White Athena: A Critique of Afrocentrist Claims Volume 2

By Walter Slack

Return to the fray of the Afrocentrist movement in the second volume of White Athena.

Walter Slack follows up his first volume, which took to task those who claim that the Greeks and others stole their philosophy, science, and culture from black Africansarguing that the world needs to give credit to the right people.

This volume is much less a comparison of diverse philosophies and cosmologies, and much more an evaluation of claims regarding imagined imports of technical, cultural, religious, and practical artifacts.

Slack examines numerous Afrocentrist claims, including that cultural tutors from black Africa roamed early Europe, Muslim Spain, and pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and even traveled to ancient China with all sorts of cultural, intellectual, and scientific contributions.

The author concludes that most damaging to the credibility of Afrocentrists is their willingness to adopt any and every theory that supports their ideological thesis of African cultural supremacyovertly or covertlybased upon race. Open your mind to an honest and impartial view of world history with White Athena, Volume 2.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491757895

Walter Slack

Walter Slack’s scholarly interests include researching political philosophy and history. He earned a PhD from the University of Iowa.

Book preview

WHITE ATHENA

A CRITIQUE OF AFROCENTRIST CLAIMS VOLUME 2

Copyright © 2015 Walter Slack.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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CONTENTS

The End of Time

CHAPTER 1 Black Athena Writes Back

CHAPTER 2 North Africa and Ancient Egypt

CHAPTER 3 Sesostris’s Fabled Adventures in Colchisland

CHAPTER 4 Races in Prehistory

CHAPTER 5 Black Grimaldi Civilization

CHAPTER 6 African Tourists in Early Europe

CHAPTER 7 Imaginary Voyages to Fantasyland

CHAPTER 8 The Piri Reis Map of 1513 C.E.

CHAPTER 9 The Large Olmec Stone Heads

CHAPTER 10 Cultural Transfers from Never-Never Land

CHAPTER 11 Egyptian, Mexican and Nubian Pyramids

CHAPTER 12 What the Afro-Egyptians Forgot to Teach the Olmec

CHAPTER 13 Christian Europe, Muslim Spain, and Africa

CHAPTER 14 Spain and the Muslim World

CHAPTER 15 Muslim Books and Libraries

CHAPTER 16 Science and Technology

CHAPTER 17 Meanwhile Back in Africa

Notes

It has been said of Thomas Aquinas, He had no airs, made no demands upon life, sought no honors, refused promotion to ecclesiastical office. His writings span the universe, but contain not one immodest word. He faces in them every argument against his faith, and answers with courtesy and calm. (Will Durant, The Age of Faith, 963).

Such precious encomiums are celebration enough for any true lover of knowledge.

THE END OF TIME

And so my life and creativity—if such there be in these pages—have run their course. My books listed below were my appeal for intellectual greatness, never quite fulfilled! Perhaps that is why one of my patron saints was Arthur Schopenhauer. It is my hope that any Reader may find an intellectual gem somewhere in my works.

The Commonwealth of the Mind (1967) represents my introduction to Montesquieu, who is the proper inspiration for any callow youth beginning a sortie in philosophy.

The Grim Science: The Struggle for Power (1981)—an effort to modernize Machiavelli by introducing him to the political problems of a new century and to get beyond the groundless fluff of current liberalism.

The Surplus Species: Need Man Prevail? (1982)—my early effort at a social utopia, and a covert celebration of Malthus and Schopenhauer.

The Philosophy of Revolution (1991)—my application of the radical principles of Nietzsche and Georges Sorel.

White Athena: The Afrocentrist Theft of Greek Civilization (2006)—my extensive response to Martin Bernal’s quarrelsome, yet intellectually enjoyable effort, Black Athena, where he made unfounded claims for Egyptian (and African) creativity.

White Athena: A Critique of Afrocentrist Claims (2015)—the Afrocentrists had so many crackpot claims as to transform crackpotness into a Platonic Form.

1

BLACK ATHENA WRITES BACK

This second volume of White Athena is our passport to return to the fray regarding the rank diffusionism and the pedagogical fantasies of the Afrocentrist movement. Its central theme will be an examination of the alleged claims made by those ethereal cultural tutors from black Africa who supposedly roamed early Europe, Muslim Spain, and pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, with equally unverified sorties to ancient China, whose baggage trains were always bursting with all manner of precocious cultural, intellectual, scientific, and artistic goods just waiting to be unpacked by the enthusiastic, if somewhat benighted resident natives. This volume of White Athena (hereafter WA 2) is unlike WA 1 in that it is much less a comparison of diverse philosophies and cosmologies, and much more an evaluation of claims regarding imagined imports of technical, cultural, religious, and practical artifacts.

We were expecting finally to be done with the extravagant claims and pronouncements of Martin Bernal and his Black Athena (BA), when we chanced upon a copy of his Black Athena Writes Back (BAWB 2001).¹ It is a reply to the 1996 critique of his BA thesis entitled Black Athena Revisited (BAR), edited by Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers. Subsequnently, Bernal published volume 3 of BA dealing with the alleged linguistic evidence for his Egyptian hypothesis (2006), but those topics are for debate between Bernal and the philologists, so we’re going to pass on that particular squabble.

Jacques Berlinerblau, associate professor and Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, published in 1999 (while assistant professor and director of Judaic studies at Hofstra University) a very interesting study of the various historical methodologies used in the analysis of Black Athena. His book is entitled Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals (HIU),² and we would recommend it as a useful real-life text for any methodology seminar for history grad students. He expanded our biographical data on Martin Bernal. The latter’s mother is Margaret Gardiner, the daughter of the famous Egyptologist, Alan Gardiner. The crucial point here for us was the information that we have five years seniority on Bernal, i.e., birthdates of 1932 and 1937 respectively,³ and it was and is our devout wish not to end our remaining years slumping over our desk, still clutching volume 27 of Black Athena, subtitled Greek Cuisine Stolen from Egypt! [And we had hoped that he would have stopped at volume 10.]

We could not leave Bernal, however, without a brief [one-million-word] inventory of some of the changes, contradictions, and new charges linking BAWB with its two genetic BA ancestors. In his new polemic he has an endless litany of complaints about the authors and especially the co-editors of BAR, viz. Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers.

1.

