Biographie de cheikh anta diop

Natural scientist, historian, writer

At a Glance…

Argued That the Earliest Humans Were Black

Focused on Representations of Egyptians in Art

Theories Drew Criticism

Selected writings

Sources

“The return to Egypt in all domains is the necessary condition for reconciling African civilizations with history, in order to be able to construct a body of modern human sciences, in order to renovate African culture,” the late Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop proposed in his last work, Civilisation ou barbarie: anthropologie sans complaisance (translated as Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology ).

One of twentieth-century Africa’s most influential scholars, Diop sought to prove not only that ancient Egyptians were descendants of black Africans—that Egypt was a black society—but that the cultural achievements of that society predated and directly influenced the cultures of Greece and Rome, an