Black Athena

[Ptolemy]

Was Greek Culture Stolen from Africa?
Modern myth vs. ancient history

Excerpted from her Book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History
Why I wrote the book. In the fall of 1991 I was asked to write a review-article for The New Republic about Martin Bernal's Black Athena and its relation to the Afrocentrist movement. The assignment literally changed my life. Once I began to work on the article I realized that here was a subject that needed all the attention, and more, that I could give to it. Although I had been completely unaware of it, there was in existence a whole literature that denied that the ancient Greeks were the inventors of democracy, philosophy, and science. There were books in circulation that claimed that Socrates and Cleopatra were of African descent, and that Greek philosophy had actually been stolen from Egypt. Not only were these books being read and widely distributed; some of these ideas were being taught in schools and even in universities.

Ordinarily, if someone has a theory which involves a radical departure from what the experts have professed, he is expected to defend his position by providing evidence in its support. But no one seemed to think it was appropriate to ask for evidence from the instructors who claimed that the Greeks stole their philosophy from Egypt.

Normally, if one has a question about a text that another instructor is using, one simply asks why he or she is using that book. But since this conventional line of inquiry was closed to me, I had to wait till I could raise my questions in a more public context. That opportunity came in February 1993, when Dr. Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan was invited to give Wellesley's Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial lecture. Posters described Dr. ben-Jochannan as a "distinguished Egyptologist," and indeed that is how he was introduced by the then President of Wellesley College. But I knew from my research in Afrocentric literature that he was not what scholars would ordinarily describe as an Egyptologist, that is a scholar of Egyptian language and civilization. Rather, he was an extreme Afrocentrist, author of many books describing how Greek civilization was stolen from Africa, how Aristotle robbed the library of Alexandria, and how the true Jews are Africans like himself.

After Dr. ben-Jochannan made these same assertions once again in his lecture, I asked him during the question period why he said that Aristotle had come to Egypt with Alexander, and had stolen his philosophy from the Library at Alexandria, when that Library had only been built after his death. Dr. ben-Jochannan was unable to answer the question, and said that he resented the tone of the inquiry. Several students came up to me after the lecture and accused me of racism, suggesting that I had been brainwashed by white historians. But others stayed to hear me out, and I assured Dr. ben-Jochannan that I simply wanted to know what his evidence was: so far as I knew, and I had studied the subject, Aristotle never went to Egypt, and while the date of the Library of Alexandria is not known precisely, it was certainly only built some years after the city was founded, which was after both Aristotle's and Alexander's deaths.

A lecture at which serious questions could not be asked, and in fact were greeted with hostility -- the occasion seemed more like a political rally than an academic event. As if that were not disturbing enough in itself, there was also the strange silence on the part of many of my faculty colleagues. Several of these were well aware that what Dr. ben-Jochannan was saying was factually wrong. One of them said later that she found the lecture so "hopeless" that she decided to say nothing. Were they afraid of being called racists? If so, their behavior was understandable, but not entirely responsible. Didn't we as educators owe it to our students, all our students, to see that they got the best education they could possibly get? And that clearly was what they were not getting in a lecture where they were being told myths disguised as history, and where discussion and analysis had apparently been forbidden.

Good as the myths they were hearing may have made these students feel, so long as they never left the Afrocentric environment in which they were being nurtured and sheltered, they were being systematically deprived of the most important features of a university education. They were not learning how to question themselves and others, they were not learning to distinguish facts from fiction, nor in fact were they learning how to think for themselves. Their instructors had forgotten, while the rest of us sat by and did nothing about it, that students do not come to universities to be indoctrinated --at least in a free society.

Was Socrates Black?

I first learned about the notion that Socrates was black several years ago, from a student in my second-year Greek course on Plato's Apology, his account of Socrates' trial and conviction. Throughout the entire semester the student had regarded me with sullen hostility. A year or so later she apologized. She explained that she thought I had been concealing the truth about Socrates' origins. In a course in Afro-American studies she had been told that he was black, and my silence about his African ancestry seemed to her to be a confirmation of the Eurocentric arrogance her instructor had warned her about. After she had taken my course, the student pursued the question on her own, and was satisfied that I had been telling her the truth: so far as we know, Socrates was ethnically no different from other Athenians.

What had this student learned in her course in Afro-American studies? The notion that Socrates was black is based on two different kinds of inference. The first "line of proof" is based on inference from possibility. Why couldn't an Athenian have African ancestors? That of course would have been possible; almost anything is possible. But it is another question whether or not it was probable. Few prominent Athenians claim to have had foreign ancestors of any sort. Athenians were particularly fastidious about their own origins. In Socrates' day, they did not allow Greeks from other city-states to become naturalized Athenian citizens, and they were even more careful about the non-Greeks or barbaroi. Since Socrates was an Athenian citizen, his parents must have been Athenians, as he himself says they were.

Another reason why I thought it unlikely that Socrates and/or his immediate ancestors were foreigners is that no contemporary calls attention to anything extraordinary in his background. If he had been a foreigner, one of his enemies, or one of the comic poets, would have been sure to point it out. The comic poets never missed an opportunity to make fun of the origins of Athenian celebrities. Socrates was no exception; he is lampooned by Aristophanes in his comedy the Clouds. If Socrates and/or his parents had had dark skin, some of his contemporaries would have been likely to mention it, because this, and not just his eccentric ideas about the gods, and the voice that spoke to him alone, would have distinguished him from the rest of the Athenians. Unless, of course, he could not be distinguished from other Athenians because they all had dark skin; but then if they did, why did they not make themselves bear a closer resemblance the Ethiopians in their art?

[Ptolemy]

Was Cleopatra Black?

Until recently, no one ever asked whether Cleopatra might have had an African ancestor, because our surviving ancient sources identify her as a Macedonian Greek. Her ancestors, the Ptolemies, were descended from one of Alexander's generals. After Alexander's death in 323 B. C., these generals divided up among themselves the territory in the Mediterranean that Alexander had conquered. The name Cleopatra was one of the names traditionally given to women in the royal family; officially our Cleopatra (69-30 BC) was Cleopatra VII, the daughter of Ptolemy XII and his sister. Cleopatra VII herself followed the family practice of marrying within the family. She married her two brothers (Ptolemy XIII and XIV) in succession (after the first died in suspicious circumstances, she had the second murdered). Her first language was Greek; but she was also the first member of the Ptolemaic line who was able to speak Egyptian. She also wore Egyptian dress, and was shown in art in the dress of the goddess Isis. She chose to portray herself as an Egyptian not because she was Egyptian, but because she was ambitious to stay in power. In her surviving portraits on coins and in sculpture she appears to be impressive rather than beautiful, Mediterranean in appearance, with straight hair and a hooked nose. Of course these portraits on metal and stone give no indication of the color of her skin.

The only possibility that she might not have been a full-blooded Macedonian Greek arises from the fact that we do not know the precise identity of one member of her family tree. We do not know who her grandmother was on her father's side. Her grandmother was the mistress (not the wife) of her grandfather, Ptolemy IX. Because nothing is known about this person, the assumption has always been that she was a Macedonian Greek, like the other members of Ptolemy's court. Like other Greeks, the Ptolemies were wary of foreigners. They kept themselves apart from the native population, with brothers usually marrying sisters, or uncles marrying nieces, or in one case a father marrying his daughter (Ptolemy IX and Cleopatra Berenice III). Because the Ptolemies seemed to prefer to marry among themselves, even incestuously, it has always been assumed that Cleopatra's grandmother was closely connected with the family. If she had been a foreigner, one of the Roman writers of the time would have mentioned it in their invectives against Cleopatra as an enemy of the Roman state. These writers were supporters of Octavian (later known as Augustus) who defeated Cleopatra's forces in the battle of Actium in 31 B.C.

Does Racial Identity Matter?

The question of race matters only insofar as it is necessary to show that no classicists or ancient historians have tried to conceal the truth about the origins of the Greek people or the ancestry of certain famous ancient figures. It has been suggested that classicists have been reluctant to ask questions about Greek origins, and that we have been so "imbued with conventional preconceptions and patterns of thought" that we are unlikely to question the basic premises of our discipline. But even though we may be more reluctant to speculate about our own field than those outside it might be, none of us has any cultural "territory" in the ancient world that we are trying to insulate from other ancient cultures.

Did ancient Greek religion and culture derive from Egypt?

The idea that Greek religion and philosophy has Egyptian origins derives, at least in part, from the writings of ancient Greek historians. In the fifth century BC Herodotus was told by Egyptian priests that the Greeks owed many aspects of their culture to the older and vastly impressive civilization of the Egyptians. Egyptian priests told Diodorus some of the same stories four centuries later. The church fathers in the second and third centuries AD also were eager to emphasize the dependency of Greece on the earlier cultures of the Egyptians and the Hebrews. They were eager to establish direct links between their civilization and that of Egypt because Egypt was a vastly older culture, with elaborate religious customs and impressive monuments. But despite their enthusiasm for Egypt and its material culture (an enthusiasm that was later revived in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe), they failed to understand Egyptian religion and the purpose of many Egyptian customs.

