She goes on to say that: "Linguists have long since noted the relatively few words of Egyptian origin that have made their way into Greek." She does not mention that over half of the basic Greek vocabulary cannot be explained in terms of Indo-European or consider the arguments I have made at length in Black Athena I: a) lexicographers of Greek have not known Ancient Egyptian, and b) since the 1820s, when hieroglyphics were first deciphered, there have been ideological reasons why they should not have not wanted to find Egyptian etymologies for significant or fundamental Greek words. It should also be pointed out that it is precisely this historiographical or ideological aspect of my work that has been most widely accepted.[[14]] Nevertheless, Mary Lefkowitz is certain that there was no significant contact between Egypt and Greece before the former's conquest by Alexander the Great and her faith in this general truth sustains her in all the twists and turns of her argument.
The aim of impressing and intimidating through language appears at the very beginning of the book in the Latin dedication to her colleague Guy MacLean Rogers. The lines are left untranslated and without any indication of their source. They come, in fact, from an ode by Horace (I vii) about the legendary Greco-Trojan hero Teucer, who after being banished from the Greek Salamis sailed to establish a new and greater Salamis in Cyprus.[[15]] The last verse reads as follows:
Now I do not know what personal references or drinking parties this
may refer to, but the political message is plain. It is what, when applied
to Afrocentrists, is called "vindicationalism." Mary Lefkowitz believes
that she and her comrades have suffered many slurs and "calumnies" to use
her word (p.10), but that sooner or later they will be vindicated.
Her sense of belonging to a small band of defenders of reason against the forces of unreason, or the demon "Political Correctness," antedates her encounter with Afrocentrism. Before 1991, she was the scourge of what she saw as feminist nonsense in Classics.[17a] In both struggles, she has found powerful helpers on the far right. In the preface to Not Out of Africa she thanks Wellesley College and the Bradley and Olin Foundations for their grants.[[17]] The latter two are among the most generous contributors to many right-wing organizations including The National Review, The Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Scholars (N.A.S.). Mary Lefkowitz, along with Jeane Kirkpatrick, Peter Diamondopoulos and some three dozen others, sits on the advisory board of the N.A.S. and plays an active role in its journal Academic Questions. The main concern of all of these organizations and journals is to turn back what their members and contributors view as the tides of liberalism and multiculturalism that have engulfed not only society but also education and the highbrow media.[[18]] This explains why they see themselves as besieged, and as potential or actual victims of their enemies.
This imagery resembles the sense of isolation and persecution experienced by many Black Afrocentrists, which explains the latter's intolerance towards interventions from hostile outsiders like Mary Lefkowitz. However, there is a fundamental difference, in that the Afrocentrists really are in a social and academic ghetto, while she and her allies are in one that is largely imaginary. Unlike the Afrocentric Black scholars--or even white liberals--they are amply funded and have access to many prestigious journals.[[19]] The articles that make up Not Out of Africa have appeared in the New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Partisan Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Academic Questions. Thus, she and her conservative comrades have every opportunity to carry out research, publish their results and participate freely in academic debates. Despite all this, however, she is just as intolerant as the extreme Afrocentrists.
Let me take a personal example. She and her colleague Guy Rogers (mentioned above) have organized the publication of a book entitled Black Athena Revisited. This massive work of some 520 pages is largely made up of reviews of Black Athena, selected for their hostility to it.[[20]] Despite being the author of the book in question, I was not informed of this project and was only told about it many months later by an uncomfortable contributor. I immediately e-mailed Mary Lefkowitz saying that I looked forward to seeing the pieces, so that I could prepare my response. She answered that they "had decided not to have a response" from me. I wrote back that it was very unusual in respectable scholarly studies not to include responses from the living subject of a book when he or she wanted to respond. She said that most of the pieces had appeared already and I had published responses to them. "Were these going to be included?" "No it had been decided not to include them." So much for the free market of ideas!
Before turning to her major attacks on Afrocentrist claims, it is necessary to consider two important issues of approach and method. The first of these is raised by Mary Lefkowitz when she admits that she may have biases but that this is very different from "consciously setting out to achieve a particular political goal" (p. 161). She does not say what her biases are, but two of the most important come out loud and clear throughout her book. They are that Europe owes nothing to Africa, or Greece to Egypt and that untrained outsiders should not question the conclusions of trained and competent professionals. Ten years ago, she would have been able to avoid the charge of "consciously setting out to achieve a political goal" because she and those who think like her then held complete academic power. This had been achieved during the 19th century by Northern European scholars, who did have the explicit ideological and political aims of denying European or Aryan indebtedness to Africans and "Semites."[[21]] Since 1991, however, Mary Lefkowitz has herself been "consciously setting out to achieve a particular political goal", i.e. the discrediting of my work and that of the Afrocentrists, as part of the overall conservative agenda to turn back multiculturalism.
