When Mary Lefkowitz first encountered Afrocentrism in 1991, she was appalled. She discovered that there were people writing books and teaching that Greek civilization had derived from, or had even been "stolen" from Egypt. They were making claims that the Ancient Egyptians were black, as were Socrates, Cleopatra, and other important cultural figures in the Ancient World. They maintained that Greece had been invaded from Africa in the Middle of the 2nd millennium, that Greek religion and mystery systems were based on Egyptian prototypes and that what was called "Greek" philosophy was in fact the secret wisdom of Egyptian lodges of a Masonic type. She also discovered that these arguments were being supported by gross errors of fact, such as the idea that Aristotle had plundered the Egyptian library at Alexandria as a basis for his own massive philosophical and scientific writings. In fact, of course, the library at Alexandria was founded by Macedonian Greeks at least 30 years after Aristotle's death.

If Mary Lefkowitz knew that this was all fantasy and did not conform to the facts as painstakingly assembled by modern classicists and ancient historians, why did she bother to confront it at all? She explains that it was because Afrocentric literature was widely read and that it was being taught, not merely in a number of school districts but also in some universities. Furthermore, when she had attempted to question Afrocentric speakers on her own campus (Wellesley) she had been rudely rebuffed. Even worse, when she appealed to colleagues for help they often failed to support her. Their ostensible grounds for this reluctance was the relativist position that as all history is fiction, there was room for many different stories.  Thus, for them Afrocentrist history was no less true than the classicists' version of the roots of Greek civilization. However, Mary Lefkowitz believes that another and more significant reason why her colleagues let her down, was the fear of being labeled as racist.

She sees the Afrocentrists as living in a sealed off intellectual ghetto, impervious to outside information, where they pay no attention to the truth of their propositions but are purely concerned with the "feel good" factor and boosting the low self-esteem of African-Americans. While she has some respect for this motive, she denies that it has any place in the writing and teaching of history which must always remain objective. Thus, she has felt obliged to stand up and be counted against what she sees as the Afrocentrist assault on the basic principles of education, respect for the facts, logical argument and open debate.

For this reason, she wrote a series of overlapping articles on these "myths". This book is a compilation from these with added material and argument. Its purpose is to expose Afrocentric absurdities once and for all, but its length is required because their demolition has turned out to be rather more complicated than she first supposed.

Before going any further, I should like to look at what is meant by "Afrocentrism." As Mary Lefkowitz points out, the term was invented by Molefi Asante, who sees it as a way to escape Eurocentrism and its extensions, by looking at the world from an African standpoint. Since then, the label "Afrocentrist" has been attached to a number of intellectual positions ranging from "All good things come from Africa," or as Leonard Jeffries puts it: "Africa creates, Europe imitates," to those, among whom I see myself, who merely maintain that Africans and peoples of African descent have made many significant contributions to world progress and that for the past two centuries, these have been systematically played down by European and North American historians.

Mary Lefkowitz dislikes the whole gamut. She swipes at Frederick Douglass, Edward Blyden and W.E.B. Du Bois for maintaining that African Americans shared a common African heritage with Ancient Egypt. However, her principal objection is to the 20th century group that some African-Americans refer to as "Nilocentric," because of its relative neglect of other African regions and civilizations, and its focus on the Nile Valley and Egypt. I too am included in her attacks but her rogues' gallery consists of John Henrik Clark, Cheikh Anta Diop, Yosef Ben-Yochannan and above all George G.M. James.[[1]]

That Afrocentrists should make so many mistakes is over-determined. They have the sense of being embattled in a hostile world and of possessing an absolute and general truth, which makes one have less concern about details. More important than these reasons, however, are the extraordinary material difficulties they have faced in acquiring training in the requisite languages, in finding time and space to carry on research, money to buy books or even gain access to libraries, let alone finding publishers who could provide academic checks and competent proof readers. None of these difficulties applies to Mary Lefkowitz, who has been thoroughly educated in Latin and Greek (though not in Ancient Egyptian), has for many years been tenured at a rich college and has received financial grants from massive foundations in order to write her attacks on Afrocentrism. That Professor Lefkowitz should make so many factual errors is much more intriguing.