The latter’s original sin was their capital failure to invite Bernal to reply to each co-author as the text of BAR developed (BAWB: ix, 13-14). The idea for BAWB was conceived in 1994 even before the publication of BAR, with submission of the manuscript to Duke University Press much later, where its manuscript readers found Lefkowitz and Rogers’s behavior disgraceful, but the readers were bored by the manuscript’s many repetitions and were irritated by what they saw as its one-sidedness (BAWB: x). Our own assessment of that situation would be the reverse. Lefkowitz and Rogers owed Bernal no inclusion into BAR for reasons stated below, and we certainly did not find BAWB to be boring, and, yes, it is one-sided, but in the dynamics of conflicting scholarly views, that is properly one of its main functions.

It is our view that where controversial ideas clash, especially in print form, Side-A produces a statement of claims and evidence, thereafter Side-B replies in kind, without including any of Side-A’s articles or writers, and if the intellectual marketplace will financially support another round, so be it. The Reader will note that when Bernal was preparing volume 2 of BA, he did not include the views of any critics who had questioned his arguments made in volume 1. Moreover, he published one of his early expositions of his Black Athena thesis in the November 1985 issue of the Journal of African Civilizations, which is the product of a gaggle of his fellow Afrocentrists, and that Journal and its companion anthologies compiled by Ivan Van Sertima have never, to our knowledge, included any contributions by scholars critical to their views. Finally, Bernal either totally forgot or else ignored the overarching restriction which operates in such publishing situations: Most authors want to convert a short story into eight hefty volumes, however, the Categorical Imperative for all publishers is to cut costs, and that means the number of pages. The University of North Carolina Press was generous to allow BAR to run to 521 pages of text, without adding 200 or 250 pages from Martin Bernal. Similarly, Rutgers University Press was equally beneficent in allowing a semi-unknown to have 575 pages for volume 1 of BA. [If Bernal ever hears of WA, he’ll probably crab that we neglected to ask him to co-author it!]

2.

Bernal manifests another instructive stylistic and ideological quirk: He has a marked penchant in the two volumes of BA and in BAWB to label the historical and philosophical views of those with whom he disagrees as being prejudices or biases, e.g., Professor Lefkowitz does not say what her biases are, but two of the most important come out loud and clear throughout the books. Bernal then proceeded to instruct his readers as to the content of Lefkowitz’s alleged biases: They are that Europe owes little or nothing to Africa, or Greece to Egypt, and that untrained outsiders should not question the conclusions of trained and ‘competent’ professionals (BAWB: 383).

One dictionary definition of prejudice is "a bias for or against something formed without sufficient basis." The key to that definition is in the italicized portion. Question to Bernal: Would there ever be a sufficient mountain of empirical evidence to convince him that the ancient Greeks had ever really been culturally creative in their own right and for him to follow through with an enumeration of the intellectual and tangible products of that independent creativity? Our money is on a resounding "Never!" That intellectual and moral denial is one of Martin Bernal’s intrinsic prejudices!

Jacques Berlinerblau described Bernal as being by training a Sinologist,⁴ (also see BA 1: 1), that is, in Chinese history and culture. Especially in volume 1 of BA, Bernal has prided himself on being an outsider and an amateur vis-à-vis the experts in classics, Egyptology, archaeology, and ancient history (BA 1: xv, 3-6). We can assure Bernal that in relation to those areas of Chinese study, this author is a rank amateur and outsider. We have to wonder what Bernal’s response would be if we began to blunder wildly through that history and culture and making all sorts of outlandish claims? Would he revert to professional form and begin charging us with ignorance of the canons of Chinese history established by competent professionals such as himself?

Readers look in vain in Bernal’s books for any adumbrations that he might consider any of his views to be either prejudices or biases. For all of his blather about his conclusions being based merely upon competitive plausibility (BA 1: 8-9), a reading of BA discloses that Bernal announces TRUTH. Anyone relying on plausibility to make his/her case should make frequent use of terms like maybe, might be, and could be to indicate conditionality, but as he warmed to his subject in all of his books, his conclusions began to be absolutisms, e.g., his conclusions are "irrefutable, the semantic fit with Apollo, the young god of the sun is perfect, or no one doubts the Platonic roots of the notion of the just king" (italics added, BAWB: 103, 342, 368). Prophets of Plausibility do not come accoutered with stone tablets etched by the finger of God!

3.

Bernal scoffed at Mary Lefkowitz’s surprise when she began her journey of discovery of Afrocentrism in 1991-1993 (BAWB: 374). Bernal should have experienced a similar shock when he first read the vastly exaggerated fantasies of George James, Cheikh Diop, John G. Jackson, and Ivan Van Sertima regarding Africa, Egypt, Greece, Europe, and Mesoamerica, but no such expressions of astonishment seem to have escaped his lips.

He then asked the rhetorical question, that if she knew that all of those Afrocentrist assertions were nothing more than ideological fabrications, why did she bother to confront them? (BAWB: 374) University students are usually more politically and philosophically radical than are their parents—unless, of course—some of them have blown their minds with repeated drug usage—and therefore, especially among impressionable young black students, there would be a manifest tendency to accept the inventions of Afrocentrists at face value. Our reading of Mary Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa (NOA) suggests that she wanted students—black or white—to ask of Afrocentrists the same kind of hard factual questions that they should address to non-Afrocentrists, rather than simply play the race card and label any critic as a racist (NOA: 2).

Bernal seemed to be amused that during a campus lecture in 1993 by Yosef ben-Jochannan, she challenged him during the question period about allegations regarding Aristotle stealing Egyptian books after Alexander’s conquest, that none of her academic colleagues supported her position (BAWB: 374-75 and NOA: 3-5). Surely, Bernal is not going to claim that he is so submerged in the study of ancient antiquities, that he is totally unaware of the ideological transformation of American universities since 1965? The anti-Vietnam War radicals of the sixties, who wanted unlimited free speech [except, of course, for those who disagreed with their political views], are now the tenured teachers and administrators who again want to silence any voices but their own. Most university deans and presidents are too gutless to oppose any leftist speakers such as Angela Davis or Leonard Jeffries, but they can find all sorts of excuses for canceling campus meetings by conservatives, Republicans, or military types, e.g., because the black students might riot or because of the financial costs of beefing up campus security forces to protect the First Amendment rights of such conservative pariahs. Such deans and presidents don’t want the liberal community thinking that they are not true-blue educational progressives, so in many segments of American society radical minorities have been endowed with a fourth inalienable right, i.e., to riot! Bernal knows that he doesn’t have to face any howling mobs of leftist students and other assorted thugs, because his views are carefully on the safe side of political correctness.