Classical scholars tend to be skeptical about the claims of the Greek historians because much of what these writers say does not conform to the facts as they are now known from the modern scholarship on ancient Egypt. For centuries Europeans had believed that the ancient historians knew that certain Greek religious customs and philosophical interests derived from Egypt. But two major discoveries changed that view. The first concerned a group of ancient philosophical treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus; these had throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance been thought of as Egyptian and early. But in 1614 the French scholar Isaac Casaubon demonstrated that the treatises were actually late and basically Greek. The second discovery was the decipherment of hieroglyphics, the official system of Egyptian writing, completed by 1836. Before decipherment, scholars had been compelled to rely on Greek sources for their understanding of Egyptian history and civilization. Once they were able to read real Egyptian texts, and could disregard the fanciful interpretations of hieroglyphics that had been circulating since late antiquity, it became clear to them that the relation of Egyptian to Greek culture was less close than they had imagined. Egyptian belonged to the Afroasiatic language family, while Greek was an Indo-European language, akin to Sanskrit and European languages like Latin.

On the basis of these new discoveries, European scholars realized that they could no longer take at face value what Herodotus, Diodorus, and the Church fathers had to say about Greece's debt to Egypt. Once it was possible to read Egyptian religious documents, and to see how the Egyptians themselves described their gods and told their myths, scholars could see that the ancient Greeks' accounts of Egyptian religion were superficial, and even misleading. Apparently Greek writers, despite their great admiration for Egypt, looked at Egyptian civilization through cultural blinkers that kept them from understanding any practices or customs that were significantly different from their own. The result was a portrait of Egypt that was both astigmatic and deeply Hellenized. Greek writers operated under other handicaps as well. They did not have access to records; there was no defined system of chronology. They could not read Egyptian inscriptions or question a variety of witnesses because they did not know the language. Hence they were compelled to exaggerate the importance of such resemblances as they could see or find.

On the Origins of the Egyptians Recent work on skeletons and DNA suggests that the people who settled in the Nile valley, like all of humankind, came from somewhere south of the Sahara; they were not (as some nineteenth-century scholars had supposed) invaders from the North. See Bruce G. Trigger, "The Rise of Civilization in Egypt," Cambridge History of Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol I, pp 489-90; S. O. Y. Keita, "Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships," History in Africa 20 (1993) 129-54.

[Ptolemy]

Did the theory of the transmigration of souls come from Egypt?

Because he tended to rely on such analogies as he could find, Herodotus inevitably made some false conjectures. Herodotus thought that Pythagoras learned about the transmigration of souls from Egypt, when in fact the Egyptians did not believe in the transmigration of souls, as their careful and elaborate burial procedures clearly indicate. Herodotus tells us that he wrote down what the Egyptians told him; but when they spoke, what did he hear? Since he did not know Egyptian, his informants could have been Greeks living in the Greek colony of Naucratis in the Nile Delta, or Egyptians who knew some Greek. How well-informed were his informants? On the question of origins, at least, it seems that neither group had any more than a superficial understanding of the other's culture. Perhaps someone explained to him about the Egyptian "modes of existence," in which a human being could manifest itself both materially, or immaterially, as ka or ba or a name, and that death was not an end, but a threshold leading to a new form of life. Belief in these varied modes of existence required that bodies be preserved after death, hence the Egyptian practice of mummification. Greeks, on the other hand, believed that the soul was separated from the body at death, and disposed of bodies either by burial or cremation. In any case, there is no reason to assume that Pythagoras or other Greeks who believed in transmigration, like the Orphics and/or the philosopher-poet Empedocles, got their ideas from anyone else: notions of transmigration have developed independently in other parts of the world.

Did Plato Study in Egypt?

Plato never says in any of his writings that he went to Egypt, and there is no reference to such a visit in the semi-biographical Seventh Epistle. But in his dialogues he refers to some Egyptian myths and customs. Plato, of course, was not a historian, and the rather superficial knowledge of Egypt displayed in his dialogues, along with vague chronology, is more characteristic of historical fiction than of history. In fact, anecdotes about his visit to Egypt only turn up in writers of the later Hellenistic period. What better way to explain his several references to Egypt than to assume that the author had some first-hand knowledge of the customs he describes? For authors dating from the fourth century and earlier, ancient biographers were compelled to use as their principal source material the author's own works. Later biographers add details to the story of Plato's Egyptian travels in order to provide aetiologies for the "Egyptian" reference in his writings. The most ironic anecdote of all is preserved by Clement of Alexandria: Plato studied in Egypt with Hermes the "Thrice Great" (Trismegistus). This is tantamount to saying that Plato studied with himself after his death. The works of Hermes could not have been written without the conceptual vocabulary developed by Plato and Aristotle, and is deeply influenced not just by Plato, but by the writings of Neoplatonist philosophers in the early centuries AD. In any case, whoever these teachers were, Plato seems never to have learned from them anything that is characteristically Egyptian, at least so far as we know about Egyptian theology from Egyptian sources. Instead, Plato's notion of the Egyptians remains similar to that of other Athenians; he did not so much change the Athenian notion of Egyptian culture as enrich and idealize it, so that it could provide a dramatic and instructive contrast with Athenian customs in his dialogues.

Was there ever such a thing as an "Egyptian Mystery System?"

Even after nineteenth-century scholars had shown that the reports of Greek visitors to Egypt misunderstood and misrepresented what they saw, the myth that Greek philosophy derived from Egypt is still in circulation. The notion of an Egyptian legacy was preserved in the literature and ritual of Freemasonry. It was from that source that Afrocentrists learned about it, and then sought to find confirmation for the primacy of Egypt over Greece in the fantasies of ancient writers. In order to show that Greek philosophy is in reality stolen Egyptian philosophy, Afrocentrist writers assume that there was in existence from earliest times an "Egyptian Mystery System," which was copied by the Greeks. The existence of this "Mystery System" is integral to the notion that Greek philosophy was stolen, because it provides a reason for assuming that Greek philosophers had a particular reason for studying in Egypt, and for claiming that what they later wrote about in Greek was originally Egyptian philosophy. But in reality, the notion of an Egyptian Mystery System is a relatively modern fiction, based on ancient sources that are distinctively Greek, or Greco-Roman, and from the early centuries AD.

In their original form, ancient mysteries had nothing to do with schools or particular courses of study; rather, the ritual was intended to put the initiate into contact with the divinity, and if special preparation or rituals were involved, it was to familiarize the initiate with the practices and liturgy of that particular cult. The origin of the connection of Mysteries to education in fact dates only to the eighteenth century. It derives from a particular work of European fiction, published in 1731. This was the three-volume work Sethos, a History or Biography, based on Unpublished Memoirs of Ancient Egypt, by the Abbé Jean Terrasson (1670-1750), a French priest, who was Professor of Greek at the Collège de France. Although now completely forgotten, the novel was widely read in the eighteenth century..Of course Terrasson did not have access to any Egyptian information about Egypt, since hieroglyphics were not to be deciphered until more than a century later.

Why claim that Greek philosophy was stolen from Egypt?

Perhaps the most influential Afrocentrist text is Stolen Legacy, a work that has been in wide circulation since its publication in 1954. Its author, George G. M. James, writes that "the term Greek philosophy, to begin with is a misnomer, for there is no such philosophy in existence." He argues that the Greeks "did not possess the native ability essential to the development of philosophy." Rather, he states that "the Greeks were not the authors of Greek philosophy, but the Black people of North Africa, The Egyptians." It is not hard to understand why James wishes to give credit for the Greek achievement to the Egyptians, even if there is little or no historical foundation for his claims. Like the other nationalistic myths, the story of a "Stolen Legacy" both offers an explanation for past suffering, and provides a source of ethnic pride.

But although the myth may encourage and perhaps even "empower" African-Americans, its use has a destructive side, which cannot and should not be overlooked. First of all, it offers them a "story" instead of history. It also suggests that African-Americans need to learn only what they choose to believe about the past. But in so doing, the Afrocentric myth seeks to shelter them from learning what all other ethnic groups must learn, and indeed, face up to, namely the full scope of their history.

What people on earth have had a completely glorious history? While we point to the great achievements of the Greeks, anyone who has studied ancient Greek civilization knows that they also made terrible and foolish mistakes. Isn't treating African-Americans differently from the rest of humankind just another form of segregation and condescension? Implied discrimination is the most destructive aspect of Afrocentrism, but there are other serious problems as well. Teaching the myth of the Stolen Legacy as if it were history robs the ancient Greeks and their modern descendants of a heritage that rightly belongs to them. Why discriminate against them when discrimination is the issue? In addition, the myth deprives the ancient Egyptians of their proper history and robs them of their actual legacy. The Egypt of the myth of the Stolen Legacy is a wholly European Egypt, as imagined by Greek and Roman writers, and further elaborated in eighteenth-century France. Ancient Egyptian civilization deserves to be remembered (and respected) for what it was, and not for what Europeans, ancient and modern, have imagined it to be.

[Ptolemy]

What is the evidence for a "Stolen Legacy?"

James's idea of ancient Egypt is fundamentally the imaginary "Mystical Egypt" of Freemasonry. He speaks of grades of initiation. In these Mysteries, as the Freemasons imagined them, Neophyte initiates must learn self-control and self-knowledge. He believes that Moses was an initiate into the Egyptian mysteries, and that Socrates reached the grade of Master Mason. In his description of the Greek philosophy, he emphasizes the Four Elements that play such a key role in Terrasson's Memphis and Masonic initiation ceremonies. He speaks of the Masonic symbol of the Open Eye, which based on an Egyptian hieroglyph but in Masonry has come specifically to represent the Master Mind. As in the University/Mystery system invented by Terrasson, Egyptian temples are used as libraries and observatories.

