Mary Lefkowitz takes the conventional line that the idea ofspiritual rebirth in the present life was a uniquely Greekconcept and that Egyptian descriptions of the voyages of the soulas set out in the Going Forth By Day were purely what theypurported to be and had nothing to do with initiations. However, in addition to the evidence from Apuleius and Horsiesis, there isthe mysterious underground "Cenotaph of Seti the 1st" (c.1309-1291 BC) or Oseirion. This structure contains complexpassages inscribed with broken hieroglyphs and sections of the Book of the Dead, a strange underground island and a halldecorated with the text of a mysterious religious play.[[36]] It is very plausible to suggest that this was used for initiations.In addition to this, there are references going back to the 17th century BC, to men who though alive, were called "m3' hrw" or "True of Voice," the title generally applied to the immortal dead.[[37]] There is even one from a man who claimed to have taken part in a ritual described in Going Forth By Day.[[38]] Thus, the balance of evidence indicates both that theBook of the Dead was also used for initiations of the living, and that we should accept the ancient view that the Greek mysteries and the initiations associated with them, derived from Egypt. I admit that these argument are based not on certainty but on competitive plausibility. Nevertheless, it is ludicrous for Mary Lefkowitz to claim that her denial of Egyptian influence on Greek mysteries and initiations is based on "warranted facts."
The issue of whether there were "colleges" or "universities" at Memphis and other Egyptian cities, depends on definition. It is known that at least since the Old Kingdom c. 3000 BC, there was an elaborate bureaucracy of specialized scribes, doctors and magicians and that from the Middle Kingdom c. 2000 there was an institution called "pr ' nh" -- "House of Life." Egyptologists have been divided on how to see this. Some like Alan Gardiner describe it merely as "scriptorium," a place of restricted entry where some papyri were kept.[[39]] Others have concluded that it was "a kind of university." For instance, the Egyptologist P. Derchain maintained that by the first period of Persian rule 525-404 BC, these institutions contained papyri on subjects ranging from medicine, astronomy, mathematics, myths, embalming, to geography, etc. ... in a word one ought to find there the complete totality of all the philosophical and scientific knowledge of the Egyptians."[[40]] The subject is clearly moot but equally clearly, Mary Lefkowitz is wrong to claim that the ancient, 18th century and Afrocentrists' descriptions of "Egyptian Colleges" are solely based on fiction.
Did the Ancient Egyptians possess a "science", and if they did, did it have a significant impact on the Greeks? For some years now, I have argued in favor of both claims. When I presented my arguments on them to the departments of the History and Philosophy of Science at both Harvard and Cambridge, some of the audience agreed, others did not, but the claims were clearly accepted as legitimate topics of scholarly debate. There was also a polemic on the subject between me and Robert Palter, a historian of Renaissance science.[[41]] It is not for me to say who came out on top, but Victor Katz the historian of Greek mathematics wrote about the debate: "As far as mathematics goes, although Palter argues with Bernal on many specific points and seems to deny both of Bernal's claims, he does not give a clear and definitive response to them."[[42]] Here again, Mary Lefkowitz is wrong to dismiss Afrocentric claims as absurd.
