A People's History Of The World: From The Stone Age To The New Millennium - Plot & Excerpts
According to them it was without civilisation and without history, its life ‘blank, uninteresting, brutal barbarism’, according to a Professor Egerton of Oxford University.78 So strong were their prejudices that the geologist Carl Mauch, one of the first Europeans to visit the site of the 12th century city of Great Zimbabwe, was convinced it could not be of local origin, but must of been built by some non-black people from the north as a copy of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem.79 The Tory historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote in 1965, ‘There is only the history of the European in Africa. The rest is largely darkness’.80 Yet all the processes which led to the rise of civilisation in Eurasia and the Americas occurred in Africa too, and not just once but several times. Egypt is the most obvious example. Although certain aspects of its civilisation were probably influenced by contact with Mesopotamia, its roots lay in independent developments in southern Egypt, among peoples from the west and south who settled in the Nile Valley.81 The Greek historian Herodotus referred to the Kushite civilisation of Nubia (from the Nile above Aswan), which briefly conquered Egypt early in the first millennium BC, and which developed its own phonetic script.
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