originally posted on my tumblr
Pretty ambiguous title, but it’s shorter than “Erasure of race in history, believing advanced technology was the only thing that could do something and why the Western world just can’t say I don’t know”. Maybe that’s be the sub title.
History is filled with colourful stories, epic battles, major events that changed the world, and helped the human species advance to what we are today. But there’s a major problem. A lot of people in this modern world continue to erase the aspects of history to favour a very whitewashed look into it. One need only look at the European paintings of Christ to realize this. How a white man was born of a Middle Eastern Jewish woman is beyond me. Maybe that’s how racists see it as a miracle.
When a treasure trove of knowledge is often found, it usually is celebrated. The Timbuktu Manuscripts are a prime example. While research and preservation of the manuscripts located in the West African nation of Mali has been conducted on them for decades (since at least 1970), the Western world, in particular right wing media, continues to state that African nations had no history, were better off as slaves, were savages with no written language. Yet, these manuscripts, centuries old, contain thoughts and facts (known at the time) in a wide range of studies; medicine, philosophy, astronomy, economics, and more. All of the manuscripts were written in Arabic (which was something that was common around the time of the Silk Road trading route). But this proves before any aspect of European colonization that African nations had libraries and authors with deep questions about the world and it’s social fabric, as well as great scientific minds.
This is proven further with the evidence displayed by the Ancient Egyptians. Thousands of years before the Timbuktu Manuscripts, the Egyptians were practicing medicine, studying the stars, and creating massive engineering projects. This wasn’t just an isolated incident in one nation that bordered on the African continent and the Middle East. Many cultures throughout the region were developing incredible breakthroughs, many of which are still seen today.
This is where I blast those who believe in ancient aliens theories (and in this case, by theory I mean science fiction). Ancient aliens theories are good for one thing and one thing only; making entertaining science fiction. See Stargate. Those who hold these theories tightly are ignoring the innovative capabilities of the people in the region at the time, and are ignoring the basics of geological science.
A good example is the ancient city of Baalbek, where it is said that a slab of rock so massive was laid as a foundation, that it had to have been erected by aliens as a landing pad for their spaceships. ‘Cause, that’s only what it could be! There are three stones at Baalbek, the heaviest of which weighs 800 tons (but ancient aliens theorists will tell you that it really weighs 1200 tons… but what’s 400 tons between friends). They will also say that no human could have moved those due to the fact there was nothing to move it with. Not, a lot of these theories are states around Middle Eastern countries, but they often tend to leave out places like Stonehenge. There are some, but the primary focus is on countries filled with brown people.
The bottom line is that much of this talk is the erasure of history. Making it so that the people of that area could not have possibly built those massive monuments or written those incredible things, so it had to be something else. Either ancient aliens, or by divine providence.
The West will use any excuse to comfort itself and explain it’s own ignorance.
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