4.

Bernal complained that of all the available Afrocentrists to scrutinize, Lefkowitz chose to focus on his views and those of George James and his book, Stolen Legacy (SL). Yet, as if to make contradiction and contrariness into a fine art, he also bemoaned that she had criticized such earlier versions of Afrocentrists as Frederick Douglass, Edward Blyden, and W.E.B. DuBois, plus such contemporary figures as John Henrik Clark, Cheikh Diop, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and Joel Rogers (BAWB: 376-77). All in all, it would appear that Mary Lefkowitz’s broom swept wider than just Bernal and James.

First of all, we would recommend to the Readers Stephen Howe’s history of Afrocentrism.⁵ It is quite fair, accurate, and detailed regarding all parties involved. Howe’s study of the Afrocentrist heritage suggests that a staple item of that ideology is the generalized notion that white Greeks or white Europeans had plagiarized their culture, sciences, and philosophies from Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, or Africa in general. So we’re back to reminding Bernal that neither NOA or BAR could ignore the legitimate limitations imposed by publishers, especially on a subject as esoteric as Black Athena, i.e., authors can’t discuss all aspects of any topic.

Second, the emphasis was on Bernal because his effort is recent, obviously because he is one of the few Caucasians among otherwise black Afrocentrists, and because of the entire contemporary lot, he is the best scholar of the bunch, although if space and time permit, we hope to present at least a few examples of what we deem to be an unseemly shallowness and pettiness which seem to punctuate his analysis. The focus on George James in inevitable, because he was almost alone in attempting to detail the alleged elements of Greek philosophy supposedly stolen from Egyptian cosmologies—even if his mistakes and misinformation were legendary.

5.

As one example of Bernal’s pettiness, he injected some class warfare criticism of Lefkowitz into his rejoinder, when he admitted that Afrocentrist writers made so many mistakes while presenting their faith as an absolute and general truth, because they had so many material difficulties obtaining training in foreign languages, finding time to carry on research, acquiring teaching positions, getting money to buy books, and even gaining access to libraries (BAWB: 377). [At the major American universities that we attended decades ago, black scholars just walked through the front doors of the library like everyone else! The Reader should also notice the monumental admissions sleeping quietly in Bernal’s statement: His black Afrocentrist comrades have made many mistakes in their books and how can an advocate of plausibility make common cause with ideologists who proclaim that they are preaching an absolute and general truth?]

On the other hand, Bernal laments that Mary Lefkowitz has experienced none of those hardships, having been thoroughly educated in Latin and Greek, but not Egyptian, and who has for many years been tenured at a rich college (BAWB: 377).

Such impediments may well have burdened Afrocentrist writers seventy years ago, but hardly so for the last thirty or more years. Contrary to Bernal’s view, Stephen Howe concluded that such Afro-American cultural nationalists in the 1980s and 1990s…had higher degrees, secure and well-paid jobs and guaranteed publishing outlets.⁶ Ivan Van Sertima is a professor at Rutgers University and he and his Afrocentrist anthologies have an inside track with Transaction Publishers since—as of 1998—it has published twelve of his titles. Transaction Publishers has a reputation for producing high-quality scholarly books with solid research backgrounds—all of which cannot be said to describe Van Sertima’s anthologies—as we will demonstrate in subsequent chapters. We have to wonder if Irving Louis Horowitz, chairman of the Board and Editorial Director as of July 24, 2004, has ever read any of those twelve books?⁷ And if memory serves, Joel A. Rogers managed to produce his Afrocentrist magnum opus, World’s Great Men of Color in 1947 solely with the resources of the New York City Public Library.

Berlinerblau’s biographical data on Bernal tells us that the latter was hardly a poor boy from the slums of the East End. He attended a well-appointed public school in London. And it should be obvious that not every bright lad in the U.K. graduates from Cambridge University. From 1966 to 1972 he lectured on Chinese history at Cambridge and the University of London. In 1972 he moved to Cornell as an already tenured associate professor in the Department of Government.⁸

Bernal faulted Mary Lefkowitz for being tenured for many years at a rich college. Doesn’t that description also fit Bernal’s status at Cornell University? The latter is hardly a community college in Arkansas! Let us conclude with Berlinerblau’s evaluation of Bernal’s academic position at Cornell, and then ask by what moral right is he supposedly justified in faulting Lefkowitz’s position at Wellesley: He is securely and permanently employed. As far as his research is concerned, he is subject only to his own whims. (Recall that the government department at Cornell was not pleased with his project, ‘but they couldn’t do much about it.’) Tenured and in good standing at a prestigious Ivy League university, the author was entitled, so to speak, to his heresy.⁹ What’s that old adage about people who live in glass houses not throwing rocks?

6.

Ostensibly, in BAWB Martin Bernal appeared to be backpedaling on some crucial ideological positions taken in the two volumes of BA. He seemed to argue (a) that he did not claim that there existed a contemporary scholarly conspiracy to deny the central tenet of the Ancient Model, that Egypt and Phoenicia had had a lasting cultural and intellectual influence on ancient Greece (BAWB: 15-16, 63). (b) Bernal went on to deny that he was in fact an Afrocentrist (BAWB: 13, 17, 251). And finally, (c) he affirmed that he was as much—or even more—interested in the influence of Phoenicia—a.k.a. Southwest Asian Semites—on Greece (BAWB: 16).

(a) Taking the issue of conspiracy first, Bernal did not disavow volume 1 of BA, where certainly chapters IV through IX outline a postulated conspiracy over the centuries against Egypt, with the Phoenicians almost as an afterthought. In BAWB (16), it should be noted that he is only exempting modern classicists and historians of Antiquity from being racist participants in the conspiracy. As we pointed out in WA 1, Bernal has an interesting, if insidious, argumentative methodology, which will be illustrated as we go along, one facet of which is a marked tendency to retract any concession made regarding his hypothesis qua dogma. If someone else had made that point above, he/she might have said, Taken as a group, modern classicists and historians of Antiquity are not racists in any conspiracy, but Bernal said, in his view, they are no more racist than other academics. If that statement is unpacked, all that Bernal has really conceded is that such classicists and historians are no more racist than other racists! The former are always on trial to prove they are not the latter. [That’s no hand of friendship!]