This is not to say that Hellenistic science based in Greek dominated Egypt, did not add to what had been received from Egypt. The same is true of philosophy. The term "philosophy" is extraordinarily slippery but taken in the Socratic sense of "wonder, or speculation on truth and reality," there is every reason to suppose that it was present in Ancient Egypt. Indeed, it was conventional wisdom among Greeks and Romans that philosophy had derived from Egypt.[[43]] Furthermore, an Afrocentrist perspective can add to our understanding of some details of Greek philosophy. For instance, Mary Lefkowitz (p. 149) pours scorn on the proposal by G.G.M. James in his Stolen Legacy that Democritus' use of the word "atom" derived principally not from "indivisibility" but from the Egyptian god Atum.[[44]] The name of this divinity appears to have meant both "fullness" or "being" and "non-being." The Egyptologist Erik Hornung after describing the difficulties of translating such a concept concludes that:
Atum is the god who "in the beginning was everything", complete in the sense of being an undifferentiated unity and at the same time non-existent because existence is impossible before his work of creation.[[45]]
The philosopher Anthony Preus has argued that:
If we put that statement beside the notorious fragment DK 156--"MH\ MA=LLON T DE\N N)/ TO\ MHDE\N EI)=NAI"--we might come to the conclusion that Democritus is aware of the ambiguity of the Egyptian "Atom" and has imported it into Greek.[[46]]
It is strange that James should have focused on Aristotle, whose thought appears to have been distinctively Greek rather than on the Presocratics, whom the Classicist Geoffrey Kirk saw as having been significantly influenced by Egyptians and Mesopotamians.[[47]] Similarly, he could have focused on Plato who was clearly very impressed by Egypt, and for more than 2000 years his followers saw his thought as a glorious link in a chain leading back to Egypt.[[48]]
Mary Lefkowitz's conviction that there is a categorical distinction between a rational Greece and an irrational Egypt only holds if you believe that reason only began with Aristotle's formal binary logic and Euclid's axiomatic geometry, neither of which existed--as far as we know--in Ancient Egypt. However, this claim should be tempered by the works of some scholars who have thought about the issue more profoundly. The first of these is the classicist E.R. Dodds, whose brilliant The Greeks and the Irrational showed the centrality of madness and shamanism to Greek life and thought.[[49]] The second is the classicist and historian of science, Heinrich von Staden, who wrote recently:
... there has been inadequate reflection on the cultural conditions that have shaped modern historians' selections and elisions. These cultural conditions include, centrally, two mutually reinforcing collective experiences: the modern reception [perception?] of ancient Greece as the fountainhead of our culture and, second, modern western scientific culture as our lodestar. These long-lived collective constructions of fountainhead and lodestar have led to concrete, entrenched consequences in the modern history of science. Thus the Hippocratic treatise On Sacred Disease, with its criticisms of magic and with its overt questioning of etiologies that resort to the divine, is known to practically all historians of ancient science, having been translated often (and anthologized even more often), whereas there is no English translation of the Hippocratic gynecological treatises, which are replete with the "otherness" of Greek science--and which constitute a far larger part of the Hippocratic corpus.[[50]]
In Egypt too, there were areas of "rationality"—sophisticated and rigorous mathematics, superb geometry, wonderfully observed medical symptoms, precise surgery, etc.,--amidst what we should now consider to be magic and superstition. Thus, Mary Lefkowitz's categorical distinction between the two cultures on this criterion is much less hard and fast than she supposes.
Now to Mary Lefkowitz's ultimate bugbear, the Afrocentrists' claims of a "stolen legacy." As stated above, there is no doubt that the Afrocentrists have been wrong on many particulars. Furthermore, there is little chance that Greeks could have stolen ideas that Egyptians do not appear to have possessed, such as Aristotelian binary logic and Euclidian geometry. Nevertheless, in general, the Afrocentrists are tapping into a tradition of great antiquity and, at least in the areas of religion and science, of some validity.
In the 1st century AD, the Neo-Pythagorean sage Apollonios of Tyana visited India. According to his biographer Philostratos, the Indians were surprised to find Apollonios virtuous because Egyptians had told them that they, the Egyptians, had established "all the sacrifices and rites on initiation that are in vogue among the Greeks," who were ruffians.[[51]] The idea that Greeks were taking aspects of Egyptian religion also comes in a passage in the Hermetic Corpus.[[52]] Philo of Byblos writing around 100 AD claimed that Greeks had appropriated Phoenician and Egyptian ancient myths and had then imposed their versions or fictions on other peoples.[[53]] In the 2nd century AD, the Assyrian Christian, Tatian argued that the Greeks had taken their culture from "barbarians," including Phoenician letters and Egyptian geometry and historical writing.[[54]] The church father Clement of Alexandria went all the way and called the Greeks "thieves."[[55]]
Despite the obvious biases of Christian and other non-Greek writers and the openness with which Herodotos, Plato, Aristotle and others accepted the central importance of the Egyptian contribution to their culture, such arguments are not altogether implausible. We know, for instance, that "Pythagorean" triangles were used in the Near East more than a thousand years before Pythagoras.[[56]] The volumes of pyramids were measured almost equally early, long before the time of Eudoxos, who according to Archimedes was the first person to do so.[[57]] Archimedes' "balanced scales" and "screw" were in use in Egypt centuries before the Greek scientist was born. Academics might prefer the fashionable word "appropriation," but the word 'stealing' in such cases is not altogether inappropriate.
