Having exhaustively demonstrated that the Pharaonic Egyptians were black, Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop argued that “the moral fruit of [Egyptian] civilization is to be counted among the assets of the Black world. Instead of presenting itself to history as an insolvent debtor, that Black world is the very initiator of the ‘western’ civilization flaunted before our eyes today.” —[Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myt