(b) Are we really to take Bernal at his word, that he is not an Afrocentrist? Common sense would move us to reply: If a web-footed bird looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and flies like a duck, then there is a high probability—way beyond Bernal’s favored competitive plausibility (BA 1: 8-9)—that it is, in fact, a duck. The same logic of identification applies to Martin Bernal and his Afrocentrism.

(c) As we stated in volume 1 of WA, he gave the Egyptians about 97 percent of the credit for all cultural creativity in the Mediterranean basin and the Phoenicians about 3 percent—the latter were always the junior, junior partner. That ratio is a big argument for his Afrocentrist persona. With BAWB, the credit ratio is maybe 95 percent for the ever-cerebral Egyptians and 5 percent for the Phoenicians. In BA the latter gave the Greeks the alphabet, while now in BAWB it’s the alphabet and maybe the inspiration for the democratic organization of government (BAWB: 356-60). But as we indicated above, what Bernal conferred upon the Phoenicians, he can also revoke, because the greatness and creativity of the Egyptians lurks inevitably behind whatever is alleged for the Phoenicians (BAWB: 365-70). We invite the Readers to examine both volumes of BA and BAWB and to see for themselves, that when push comes to shove for Bernal, all roads to creativity in the ancient world always lead back to Egypt. He attributed these sentiments to Plato, but they are every bit as much his own: Plato…maintained that Egypt was the source of most aspects of civilization (BAWB: 368). [For our analysis of Bernal’s distortions of Plato, see WA 1, pages 11 to 14, 163-64, 309-12.]

On pages 17 and 251 of BAWB Bernal engaged in some interesting definitional gymnastics. On page 17 he declared, "that in BA 1 I made it clear that I disagree with extreme Afrocentrists. The tenor of his statement would naturally suggest his agreement therefore with more moderate Afrocentrists, whomever they might be. But then on page 251, he affirmed, I do not consider myself to be an Afrocentrist." [Clearly a case of ideological transubstantiation!] The Afrocentrists who have been endorsed by Bernal are the most extreme cultural diffusionists around, and if he can approve of their radical positions, that commitment would seem logically to define his true ideological identity.

On page 38 of BA 1 he proclaimed a rousing endorsement for George James’s "fascinating little book Stolen Legacy, which makes a plausible case for Greek science and philosophy having borrowed massively from Egypt." By page 401 of BA 1 Bernal had managed to inflate his evaluation of Stolen Legacy (SL) to the Egyptian cultural achievements stolen by the Greeks. We did a thorough critique of James’s book (SL) in volume 1 of WA and the Reader is referred to that analysis. It is enough here if we remind Bernal of two of James’s cardinal beliefs: (a) Regarding the natural sciences, that the Greeks did not seem to possess the natural ability to advance these sciences (SL: 3), and (b) the Greeks did not possess the native ability essential to the development of philosophy (SL 164). James was a black racist and about as excessive a radical Afrocentric diffusionist as it is possible to find. It seems natural to assume that Bernal actually read Stolen Legacy—although when we examine the almost unlimited entries in his bibliographies for BA 1 and 2 and BAWB we have to wonder if even Clark Kent could really have read all of those books and articles—and if he did read it and he still went on with his florid commendations for SL, then he has clearly identified himself with the extreme Afrocentrists.

Similarly, Bernal has nothing but approval for the even more extravagant diffusionist fantasies of Ivan Van Sertima and his co-ideologists, e.g., "the increased evidence of African influence on Pre-Columbian America after about 1000 B.C.E., and discoveries such as the fact that the Mesoamerican Pyramids were not merely bases for temples but could contain burials, strengthen the possibility of indirect Egyptian influence on these much later civilizations" (italics added, BA 1: 271). By page 486 n. 168 of BA 1, Bernal had concluded that the Egyptian influence on Mesoamerica was more than just indirect: It is also very likely that American cultures—at least since the Olmec civilization, found in Eastern Mexico and dating to the early 1st millennium BC—have received considerable African influence; see Van Sertima (1976; 1984). The fact that Bernal could say African influences rather than Egyptian influence associates him even more closely with the extreme Afrocentrist position!

Since Bernal published an article in Van Sertima’s Journal of African Civilizations and he claimed to have read the latter’s They Came Before Columbus (1976) (BA 1: 486, 561), it seems logical that the former has some accurate idea of the size of Van Sertima’s corps of Afrocentrists and their unlimited diffusionism. In passing it is over 6000 nautical miles between Egypt and Mexico, so we have to wonder how Bernal could support the idea of any "indirect Egyptian influence" on Olmec Mexico? If he can congratulate the pseudo-scholarship of Van Sertima and his team of diffusionists, then we find it very hard to accept his plea that he is not an Afrocentrist. Finally, are we really to believe that any of the Mesoamericans, whose public architecture vastly surpasses any thing done by the Egyptians in terms of aesthetic structure, would have required the instruction of any visiting ancient Egyptians or Africans—sometimes, but not always—to use some of their pyramid temples as tombs, as well as temple platforms?

We are having some major problems squaring all of Bernal’s claims of Phoenician influences upon Greece when that alleged enterprise is set within the larger framework of his projected Egyptian instruction of the Greeks at various times after 3300 B.C.E. (BA 2: 78). It is necessary to use several quotations from his books to illustrate our puzzlement: He made several excursions between Egypt and Greece and around the eastern Mediterranean, but for all of his asseverations regarding the detailed cultural output flowing unilaterally from Egypt in Greece over the millennia, it is difficult for us to see how Bernal can be so absolutely certain regarding his ascriptions of Egyptian origin for alleged loanwords and rather hazy assertions of Egyptian/Greek ritual kinship, e.g., the "presence of scales in a funerary context…in one of the tombs at Mycenae…strongly suggests some knowledge in Mycenaean Greece of the Egyptian weighing of souls and the trial of the dead in which it took place" (italics added, BAWB: 361). At most the symbolism of the scales is highly provisional. In the light of the whole structure of cultural claims made by Bernal, what are we to make of his admissions in BA that modern scholars vis-à-vis ancient Greece really know the most only about classical Greece. Doesn’t that limitation of data cry for a massive application of caution when dealing with alleged events before the destruction of Mycenae c. 1150 B.C.E? (BAWB: 361) Add to that confession the even more damning one that "the reconstruction of the murky origins of Greek civilization over thirty-five hundred years ago is absurd" (italics added, BAWB: 384). If the origins of Greek civilization are so murky, it would seem to us that even Bernal’s much celebrated competitive plausibility as a method of cultural confirmation would usually be a dubious intellectual tool.

