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Patrice Ayme's Thoughts @[email protected] · 2026-07-31 · 13:19 UTC

CIVILIZATION! Was Helen Of Troy Black? No: Subsaharan Africa Didn’ t Have Writing

Writing is necessary for a civilization to acquire a culture so vast that it makes possible the exponentiation of culture which ultimately brings the singularization of technology we are presently experiencing. And Subsaharan Africa did not have writing, so its influence and even presence during the genesis of civilization in Middle Earth, and in particular Mycenaean Bronze Age Greece, was basically inexistent. (Contrary to what Hollywood pretends.)

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Abstract: Writing was one of the decisive technologies enabling large-scale civilization and that its earliest development occurred in the ancient Middle-Earth and Mediterranean civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia before spreading across Eurasia. Indigenous writing systems south of the Sahara are late 19th century anecdotes. However credits must be given to sub-Saharan Africa for independent advances in early iron and steel metallurgy (which made Africa unconquerable for millennia, an important dimension of civilization).

Recent portrayals of Bronze Age Greece as full of Subsaharan Africans—especially depictions of charcoal black Helen of Troy—are examples of ideology overriding historical evidence. Such reinterpretations are symptoms of a broader cultural tendency to reshape the past for contemporary political purposes by the wealthy manipulators… Purposes which moreover, targets the erosion of rationality with the aim of turning We The People into sheep. As far as masters are concerned, the best thing about sheep is that they are stupid (connect with Christianism).

The essay further argues that geography, transportation, and communication networks strongly enabled where civilizations emerged and expanded. Ultimately, it defends the view that civilization advances through the metaknowledge of how to gather evidence and respect for those individuals who enforce that mental capability, technological innovation, and historical realism, warning that abandoning factual standards in favor of ideological narratives undermines both scholarship and the public’s ability to achieve understanding.

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MiDDLE EARTH, WHERE ALL IDEAS MEET AND BREED:

Unsurprisingly, writing was developed first in the exact middle of the EURASIAFRICA super continent, Egypt and the Sumerian cities, 5200 years ago. Egypt went for hieroglyphs, a blind alley, while Mesopotamia developed the cuneiform alphabet, ancestor to the Phoenican alphabet which morphed into the present dominant European alphabet. Cretan Linear A (still undeciphered) followed, 38 centuries ago. Then China developed writing another six centuries later. Three thousand years after Sumer, a short (at the right season) sailing trip away, the Brahmi alphabet appeared in India. (There is evidence of proto-writing from much older prehistoric sites in Europe, following the symbolic explosion of 42,000 years ago…)

Ethipian Geʽez script’s earliest precursors go back to the 9th century BCE in inscriptions related to Ancient South Arabian writing,

The expansion of writing roughly follows the expansion of civilization and their inventions.

Idiotic woke AIs mention African scripts invented in the 19th century (under obvious Arabic and European influences)… As counterexamples coming 52 centuries too late…

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Did Black Africa Invent Steel? Maybe.

A theory in some unlearned circles in the USA is that Africa invented everything, including Greek civilization. This is beyond grotesque and not morally innocuous as it is a form of racist, racial fantasy.

However, subsaharan Africans were not devoid of agency.. African steel arrows go a long way to explain why Greater Mediterranean civilizations were unable to conquer Africa until late in the 19th century. My own theory is that SUBSAHARAN AFRICA MAY HAVE INVENTED STEEL TECHNOLOGY. Because subsaharan steel tech is a fact, and one developed indigenously with evidence predating 1000 BCE in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Hamady Bocoum, a Senegalese archeologist, asserts that “more and more numerous datings are pushing back the beginning of iron production in Africa to at least the middle of the second millennium BCE”. Certainly then one of the world’s oldest iron metallurgies have been found in Senegal.

Bronze Age civilization in the greater Mediterranean area fabricated bronze in part from tin coming from Britain. When superior steel tech appeared, those long distance trade routes disappeared. .

It is also known that iron metallurgy appeared in Anatolia and the Caucasus around 1500 BCE, and then spread to the rest of Europe..

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Hollywood lunatics: Black Subsaharan Africa invented Greece:

A movie maker jet setter represented Helen of Troy by a charcoal black Kenyan…While Homer describes Helen as “white-armed,” and Helen is depicted as “xanthē” by 7th–6th century BCE lyric poetry. Xanthe means “blonde”.

Jet setter Nolan chose a charcoal black Kenyan from the plutocratic elite to represent Helen, so he could grab woke points. I immediately knew there was a PLUTOCRATIC CONNECTION. Indeed. The father of charcoal black Helen, Lupita Nyong’o is a PhD product of the University of Chicago, associated with Harvard. Besides playing academia in Mexico, and Ethiopia, charcoal black Helen Lupita’s father was also a Kenyan Senator, MP, government minister of development (9 years), and presently a governor (and also UN big wig, naturally).

