Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
THE STARS HAVE GIVEN US ALL
THE STARS HAVE GIVEN US ALL
Reading and recording the stars on their annual circuits, as they coursed through the night sky, from fixed reference points, and relative to such points, enabled early men to mark and to demarcate the earth, in relation to those stars' perennial and unerring rhythms and risings, over thousands and thousands of years of observing.
These men equated the flooding of their blessed river, the sacred Mother Nile, whose beneficent, nutrient-rich, effluvia, and whose inundating waters, annually, faithfully overspread their dry, thirsty land with inner Africa's life-giving, black muds.
Thus, they called their country by the eponym, "Kemet," meaning the black land, whose metonymic nomenclature described the land and its people. The Greeks, their very latter-day students, whose knowledge they regarded as akin to that of "children" says Plato, who had flocked to Kemet to learn, called this land, " Egypt, " their transliteration for its true given name, "Hwt-ka-Ptah" by its indigenous people.
Still, the stars, whom they named and revered as their gods, enabled them to define, to refine, and to delineate the notion of "time;" their lands, the skies and the seas by use of their marvelous fractions and geometry; in Greek, "earth measures" . These ritualized mathematical applications gave civilization : the calendar, surveying, navigation, architecture, engineering, astronomy, astrology, agriculture, music, medicine, writing, education, religion. Systematic priestly applications of plane and solid geometry and mathematics afforded by the stars to the daily lives of mankind, regularly and rigorously are recorded in stone megaliths that yet awe modern man.