Let us set forth the core of Bernal’s argument in regards to the Egypt/Phoenicia/Greece equation:

"The fact that many of the political institutions of Archaic Greece and hence much political thought came from Phoenicia does not mean that Greek politics and political thought were mere reproductions of Levantine prototypes. Geometric Greece was not a blank sheet on which anything could be written" (italics added, BAWB: 360). At first glance the Reader might conclude that the above statement was a Bernalian concession to Greek intellectual originality, ah, but such is not the case.

"I am convinced that one must go still further back in time and consider the possibility that Greece of the Dark and Geometric Ages are still heavily influenced by the Mycenaean past. Most scholars today agree that the Dark Ages did not create a hermetic seal between Bronze and Iron Age Greece" (italics added, BAWB: 360). And as any Reader of BA should expect, his quest for the Holy Grail did not stop there with either Phoenicia or Mycenae, but effortlessly debouched Bernal and his Readers on the sacred shores of ancient Egypt. [What Bernal confers on the Phoenicians with one hand, he quickly retrieves with the other!]

"I see nothing inherently implausible in the claims of Egyptian influence on the Athenian forms during this period [15th and 14th centuries]. A modified diffusionist would not be distressed by the fact that the Athenian social orders or castes did not mirror exactly what we know of their supposed Egyptian prototypes. This is both because of the many centuries that would have intervened between the hypothetical introduction of the system in the Bronze Age and its first description over a thousand years later and, even more important, because one would expect modification of Egyptian institutions in a Greek context" (italics added, BAWB: 366). In and of itself, that admission by Martin Bernal pretty much destroys his whole intellectual argument, which rests by his own confession upon such a vaporous foundation as "supposed Egyptian prototypes whose hypothetical introduction" into Bronze Age Greece was not noticed and first described for well "over a thousand years" and which any diffusionist—modified or radical—would expect to be inherently transformed by an alien cultural environment. Based upon the above quotation, one has to wonder if Bernal isn’t actually writing the sequel to the prophecies of Nostradamus! The same problem of cultural evolution over a millennium or more would apply to all of Greece. Central to his historical methodology, Bernal wants an infinite and consummate survival of all Egyptian intellectual artifacts once transferred to the ever-receptive Greeks, but even he cannot annul the omnipotent flow of time. Consider the following admission:

In any event, the survival of a social system as delicate as chattel slavery, after the twelfth-century destruction of the palaces and three hundred to four hundred years of ‘Dark Ages,’ is almost impossible (BAWB: 352). There are many other intellectual/cultural arrangements which Bernal believes were transplanted to Greece, e.g., political philosophy, religion, magic, courts, etc. (BAWB: 32, 365, 370), and we have to wonder that if they apparently did not survive intact, perhaps they all had never actually been in the Egyptian basket of goodies for Greek distribution.

In his systematic effort to deny any cultural and intellectual creativity unique to the Greeks, Bernal leaves no denigration unturned. Contrary to long-standing belief, the Greeks did not invent democracy. The Phoenician city-states in the late 7th and 6th centuries experimented with a wide political repertoire: monarchy/tyranny, aristocracy/plutocracy, and democracy/ochlocracy, with Phoenicia as the earlier genesis of the democratic form of government (BAWB: 346). Once again, in Bernal’s litany of cultural development, those dull-witted Greeks, wandering somnambulistically around their barren cultural landscape, could only follow where other cultures led. Egypt could not provide a feasible model for the minuscule Greek city (with the possible exception of Sparta). As the Greek poleis were small, with limited land base, they often emphasized manufacture and commerce. Phoenician—rather than Egyptian—political-economic models were, therefore, much more appropriate for them (BAWB: 346). A few comments are in order: First, Bernal’s Marxist inheritance is certainly economic, while surely class, religion, race, nationality, and conquest are psychological motivations. Second, we have serious reservations that Sparta’s socio-agricultural resources were all that much different from those available to the other Greek city-states. Third, perhaps Bernal didn’t notice it because the idea is so inconspicuous, but he covertly admitted that a democratic form of government did not exist in pharaonic Egypt, so therefore Egypt could never have been a model for any democracy in Greece!

If Egyptian institutions, language, and thought were adopted and adapted in Mycenaean Greece, could any of them have been transmitted through the Dark Ages to the Archaic Period? (BAWB: 361) Bernal, of course, answered in the affirmative, with one example of religious export being the use of scales in the weighing of the heart of the deceased against in the feather of maat in chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead being transferred to the Homeric Greeks at Troy for the divine weighing of the outcome of battles between Greeks and Trojans and between Hector and Achilles.¹⁰ Regarding the discovery of weights and scales, George Sarton awarded the palm to Sumerians¹¹ and not to the Egyptians. It would seem logical that as a geographical degree of urbanization infused the Near East, the utilitarian value of something like weights and scales would invite their repeated invention and introduction across the region as the natural adjuncts of even primitive business exchange, especially in barter economies. For the moment, let’s agree with Bernal that scales as mundane physical objects did find their way to Egypt, Mycenae, and Homeric Greece. Their mythic uses by the Osirian Egyptians and the Homeric Greeks well illustrates the spiritual differences between the two cultures. With the Egyptians, it was the overpowering theme of death and the Afterlife. With the Greeks, it was the equally pervasive grand questions of human life. The Egyptians are infused with death, while in the Greek myth, the latter are elevated by the towering challenges of human existence. The cultural antithesis is exhibited in the twin situations, that in the Osirian trial the scale never actually consigns the properly penitent soul to destruction, while with Homer, the scale makes the mythic decision between victory and defeat in this life.