At this point, I should like to set the positions of both parties in a wider historical context. Though there have been a number deformations, the Afrocentrists have maintained what, in Black Athena, I have called "the Ancient Model" of Greek origins. Since at least the 5th century BC, Greeks and others believed that people from Egypt, Phoenicians and other Asiatics came to Greece, built cities, established royal dynasties and introduced religion and the mysteries. Later, Greeks studied in Egypt and, to a lesser extent, the Orient importing philosophy, mathematics and science.[[58]] The particular branch of the Ancient Model taken up by the Afrocentrists was that prominent at the turn of the 19th century. This was partly based on the Masonic tradition and novels but also the works of scholars such as Charles Francois Dupuis, Constantin de Volney and A.H.L. Heeren. These three maintained that the Ancient Egyptians had been Black or nearly so, and that Europeans had derived their civilizations from Africans and this argument was used by abolitionists in their attacks on race-based slavery.[[59]]
This shift of emphasis in the Ancient Model was not a drastic coupure of the type that followed in the quarter of a century after 1820, in which the modern discipline of Classics was formed. In this period, young scholars dismissed the "Ancient Model" and denied the ancient traditions of massive Greek cultural borrowings from Egypt. Their dismissal was not the result of the decipherment of hieroglyphics, as these classicists only accepted Champollion's work in the 1850s. Nor did it come from archaeological excavations of Bronze Age Greece, which were not carried out until the 1870s.
The Ancient Model was dismissed for ideological reasons. It was not seemly for Greece, now seen as the cradle of Europe, to have been the civilized by Africans and Asians, who were known according to the new "racial science" to be categorically inferior. In the 1840s, a new "Aryan Model" arose, according to which, Greek civilization had emerged from a conquest or conquests from the north by the "Aryan" or Indo-European speaking Hellenes. These had dominated the previous inhabitants of the Aegean whose name had been lost, and were therefore simply called "Pre-Hellenes." This "Aryan Model" had a scholarly basis in that, by then, the Indo-European language family had been worked out and it was realized that Greek was a charter member of the family and that therefore, there must at some early stage, have been migrations or massive cultural influences from the Indo-European homeland somewhere to the north of the Aegean. Nevertheless, the Pre-Hellenes were necessary to explain the 50% of the Greek vocabulary that could not be explained in terms of Indo-European.
There is no reason why the fact that Greek is fundamentally Indo-European should not be combined with the Ancient Model's multiple reports of Egyptian and Semitic influences. However, such cultural and linguistic mixture was intolerable to the Romantic racists who established the Aryan Model and who, like Mary Lefkowitz today, insisted that there had been no significant Egyptian influence on Greece.
This raises an amusing irony. Mary Lefkowitz reiterates Arthur
J. Schlesinger's charge that Afrocentrist history is purely an attempt
to promote group self-esteem. Whereas, history, should consist of:
"dispassionate analysis, judgment and perspective ..."[[60]] In fact,
however, this is far from the way that history is taught in schools, where
the nation or locality is always emphasized and placed above that of others.
For instance, when I was sent to France at the age of 17, my French companion
and I knew completely different sets of battles between the English and
French. We each knew our country's victories, not the defeats.
Thus, for African-American children to be taught about African and diasporic
triumphs is not unusual and is particularly useful given the constant psychological
battering they receive in a racist society.
END of Part III