The second issue is Mary Lefkowitz's insistence on a sharp distinction being made between what she calls "warranted facts" and "acceptable claims" (p.51). This appears to be similar to what I have called "proof" and "competitive plausibility." I accept that there are certainties, as for instance, that there was a holocaust in which over six million Jews and others were murdered by Nazis. However, for Mary Lefkowitz (p. 161) to put this massively documented event, which took place in her and my life time, on the same plane as the reconstruction of the murky origins of Greek civilization over 2,500 years ago is absurd. Here we are not dealing with proof or "warranted facts" but with "competitive plausibility." Furthermore, she herself appeals to plausibility and acceptability from her generally conservative, generally white, audience as often, if not more often, than the Afrocentrists do from their constituency.
As she follows the modern classical establishment in its denial of the
many Greek and Roman writers who believed in the massive Greek cultural
debt to Egypt, she is forced to overcome this ancient testimony by frequently
using such words and phrases as: "apparently", "evidently", "do not seem"
"what if ...?", "why not ...? An extreme example of this, is her treatment
of an ancient tradition that Plato had based his Republic on an idealized
image of Egypt. She writes:
Is this a "warranted fact" or an "acceptable claim"? We are both
operating on the plane of "competitive plausibility."
To return to some of Mary Lefkowitz's attempts to demolish Afrocentric claims; arguments that Hannibal, the playwright Terence Afer and St Augustine were "Blacks" are indeed implausible, if by "Black," one means someone of West or Central African appearance. It should be noted that up to 20% of the population of Carthaginian Africa may have been "negroid" and in Italy, Hannibal paid his mercenaries with coins with "negro" heads and elephants.[[22]] Nevertheless, as an upper class Carthaginian, Hannibal probably traced his ancestry back to the metropolis of Tyre on the Levant. Terence and St Augustine were born and brought up in North Africa, and there is every reason to suppose that they had North West African ancestry.
Concerning the claim that Socrates was "Black," Mary Lefkowitz in an earlier article, denounced the possibility of any African origin because as she put it: "the comic poets would not have passed up a chance to tease Socrates for being an Ethiopian." I could not resist responding that Socrates' own pupils Plato and Xenophon had described him as a "silenus" and that later sculptors had interpreted this by portraying him with a snub nose, broad nostrils, a wide mouth and prominent eyes. Thus, while it is clear that Socrates was an Athenian citizen and was Greek by culture, he did not necessarily have an "impeccable" European lineage.[[23]] In her book, she concedes that this argument is "ingenious," but she says that it is false, because, as she concludes: "if we were to use his resemblance to a silenus as an indication of his origins, it would clearly be equally logical to infer that he was descended from bearded men with horse's ears and tails." (p. 30). Once again, she sees the ancients--this time the sculptors--as having got it wrong. They should have known that to suggest an African physiognomy was equally absurd as portraying him as part horse! As for Cleopatra, apart from representations on coins, there are no contemporary portraits. Nevertheless, there is every reason to suppose that her appearance was "Mediterranean." Therefore, she was unlike both Afrocentrist pictures of her as a West African and Elizabeth Taylor. There is some doubt about the ethnicity of her grandmother who could have been Egyptian or Nubian and such a possibility alone would have made Cleopatra unmarriageable among whites, had she lived in Victorian or early 20th century England or America. Nevertheless, Mary Lefkowitz is right to state that the possibility is unlikely.
We now come to the nub of Mary Lefkowitz's attack and rage, the charge
that Greeks stole Egyptian religion, philosophy and science. The first
issue to be confronted here is that of the Hermetic Corpus. These
mystical and philosophical dialogues, many of them concerned with spiritual
initiation and centered on the mysterious figure of the sage or divine
Hermes Trismegistos, were circulating in Egypt at least from the 1st century
BC. Though written in Greek, and containing many features and ideas that
resemble those in Platonic and Neo-Platonic writings, the characters described
are Egyptian. On this issue, Mary Lefkowitz follows the standard interpretation
of the early 20th century, which is that in early 17th century AD, the
texts had been exposed as forgeries and that they are essentially Greek
writings, in which the authors portray themselves as Egyptians to enhance
their reputations and as a literary conceit. She pays no attention to the
reversal of scholarly opinion since the publication in the 1970s of the
library of Coptic Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, originally
found in 1945. The result of the evident parallels between these and the
Hermetic Corpus has been, as the modern scholar Garth Fowden puts it: ...