Another confirmation of alleged Egyptian/Greek cultural flow is one of Bernal’s favorites, i.e., professed Egyptian loanwords in Greek (BAWB: 362-64), especially Egyptian words pertaining to government. Scattered throughout the two volumes of BA and BAWB are numerous references to supposed Egyptian loanwords in Greek (e.g., BA 2: 57, 79, 93), with wide-ranging estimates that the vocabulary of the latter was 40 percent or more imported from Egypt (BAWB: 122).

Our problem, nay question, here is obviously first to Bernal, but collaterally to non-Afrocentrist philologists. [Terminology note: Whatever the dictionaries may say, for our usage here, we prefer philology and philologist rather than linguistics and linguist, because to most Americans, the latter terms simply mean someone who is fluent in two or more foreign languages unknown to most of our citizens!]

We are writing this question simply as a puzzled layperson. How can Bernal be so certain of the actual pronunciation of ancient Egyptian words as they were supposedly spoken in 1000, 1500, 2500 B.C.E.? It is our understanding vis-à-vis Egyptian that Champollion and later philologists got what verbal pronunciations they could from the Copts, but that would have been early 19th century Coptic or at most 18th or 17th century Coptic as used in old church ritual and hymns. Coptic Egyptian was continued in colloquial usage until the Muslim conquest in 641/642 C.E., but gradually the success and pressure of Islamic religion and Muslim government would have largely replaced Coptic with Arabic, especially since it is a hallowed Muslim belief that Arabic is literally the language of Allah. Add 2000 to 2500 years to 642 C.E. and we have to suggest a massive evolution in Egyptian sound shifts.

Bernal made some important admissions in that regard: He was replying to a chapter in BAR (177-205) by Jay H. Jasanoff and Alan Nussbaum regarding his claimed Egyptian etymologies for countless Greek words: "In fact, because the difficulties of script, we have even less information about possible loans from Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic into Greek, which would have taken place in many different ways and over at least 1,500 years Thus the ‘irregularities’ or ‘lack of rigor’ in my proposals of which Jasanoff and Nussbaum complain are altogether to be expected" (italics added, BAWB: 113). Over 1500 years certainly seems to us like an ample opportunity for continuous language change, e.g., like English today in the U.K. and whatever was spoken there before 500 C.E. Couple the above admission with "In the period from 2100 to 1100—with which we are chiefly concerned—all three languages [Egyptian, Semitic, and Greek], and Egyptian in particular, went through radical sound shifts. Thus I argue that the same word or name could have been borrowed two or more times with very different results" (italics added, BA 1: 46). It would be our historical judgment that those radical sound changes in Egyptian, Semitic, and Greek continued after 1100 B.C.E., thus making the claimed exactitude for Bernal’s alleged Egyptian loanwords all the more tenuous. And isn’t Bernal faced with numerous uncertainties regarding the evidential basis for all of his far-reaching claims? And what about his further admission when dealing with Robert Palter’s criticism (BAR: 350), that he [Bernal] had not fully investigated the relevant history of classical historiography (BAWB: 170). "Naturally, in my case, the incompleteness has not been a deliberate strategy; it was the inevitable outcome of attempting to paint with a broad brush on a huge canvas" (italics added, BAWB: 170), which is simply a metaphoric way of admitting that the number of his claims has significantly outrun his research materials.

It is also generally acknowledged that Egyptian culture spread south to Nubia and Meroe. Wow! That’s about like saying that American culture has spread to Barbados! Another reductio ad absurdum is Bernal’s claim that Few doubt that Egyptian influences on Archaic and Classical Greek sculpture were substantial (BAWB: 32). Has Bernal ever bothered really to examine both the Egyptian and the Greek artistic products? We have never found any such comparison in any of his books. Perhaps Bernal makes his comparisons between Egypt and Greece based solely upon unilateral and cryptic epiphanies issuing from that hidden corpus of secret wisdom still enshrouded in the dusty ruins of the Nilotic temples! He does manifest an ingrained pettiness regarding Greece that borders on hatred. He affirmed in BA (1: 73) and BARB (383) that the political purpose of Black Athena is, of course, to lessen European arrogance. [Or is his whole cultural crusade against everything European designed to obviate his own feelings of inadequacy?] What will it take for us to put paid to that arrogance? Must we submit to mass self-immolation or will we earn expiation by an unconditional admission that all of the numerous facets of Western technological civilizations are of ancient Egyptian inspiration? The second course of action would buy us the luxury of being able to lay the blame for all the of the current environmental pollution upon those genius Egyptian priests, whom Bernal loves so much, because when they encapsulated all of the knowledge of the universe in those ever-so-brief cultic cosmologies, they forgot to include the recipes for a tidy culmination!

Let us soon bring this particular excursion to a close. It has been our contention that whatever Bernal may claim regarding his intellectual interest in Egypt and Phoenicia vis-à-vis Greece (BAWB: 16), his inherent tendency is to favor Egypt. In both volumes of BA the Phoenicians were always the minor companions of those ever-instructive Egyptians. The great periods of Egyptian tutelage of the Greeks were c. 3300-2000 B.C.E. and c. 1700-1200 B.C.E. The only substantial suggestions of direct suzerainty come in the latter [period]. In Hellenistic and Roman times, writers like Theophrastos, Pliny and Plutarch frequently drew parallels between the shores of the Nile and those of the Kopais [in Greece] (BA 2: 78-79). To which he added in BAWB (302) that in the century 625-525 B.C.E., the Egyptians had the far greater cultural influence on Greece both directly and indirectly. Furthermore, abundant Greek testimony specifies Egypt, rather than Mesopotamia as the source of religion, justice and knowledge (BAWB: 32).

All in all, we don’t think that any of Bernal’s Afrocentrist allies really need to worry about any real defection from their cause. Some of Ivan Van Sertima’s co-ideologists are unhappy that Bernal does not see the population of Ancient Egypt as being 110 percent negroid.¹² We noticed, by way of extenuation, that in BAWB Bernal kept using "African Egypt, and it would seem logical to us that enough repetition of African" could easily transform it for Bernal from a geographical to a racial term.

7.