The way world plutocracy works is: I will depict your daughter as Helen of Troy and in exchange the empire you belong to will reward me… (The daughter, the charcoal black Helen, also went to a top US university, Yale, and then declared there were no women in Homer’s Odysseus… Showing charcoal black pseudo-Helen just used universities for posing and networking…)

No doubt many in the uneducated jet setter movie maker elite think Bronze age Greece was a few hours of private jet away from Nigeria.

According to uneducated Hollywood, black Africans were all over Greece. Actually one of Hollywood’s gurus teaches that ancient Greece was “Afroasian black”.

It is true that there were extensive contacts, for millennia, between Greece and the southern shore of the Mediterranean, be it only for its agricultural products. True, the founder of the Severian dynasty was from Libya (and his wife from Syria). But North Africa is not Sub Saharan Africa: I grew up mostly in the latter, while my dad was from North Africa.

So, Africans here, sorry woke guys and your assorted AIs. Not only are North Africa, a part of the Mediterranean, and Subsaharan Africa not the same, but there is often deep enmity, consecutive to the tendency of the North grabbing slaves in the Sub-Sahara… Since times immemorial.

Paradoxically the Sub Saharan African genes augmented, in North Africa and Arabia, from the slave trade… Masters breeding with slaves has unexpected circumstances… As it did in Japan….

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But how come North Africa tended to enslave Sub Saharan Africa?

Well, here is a hint: North Africa has had an alphabet for more than 3000 years…Whereas SUBSAHARAN AFRICA DID NOT DEVELOP ANY WRITING system.

By contrast, North Africa had an alphabet for more than twice the duration of Islam, and its associated Arabic alphabet (derived from Phoenicain)..

Actually Sub Saharan Africa developed no writing on its own until recently and those were derived from Arabic.

Egyptians were not Subsaharan Africans. Subsaharan Africa got separated from the Middle Earth world around 7000 years ago, when the Sahara became too dry to sustain anything but a few desert adapted species. A refugee from the encroaching desert, Egyptian civilization retreated to the Nile and a few oases where it became more technological.

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A fascinating question is why didn’t Subsaharan Africa develop civilization in the sense of Mesopotamia, Egypt and later, Ethiopia?

Well, those civilizations were water based: large streams provided enough for agriculture and transportation. Through long wars of conquest, these civilizations developed on an enormous scale, thousands of kilometers.

However, West Africa has the Senegal river and the very large Niger … .Moreover, there are deltas: Sine Saloum, Gambia, Casmance…

The obstacle to civilizational organization? Something struck me as a child was the hard character of transportation in tropical Sub-Saharan Africa: in the forest gallery zone, forest galleries are very difficult to cross from all the dangers from deadly mammals, snakes, insects, etc… Tse tse flies are a problem: there can be clouds of them, and their human victims stumbling around like zombies are certainly a warning. Linguistic evidence supports this: vastly different languages can be found only a few dozen kilometers distant.

Civilization is defined by, and needs human mass, the latter being the source of innovation. If communications are too hard, those masses can’t develop. Tropical faunal and floral exuberance is an obstacle to communications.

But did not the Maya extend over tropical lowlands reminiscent of tropical Subsaharan Africa?

Yes, but the Maya launched in the highlands, and then went down, transforming the lowlands into a vast orchard. When the civilizational control failed, the orchard went back to the jungle.

It is interesting to observe that the American civilizations seem to have been launched in temperate highlands. The Incas formed an immense empire, but Mesoamerica enjoyed city-states, the largest of which being the Aztec capital, which rested on a gardens and water agriculture, which the Conquistadores rushed to destroy ASAP: the Conquistadores could make the link between Aztec agriculture, civilization and military power.

North America did not have temperate highlands and did not develop a large civilization, but had large thriving villages which were deserted, probably from pandemics, by the time Spanish explorers got to them.

In Middle Earth, huge civilizations arose during the Bronze Age, led by the Akkadaian empire, around 2200 BCE, the first transnational empire. Those civilizations exhibited law, order, agriculture, protected by large military forces.

When the Conquistadores arrived in Mexico, the Aztecs seemed to be in imperial expansion. Cortez, the Spanish commander, used the existing hostility to provide him with a vast (80000 soldiers) army and a local Defense Industrial Base (to make bolts for crossbows). If the Spaniards had not arrived, one may guess that, within a few generations the Aztec empire may have become the equivalent of the Inca empire.

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An Equation For Civilization?

One can probably incorporate in one equation all the factors needed to grow a civilization. Technology is obviously an important aspect: once the heavy steel plow was developed by the Celts, the northern European plains became even more productive, and the Celtic population, already larger than Italy, boomed. The center of civilization demographically, innovatively and intellectually switched from the Mediterranean to the lands ruled by the Franks, the Imperium Francorum….

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A few years back, French president Sarkozy’s 2007 Dakar speech proposed that “the tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history.” That line drew strong screaming across Africa and among historians and postcolonial scholars as paternalistic and Eurocentric. However, except for the possible invention of steel, the point remains that Sub-Saharan Africa did not develop civilizations on its own so powerful that they contributed to the main thrust of civilization… This says something deep, even if one does not know what it means. I pondered that on my own when I was not even ten crossing a vast African river on top of a ferry.