For instance: Pelops was not, as she writes (p. 13), the legendary founder of Argos. His activities in Greece were focused on Elis and Pisa not the Argolid. She states that hieroglyphics were deciphered in 1836 (p. 35). In fact, Champollion, the man who deciphered them, had died in 1831. The dates generally given for the decipherment are 1821-2, when he made the breakthrough or 1824 when he published his Precis du systeme hieroglyphique ... She writes that the theory that the Nile flood is the result of snow melted by South Winds "was not far from the truth" (p. 77). In fact, it is false and, as the great Greek scientist Eudoxos realized, it was the result of rains in Ethiopia.

We are all capable of this kind of sloppiness and such errors are relatively trivial and harmless. Other mistakes are less innocent. For instance, she says that Eudoxos was supposed to have gone to Egypt when it was under Persian domination. Mary Lefkowitz is virtually alone in doubting that he did go, and it is also generally agreed that he went in the 380s or 370s BC when Egypt was independent.[[2]] This error too might seem to be simply the result of her slapdash approach. However, the mistake helps her general case that the Ancient Greeks knew very little about Egypt, by suggesting that Eudoxos did not visit Egypt but that if he did, his knowledge of it would somehow have been obscured by Persian rule or, as she puts it, it "might have presented serious difficulties" (p. 79).

A more substantial and significant error is her statement on (p. 6): "Since the founding of this country, (the USA) ancient Greece has been intimately connected with the ideals of democracy." In fact, the very source she cites, states something very different:

... in 1787 and 1788 the Anti-federalists did not have a classical leg to stand on. There was no tradition of representative democracy to which they could appeal, and direct democracies like Athens, bore the stigma of instability, violence, corruption and injustice ... (such) that even many friends of democracy in America avoided using the word. Like the advocates of mixed government, they used the word "republic ..."[[3]]

Mary Lefkowitz's sloppiness here might seem inconsequential, but in fact, it serves a very important purpose in her general argument. It is the implication that one cannot have freedom or democracy without a respectful awareness of ancient Greece, and that there has been a continuous flame of such reverence that can only be doused at our peril. Therefore--she implies--the Afrocentrists are enemies of freedom.

This suggestion is untenable even within the Western tradition. The English "Revolution" of the 17th century relied on the anti-royalist aspects of the Bible and myths of Saxon freedom, while the American and French revolutions of the 18th century took Republican Rome as a model. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that since the 1820s, the images of ancient Greece, and Athens in particular, have usually served a positive function. On the other hand, ante-bellum Southern writers used Ancient Greece and Athens to demonstrate the political and cultural benefits of slavery.[[4]] And today, extreme conservatives with whom--as we shall see--Mary Lefkowitz is intimately connected, are using images of ancient Greece for their own political agendas.

Another type of error found in Not Out of Africa comes from the author's discovering what she wants and then failing to check further. For example, referring to the information Egyptian priests gave to the writer Diodoros of Sicily in the 1st century BC, she writes of their claims of Egyptian influence on Greece and adds that:

"these included many Egyptian customs in their laws." He does not say what exactly these laws might have been; presumably no one really knew. The idea that early Greek law was inspired by Egyptian law is a historical fiction (p.75).[[5]]

On the following page, she repeats the charge that Diodoros lacked specific information. The passage she cited was from Diodoros I.98.2. If she had gone back to I.77.5 she would have seen that Diodoros (or his informants) had specified that Solon had adopted an Egyptian law according to which everybody had to declare the source of their income.[[6]] In I.79.3 Diodoros specified yet another Solonic law supposed to derive from Egypt, his famous seisachtheia "shaking off of debts" according to which a man could not be imprisoned or enslaved for debt. Whether or not Diodoros' claims are correct--the last has been treated seriously in the 20th century, though there are chronological problems--they are clearly specific.[[7]] It is clear that in her eagerness to discredit Diodoros as vague and unspecific she failed to see, or at least to note, references that would weaken her case.

I find it flattering that Mary Lefkowitz sometimes prefers to attack claims that I do not make to ones that I do. For an instance of the former class, there is her belief that I derive the Greek word hikesios "suppliant" from the Egyptian HK3 h3st "chieftains of foreign hill country," later known to the Greeks as Hyksos. These people invaded Egypt from the North East, in the 18th century BC and some of them may have gone on to the Aegean. In fact, I make no claim about the etymology of Hiko or hikneomai from which hikesios would appear to be derived. What I do say is that there was a punning relationship between Hyksos and hikesios and that the Egyptian name may have been the basis of Hikesios as the specific local title of the god Zeus.

