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(Journal of African Civilizations; V.6)
by Professor Ivan Van Sertima (Editor), Jacqueline Patten-Van Sertima (Cover design)
This unique volume provides an overview of the African queens, madonnas, and goddesses who dominated the history and imagination of ancient times. The authors have concentrated on Ethiopia and Egypt because the documents of the Nile Valley are voluminous compared to the sketchier records in other parts of Africa, but also because the imagination of the world, not just that of Africa, was haunted by these women. They are just as prominent a feature of European mythology as of African reality. The book is divided into three parts: Ethiopia and Egyptian Queens and Goddesses; Black Women in Ancient Art; and Conquerors and Courtesans. This second edition contains two new chapters, one on Hypatia and women's rights in ancient Egypt, and the other on the diffusion into Europe of Isis, the African goddess of Nile Valley civilizations. Black Women in Antiquity provides a dramatic account of the role black women have played in the history and development of civilization.
Only the image of the Black Madonna and Child, itself based on the Egyptian images of Isis with the child Horus, survived the Christian misogynistic onslaught. The cult of Isis was the dominant religion of the Mediterranean during late Roman times, and had spread into Roman-occupied lands, including Gaul. The city of Paris was devoted to Isis, as Lyons was to Cybele and Marseilles to Artemis. Like other Black Goddess figures, Isis is the life-giving and healing goddess of the Earth. In The Golden Ass of Apuleius, Isis speaks: "I am Nature, the universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all the gods and goddesses there are." The text goes on to claim that she is identical with Cybele, Artemis, Aphrodite, Persephone, Demeter, Juno, and Hecate.
The Black Earth Goddess under whatever name, including the Black Madonna, has traditionally always been supportive of and facilitative of the natural processes of life: healing the sick, easing the pain of childbirth, bringing fertility, making the milk flow, comforting and guiding the dying, helping the plants grow. As such, she represented the persistence of the Great Goddess during the time of dominance by patriarchal sky-god cults, and she represents the persistence of the Mother Goddess during the ascendancy of Christian monotheism.
Ivan Van Sertima is professor of African studies at Rutgers University. Van Sertima was an undergraduate at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, where he graduated with honors. He has been visiting professor at Princeton University and lectured at more than one hundred colleges and universities. Ivan Van Sertima’s pioneering work in linguistics and anthropology has appeared in numerous scholarly journals. He edits the Journal of African Civilizations, which has greatly changed the way in which African history and culture are taught and studied.
In 1983 he edited a book titled Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern. He also treated that topic in his contribution to the volume African Renaissance, published in 1999 as a record of the conference held in Johannesburg in September 1998 on the theme of the African Renaissance. His article (pp. 305-330) is titled "The Lost Sciences of Africa: An Overview". In it he presents early African advances in metallurgy, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, engineering, agriculture, navigation, medicine and writing. He notes that such higher learning, in Africa as elsewhere, was the preserve of elites in the centers of civilizations, rendering them very vulnerable in the event (as happened in Africa) of the destruction of those centers.
Some of his works include Blacks in Science, Nile Valley Civilizations, African Presence in Early America, Black Women in Antiquity, Egypt Revisited, Egypt: Child of Africa, African Presence in Early Europe, Golden Age of the Moor, African Presence in the Art of the Americas, Great Black Leaders, Great African Thinkers (co-edited with Larry Obadele Williams), and African Presence in Early Asia (co-edited with Runoko Rashidi). In 1998 Transaction Press produced produced Van Sertima's Early America Revisited, the definitive statement on the subject.
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