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I Fact-Checked Nana Kyidomhene: Here Are the Sources || Masterminds Podcast EP95 · Masterminds Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I had a great conversation with Nanache Dom Hine right here on the Masterminds podcast.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: And he brought a lot of claims and revealed a lot of information that we need sources for.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen you guys in the comments.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: People are asking questions, they're asking for sources.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: So this episode is all about providing the sources and the material for Nanache Dom Hine's episode.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: But this time I did something a bit different.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: I sent him some of your questions, some of your comments, and told him that can he send me his sources?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And then I did my personal research and we've put together all the information.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: So let's go.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the first claim was that Greece inherited its knowledge from Africa.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: So let's dive into it.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: So his argument was that Greece did not invent civilization, it inherited it from Africa.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the Greeks say so themselves.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the information is right there.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we start from Herodotus.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: So he's known, he's called the father of history.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Herodotus wrote in his histories that all the Greek gods came from Egypt.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Then we also have Didiorus Siculus, another Greek historian, and he recorded that from Pythagoras to other Greek thinkers traveled to Egypt to learn its laws and sciences.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: All this is in book one of the Library of History.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now to medicine.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: But Emotep, who's an African god, was healing and building in Egypt around 2650 BC.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is over 2,000 years before Hippocrates was even born.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And a research team studying ancient Egyptian medical papyri found prescriptions written in 1500 BC.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is over a thousand years before Hippocrates.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: So his claim is right on both accounts.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: The second claim is that the word Amon echoes the African god Amun.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, let's say who Amun is, first of all.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: So Amun was one of the great gods of ancient Egypt.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And even the Greeks themselves identified him with their own chief god, Zeus.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: So this is documented.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's documented that Alexander the Great, when he conquered Egypt, made a pilgrimage across the desert to the oracle of Amun at Siwa.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And he was then proclaimed as the son of God.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: So yes, this is documented.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now the only contradiction here is a lot of linguists also trace Amen to a Hebrew root meaning to confirm.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: So yes, the similarity is there because Egypt had the god Amun, which was adopted by the Greeks, and the word Amen is very similar, but some also attribute it to the Hebrew, a Hebrew word which means to confirm.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: His third claim that visitors describe African cities built in stone that were grander than Europe's.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a well-documented thing.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Leo Africanus, who wrote in 1526, described Timbuktu as a city with the great stores of doctors, judges, priests, and learned men, and that they all were maintained at the king's expense, where manuscripts, books, and everything sold for money more than any other merchandise.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the city was known to have knowledge being more valuable than any trade good at all.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: The next source is the geographer Al-Bakri, who wrote in 1068 that the towns of the Ghana Empire were built of stone and acacia wood, with the king's palace surrounded by an enclosure like a city wall.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is 1068.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So he wrote this from a compilation of reports from merchants and travelers who had been to the Ghana Empire.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then we have Benin, which had two different, two separate European visitors writing about it.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: The first one was Duard Pacheco Pereira, a Portuguese writer around 1506, who said the city was greater than Lisbon, with well-arranged houses.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then we had Alfred Dapa in 1668, who described Benin Street as straight and very broad, the houses standing in good order.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Two different men over 160 years apart, describing an African city as equal or better to what they had at home.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now his fourth claim was that the Ashanti had upstairs homes and indoor toilets while Europe stayed filthy.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's look at this.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas Bauditic, who visited Kumase in 1817, wrote down in his account in 1819.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: He described the houses that they owned their own latrooms, which is in those days the toilet facilities.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: He said some of them were upstairs and in separate rooms.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he described that boiling water was poured daily to keep the sanitation clean and prevent any offense.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is an Englishman in 1817 describing indoor sanitation in an Ashanti home at a time when European cities were still emptying waste into open streets and rivers.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the two-story architecture is backed up beyond boundage.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: So a University of Cape Coast study on Akan building traditions described these two-story courtiers houses, including the upstairs toilet facilities that he mentioned.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not even just from one man's point of view.