What then are the Greeks supposed to have stolen from the Egyptians? Are there any texts in existence that be found to verify the claim that Greek philosophy was stolen from Egypt? How was the "transfer" of Egyptian materials to Greece accomplished? If we examine what James says about the way in which the "transfer" was supposed to have been carried out, we will find that that few or no historical data can be summoned to support it. In fact, in order to construct his argument, James overlooked or ignored much existing evidence.

Did Aristotle raid the Library at Alexandria?

No ancient source says that Alexander and Aristotle raided the Library at Alexandria. That they do not do so is not surprising, because it is unlikely that Aristotle ever went there. Aristotle was Alexander's tutor when Alexander was young, but he did not accompany him on his military campaign. Even if he had gone there, it is hard to see how he could have stolen books from the library in Alexandria. Although Alexandria was founded in 331 BC, it did not begin to function as a city until after 323. Aristotle died in 322. The library was assembled around 297 under the direction of Demetrius of Phaleron, a pupil of Aristotle's. Most of the books it contained were in Greek.

Did Aristotle plagiarize Egyptian sources?

If Aristotle had stolen his ideas from the Egyptians, as James asserts, James should be able to provide parallel Egyptian and Greek texts showing frequent verbal correspondences. As it is, he can only come up with a vague similarity between two titles. One is Aristotle's treatise On the Soul, and the other the modern English name of a collection of Egyptian texts, The Book of the Dead. These funerary texts, which the Egyptians themselves called the Book of Coming Forth by Day, are designed to protect the soul during its dangerous journey through Duat, the Egyptian underworld, on its way to life of bliss in the Field of Reeds. Both Aristotle and the Egyptians believed in the notion of a "soul." But there the similarity ends. Even a cursory glance at a translation of the Book of the Dead reveals that it is not a philosophical treatise, but rather a series of ritual prescriptions to ensure the soul's passage to the next world. It is completely different from Aristotle's abstract consideration of the nature of the soul. James fails to mention that the two texts cannot be profitably compared, because their aims and methods are so different. Instead, he accounts for the discrepancy by claiming that Aristotle's theory is only a "very small portion" of the Egyptian "philosophy" of the soul, as described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. On that basis, one could claim that any later writer plagiarized from any earlier writer who touched on the same subject. But why not assume instead that the later writer was influenced by the earlier writer, or even came up with the some of the same ideas independently, especially if those ideas are widespread, like the notion that human beings have souls?

James also alleges that Aristotle's theory of matter was taken from the so-called Memphite Theology. The Memphite Theology is a religious document inscribed on a stone tablet by Egyptian priests in the eighth century BC, but said to have been copied from an ancient papyrus. The archaic language of the text suggests that the original dates from sometime in the second millennium BC. According to James, Aristotle took from the Memphite theology his doctrine that matter, motion, and time are eternal, along with the principle of opposites, and the concept of the unmoved mover. James does not say how Aristotle would have known about this inscription, which was at the time located in Memphis and not in the Library of Alexandria, or explain how he would have been able to read it. But even if Aristotle had had some way of finding out about it, he would have had no use for it in his philosophical writings. The Memphis text, like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is a work of a totally different character from any of Aristotle's treatises.

The Memphite text describes the creation of the world as then known (that is, Upper and Lower Egypt). It relates how Ptah's mind (or "heart") and thought (or "tongue") created the universe and all living creatures in it: "for every word of the god came about through what the heart devised and the tongue commanded." From one of his manifestations, the primordial waters of chaos, the sun-god Atum was born. When Ptah has finished creating the universe, he rests from his labors: "Ptah was satisfied after he had made all things and all divine words."

In form and in substance this account has virtually nothing in common with Aristotle's abstract theology. In fact, in Metaphysics Book 11, Aristotle discards the traditional notion of a universe that is created by a divinity or divinities, in favor of a metaphysical argument. If there is eternal motion, there is eternal substance, and behind that, an immaterial and eternal source of activity, whose existence can be deduced from the eternal circular motion of the heavens. The source of this activity is what is called in English translation the "unmoved mover."All that this theory has in common with the Memphite theology is a concern with creation of the universe. On the same insubstantial basis, it would be possible to argue that Aristotle stole his philosophy from the story of creation in the first book of Genesis.

Is there a diversity of truths?

There are of course many possible interpretations of the truth, but some things are simply not true. It is not true that there was no Holocaust. There was a Holocaust, although we may disagree about the numbers of people killed. Likewise, it is not true that the Greeks stole their philosophy from Egypt; rather, it is true that the Greeks were influenced in various ways over a long period of time by their contact with the Egyptians. But then, what culture at any time has not been influenced by other cultures, and what exactly do we mean by "influence"? If we talk about Greek philosophy as a "Stolen Legacy," which the Greeks swiped from Egyptian universities, we are not telling the truth, but relating a story, or a myth, or a tall tale. But if we talk about Egyptian influence on Greece, we are discussing an historical issue.

In historical and scientific discussions it is possible to distinguish degrees, and to be more or less accurate. As a classicist, I may overemphasize the achievement of the Greeks because I do not know enough about the rest of the Mediterranean world; Egyptologists may be inclined to make the same mistake in the opposite direction. We recognize that no historian can write without some amount of bias; that is why history must always be rewritten. But not all bias amounts to distortion, or is equivalent to indoctrination. If I am aware that I am likely to be biased for any number of reasons, and try to compensate for them, the result should be very different in quality and character from what I would say if I were consciously setting about to achieve a particular political goal.

Drawing a clear distinction between motivations and evidence has a direct bearing on the question of academic freedom. When it comes to deciding what one can or cannot say in class the question of ethnicity or of motivations, whether personal or cultural, is or ought to be irrelevant. What matters is whether what one says is supported by facts and evidence, texts or formulae. The purpose of diversity, at least in academe, is to ensure that instruction does not become a vehicle for indoctrinating students in the values of the majority culture, or for limiting the curriculum to the study of the history and literature of the majority culture. That means that it is essential for a university to consider developments outside of Europe and North America, and to assess the achievements of non-European cultures with respect and sympathy.

It is another question whether or not diversity should be applied to the truth. Are there, can there be, multiple, diverse "truths?" If there are, which "truth" should win? The one that is most loudly argued or most persuasively phrased? Diverse "truths are possible only if "truth" is understood to mean something like "point of view." But even then not every point of view, no matter how persuasively it is put across, or with what intensity it is argued, can be equally valid. The notion of diversity does not extend to truth.

Students of the modern world may think it is a matter of indifference whether or not Aristotle stole his philosophy from Egypt. They may believe that even if the story is not true, it can be used to serve a positive purpose. But the question, and many others like it, should be a matter of serious concern to everyone, because if you assert that he did steal his philosophy, you are prepared to ignore or to conceal a substantial body of historical evidence that proves the contrary. Once you start doing that, you can have no scientific or even social-scientific discourse, nor can you have a community, or a university.

http://www.wellesley.edu/CS/Mary/contents.html

[akritas]

Excellent thread perseas. The work of Mrs Lefkowitz give strong and very comprehansive answers in the propaganda of the FYROM side and specially from Risto Stefov. Mr Risto Stefov has as a source in his many pathetic articles the professor Bernal work a very un-hellenic writer as about the ancient Greek History.

Lefkowitz has write two books

Not Out of Africa by Mary Lefkowitz- The book that has sparked widespread debate over the teaching of revisionist history in schools and colleges. Was Socrates black? Did Aristotle steal his ideas from the library in Alexandria? Do we owe the underlying tenets of our democratic civilization to the Africans? Mary Lefkowitz explains why politically motivated histories of the ancient world are being written and shows how Afrocentrist claims blatantly contradict the historical evidence. Not Out of Africa is an important book that protects and argues for the necessity of historical truths and standards in cultural education.

http://www.wellesley.edu/CS/Mary/povgfx/athena.jpg Black Athena Revisited by Mary R. Lefkowitz - In this collection of twenty essays, leading scholars in a broad range of disciplines confront the claims made by Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. In that work, Bernal proposed a radical reinterpretation of the roots of classical civilization, contending that ancient Greek culture derived from Egypt and Phoenicia and that European scholars have been biased against the notion of Egyptian and Phoenician influence on Western civilization. The contributors to this volume argue that Bernal's claims are exaggerated and in many cases unjustified. Topics covered include race and physical anthropology; the question of an Egyptian invasion of Greece; the origins of Greek language, philosophy, and science; and racism and anti-Semitism in classical scholarship. In the conclusion to the volume, the editors propose an entirely new scholarly framework for understanding the relationship between the cultures of the ancient Near East and Greece and the origins of Western civilization.

[Spartan]

Great post Perseas, I actually read that piece of cr*p and threw it across the room before I even read the first chapter. Of course I forced myself to finish it just so I could understand our enemies better. I thoroughly enjoyed Mary Lefkowitz book "Not Out of Africa" I loved everyone of her refutals.

It is amazing how trash like that can actually be taught at U.S universities. I know they tried to teach it at the University I went to and my Classics professors stopped it. It is also amazing how they can base so much of it on Free Mason secret ritual that were based on Egyptian ideas(Ideas is the key word since at the time Heiroglyphics were not even deciphered so all the rituals were bases on the IDEAS of a few priveledged white men.) Black people basing some of their evidence on white racist rituals.(the Free Mason until recently refused any admittance of Blacks into the society. I know this because my dads entire male ancestry has been members of the Masons, but my dad refused to join because of their policies against blacks.)

