The Nation, Kenya
April 15 2007
Ms Wangui will re-link us with our ancient kin
Story by PHILIP OCHIENG
Publication Date: 4/15/2007
If a marriage takes place between the Armenian lad and the Kenyan
lass, I will chortle because intermarriage is one method by which our
horribly sundered world might redeem its specific unity.
The adjective specific refers to all those things that objectively
unite a species. In humans – puzzlingly – they include the
individual, racial, gender, ethnic and sectarian prejudices which
specifically divide us.
Although ours is the most intense of all the specific brains – nay,
because of it – it is also the most impressionable. A snake’s thought
cannot be influenced by tuition or propaganda. Therefore, snakes have
no superstitions and religions and never go to war to impose these on
one another.
That is the paradox of human intelligence: Nature has equipped us
with the ability not only to be curious but also to investigate and
find out. Yet we prefer to jump to the most facile conclusions,
spinning the most ignorant tales and phobias against one another.
Then we declare our myths to be the Truth, condemn those of
neighbours as evil and can slaughter them if they persist in their
beliefs. Highly educated Europe has murdered millions in such
thoughtlessness as the Inquisition, the witch-hunt, the Jewish
holocaust, the Crusades, the black slave trade, `Our Manifest
Destiny’, colonialism, globalisation, the `war on terror’.
Thus, merely because our prospective Armenian son-in-law has made
horrible headlines in Kenya, many Kenyans are apt to jump to the
conclusions that all Armenians are devils. Yet, if they investigated,
they might find that Armenians have deep African roots.
The story begins around 3100 BC, when a Nubian prince called Men
invaded Lower Egypt and united it with his kingdom of Cush to set up
at Memphis the pharaonic house that ruled Egypt for the next 3,000
years.
Menes – as the Hellenic Greeks called him – then invaded Crete, where
the insular dialect rendered him as Min and the Hellenes subsequently
as Minos, the name by which this Nubian is best known as the founder
of the Minoan empire. In The Greek Myths, Robert Graves affirms it:
`A large number of goddess-worshipping [pre-Arab black] Libyans …
from the Western Delta … arrived [in Crete] when Upper and Lower
Egypt were forcibly united under the First Dynasty about the year
3000 BC. The First Minoan Age began soon afterwards, and Cretan
culture spread to Thrace …’
Graves makes it certain that the three events were led by the same
individual – Egypt’s unification by Menes, the Minoan dynasty’s
foundation by Minos and Armenia’s conquest by a Cretan hero called
Menus or Minyas.
They moved steadily along the Nile
In Gods of the New Millennium, Alan Alford avers that the names
Menes, Minos and Minyas all refer to that same Nubian warrior.
Hellenic historian Herodotus confirms that Colchis had been colonised
by Pharaoh Sesostris and identifies the Colchians by their `…black
skins and kinky hair…’
But, much more germane to our theme is that the Colchians were what
came to be known as Armenians, an offshoot of what Graves calls
`Libyo-Ethiopians’.
They moved steadily along the Nile through the Delta to Rhodes,
Crete, Argolis, Attica, Arcadia, Corinth, Boeotia, Thessaly, Magnesia
and the Troad to the Caucasus and backwards to rejoin their brother
Agenor (the Bible’s `Canaan’), whose roots Graves traces also to
Uganda.
The Minyans of Thessaly, Euboea, Thrace, Troy and Colchis are known
in other texts as Minni, Menus and Menia, and their ultimate country
as Ar-Minni, Ar-Menus or Ar-Menia, names which link them unmistakably
to Min (Minos) and Men (Menes).
The prefix Ar means `hill’ or `mountain’ (here the Caucasus). Armenia
thus means `Mount Men’ or `Min’s Hill’, being the Hamitic equivalent
of the Semitic har, as in Hebrew Har Megiddo, Galilee’s strategic
`Mount Megiddo’ from which the Hellenes wove their yarn of
Armageddon.
Thus `Mount Ararat’, which also rises in Armenia, is a tautological
term because the `ar’ in it already means `mountain’. Ararat’s
original name was Ar Aras (going into Hebrew as Har Arat), `Aras
mountain’.
Aras refers also to a river that rises in Turkish Armenia and flows
into the Caspian. Araks or Aragats – the Russian name for Aras – also
owes its `ar’ prefix (to the same Hamitic etymology. If Armenians are
now fully Caucasian, so are the PelasgicGreeks, descendants of the
African Graikoi (`children of the Grey Goddess’); so are Scythians
and Scots, descendants of Queen Scota of Cush; so are the Irish and
Danes, descendants of the Pelasgic Tuatha de Danaans; so are the
Gauls and other Celts, descendants of the African Goidels.
Racial outlooks can be altered beyond recognition by commingling in
long-run climate conditions. And, in Armenia, Wangui’s descendants
will in the end – like Scota’s – lose all their Negroid attributes
and become Caucasian. But Wangui will have re-linked us to these
ancient relatives of ours.