Since it is our hope that Bernal will read a copy of White Athena, we are certain that with his usual thoroughness—we can only marvel at his metabolism—that he will pick its bones clean and thereby register all of its factual and typographical errors for our instruction and rectification. We thank him in advance for his effort, as it will mean that if there is a second edition, we won’t have to hire any proofreader to correct that new copy. But since a quid pro quo is only fair, we have to ask him about his unanswered errors, problems, and weaknesses.

Since first reading volume 1 of Black Athena, we have been waiting patiently for Martin Bernal to answer two monumentally important questions which are at the core of his Egypt/Greece hypothesis. It will be readily apparent to the Reader that we have already hinted at various aspects of these two queries.

First, Bernal announced in BA 1 (117-119) that it was widely believed in the Greco-Roman intellectual world—and that he wholly subscribed as well—that the Egyptian priests had elaborated a two-fold philosophy. Basing his initial thesis upon the content of Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris, Bernal stated that "Plutarch spelled out in detail the general image of Egyptian religion that appears to have been common among cultivated Greeks, at least since the 4th century B.C. According to this, the zoolatry and apparent superstition of Egyptian religion were merely an allegorical veneer for the masses: the priests and/or those who had been initiated, knew that in reality the zoolatry and fantastic myths concealed deep abstractions and a profound understanding of the universe…Egypt’s religious philosophy was principally concerned not with the ephemeral, material world of ‘becoming’ with its growth and decay, but with the immortal realm of ‘being’ which was especially manifested in numbers, geometry and astronomy" (italics added, BA 1: 117-118). [Bernal has expressed great admirations for the real or imagined level of mathematical ability displayed by the Egyptian scribes in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (RMP) and the Moscow Mathematic Papyrus (MMP) (Isis, December 1992, pp. 596-607). Call us unregenerate Platonists, but given the practical origins of ancient mathematics in Egypt and elsewhere, plus the fact that what little genuine astronomy the Egyptians had developed was purely concerned with physical phenomena, we fail to see how rudimentary numbers, geometry, and astronomy could have been any cosmological keys to the universal nature of Being. Being is boundless and beyond material calculation.]

After his declaration above, Bernal then added his clincher, that such superbly intelligent men as Eudoxus had bonded with the Egyptians while visiting there, and had lived with the priests and learnt Egyptian, and clearly had a great respect and enthusiasm for Egyptian culture, and thus was privy to the intellectual operation of the two-fold philosophy (BA 1: 118). Eudoxus was thus too intelligent to be duped by the Egyptians. The fact that Eudoxus may have been superbly intelligent and blessed with a great respect and enthusiasm for Egyptian culture are not guarantees that the cultic priests had developed any advanced forms of mathematics, science, and philosophy.

Bernal evidences a very questionable methodology for proving his claims that the Greeks borrowed, plagiarized, stole or his most recent term, appropriated (BAWB: 393), Egyptian religion, philosophy, and science. In essence, it is little different from George James’s allegation (SL: 10) that the secret wisdom of ancient Egypt was encompassed in whatever the Greek philosophers had written and published as their own creative effort. In a very real sense, Bernal is our reliable resource-person, because he is thorough and he has a vested interest in citing any and all ancient writers who seem to support his claim for an Egyptian two-fold philosophy in volume 1 of BA. As we said above, it was Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris and on what did an essayist like Plutarch (c. 46 to 119 C.E.) base his Egyptian assertions? It was a combination of the latter’s personal opinion and that of cultivated Greeks and what everyone knew about Egypt. Given Plutarch’s stellar role among Bernal’s prized ancient authors vis-à-vis the supposed two-fold philosophy of the priests, it is instructive that the latter built so much of his intellectual edifice upon claims grounded upon ephemeral public opinion and gossip—even if cultivated, combined with his strenuous effort to excuse Plutarch’s severe disparagement of Herodotus’s veracity (BA 1: 112-114). Bernal made an interesting admission: Plutarch went on to give details of cultic similarities between Egyptian and Delphic cults (BA 1: 119). If Egyptian religion had all of that sophisticated, secret knowledge proclaimed by Bernal, George James, and other Afrocentrists, the fact there were so many cultic similarities with Greek anthropomorphic polytheism certainly questions Plutarch’s credibility and exhibits Bernal’s gullibility.

In his article in Isis, 1992¹³ Bernal relied on Giorgio de Santillana’s exposition of the alleged triumphs of the Greek scientist, Eudoxus of Cnidus, during his visit to the Egyptian priests after 378 B.C.E., where he supposedly spent many years [in BA 1: 108 Bernal remembered that the general estimate is sixteen months], learned Egyptian and made translations, "some of which may well have come from the Book of the Dead, into Greek" (italics added, Isis: 603). Bernal agreed with de Santillana’s conclusion, that Eudoxus "believed that they contained esoteric astronomical information. This raises the important suggestion that Egyptian religious and mystical writings and drawings may well contain esoteric mathematical and astronomical wisdom" (italics added). The Reader will notice that for all of the dogmatic certainty of Plutarch, Bernal, and de Santillana, for all of the hints and promises of hidden knowledge imminently to be revealed, neither Martin Bernal nor any of his other chimerists have as yet ever made public any of that vaunted, but unexplained, knowledge. We wait patiently—and excitedly—for the no-longer-secret documents to see the light of day, hoping that those esoteric translations arrive before the anticipated visit of the Grim Reaper!

George Sarton considered Eudoxus to be the greatest mathematician and astronomer of his age, with his well-deserved mathematical fame [resting] on three grounds—his general theory of proportion, the golden section, and the method of exhaustion… The fame of Eudoxus rests upon his invention and development of the theory of homocentric spheres, thanks to which he must be considered the founder of scientific astronomy and one of the greatest astronomers of all ages… In order to explain the motions of all the celestial bodies, Eudoxus was forced to postulate the existence of no fewer than 27 concentric spheres, each of which turned around a definite axis with a definite speed. The boldness of that conception is staggering. It was the first attempt to explain astronomic phenomena in mathematical terms.¹⁴

Volume 1 of Sarton’s A History of Science, entitled Ancient Science through the Golden Age of Greece, was published in 1952. Giorgio de Santillana would have had ten years to read it and to incorporate its data into his chapter in a science anthology.¹⁵ Volume 1 of BA was published in 1987. The attention of the Reader is directed to the fact that de Santillana and Bernal therefore had ample opportunity to learn of the great mathematical and astronomical exploits of Eudoxus, and for ideological reasons to claim that he had learned it all from the Egyptian priests, yet for all of our efforts we can find no allegations to that effect. In our years of reading for this book, we have found absolutely nothing in the original Egyptian sources which even remotely sounds like Eudoxus’s accomplishments.