Anyways, Great post because more people need to know about the Greek peoples other enemy.

What the afro-centrists and FYROMs have in common is REVISIONISM and distorting of historical, linguistical, archaeological proofs and sources to obtain an IDENTITY FOR THEMSELVES! Why can't people just be proud of who they are and who their ancestors were? I always believe in giving credit where credit is due, but this is a time where there is no credit due to any of these people especially when it is Greek credit.

[Ellinas]

This -witz ending can tell many.

[Spartan]

Ellinas,

Mary Lefko-witz is opposed to the Black Athena idea. She is adamately against the Black revisionist and is a staunch believer in the Classics.

[akritas]

Ellinas if you live in Greece, there is a book that written from her and published in Greek fro Kaktos publishing. It's good to bye it and read it.
In Athens, Panepistimiou 46.:)

[pankration]

These are excellent postings. I have researched the subject of population makeup in ancient Greece and there is no question that Greece was influenced by other cultures. Greece was the center of knowledge, art and philosophy for hundreds of years. It attracted scholars from many lands who came to study and observe. Greece was a trade portal to the far east and had a plethora of different languages and ethnicities present in their agoras and trading fairs. Throw in the fact that most Greek states kept slaves (from both enemy city-states and foreign countries) and you have what is in effect a multi-cultural society. But unlike countries like the US and Canada, the Greeks maintained their identity even in the face of new cultures. Their Hellenism was so strong that Alexander was able to spread it across the known world and its basic societal ethos still dominates Western society today. Using obscure bits of language, isolated DNA samples, racial profiling and wishful revisionism does not change what Hellas was or is: a way of seeing the world that remains unparalleled.
Finally, on the issue of Afro-centrism. It is true that many of the great civilizations of Africa are ignored by historians and that should be corrected. However, a miniscule number (if any at all) of central and south African societies had any form of written language. This makes it implausible that they would have had any influence on Hellenic society especially considering that the Hellenes had been around for thousands of years before Alexander. Claiming the Egyptians were black (and watch for the same to be said of the Carthaginians) may have some genetic support but culturally speaking, these civilizations were far more European than they were African. I am afraid that the upper classes of these civilizations were far more white than black. In fact, black Africans were used and abused by both the Egyptians and the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians were descended from Phoenician exiles (from Tyre in the Middle East) so to call them native to North Africa would be wrong but that's a subject for another forum.

[akritas]

FUROM Diaspora propaganda (Stefou) recently touches the Bernal Theories and the supposing connection of the ancient Hellenic Heritage and the African. When Bernal said African mean Egyptian. But when Stefou mean African mean African by skin colour. To the extent that Stefou (and his students) has contributed to the provision of an apparently respectable underpinning for Afrocentric fantasies, he must be held culpable, even if his intentions are honorable and his motives are sincere. But not even he has dealt with the racial issue squarely .

more in :
http://www.macedoniaontheweb.com/articles/?p=28

also some intrestings informations regarding in the afrocentrism in
http://www.macedoniaontheweb.com/forum/showthread.php?t=148

[Truth Bearer]

The Bernal theory is utter hog wash the man was dellusional Akritas.Stefanopoulos is really a joke and his clinging to straws mate.

[akritas]

TB
long time to seeing you :)
The problem is that there is innocent people that read Stefou articles and consider him as "scholar"
E.g.

According to Bernal, the ancient Greek culture, as we know it today, did not develop on its own but rather was influenced from the outside(6).
Bernal also claims, with overwhelming evidence, that the indigenous people living in present day Peloponnesus were culturally and linguistically influenced, mostly by the more civilized Egyptians and Phoenicians. It was this cultural influence that transformed the indigenous people into what we today call the "ancient Greeks". In other words the so-called ancient Greeks have culturally evolved, among others, from the Pelasgians.
http://www.maknews.com/html/articles/stefov/stefov83.html
.

Stefou via copy-paste Bernal quotes has forcefully reminded us of what may have been the principal reason that contact with Egypt was essential for the Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples, including, in the second half of the first millennium, the Romans: Egypt provided an abundant source of grain. In this way, and with the data that he has assembled, he may have sharpened the quality of the debate about the origins of Greek culture.
When Marcus Garvey (Bernal source) first spoke about the Greeks' stealing from the Africans, he was not creating a new historiography, he was creating a new mythology as Edith Hall mentioned. Martin Bernal, in successive volumes of Black Athena, has constructed such a fantasy about Hellas and classical scholarship.
And Stefou follow this afro-ecentrism game. Many times I challenged him for a debate, but as usuall avoid by troll and accussed me as agent.

[HellenicPride]

TB
long time to seeing you :)
The problem is that there is innocent people that read Stefou articles and consider him as "scholar"
E.g.
.

Stefou via copy-paste Bernal quotes has forcefully reminded us of what may have been the principal reason that contact with Egypt was essential for the Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples, including, in the second half of the first millennium, the Romans: Egypt provided an abundant source of grain. In this way, and with the data that he has assembled, he may have sharpened the quality of the debate about the origins of Greek culture.
When Marcus Garvey (Bernal source) first spoke about the Greeks' stealing from the Africans, he was not creating a new historiography, he was creating a new mythology as Edith Hall mentioned. Martin Bernal, in successive volumes of Black Athena, has constructed such a fantasy about Hellas and classical scholarship.
And Stefou follow this afro-ecentrism game. Many times I challenged him for a debate, but as usuall avoid by troll and accussed me as agent.


That guy is a troll. Ive read about him an whats his name that guy marcus gravey. The black athena is nothing but a story and thats it. I dont believe any one takes them seriously. None of them have any credentials. The only people who take them seriously are afrocentrists like you mentioned above and pseudo commie morons and liberals.
What pisses me off the most about that situation is that Greece never has any peace. We get attacked from north to south east to west its unbelievable if you ask me. Their is not enough going on to counter attack those accusations that they make about our history.

[akritas]

The 2 Volume Book Black Athena as Professor Lefkowich (and not only) said :In sum, Bernal's presentation of European classical historiography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as pervaded by racism and anti-Semitism that prevented scholars from accurately assessing the Afro-Asiatic roots of classical civilization, is oversimplified and unconvincing.

and Stefou follow this racist presentation :mad:

[HellenicPride]

The 2 Volume Book Black Athena as Professor Lefkowich (and not only) said :In sum, Bernal's presentation of European classical historiography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as pervaded by racism and anti-Semitism that prevented scholars from accurately assessing the Afro-Asiatic roots of classical civilization, is oversimplified and unconvincing.

and Stefou follow this racist presentation :mad:


Aftos xreiazetai vromoxilo ta exei xasei telika.

[akritas]

Nationalistics in the late modern world have more than enough grounds for paranoia. And live with that. Any vromoxylo is not worthing for a troll guy as you said. But you cannot ignore him...just watch him, observ and strike him in the right moment. Not directly, because as usually is "invisible" but his funs or readers of his supposing literature.:shit:

[preston]

People…please relax and do not get too Academic. It’s very simple. The African Americans of the Martin Louther King era had to make the most of worlds history to inspire their followers. The Greeks had shown to the wolrd “How the Slaves become Free men” (if you remember the famous quote by our Politician…Tsaldaris?) …Now can you thing of a better way to find a link of slave’s fighting for freedom then “Blacks of USA and Modern Greeks?”?? It’s all in the marketing!!

[akritas]

As we already mention as also and many of you debate with FYROMians bring as argyment the Martin Bernal Theory in ancient Greek Historiography.But who was Proffesor Bernal. The answer from
Guy MacLean Rogers and the book Black Athena Revised:

Why has the "true" identity of the founders of classical and Western civilization been reasserted at the present time? Bernal himself has provided the explicit answer to this question.

Trained in Chinese studies, and a teacher and researcher of intellectual relations between China and the West at the turn of the twentieth century, according to his own public revelations, Bernal became concerned after 1962with the war in Indochina. He studied Vietnam both to contribute to the movement against American military involvement there and for its own sake ( BA 1:xii). In 1975 he rediscovered his own Jewish roots:
In 1975 came to a mid-life crisis. The personal reasons for this are not particularly interesting. Politically, however, it was related to the end of the American intervention in Indo-China and the awareness that the Maoist era in China was coming to an end. It now seemed to me that the central focus of danger and interest in the world was no longer East Asia but the Eastern Mediterranean. This shift led me to a concern for Jewish history. ( BA 1:xii-xiii)

He also tells us that it was specifically the exploration of his Jewish roots that led him to look at Jewish history in relation to Canaanite and Phoenician history. His subsequent "discovery" of a large number of loan words from Canaanite/Phoenician into Greek led him, in turn, to the stories of the Phoenician colonization of Greece. The search for the quarter to the third proportion of Greek vocabulary which could not be attributed to Indo-European or Phoenician/Canaarn'te sources brought him to late ancient Egyptian.) and the stories of the Egyptian colonization of Greece (1:xiv-xv).

