians have been belittling and denying African history for hundreds of years, only for later generations to have to painstakingly correct these mistakes. My approach ended up being to mark down facts, ideas, and cultures from the book that I wanted to read about in more modern books, and to read the current book as a wonderful myth or legend in the same vein as Greek mythological stories. Reading it all as myths, especially at bedtime, was a remarkably effective bridge between belief and fantasy, and actually fit the 1920s language better than trying to read it as straight fact.

Bottom line: if you are doing a research paper, look to more modern sources. If you are looking for a dreamy view of ancient Ethiopia, this is your gem. ( )