>>8671120Variants of the term "Moor" have been used by many Europeans since ancient times as a general description for indigenous Africans. Contrary to popular belief, the term is not synonymous with "Islamic" or any specific Arab or African religion, civilization, or ethnicity.
The origin of the English term, "Moor," is the Greek word, "μαυρο" or "mavro" which literally means "black, blackened or charred" and has long been used to describe black or very dark things such as, "Mavri Thalassa" which refers to the Black Sea or "mavri spilia" which means "black cave." Ancient Greeks used the term to describe the complexion of Africans and (even today, some Greeks use "mavro" to refer to Africans, although in a pejorative manner).
see the word's evolution from the Greek "mavro" to the Latin word, "mavrvs" (actually, "mavro" in the ablative, singular, masculine Latin form). The English transliteration is "Maurus" and the plural form is "Mauri," specifically used by ancient Romans in reference to Black Africans. Writers in both Greek and Latin specifically used the term as a racial identity. In the Epitome de Caesaribus (390s AD), we learn that Aemilianus was "a Moor by race." Procopius of Caesarea (500-565 AD), a Byzantine scholar who wrote in Greek, said in his History of the Wars, "beyond that there are men not black-skinned like the Moors..."
Arabs and Caucasians alsways try to fit themselves into ancient Kemet and Moorish history and try to make someone else’s history a part of their own.
As late as the 5th Century A. D. Procopius, a Roman historian, called the people of Morocco “black.”