Thus a specific social and personal context gave birth to the new founda- tion myth of the West: it was conceived in Bernal's mind during the years of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in America; it developed as he rediscovered his own Jewish roots only two years after the victory of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and less than a decade after the dramatic triumph of the Six Day War, at a time when many Jews living in the Diaspora reassessed their relationships to Judaism and Israel.

It was therefore no accident at all, or the result of an impersonal scientific inquiry, that when the new foundation myth first saw the fight of day, its identity was Afro-Asiatic. The social and personal context in which it was conceived by Bernal ensured that the new founders of classical civilization should only be Egyptians (some of whose most powerful dynasties could "usefully" be called black) and Phoenicians (who were culturally related to the Jews). That context also explains why people who spoke Indo-European languages, such as the Hittites, had to be left out of the new foundation myth of the West. It was not simply because "Aryanist" scholars of the nineteenth century, hunting around for Indo-European language speakers to fit their racist theories, had championed the contributions made by the Hittites and others to Greek civilization. The Hittites and others were also excluded because Bernal could not trace his own personal roots or changing intellectual interests to the Hittites, the Hurrians, or the Babylonians.

Such a reconstruction of Bernal's enterprise as the above is inevitable; he himself has anticipated such a reconstruction, possibly because he has applied precisely such a method of historiographical analysis to countless scholars in Black Athena. Indeed, he has tried to mitigate the implications of such a reconstruction of his endeavor. He has taken care to insist that even where scholars have worked within the Aryan model, the origins of their projects do not necessarily invalidate their results ( BA 1: 442).

The origins of a scientific project may well be divorced from initial consideration of its results (and it is perhaps to Bernal's credit that he has openly laid out what he wants the world to believe about the story behind Black Athena). But if, after due consideration, the results of a project appear to be closely linked to its origins, scholars are obligated -- as Bernal himself has felt obligated -- to examine the relationship between the two. Given the stated social and personal contexts from which Black Athena evolved, it is hard in retrospect not to see the entire enterprise of Black Athena as a massive, fundamentally misguided projection upon the second millennium B.C.E. of Martin Bernal's personal struggle to establish an identity during the later twentieth century.

The outcome of that struggle has been the creation of a highly selective myth of influences on early Greek civilization. As we have seen (and much more evidence could easily be produced), the selectivity of Bernal's foun- dation myth cannot be explained on the basis of the ancient evidence; the reasons for that selectivity he inescapably in the personal odyssey of Martin Bernal.

[HellenicPride]

Not out Africa By Mary Lefkowitz

I own this book.
To my surprise a book written obviously by an evraia which I hardly every read any of their literature she brought up some great facts which counter Martin Bernal's and other afro centrists views about the Africa theory.

[olvios]

Αδερφια κυκλοφορουν τα βιβλια στην Ελλαδα? Το εχει κανεις σε μορφη pdf?
Brothers do the books circulate in Hellas?Does anyone have in pdf format?

[akritas]

Αδερφια κυκλοφορουν τα βιβλια στην Ελλαδα? Το εχει κανεις σε μορφη pdf?
Only the "Not Out Of Africa" with the Greek Title
η ΜΑΥΡΗ ΑΘΗΝΑ, μύθοι και παραγματικότητα, εκδόσεις Κάκτος,1997

As about the english editions you must order via Internet or any local bookstore

[olvios]

Ευχαριστω θα το ψαξω.
Thankou i will look for it.

[nsminc]

What a joke.

[Orphic_Hymn]

Here are some excerpted lyrics from the rapper "Nas" (that just out of coincidence is black) in his song titled "I Can".
Note how he claims that Hellines and Romans were taught by blacks and that Egypt was a black civilization.
Now that this afrocentrist revisionism has finally begun being transmitted in mainstream hip-hop/rap music you can expect such ideas to infest our youth


The lyrics:

Be, be, 'fore we came to this country
We were kings and queens, never porch monkeys
It was empires in Africa called Kush
Timbuktu, where every race came to get books
To learn from black teachers who taught Greeks and Romans
Asian Arabs and gave them gold when
Gold was converted to money it all changed
Money then became empowerment for Europeans
The Persian military invaded
They learned about the gold, the teachings and everything sacred
Africa was almost robbed naked
Slavery was money, so they began making slave ships
Egypt was the place that Alexander the Great went
He was so shocked at the mountains with black faces
Shot up they nose to impose what basically
Still goes on today, you see?
If the truth is told, the youth can grow
They learn to survive until they gain control
Nobody says you have to be gangstas, hoes
Read more learn more, change the globe
Ghetto children, do your thing
Hold your head up, little man, you're a king
Young Prince thats when you get your wedding ring
Your man is saying "She's my queen".


Interesting fact to be concidered:
MTV, owned by multibillionaire Zionist Murray Rothstein also known as Sumner Redstone, is the main purveyor of Hip-Hop worldwide, the dominant trend setter and culture bearer for the Western world and MTV is expanding currently, in order to broadcast in over seventy countries !!!

[PhiliptheUniterchaeronea]

NAS, I'm surprised that guy can even read. Of all the rappers out there, many intelligent people, this guy comes around, tried to act smart and looks like a dumb ass. I also can't stand the liberal apologists that sit and listen and don't have any balls to say anything about it.

[pankration]

The rapper should be commended for taking pride in his ancestors. But like too many black or Africans who should know better, they compartmentalize ALL the African societies into one superpower of black pride. Africa is a continent with hundreds of different tribes and ethnic groups. Yes there were great civilizations and I am sure that travellers from other lands visited them. But to claim that Central Africa somehow shaped Egypt, Asia and Europe is ludicrous. An exchange of goods and ideas does not reconstruct a society, it merely adds to it. Those who consider themselves of African ancestry should take the time to find out where they are from, who their tribal ancestors are and they should endeavor to discover their roots.

Finally, I am sick of hearing about slavery. Comparing the atrocity of American slavery of Africans to what occurred in the ancient world is misleading. The slave trade in those days encompassed ANY foreign enemy. Slaves were MOST OFTEN caucasian and could earn or buy their release in most cases whereupon they would live harmoniously within their now adopted country. There was no real slave trade as epitomized by the Americans almost 2000 years later. In the old days, if you lost in battle YOU were the prize the other side got. The give and take of this form of slavery was reflected in the status they held in society.

[The Blood of Dorus]

Finally, I am sick of hearing about slavery. Comparing the atrocity of American slavery of Africans to what occurred in the ancient world is misleading. The slave trade in those days encompassed ANY foreign enemy. Slaves were MOST OFTEN caucasian and could earn or buy their release in most cases whereupon they would live harmoniously within their now adopted country. There was no real slave trade as epitomized by the Americans almost 2000 years later. In the old days, if you lost in battle YOU were the prize the other side got. The give and take of this form of slavery was reflected in the status they held in society.

Most barbarians that ended up as slaves in classical and Hellenistic Greece were either Phrygians or Paphlagonians.

[admin]

Greeks were slaves basically for 400 years... do you hear Greeks complaining of slavery?

[pankration]

No we don't because Greeks have not bought into the North American (maybe European too) culture of victimization. It happened, we dealt with it and got over it.

[Euklid]

No we don't because Greeks have not bought into the North American (maybe European too) culture of victimization. It happened, we dealt with it and got over it.


There are many Greeks though, i encounterd one today here. (http://www.balkanium.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1572)

Where he states: Spain well deserved the title they are the best team in the planet so, bravo to them.

We lost mainly becouse the team wasnt prepared to play basketball yesterday and this is becouse of a known greek weakness (as a nation not as a team).


This guy is a victim of "victimization" and weak insecurities.

Some of us in Greece have just become to be little girls and to support their weakness, they consider everyone similar to them.

Do i have to remind you what the Spartans did to the weak?:dry:

[pankration]

Need I remind all those out there that Hellenism is a way of life, a philosophy, an attitude!!! Race is incidental as Alexander proved when he conquered Asia. He turned the Persians into Greeks, Ptolemy turned the Egyptians into Greeks and Rome turned itself into Greeks. If some group wants to claim Sophocles as their own, let them. Their claim will be based on skin colour, the least important of all man's qualities. We can lay claim to Sophocles' heritage, upbringing, spirit and ethos. Good luck to Sophocles in the NBA and make no mistake about it, he will be referred to as GREEK, not black.

