Published in : Journal of Alliance of Civilizations
Issued by     : The Qatari Committee of the Alliance of Civilizations

 

Authored by :  Prof. Qusay Mansoor Abdulkareem Al-Turkey

 

Introduction:
Archaeological and anthropological evidence available to researchers for some prehistoric times have proven that Man had practiced some activities that described as magical tending to what is known today as parapsychology during the early ages of the civilization emergence in the shadow of the primitive life. Additionally, while going through studying the evidence about magical practices, we can investigate a number of these phenomena and traces the
continuation of their existence since long time ago to date. There is no doubt that recent scientific studies have contributed with valuable information that had been provided by anthropologists and sociologists. They tried to introduce logical and scientific explanations
for such magical and parapsychological practices, because ancient and modern humans cannot believe in practices that are not based on logic, especially since sorcery and quackery cannot be implied with the main human practices.
It goes without saying that specialists during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries classified these practices among the peoples of Africa as magical, while recent studies confirmed that they fall within the parapsychological practices(1).This occurred especially since the roots of most of these practices have been established within the customs, traditions and practices of the ancient East societies in the Northeastern Africa and in the Northwestern Asia,  Moreover, this study clarifies the major similarities through what we termed as magical laws, or what is known now as parapsychology. This is because those laws govern the behavior of societies in the past and present. Still, communities and individuals, on the other hand, enable us to reach results through simple references of historical value to understand the heritage that is still in the memory of peoples. By doing so, we achieve the goal to which it referred global thinkers through their sayings, among them the famous historian, Dr. (MarcusTullius Cicero) (106-43 BC) when he said: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life”(2). Furthermore, in the light of the above, we tried in this study to identify distinctive aspects of the Mesopotamian civilization and the extent to which it was rooted in the culture and civilization of some African peoples. This was achieved through two demands, the first of which was related to the laws of representational magic, both formative and communicative. We used the original sources with which we searched for distinct elements of the heritage and aspects of African civilization. We have noticed the existence of such elements in the culture of both civilizations. As for the second requirement, we dealt with a set of common elements in the two ancient Mesopotamian cultures, of which we found similar in African culture. Then, we concluded the paper with some notes that considered as an outcome of the research, which we hope we have succeeded in introducing its ideas.

 

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