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: This was well documented about the Ashanti Empire in 1817.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: His fifth claim was that Africa had universities like Sankori and that the Moors lifted Europe from darkness.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, let's talk about Sankori in Timbuktu.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a major center of Islamic learning.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Even UNESCO today documents the Sankori Mosque and the Timbuktu manuscripts as protected intellectual heritage.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Once again, we have Leo Africanus who describe the scholars in the manuscripts trade of that city.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then we have the Moors.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'll talk more about the Moors in a completely separate episode because the Moors were African and North African people who actually ruled parts of Europe for centuries, about over 700 years.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: They poured maths, medicine, optics, and preserved knowledge of the classical world into a struggling Europe.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: So much of what became the European Renaissance stood on the foundation that the Moors, that Africans, took to Europe.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: His sixth claim was that the walls of Benin outbuilt the Great Wall of China and then it was buried.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the Benin Earthworks were officially recognized in the 1974 edition of the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: So this is well documented.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Even the journalist Fred Pierce, writing in News Scientists, reported that the walls of Benin were around four times longer than the Great Wall of China and consumed roughly a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid at Giza.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: The surveyor Patrick Darling estimated a full network of 16,000 kilometers of earthworks.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: And to add to this, he also mentioned other pyramids in Africa.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now we have over 200 pyramids which still stand at Meroi in Sudan, more than all of Egypt.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea of monumental building being foreign to Africa until colonization is completely false.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now the seventh claim was that Western religious scripture was borrowed, translated in Africa, and voted on by the Council of Nisa.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start with the Bible's own opening.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: So the Oxford scholar David Carr, in his book on the formation of Genesis, actually documents that Genesis chapter 1 engages directly the older Mesopotamian creation epic, the Enuma Elish.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: So this is accepting the fact that the creation story in Genesis was taken from Samaria, the Mesopotamian creation epic.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then even the transmission of the scripture itself.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: So the Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures was produced in Alexandria in Africa under the Ptolemies.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: So the letter of Aristias records it as translated by 72 Jewish elders in that African city.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the scripture that shaped the Western world passed through the African center of learning to get there.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then, of course, the popular council of Nicaea.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: So in 325 AD, the Council of Niceah formally defined the divinity of Christ.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the creed that they produced declares Christ the God of God, light of light, and one substance with the Father.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: So this was defined by the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, over 300 years after the alleged birth of Christ.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now to the most interesting, or should I say, controversial claim, which is that the death and resurrection story existed in older religions before Christianity.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is what's documented.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea of a God who dies and rises again is not new to Christianity.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: So we have from Osiris in Egypt, Tamus in Mesopotamia, Dionysus in Greece, Atis and Adonis in Near East.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a pattern that has been happening over and over again in different religions.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's formally identified by Sir James Fraser in his landmark 18, is in his landmark 1890 work, The Golden Bough, one of the founding books of comparative religion.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: So he explicitly grouped Osiris, Tammuz, Dionysus, and Jesus together as versions of the same recurring motif.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: This is real academic history.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: So of course, there are a lot of arguments when it comes to this one because some call it a coincidence, some say they are just different stories, some say they're just different narratives, but you cannot ignore the fact that four to five different documented gods in other religions had a similar story of the death and resurrection before Christianity.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: So the last claim I'll discuss is the fact that there's no historical evidence that Moses ever existed.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: I've already discussed this in the fact check on the Panji episode, but I can just go through it again quickly, where you know, like scholars like Philip Davis have actually said that the Moses story is about historic as the Kenata story.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we even have people like what's what's his name, James Hoffmeyer, who's actually an Egyptologist who defends the Exodus tradition, saying that there was no contemporary record of a man named Moses.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: But as I always say, all I can do is bring the information and you make your own decisions.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: And please always make sure that you also fact check everything you are hearing.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: The sources are down here in the description so you can check it out for yourself.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Don't take my word for it, don't take Danachidom Hine's word for it.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Do your own research because to become a mastermind is not about just taking what you've been told, it's about deciding to learn and grow for yourself.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: I hope this conversation and the many others that we're going to have is going to make you the mastermind that I know you deserve to be.