New issue of www.fightingbest.com
Big news at www.pankration-novel-patrida.com

[akritas]

Chris Stefou(aka Risto Stefov) as you know one from the Slavamcedonian that use lies in order to expose his propaganda. He uses in the net name Risto Stefov but sell books with the name Chris Stefou. This post is an answer to an afrocentrist article of Samuel David Ewing , publish via maknews.com and has title …THE Greek Heracles was a black man and you can read in

http://www.maknews.com/html/articles/stefov/digest_15.html


Archaeologist have found numerous vases, statues and other forms of art from the Archaic Period of Ancient Greece in which the native Greek people portray themselves as Africans and as people having a mixture of African and European features. The constant miscegenation between the people of Ancient Crete (Western Ethiopians) and the Europeans, during 2000-1200 B.C. was a well known fact to the Archaic Greeks. Andromeda, Perseus' wife is shown on a terracotta vase, from the 4th century B.C. as the beautiful black woman that she was. Is there any proof that the ancient Greeks of the of the Archaic Period acknowledged and portrayed Heracles (HERCULES) as a black man? YES THERE IS! In the Oesterreichisches Museum, Vienna was kept the Ionian 'Caeratan' hydria (very large water jar), made during the middle of the 6th Century B.C. The title of the art work on the hydria is 'HERAKLES AND BUSIRIS KING OF EGYPT'. This art reveals the Greek Herakles as an enormously muscled black African giant who is crushing evildoers beneath his feet, strangling and breaking the necks of evildoers with his bare hands, as well as by trapping their throats between his elbow and bicep region, in his left hand he is holding a man in the air by his left ankle using the superhuman might of his left arm, and finally the rest of the evildoers are fleeing from the Greek Herakles in terror. The story has to do with Herakles putting a stop to human sacrifices which were instituted by an evil group of cultist under the direction of King Busiris of Egypt. Heracles allowed them to attempt to use him as a sacrifice, then at the right moment he broke his bonds, slaying 1000 cultists including the king. The story resembles that told of Samson. *** The point to be emphasized here is that the Greek Herakles was originally thought of as a BLACK MAN by the ancient Greek peoples before his features were altered by the later Eurocentric influence centuries later.
The Greek Heracles as a black man on this hydria is shown slaying black men (Egyptians) who have features like himself, such as black skin, flat nose, flaring nostrils, large lips, and the wooly textured hair of Hamites. This same Herakles is also shown slaying fair skinned Greeks, and Europeans, the difference between these opponents and Herakles the black man leaves know room for doubt concerning who is of what race.
Martin Bernall, author of BLACK ATHENA, VOL. 1, pages 476- 477 has this to say about this particular hydria; ".....While both point out that Bousiris has black attendants and that Bousiris himself is portrayed as one on another vase, neither Boardman nor Snowden ( 1970, p.159 ) mentions the fact that the 'Greek hero Herakles' is depicted as a curly-haired African Black. This is something that the Aryan Model is completely unable to handle. For reasons that Herakles should have been seen this way, see Vol.3." I would like to add that I have seen photo-prints of this vase myself therefore I know Martin Bernall is telling the truth! Finally apparently it isn't mentioned that an equal amount of Bousiris' attendants on this vase are obviously European.


blatantly driven by political ideology. It is not the claim of a pervasive role of such ideology in scholarship that I deplore (that is something I am quite prepared to entertain); it is rather the way in which he seemingly always hits on the most obvious, least subtle, ideological -- usually racist -- interpretations of his opponent's views.

Consider his objection to descriptions by John Boardman ( 1980, 149-51, 205) and Frank Snowden, Jr. ( 1976, 139-40) of one of the paintings on a remarkable black figure Greek vase (of the type called a hydria) from Caere in Etruria, dating from 510-500 B.C.E., now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. There are three scenes painted on the vase, two relating to the legend of Heracles and the Egyptian king Busiris. On one side of the vase we see Busiris' bodyguard; on the other, Heracles routing Busiris and his retainers. The five members of the bodyguard are obviously black, and both Boardman and Snowden mention this.

Where Bernal faults Boardman and Snowden is in their failure to "mention the fact that the 'Greek hero Herakles' is depicted as a curly-haired African Black!" He adds, "This is something that the Aryan Model is completely unable to handle. For reasons Herakles should have been seen in this way', see vol. 3" ( BA 1:477 n. 81). ( BA 3 has not yet been published, as of this writing.) He is clearly implying that Boardman and Snowden have been influenced, wittingly or not, by the (racist) Aryan Model. Such a charge should never be lightly made, particularly by someone who lacks expertise in the subject matter under consideration. But, as usual, Bernal has no qualms about taxing those whom he takes to be establishment scholars with inadvertent, if not deliberate, prejudice.

His criticism of Boardman and Snowden is in fact totally misconceived. Indeed, owing perhaps to his own ideological preoccupations, he has seriously misinterpreted the image of Heracles on the Vienna Busiris vase. To begin with, it must be noted that the vase painting is polychromatic, with red, yellow, and white over the usual black glaze. Most importantly, Heracles' skin was originally painted red, although the paint has flaked off in places, showing patches of background black. (The flaking is apparent in Snowden's and Hemelrijk's illustrations but not in Boardman's; illustrations in all three books are in black and white.)

As for Heracles' curly hair (which, together with his beard, is black), it is not an unusual style for Greeks on Attic vases of the period ( Hemelrijk 1984, text p. 214 n. 280), which means that any similarity between the hairstyle of Heracles and that of the five bodyguards need not imply that Heracles is an African black. It is also of interest that another depiction of Heracles on a Caeretan hydria of the same period (Louvre Nessus; Hemelrijk's no.17) shows the hero with black skin and curly--but red!-hair. The painter of no.17--the so-called Eagle Painter--is believed to have been a close colleague of the Busiris painter; they shared a workshop, and a certain quirkiness is evident in their work (as in the whimsical coloring of Heracles).]


I trust we shall hear no more of the Vienna Busiris Heracles in subsequent of racist STEFOV/EWING articles except, one hopes, for an apology to Boardman and Snowden as suggest Robert Palter in the book BLACK ATHENA REVISED .



It has occurred to me lately as I pondered about the next article for this section that the lineage, pedigree, or family tree of the Greek Heracles must be clarified once and for all. Diodorus Siculus and Herodotus recorded that it was the Egyptian Heracles who was the hero who performed the legendary 12 Labors, subdued the animals of the wild that had threatened the people, ushered in the building of cities, water systems, fortifications, and laws. Walter Burkert has estimated that this original Heracles was renowned as far back as 20,000 years ago. The Greek Heracles ended up receiving honors for the accomplishments of his predecessor, having the title of "Heracles", furthermore by the Bronze Age of Greece in which the Greek Heracles was said to have lived the taming of the wilderness had already been accomplished. The Greek Heracles was not likely to be wearing lion skin armor, wielding a club, with spear as weapons, and the danger of lions running amok was remote. The Egyptian Heracles did wear lion's skin and or leopard skin (leopards were considered to be lions without manes), he used the spear and club as his weapons, he traveled on foot because there were no chariots during the early history of Egypt, and the black rulers of Egypt were the persons who fit the description of the Egyptian Heracles. Richard Poe, author of BLACK SPARK WHITE FIRE, Did African Explorers Civilize Ancient Europe, Prima Publishing, P.O. Box 1260BK , Rocklin, CA 95677, pg. 316 quotes Diodorus on the differences between the Egyptian Heracles and the Greek Heracles; "By the time the Greek Heracles lived, said Diodorus, "most parts of the inhabited world had already been reclaimed from their wild state by agriculture and cities and the multitude of men settled everywhere over the land". Again quoting Diodorus, Richard Poe reveals; "Likewise, both the club and the lion's skin are appropriate to their ancient [Egyptian] Herakles, because in those days arms had not yet been invented, and men defended themselves against their enemies with clubs of wood and used the hides of animals for defensive armor".
Herodotus' research led him to discover that the most ancient Heracles was Egyptian (a native black African). In Pausanias, 9.38.6-8 (Jones, trans.) Herodotus reports that the Greek Heracles was a black man also; "There is plenty of evidence to prove the truth of this, in particular, that both parents of Herakles - Amphitryon and Alkmene - were of Egyptian origin". The Greek Herakles was a black man? How could this be? Ancient literature by the Greek scholars reveals that:
1. Herakles' parents were descendants of the Egyptian King Danaos who was a native black African of Egypt. The Egyptians, of course were predominantly black people.
2. Herakles' father, Amphitryon and his mother, Alkmene were first cousins, grandchildren of the mighty hero Perseus, who is the great, great, great, great grandson of King Danaos. In addition there was miscegenation between Egyptians and Greeks. One can obviously understand that the Greek Herakles would hardly resemble a European or Caucasian male. In present day American society he would be considered a black man, mulatto or at the very least having a 'biracial background'. This information was gathered by Herodotus who researched the Greek Herakles' pedigree. Apollodorus points to the fact that the Greek Herakles' parents were also descended from Perseus' wife, Andromeda, whose parents were Cepheus and Cassiopeia, the rulers of Ethiopia. Thus we see in the Greek Herakles the hero whose parents are of Ethiopian and Egyptian descent, both groups of people who are native Africans (black people) with some Greek mixture also.
3. Richard Poe further reports on page 317 that the ancient Roman poet, Ovid emphasizes that the beautiful Andromeda was "dark (fusca)". On page 318, BLACK SPARK WHITE FIRE, Richard Poe further clarifies that; "We, of course, have no way of knowing to what extent the Herakles of legend represents a real person. But even if he does not, his portrayal as an African prince-- part Egyptian and part Ethiopian-- suggests that the ancient storytellers held a profoundly different view of Bronze Age Greece than that served up by Hollywood scriptwriters. Rightly or wrongly, ancient tradition places African dynasts at the head of some of Greece's most powerful and prominent cities. It also portrays Herakles as an ambitious hydraulic engineer, responsible for damming rivers and digging canals all over Greece--- an occupation peculiarly appropriate for a prince of an Egyptian royal dynasty". Richard Poe asks these thought provoking questions, "Was Herakles a Paul Bunyan of his time? Do his adventures reflect the achievements of real- life canal diggers and dam builders in early Greece? If so, then the legend implies that those ancient engineers had a strong ancestral link with Africa and particularly with Egypt. It seems more than coincidental that Herakles' great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather Danaos was also remembered, in legend, for his feats of water engineering".
Briefly I want to talk about Zeus, the Supreme Father god who was said to be the Greek Herakles' actual father. Zeus is the name or title of the supreme god of ancient Ethiopians and the Egyptian. He was known as Zeus, Zeus-Ammon, Ausar, Khnum, Ammon- Zeus, and Ethiops. The ancient Greeks' religion was copied from the ancient Ethiopians and Egyptians from whom they learned spiritual and religious teachings. The Greeks and Romans referred to Zeus using the African titles previously mentioned in addition calling him Serapis, Jupiter, Jove, Zagreus, Dionysus, and Osiris.
Joel A. Rogers, author of “Nature Knows No Color Line”, reports; "Negroes were first worshipped in Greece and Rome. White masses bowed down to black deities. The rites of Apollo were founded by Delphos and his Negro mother, Melainis; and the worship of black Isis and Horus were popular in Rome and the Roman colonies as far north as Britain. When this later evolved into the worship of the Black Madonna and the Black Christ, Christian Whites also bowed down to them. Negroes, as was said, were deified in the early Greece. They appear as gods in Greek mythology. The chief title of Zeus, greatest of the Greek gods, was 'ETHIOPS', that is 'BLACK'".
In addition to this information the same Ethiops or Zeus is the historical king named CUSH who ruled over the native African peoples (the black race, the Hamites ).
Godfrey Higgins, author of ANACALYPSIS, Vol. 1, published by A & BOOKS PUBLISHERS, 149 Lawrence Street, Brooklyn, New York, 11201, reports that; "In my research for the origin of the Ancient Druids, I continually found, at last, that my labors terminated with something black. Thus the Oracles of Dodona and of Apollo at Delphi were founded by Black Doves. Doves are not often, I believe, never black. Osiris and his Bull were black, at least this was the case with Jupiter, Bacchus, Hercules, Apollo, Ammon. The goddesses Venus, Isis, Hecati, Juno, Metis, Ceres, Cybele were black in the Campdoglio in Rome". Higgins further states on page 286 of the same book; "We have found the black complexion or something relating to it whenever we have approached the origin of nations......... or first idols were black". J.A. Rogers, author of Sex And Race, Vol.1, New York, 1967 reports; ".......the earliest gods and messiahs on all the continents were black."
The ancient Greeks, ancestors of some of the present Greek peoples readily admitted that they were descendants of Ethiopians (native African black people of Ethiopia) and the Europeans of ancient times. The ancient Greeks, with pride tell the story of how Zeus (Cush, first Ethiopian Ruler ) and the prototype for the king of the Olympian gods, made love to the white-skinned IO, who gave birth to Epaphus, a mulatto male.