Where she attacks claims that I do make, she does precisely what she accuses the Afrocentrists of doing: she selects her evidence rejecting data that does not support her arguments. For instance, she admits the "ingenuity" of my proposal that the name Athena derives from the Egyptian Ht Nt, the religious name of the city of Sais, the center of the cult of the virgin goddess Neit. Furthermore, she provides no alternative, nor does she question the phonetics of my proposed etymology.  Nevertheless, she rejects it because of what she sees as dissimilarities between the two goddesses (p. 65). The outline of the evidence for the etymology, which I shall present in more detail in volume III, is set out in volume I (pp. 51-52). In this, I make it clear that Plato too, identified the two goddesses, that there was strong iconographic or pictorial evidence linking them, and that a derivation from Ht Nt would explain the double use of the name for the goddess and her city.

Why should Mary Lefkowitz make so many slips and use so many slippery arguments, when she does not have the excuses of many Afrocentrists of lacking training and resources? One reason is that although more than four years have passed since 1991, the book was obviously written in a hurry. It still shows signs of its origin in the cobbling together of articles written with passionate urgency for the popular and semi-popular press, with a few academic excursions. Nevertheless, I am convinced that this is less significant than the impact of two other factors, which, interestingly, she shares with the extreme Afrocentrists. The first of these is her conviction that she possesses an absolute general truth that allows her to be cavalier with specifics. The second is that she and her allies feel besieged and therefore they sometimes feel obliged to abandon the niceties of open academic debate.

Her general truth is that Greece did not derive any significant part of its civilization from Egypt. In this, she not only flies in the face of Greek and Roman tradition but even goes further than most of her classicist colleagues. For instance, she is extremely doubtful that Plato ever went to Egypt because, she maintains, references to the visit only appear in the late Hellenistic period (1st century BC). However, according to recent scholarship on the issue, the tradition of the journey goes back to Speusippos, Plato's nephew and his successor as head of the Academy.[[8]]

Similarly, Mary Lefkowitz challenges 19th and 20th century classical scholarship when she says that:

Every English translation [of Herodotos. II 43.2] that I know of says that Heracles was descended distantly "from Egypt." But the translation is incorrect. Herodotos is talking about Aegyptus the man rather than Aigyptos the country (p. 25).

Mary Lefkowitz's far fetched claim here can easily be explained in terms of her eagerness to separate Greece from Egypt and the desire to use her knowledge of language to intimidate the Afrocentrists. It does not cast doubt on Mary Lefkowitz's knowledge of Greek and Latin. On the other hand, while she knows these languages, she does not know much about linguistics and she has virtually no understanding of language contact, which is the relevant field when looking at the relations between Egypt and Greece. For instance, she writes:

Once they were able to read real Egyptian ... it became clear to them that the relation of Egyptian to Greek culture was less close than they imagined. Egyptian belonged to the Afroasiatic family while Greek was an Indo-European language, akin to Sanskrit and European languages like Latin (pp. 57-8).

The family relationships are undoubtedly correct, but to my knowledge, no Afrocentrist has ever argued that there was a genetic relationship between Egyptian and Greek. What they and I maintain is that Ancient Egyptian culture had a massive impact on that of Greece and that this is reflected in a substantial number of Egyptian names loan words in Greek.[[11]] Mary Lefkowitz does not seem to realize that lexical loans primarily reflect contemporary contacts, not past genetic relationships. For example, while Chinese is even more distant genetically from Korean and Japanese than Egyptian and Semitic are from Greek, Korean and Japanese are filled with Chinese loan words.[[12]]

At another point she writes:

Vague similarities do not prove any connection between words. The sound qualities of vowel consonants alike change when words are assimilated from one language to another, and even loan-words are transformed: for example, the Latinized Greek word episcopus becomes bishop in the mouths of Saxon converts in the 9th century A.D.(pp.23-4).[[13]]

The last clause may impress her readers with her learning, but in fact, it undermines her basic argument. If words as apparently dissimilar as episcopus and bishop can be related, it shows that given semantic parallels, "vague similarities" should be taken into account. Furthermore, the net must be cast still more widely when, as is the case with Egypt and Greece, contact between two cultures has been carried on for many thousands of years and there will be many different phonetic correspondences.

END of Part I

CONTINUE TO PART II

Gopher Library, University of Virginia,  alpha, Bryn Mawr Classical Review,   96 (1996),  96.4.5, Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa,

Internet. 29 Oct. 1999. Available: gopher://gopher.lib.virginia.edu:70/00/alpha/bmcr/v96/96-4-5