DÜNYA MEDENİYETLERİNE GİRİŞ

Some ask: is Egypt African, Middle Eastern, or European? In the thinking of Egyptians of all walks of life, modern Egypt is an Islamic state with a history of identities, ones that have fluctuated between European and Islamic Middle Eastern cultural and religious identities.

The simple and plausible answer to these questions is that the center of Egyptian civilization is in Africa, but its geographical reaches cover vast areas of Africa and the Middle East.

Before the digging of the Suez Canal, Africa and the Middle East were connected through the northeastern section of Africa. This geographical feature of Africa is as essential a component of the eastern, western, southern and northern parts of Africa as any other feature.

Here it is essential to first clarify what intellectual behavior is: Intellectual behavior is the thought process that influences the outcome of scholarly research. The scholar who is dedicated to intellectual integrity is an explorer of the unknown.

Knowledge is authentic when it is based on proven and tangible facts. Conjectures, assumptions, probabilities, and speculations may provide a path to the discovery of authentic knowledge, but they are not facts and they are not knowledge. They can also lead to false conclusions.

G. Sutton catalogues that the entire region now known as the Sahara was wet and strewn with lakes and rivers.

“Ethnologists, classifying White men in accordance with their physical types, long heads and round heads, fair skins and drake skins, and all the rest of it, have sorted out three main White “races,” which they call Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean.

Ancient Egypt emerged in the Pre-Dynasty period in the distant post-Neolithic Age. The culture of survival at that era was based on the use of stone and stick tools improvised for hunting, fishing, cutting wood, and cultivating.

Harold H. Sprout and Margaret Sprout speak of environmental determinism to argue that man’s geographical environment is a strong stimulus to the human abilities to craft means of survival.

During this period was built the Great Pyramid of Giza, erected for the great Pharaoh Khufu in ways so complex and technically ingenious that no one, even today, is yet able to determine how it was built.

Some scholars argue that ancient Egyptian Civilization originated in Africa. Often, they are referred to Africanists, Afrocentrists, and, in the opinion of some Western scholars, revisionists. Africanists look at Egypt and tend to rely on material facts and let their research lead them to the objective outcomes of their research. Afro-centrists also look at African and Egyptian material civilizations and articulate their views with vocabularies laced with ideology. The correct answer is C.

Intellectual behavior is the thought process that influences the outcome of scholarly research. The scholar who is dedicated to intellectual integrity is an explorer of the unknown. When his/her research leads them to an outcome, the scholar embraces the outcome based on the premises on which their own scientific standards are rooted. The behavior of the scholar whose research is based on objectivity will accept the research outcome as irrefutable, even if the outcome is unpleasant or varies from the assumptions at the initiation of the research. The correct answer is B.

Egypt’s geographical location has been a source of confusion and an expression of psychological mindset among intellectuals and laymen. Some ask: is Egypt African, Middle Eastern, or European? Mazrui in his article entitled “On the Concept We are All Africans” stated that Africa is whatever the mind determines it to be; it is a state of mind or “the quality of thinking of oneself as an African” (Mazrui, 1963: 88-97). Egypt is an African land, but the greatness of its golden civilizations of the past is so gargantuan that it can only be described as an amorphous geographical entity encompassing the entire continent, but also containing the Western part of the Middle East, and the Sinai Peninsula. Cheikh Anta Diop on Ancient Egypt stated “Egyptian antiquity is to African culture what GrecoRoman antiquity is to Western culture. The building up of a corpus of African humanities should be based on that fact (Diop, 1990: 31). Arnold J. Toynbee on Ancient Egypt wrote “This notable society emerged in the lower valley of the Nile during the fourth millennium B. C. and it was without ‘parents’ and without offspring; no living society can claim it as an ancestor (Toynbee, 1947:30). The correct answer is D.

Like nearly all ancient civilizations, the ancient Egyptian civilization began in the Nile River valley whose length from Lake Tana, in the high lands of Ethiopia, and from Lake Victoria, in Eastern Africa, is over 4000 miles as it reaches Alexandria, Egypt in North Africa. Geographers and anthropologists can go back around 9,000 BCE and affirm the existence of farming, hunting, and fishing communities on both banks of the River Nile. The correct answer is A.

Under the leadership of Menes, the unity of Egypt was assured: he brought Lower Egypt (the northernmost region of Egypt, from the mouth of the Nile River south to Memphis, below today’s Cairo) into union with Upper Egypt. This union consolidated the cumulative advances that Egypt was embarking upon from its traditional society phase to the take-off stage. The correct answer is E.

Egyptologists before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone (found in 1799) were unable to decipher the hieroglyphic writings of the Egyptians. They could read and translate other civilization’s records, but the enigmatic Egyptian hieroglyphics were obscured for many years. The correct answer is D.

During the period between 2890-2560 BCE the Great Pyramid of Giza was erected for the great Pharaoh Khufu. It was so complex and technically ingenious that no one, even today, is yet able to determine how it was built. The correct answer is E.

Imhotep, a “Renaissance Man,” was a gifted friend of the Pharaoh Djoser; he was commissioned to build his grave. Djoser made a wise choice by placing the future management of his dead body in the hands of Imhotep, who made sure that he glorified and honored his lord by building a most spectacular burial place, the Step Pyramid in Saqqara in Memphis. The correct answer is A.

A group of Egyptian Pharaohs were the mighty builders. These kings took advantage of the blueprint that the Founders have bequeathed them and they made the best of their forefathers’ wisdom and excelled, to the pride of their ancestors. They called themselves the Horus Kings, each identifying with a particular god. Among these kings were Djoser, Pepi I, Pepi II, Sekemket, and Peripsen. The correct answer is C.

During their daily lives, the older folks prepared for sleep by praying to one of their gods, in the Egyptian case, the sun god Ra or god of the underworld, afterlife and the dead Osiris, or variants of the relations of the gods. The correct answer is B.