African Astronomer Priestesses

The women of Africa have already shown themselves to be of paramount importance in the revolutionary struggle. They gave active support to the independence movement in their various countries, and in some cases their courageous participation in demonstrations and other forms of political action had a decisive effect on the outcome. They have, therefore, a good revolutionary record, and are a great source of power for our politico-military Organisation. Maximum use must be made of their special skills and potentialities.

Kwame Nkrumah

Astronomer Priestesses

by Edward W. Robinson, Jr., J. D.

World-renown historians of Egypt's early history trace the background of the three astronomer-priestesses who gave to the world higher mathematics. English historian, Gerald Massey Ancient Egypt, The Light of the World tells us that they were of a long line of distinguished African women who would lead the travel of civilization from its southern origins until it arrived in the north in a land now known as Egypt. This upper Nile was where the goddess Ater-Tshema-T is credited with having created calculus over 4700 years ago.

G. Michanowsky tells us that about 4000 B. C. there was a giant supernova in the southern constellation Vela. This and other celestial phenomena inspired these southeastern African people to move to a part of Africa which afforded an unobstructed view of the heavens they found in the barren ground of what-is-now Egypt. They constructed telescopes and observatories to record precise movements of heavenly bodies.

They drew the land as a right triangle of thirty-six, fifty-four and ninety degrees. Livio C. Stecchini says that this allowed these astronomer-priestesses to calculate all of the trigonometric functions of angles between zero and thirty-six degrees. The astronomer-priestess Sheshet is credited with the creation of trigonometry.

According to Livio Stecchini, priestess Sheshet analyzed curves by dividing the area under a curve into a series of rectangles which is the basis of integral calculus. In analyzing the curvature of the earth she used rectangles six feet wide.

Geometry, created by the astronomer-priestesses Tekhi, evolved with the object of controlling the flow of the Nile River, so that maximum enrichment of the land would result. According to E. A. Wallis Budge, Keeper of the Antiquities of the British Museum, in his book, The Gods of Egypt, and Moses Cotsworth say that these priestesses were the most learned of Egypt.

They say that they could measure the length of the year to 365.24219 of days. They were credited with placing the granite slab into the great pyramid, which, according to the French mathematician, Abbe Thomas Moreau, in his book The Mysterious Science of the Pharaohs, is the basis for the metric system. This is due to the fact that the length of this granite slab is exactly one meter in length which is one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator.