Review (and author's response): History Lesson

History Lesson by Mary Lefkowitz (Yale University Press)

The Wall Street Journal (Reviewed by John Leo)

I've had to carve this review up to give a sense of its direction without stealing the entire thing. It is a fascinating piece and the response by Mary Lefkowitz won't make sense without reading John Leo're review in full.

According to various Afrocentric books and popular assertions, ancient Egypt invaded ancient Greece, Plato and Herodotus somehow picked up their ideas in travels along the Nile, and Aristotle stole his philosophy from the library at Alexandria. Though the arguments were contradictory and scattered, the point was that Western civilization had been founded on materials and discoveries borrowed or stolen from black Egyptians. . . .

The scholar who did the most to break this silence was Mary Lefkowitz, a mild-mannered classicist at Wellesley College. Without fully understanding the abuse she would invite by speaking out against Afrocentrism, she accepted an assignment in the fall of 1991 to write a long review of the second volume of Martin Bernal's "Black Athena" for the New Republic magazine. . . .

"History Lesson" is Ms. Lefkowitz's personal account of what she experienced as a result of questioning the veracity of Afrocentrism and the motives of its advocates. She has advanced the intellectual case against Afrocentrism before, in "Not Out of Africa" (1997); here she takes a more personal approach, at one point mentioning the strain of the controversy as she battled breast cancer.

History News Network (Mary Lefkowitz)

Mary Lefkowitz responded to that review as follows:

A few days ago a colleague sent me a long e-mail about John Leo’s review of my new book History Lesson. This professor had been at Wellesley during the troubled years that I describe in the book. Now in retrospect he wishes that he’d had the courage to get up and say that he really didn’t care about whether or not Greek philosophy had been subject to significant Egyptian influence. What does such a question matter, in comparison to the terrible problems of our own times? In short, he surely had something better to do with his time (and mine) than worrying about the origins of Greek philosophy. Whoever invented it, it would still be great philosophy. And Socrates would be one of its founding fathers even if his ancestors had been immigrants from ancient Memphis rather than natives of Attica.

I hear what he is saying. What’s so terrible about supposing that Egyptian ideas could have played an important role in the formation of what we now call Western thought? Nothing whatever, except that they didn’t, at least so far as we now know. I don’t say that because I have anything against ancient Egypt, or because I’m not open to new ideas, or because I always seek to defend ancient Greece. It’s just that there isn’t any textual evidence to support the idea that Greek philosophy originated in the valley of the Nile. One could argue on the grounds of possibility that Egyptian philosophical texts might have existed that could have served as inspiration for the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle. But if so, it’s hard to understand how they managed to disappear without a trace, when the Egyptians had a system of writing and so many of their other writings still survive, on a variety of topics, religious, historical, and medical.

If you have any comments about Egyptian ethnicity there are other places where discussions are in full flow. A previous post on this blog resulted in a spirited set of responses. If you want to join that conversation, please keep it civil! I have had to filter out a few posts, which were unacceptable due to the way in which they were phrased. Unfortunately, you will find that most of the people who posted are "Anonymous". You will also find a much more long-standing and extensive conversation on the subject of Why Cleopatra was definately not black on the Topix website. I have only had the quickest look at this, and there iappears to be a fairly standard mixture of interesting /thoughtful and thoroughly silly posts - so visit at your own risk :-)