I will try to brake up in several paragraphs in order to exspose the afroccentrist lies of EWING that advertised STEFOV with UUZUNOVSKI via his nationalist maknews

DANAUS

Danaus was Egyptian is slightly less farfetched. He was Egyptian, in the sense that he was born in Egypt. But according to the myth, his family was Greek in origin. His great-grandfather, Epaphus, was born in Egypt, after his mother, Io, the daughter of the river Inachus in Argos, had come to the Nile Delta . Io ( Danaus's great-greatgrandmother) had been compelled to leave Greece because the Greek god Zeus had fallen in love with her, and in jealousy his wife, Hera, turned her into a cow.In that form, Io wandered from Greece to Asia Minor, and from there to Egypt. There she gave birth to Epaphus, Danaus's great-grandfather. Danaus and his fifty daughters returned to Argos from Egypt, because the daughters refused to marry their first cousins. These were the sons of Danaus's brother Aegyptus, whose name in Greek is the same as the country "Egypt"

Even though Danaus's family had been in Egypt for several generations, when they wanted to escape they went to Argos in Greece, because they were Greeks. For that reason, they found sanctuary there. Once they realized that Danaus's ancestors came from Argos, the Argives welcomed them. They were not deterred either by problems of language or appearance.

[NOT OUT OF AFRICA, Mary R. Lefkowitz ]

GREEK (& Romans) GODS -RELIGION

EWING postulating probable that Greeks and Romans steal/borrow many Egyptian Gods. If the Greeks did, in fact, actually borrow so many Egyptian gods what is strange is that they forgot to adopt one of the principal features of Egyptian cultic worship, namely, the organized priesthoods. If the Greeks/Romans had such a wholesale admiration for all things Egyptian, as Stefoy/Ewing averred, it would seem logical that with all of those Egyptian gods would also have come the companion concept of perpetual clerical organization and social power. The absence of Egyptian-style priesthoods suggests very strongly the scarcity of Egyptian influence on Greek/Roman culture and society.

The Greeks were polytheists, and however much Stefou/Ewing may wish otherwise, so were the Egyptians at whatever level of sophistication they each may have venerated their gods. There was no elegantly crafted system of syllogism, dialectics, generalization, or casuistry evinced by Greek religion.

As Walter Slack mention in his NEW book White Athena remarked as about the antithesis of the Greek and Egyptian religion:

[Traditional Greek polytheism was essentially this-worldly, anthropomorphic,community inclusive, humanistic, passionate, quarrelsome, amoral in many ways, ambiguous, dynamic, lusty and generally non-sacerdotal. In passing, one could say that those characteristics were the exact antitheses of Egyptian traditional polytheism. Greek evidenced "an almost fierce joy in life, the exultation in human achievement and in human personality. So far was the Greek from thinking that Man was a mere nothing in the sight of the gods that he had always to be reminding himself that Man is not God, and that it is impious to think it. Never again, until the Greek spirit intoxicated Italy at the Renaissance, do we find such superb self-confidence in humanity…”

On the other hand, Egyptian polytheism was suffocatingly ritualistic, conventionally official, statist, supernal, pious, impersonal, bureaucratic, deterministic, passive, sequestered, sempiternal, necrotic, athanastic and ecclesiastical. Obviously, given the complexity of each brand of polytheism, the catalogue of characteristics posited for each one did not necessarily apply equally across each national pantheon. Each form of belief served well its respective patron-community. The Egyptians had order, permanence, and certainty, but at the cost of social and cultural immobility. The Greeks had exuberance, familiarity, indulgence and participation, but at the price of impermanence and a deep sense of tragedy. But that only accentuates our point, viz., if the two polytheisms had ever-somehow- shared a religious ancestry, any reading of each mythology ought easily to convince any unbiased scholar that they were not cultural clones joined at the hip ]


[B]EGYPT PRESENCE IN GREECE (BRONGE AGE)

Archaeology does not provide any support for an invasion of Greece by Egyptians in the second millennium. Such information as we have suggests instead that settlers came to Egypt from Greece. A thousand fragments of frescoes in the Minoan Greek style have been found in the last several years at Avaris in the Nile Delta, dating from the seventeenth century, during the period when the Semitic (probably Canaanite) people known as the Hyksos ruled Egypt ( 1674-1566 B.C.). In 1991, a fragment of a painted Minoan floor, dating from the sixteenth century, was discovered in Tell Kabri in Israel.

These findings seem to suggest that an "invasion," whatever form it may have taken, went from Greece to Egypt, rather than in the other direction. Perhaps the story of Io's journey to the Nile Delta is a distant reflection of this cultural influence from the north, as Egyptologist Donald Redford has suggested. But the myth need not reflect history at all, since the Greeks used myths to account for all kinds of different phenomena. Here it may simply have been a means of explaining why Io resembled the Egyptian goddess Isis, who was often represented with cow's horns on her head.

Herodotus, who had visited Egypt, remarks on the resemblance. Whatever the origin of the story of Io's journey, the myths of the origins of Argos and Athens, as the Greeks knew them, before they were revised by the Egyptian priests in the first century, provide no indications of African roots or an Egyptian invasion.

Professor Maria Lefkowitz in hers book Not out of Africa remarked as about the supposing Egyptian presence in Greece…… no substantial arguments can be made for an African invasion of Greece in prehistoric times. The absence of evidence for such an invasion seriously undermines the Afrocentric argument that there was a significant African element in the population in Greece in the second millennium. Without such a presence in Greece, it is more difficult to argue that historical Greeks could have had African ancestors. As it is, such claims must rest on independent evidence. But this evidence also will prove to be both weak and circumstantial.

The above answers taken from

Not Out of Africa, Mary R. Lefkowitz
Black Athena Revised, Mary R. Lefkowitz
White Athena, Walter Slack

[akritas]

Black Athena is pernicious because it serves a political purpose hostile to the culture of scholarship. (Its very title is deceptive, because the author offers no evidence that the goddess Athena was considered to be black. He says, rather, that her great-aunt may have married an African or a Phoenician, which no one doubts.)

The interesting arguments that one might have with Bernal on Bronze Age settlement, the introduction of the alphabet, Egyptian or Semitic elements in the lexicon of classical Greek, or even on the history of classics are unfortunately vitiated from the start by his resentful and truculent tone. Placing himself “in the spectrum of black scholarship� rather than “within the academic orthodoxy,� he assumes throughout the book that many professional scholars who see no evidence of strong Egyptian influence on classical civilization suffer from “passionate and systematic racism.�

This is to misrepresent grossly the ethos and requirements of scholarship. Specialists on early Greece face specific problems that cannot be wished away. Evidence for important areas of ancient Greek life simply does not exist. These scholars have, therefore, developed a technically complex, consistent, and highly productive set of methods for testing evidence and proposing hypotheses where evidence is lacking. It happens that these methods yield results that Bernal, for political reasons, does not like.