No lasting, civilization advancing contribution, except for steel, as I said, and with the exception of Ethiopia, which invented coffee… But of course, Ethiopia came into contact with Jews and Christians, …. However, of course, Ethiopian highlands are not Sub-Saharan, as this immense temperate territory is east of the Sahara… Side-Saharan, not Sub-Saharan… Nubia, Aksum and company were immediately south of Egypt, and were Sahelian civilizations, with plenty of water from the White and Blue Nile. and were definitively in contact with Egypt (which they ruled for a century, making it possible for black skinned individuals to get to the Med, and were able to block Roman forays south…o

Even the literate Almoravides, who emerged from the Western Sahara to conquer Morocco and Al Andalus (in Spain), were riding and brandishing Islam, a religion-civilization invented not in Africa, but in Arabia, from mainstream Mediterranean input… Arabia is definitively part of Middle Earth, not Sub-Saharan Africa. The even more powerful Almohads then descended from the Atlas, and replaced the Almoravides… All very good, but fundamentally a Mediterranean civilization, antinomic to Subaharan Africa.

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The message is deeply irrational, and meant to be: what is taught is to accept irrealism as the new reality. After that you are ready to go a step further, to cry with millions because Taylor Swift got married and her steroid infused husband is melting in tears. That’s swiftly tailored to render mediocre coils even more deplorable.

I pointed out to my daughter that Helen of Troy was white, not black. She replied sharply: “Why does it matter?” as if I were a skin color obsessed old fool who deserved a whipping tongue. Well, it turns out I am also a physicist and in physics the distinction between charcoal black and pure white matters. What propagandists instead are telling us is that black is white and reciprocally, as you wish, it doesn’t matter: reality is what the wealthy movie makers are telling you it is, this is the meta message that you should learn. If plutocracy asks you to jump, you should just do it.

.. As in much of “postcolonial” and Foucault’s philosophy, history is twisted into rough shapes which have little to do with what really happened. This is why and how generations of propagandists viewed as philosophers ended up embracing the enemies of civilization. It was not innocuous: a consequence is the runaway climate catastrophe… The catastrophe could have been considerably mitigated if the correct, most rational decisions had been taken… Instead the decisions which were taken were often parodies of rationality, precisely to humiliate the latter.

Some of what Hollywood makes consists of propaganda for world plutocracy which aims to degenerate civilization so that it can seize power some more. Part of that project is controlling minds through the guilt trip of “colonialism” and exploitation… Conveniently enough for the plutocrats, all civilizations can be depicted to some extent as colonialist enterprises, and this is true even in Subsaharan Africa with the sophisticated Almoravides/Almohads, the much more primitive and tentative empires of Mali/Songhai, Kongo, or Kwazulu.

So Hollywood movies, which used to be nationalistic when the empire was confined to the USA, have become anti-civilizational, now that civilization is the enemy and plutocracy in control. Thus, Hollywood says, Greece was black African until the savage white Europeans established their colonial whiteness over Greece.

One should be reasonably and morally outraged when works of popular culture subordinate historical evidence to present-day ideological messaging by the powers that be. This is what the Nazis did and tyrants always strive for. If historical figures and facts are reinvented without regard for the surviving literary, archaeological, scientific or artistic evidence, there are many adverse consequences. The least of them is that the public risks losing confidence, and even interest, in history itself. The worst is that the public may be made completely irrational, adverse to thinking and the human condition, which was always centered around honest, scientifically charged debate. It has happened before: as the Roman state collapsed in the West, except for the Franks (!), in the Orient, Rome became so mentally degenerated that only the colors of competing chariot teams seemed a worthy object of study (when the teams finally agreed, revolution was at hand, and the tyrant Justinian killed them all and a large part of Constantinople).

Obsessing about inventing powerful, contributing civilizations in Subsaharan Africa, which never existed, and, even worse and anti-chronologically, accusing Europe of the dearth of civilization south of the Sahara is fundamentally irrational.

The real truth is much more interesting: civilizations do not grow up anywhere out of anything. There is a civilizational mindset, but it needs the right circumstances to grow and dominate as an overpowering culture. That works both ways, namely an anti-civilizational mindset can invert those circumstances. This is not how the millennial Assyrian empire fell (from rebellion-invasion-treason, in 15 years), but what happened to Rome (where the democratic republic degenerated into barbarian friendly crazed tyrannical theocracy over four centuries…)

So yes, Helen had reddish blonde hair, white arms and piercing blue eyes, as described 17 centuries ago. So were many of the Dorians of Sparta (they came from the north). To claim otherwise is to try to make people crazy and the global cultural heritage unworthy. But we must resist. Reason shall not submit to its enemies, and that is the ultimate engine of intelligence in this galaxy.

Patrice Ayme

(A more historically faithful) Helen of Sparta boards a ship for Troy, fresco from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii.

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#books #bronzeage #civilization #helen #history #literacy