Hermes' Egyptian equivalent was the Egyptian god of wisdom Thoth
and the name Hermes Trismegistos has a good Egyptian prototype in "Thoth
Thrice Great."[[25]] Nevertheless, Mary Lefkowitz is adamant that: "There
is no record of any Egyptian language original from which they were derived,"
(p. 101). Apart from the close parallels in Coptic texts, there are in
fact a number of Demotic (that is late Egyptian) papyri containing substantial
sections of a dialogue of completely Hermetic type between Thoth and a
disciple.[[26]] Furthermore, Mary Lefkowitz does not engage the argument
put forward by the great Egyptologist, Sir William Flinders Petrie, that
some texts in the Hermetic corpus date back to the Persian period in the
6th century BC.[[27]] Thus, there is a real possibility that at least some
of the similarities between the Hermetic texts and Platonic and neo-Platonic
philosophy could be the result of Plato and his followers' having drawn
on Egyptian sources.[[28]]
This brings us to the central issue of the "Stolen Legacy." Mary Lefkowitz
lays great stress on George James and other Afrocentrist writers having
taken their ideas from the Masonic tradition, which in turn is based on
18th century novels, notably Sethos by the Abbe Terrasson. This neatly
supports her distinction between the "facts" taught by orthodox classicists
and the "fiction" propounded by the Afrocentrists. There is no doubt that
many of the details and particulars of Masonic ranks and initiations put
forward in Stolen Legacy and other Afrocentrist writings do derive from
this origin. Nevertheless, as Mary Lefkowitz concedes, these novels were
scholarly and based on ancient Greek and Latin sources, which stressed
the Egyptian origin of the Greek mysteries and wisdom. However, she feels
able to dismiss Herodotos as idiosyncratic, and Diodoros, Strabo and the
other authors of the Hellenistic and Roman periods as "late," which is
somewhat startling coming from someone writing in the 20th century. She
writes:
Mysteries are by their nature mysterious and are seldom if ever
described directly. It is also true that the two detailed descriptions
of Egyptian initiations come from the Roman period. One comes in a description
in the Latin novel The Golden Ass written by the North African author Apuleus,
of an initiation to the goddess Isis that took place in Greece. The other
is a papyrus in the Egyptian script of Hieratic describing the initiations
of a priest named Horsiesis, which took place in the ancient cult centers
of Abydos, Busisris and Karnak.[[29]] There are three striking features
in both sets of rituals. The first is that they appear to be based entirely
on Egyptian tradition. The second is that many of the passages resemble
those found in the Book of the Dead or, to use its original title, Going
Forth by Day. The third is that they parallel many the rituals practiced
in the most famous Greek mysteries, those at Eleusis, northwest of Athens.
The very skeptical scholar, Professor Gwyn Griffiths, has attempted to reconcile the three parallels. He maintains that the essential theme of spiritual regeneration in the present life was specifically Greek and Eleusinian. Nevertheless, he feels obliged to add: "Yet this may have developed in the Hellenistic era in Egypt as a development and projection of a very ancient funerary tradition."[[30]] His position seems, then, to be that the Greeks and late Egyptians both independently invented spiritual initiations for the living, resembling the journeys of the souls of the dead. The situation was then confused by a widespread "Egyptomaniac" fantasy that the Greek mysteries had been developed from Egyptian ones, which were fleshed out by the introduction of some Egyptian ritual. This seems much more cumbersome than simply accepting the view of the ancients, that the Greek mysterious initiations were derived from Egypt.
At least at a superficial level, the mystery and initiations in the
cult of Demeter at Eleusis resembled those of Osiris at Abydos and other
holy centers in Egypt. Furthermore, Egyptian scarabs and a symbol of Isis--Demeter
was her Greek counterpart--were found in a 9th or 8th century tomb at Eleusis.[[31]]
It is for these reasons that although the majority of Classicists deny
it, a number of the most distinguished specialists of the 20th century
have followed the predominant ancient
tradition that the cult was imported from Egypt before the Trojan War
or during what we should now call the Late Bronze Age. Most notable of
these was Paul Foucart who dominated Eleusinian studies in the early part
of the 20th century and whose detailed work is still respected, even by
the most conventional.[[32]] Charles Picard is generally supposed to have
refuted Foucart, but he admitted that "well before" the eighth century,
the Eleusinian Mysteries had received substantial influence from Egypt.[[33]]
In 1971, the British scholar A.A. Barb also saw fundamental connections.[[34]]
Even the firm isolationist, Jean Hani, admitted when referring to Isis
and Demeter: "It seems that there has always been a type of 'understanding'
between Greece and Egypt since prehistory."[[35]]
END of Part II