His reaction is to denounce this scholarship as politically tainted in order to justify his own anti-scholarship. Bernal’s denunciations, delivered with a uniformly spiteful tone, give his work the same moral and scholarly status as the Aryan science of the Third Reich or the Lysenkoite genetics of Stalinist Russia; that is, none whatever.

[The case against Martin Bernal, David Gress ]

[pankration]

Thanks for the articles. It seems that all you have to do to sell a book these days is make outrageous claims. I spent years researching so I could write a FICTIONAL book that would have as its basis historical fact. Sales could be better but if I had any brains I would have flushed my history books down the toilet and made up some crap like Black Athena. I think I'll give up on my sequel to PATRIDA and instead write a fantasy history like, How the French Won World War II or Sitting Bull: The Last Surviving Chief of the Lost Continent of Atlantis. This should make me some money.

[akritas]

DNA sheds light on Minoans
e-kathimerini, 4-4-2008 (http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_100017_03/04/2008_95079)

Crete’s fabled Minoan civilization was built by people from Anatolia, according to a new study by Greek and foreign scientists that disputes an earlier theory that said the Minoans’ forefathers had come from Africa.


The new study – a collaboration by experts in Greece, the USA, Canada, Russia and Turkey – drew its conclusions from the DNA analysis of 193 men from Crete and another 171 from former neolithic colonies in central and northern Greece.


The results show that the country’s neolithic population came to Greece by sea from Anatolia – modern-day Iran, Iraq and Syria – and not from Africa as maintained by US scholar Martin Bernal.


The DNA analysis indicates that the arrival of neolithic man in Greece from Anatolia coincided with the social and cultural upsurge that led to the birth of the Minoan civilization, Constantinos Triantafyllidis of Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University told Kathimerini.


“Until now we only had the archaeological evidence – now we have genetic data too and we can date the DNA,” he said.
Another slamming to the afrocentric theory and to Bernal.

[Truth Bearer]

Afro-Athena, Afro-Athanasius, Slavo-Alexander.. - Get the Picture?
March 3rd, 2008 by E-Blog


Martin Bernal’s Black Athena initiated or revived theories on the so called afroasiatic roots of the Greek culture. The problem is not a book or an author, but whole movements of peoples who try desperately using such theories to give themselves a sense of dignity.

These are peoples lacking (or thinking that they lack) a valuable culture - Africans, some Slavs, etc. I have made some comments on that, thinking about the case of fyrom, a slavic country that tries to elevate self-esteem by falsifying history.

This condition is equal to a spiritual suicide, because, even if the whole world was willing to accept your distortion of history, you yourself would still have to live in a lie and deception, out of which nothing great can happen - especially when you don’t love the tradition that you claim as your own!

Now I read in a Christian magazine (do they deserve a link?) an article, where the author is suddenly surprised by a brilliant thought, that the Christian roots are African, since Athanasius, Augustine and others are not Europeans but Africans! My first reaction was to just think “another fool in the neighbourhood”, and skip the web page. However, there appears a question that needs to be answered.

In the case of Africans or the Slavs of fyrom one can see the causes of such a foolishness - but what is the reason of a western Christian author to identify Athanasius and Augustine as Africans? In the first place simple as that: Athanasius was bishop of Alexandria, Augustine was bishop of Hippo. Alexandria and Hippo are in Africa, therefore Athanasius and Augustine are Africans, therefore Christianity has African roots! Let us think about this syllogism and understand things that don’t seem to be obvious enough.

Terms like Africa, Europe, etc denote geographical places and cultures / languages / civilizations / histories. Christianity is not a geographical place but a culture, a religion, a faith, etc. If we are to claim that Christianity is African, we must prove that the Christian culture is rooted in a culture that is properly and particularly African. We can not assign the roots of Christianity to a geographical reality as such, because by themselves stones, trees, waters and dust are not able to have or create a culture. If this was not true, if Christianity is African due to the geographical area called Africa, then Africa would be Christian today, but is not.

Therefore, the roots of Christianity are to be traced in cultural, not in geographical realities as such, and here comes the question: what is the African culture that influenced the Greek speaking Athanasius and the Latin speaking Augustine? What African author, what african books, what african questioning can be recognised in their thoughts? None at all. They were just bishops in Christian communities located in Africa - inside a cultural environment that beared the marks of the hellenistic era, that is in a Greek-Roman environment.

Certain people fail to understand these simple things, and compare what can not be compared or assign to some effects causes that belong to different frames of causality, out of foolishness, out of a desperate effort for self-esteem, if they come from traditions that they themselves consider as inferior, or out of a misunderstood friendliness, if they think that this way they help people of inferior cultures to feel better. Yet, can you help anyone with lies and hypocrisy, what kind of help a lesson in foolishness would be?

Huntington predicted culture wars, but our problem, in my opinion, is not in such wars; the real problem is in wars without any meaning at all, the wars of vain pride and empty minds, where people with no love for Homer claim to be descendants of Alexander, where other people don’t care about their Christianity but about the greatness of their black color, etc…

http://www.ellopos.com/blog/?p=295

[akritas]

To the extent that Bernal has contributed to the provision of an apparently respectable underpinning for Afrocentric fantasies, he must be held culpable, even if his intentions are honorable and his motives are sincere. But not even he has dealt with the racial issue squarely. One hopes that in his forthcoming volumes he will finally assess how much of the Afro-Asiatic legacy to the Greeks involved black Africans, or as the Greeks called them, "Ethiopians." So far Bernal has simply ducked the issue. Or rather, he has tried to have it both ways, allowing the Egyptians to stand for the rest of Africa, whatever their racial type or types. In a colloquium about Black Athena at the American Philological Association in 1989, he admitted that he would have preferred to have called the book African Athena, but his publisher insisted on its present tide because the combination of blacks and women would "sell."

Bernal would prefer to emphasize that Egypt is a part of Africa, rather than try to determine the exact proportion of darker-skinned central Africans in the population. For to speak of the ancient (or modern) Egyptians as "black" is misleading in the extreme. Not that it would have mattered from the Greek point of view, since the Greeks classified people by nationality rather than skin color, as Frank Snowden pointed out a quarter-century ago ( Snowden 1970). But Herodotus, the earliest Greek source, refers just once to the skin color of the Egyptians, and then only to prove that the Egyptians under Sesostris managed to penetrate as far as the northeast end of the Black Sea; he says that the Colchians, the people who lived there, could be classified as Egyptians both because they had dark skin and woolly hair and because they spoke the same language, practiced circumcision, and worked their linen in the unique Egyptian manner. Bernal takes this passage as evidence that the Egyptians were "black" in the modern sense of Negroid. But if that had been what Herodotus meant, he would have referred to them as Ethiopians, who spoke a different language from the Egyptians and had different customs.

Will believers in the Athenian conspiracy be persuaded by these and other historical arguments? Some will perhaps continue to believe that the Greeks stole African culture, without wishing to inquire what exactly they mean by African culture or Egyptian culture or Greek culture. That would be a pity, because in the process of claiming Greek history as their own, they will miss an opportunity to learn about real Africa and its own achievements and civilizations.

When Marcus Garvey first spoke about the Greeks' stealing from the Africans, he was not creating a new historiography, he was creating a new mythology. The reasons are not far to seek. For black Americans (many of whom now prefer to be known as African-Americans), the African origins of ancient Greek civilization promise a myth of self-identification and selfennoblement, the kind of "noble he" that Socrates suggests is needed for the utopian state he describes in Plato's Republic (3.414b). It is the Afrocentric view that is, to use Bernal's term, the fabrication; but such fabrications may build confidence and may encourage marginalized groups to quit the margins and participate in the common culture. In that sense, they may be useful and even "noble."

But hope is not enough of a reason for illusion. What constructive purpose will the myth of African origins really serve? If it causes us to ignore or even to subvert the truth about the past, it damages our ability, the ability of all of us, no matter what our ethnic origins, to judge fairly and accurately, which is the best purpose of education. And even if a myth helps people to gain confidence, it will teach them simultaneously that facts can be manufactured or misreported to serve a political purpose; that origins are the only measure of value; that difference is either a glory or a danger, when in fact it is a common, challenging fact of life; that the true knowledge of customs, language, and literature is unimportant for understanding the nature of a culture.

The Greeks, least of all peoples, deserve the fate to which the Afrocentrists have subjected them. The great historian Arnaldo Momigliano observed that "what I think is typically Greek is the critical attitude toward the recording of events, that is, the development of critical methods enabling us to distinguish between facts and fancies. To the best of my knowledge no historiography earlier than the Greek or independent of it developed these critical methods; and we have inherited the Greek methods" ( 1990, 30). Momigliano was not a Greek. He was an Italian Jew, and a refugee from one of the most terrible political myths of all time, the not very noble lie of Jewish inferiority that provided the justification for the Holocaust. But the rational legacy of Greece belonged to him, too, exactly as it belongs to people of African descent, whatever their skin color or their exact place of origin. Like everyone in both the African and the European diasporas, and like everyone in the American melting pot, they should take pride in the Egyptians, in the Phoenicians, and in the ancient Greeks, and give them each their due for their actual achievements, as well as for their contributions to other civilizations. For all these civilizations, like everything else in the past, belong equally to all of us.
Mary Lefkowitz in Black Athena Revised, pages 20-22

[deleteme]

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