Well, it’s high time that Bernal finally bestirs himself and tells his Readers how and when either he or his co-ideologists are going to decode that alleged cornucopia of Egyptian erudition, and then begin telling us what it says, so that his scholarly peers—does Bernal admit that he has any scholarly peers?—can evaluate just how supposedly earth-shaking it is! We’re not satisfied with being told a zillion times about five loanwords here, a tomb painting there, or lapis lazuli scarabs some place else! Either there is all of that mountain of superlative wisdom or else Bernal has just been living in fantasyland for all of these years and deceiving his Readers in the process! If he somehow tries to come up with some obscure gobbledygook, we’ll bet that it’s all still simplistic religious prayers and magic spells—and not any revelation of the secrets of the universe—except to a small cadre of like-minded dreamers.

There is a curious ancillary question here. We have listed Bernal’s sympathy for the Afrocentrist position and—according to our lights—his pervasive commitment to its ideological tenets. In his treatment of Plutarch, Egyptian religion, and its alleged two-fold philosophy, the vulgar level contained zoolatry and superstition for the consumption of the masses, while the former was merely an allegorical veneer that concealed deep abstractions and a profound understanding of the universe (BA 1: 117). Several prominent Afrocentrists, including George James (SL: 139-151), Cheikh Diop,¹⁶ and Yosef A.A. ben-Jochannan,¹⁷ argue that several of the ancient Egyptian religious cosmologies in their now available publically-stated forms contain the secret knowledge which informs the Egyptian Mystery System. We examined George James’s interpretation of the Memphite Theology at length in volume 1 of WA. With the exception of Akhenaten’s divisive adoration of Atenism, the Egyptian cosmologies, particularly the Memphite, Hermopolitan, and Heliopolitan compositions, all routinely emphasize that a senior creator god formed or initiated all of the anthropomorphic lesser gods and goddesses, who at their level of involvement in human affairs produced that zoolatry, fanciful myths, and rampant superstition which, according to Plutarch and Bernal, are all characteristic of the vulgar version of the two-fold philosophy. For the Reader’s instruction, Leonard H. Lesko’s chapter, Ancient Egyptian Cosmogonies and Cosmology, in Byron E. Shafer (ed.), Religion in Ancient Egypt¹⁸ contains nice, concise statements of the Egyptian cosmologies. James, Diop, and ben-Jochannan claim that the special secret wisdom is there for all to read. Bernal believes that it is somewhere in Egypt’s religious philosophy waiting to be decoded. Some uncharitable souls might just be unkind enough to point out that the Afrocentrists on this point are entangled in a major ideological contradiction. We suggest that the interested Reader consult Lesko’s chapter and see if any of those interesting, but elementary, cosmologies actually seem to exude any mysterious wisdom.

The Reader will remember that it was Giorgio de Santillana’s view—obviously endorsed by Martin Bernal—that Eudoxus spent so many years or months in Egypt allegedly translating the Book of the Dead and possibly other Egyptian religious documents probably because he believed that they contained esoteric astronomical information (Isis: 603). Furthermore, Bernal has made it a cardinal point of his entire intellectual edifice that there exists abundant Greek testimony for Egypt as the source of religion, justice, and knowledge (BAWB: 32). Since Bernal is our dauntless resource-person, where in BA and BAWB does he literally quote Eudoxus or other contemporary Greek writers, where one or more of them has stated in his writing, in effect, Here is a translation of Egyptian religious documents and the highly sophisticated scientific, mathematical, or philosophical data they contain. All that the Reader ever gets in dubious generalizations that it was common knowledge among all, many, some, or a few cultivated Greeks that Egypt had to be the source of such knowledge (BA 1: 117). But where in his books are the verbatim quotations from Greek sources?

Erik Hornung is professor emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Basel and Bernal seems to respect his scholarship in that area (BAWB: 391). Hornung has published a very scholarly study (1999) of The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife. He considered the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts, and especially the Book of the Dead (BOD), and he defined its intellectual contents as follows: "Like the two earlier text corpora, the Book of the Dead primarily served the purposes of provisioning and protecting the deceased…it is not concerned with descriptions but rather with practical help and magical assistance for the hereafter"¹⁹ (italics added), followed by a listing of most of the magical spells therein. The mundane content of the BOD is exactly what other, albeit non-Afrocentrist, scholars have found in that text. Magic Spells! Not esoteric astronomical information! But perhaps we err here. Hornung stated that Spells 31-32 and 33-35 were directed against crocodiles and snakes in the hereafter. Surely, Martin Bernal can transmogrify those Spells into a complete exhaustive anticipation of Aristotle’s Historia Animalium!

BAWB (2001) is, of course, an extended defense of his historical, cultural, and philosophical claims made in BA and criticized in BAR (1996). Debating Black Athena is apparently not going to be published until sometime in 2008 or later, so for several years BAWB is Bernal’s primary rejoinder to his critics, thus we would have expected him to bring up his biggest intellectual guns.

He did include a quotation from a German-speaking writer who clearly supports Bernal’s Afrocentrist exegesis as it pertains to Greek and Egyptian philosophy. Given the author’s congratulatory support, Bernal presented the former’s arguments in curiously subdued fashion. First, the author and his essay did not receive Bernal’s usual adulatory commendation, e.g., an eminent classist, most distinguished specialist, or world-renown scholar. Second, the author is identified only as A. Löwstedt and his/her statement is unceremoniously relegated solely to the endnotes (BAWB: 456, n. 55), which is hardly Bernal’s usual treatment of his champions. Third, Löwstedt is not even described according to gender or nationality. German-speaking could mean Germany, Austria, or Switzerland. As the Reader will discover when we quote Löwstedt in full, it would be our professional judgment that only German male philosophers have demonstrated such an affinity for abstruse, prolix exposition. Here is Löwstedt’s premier confirmation of Bernal’s views on Egyptian/Greek philosophy:

The Greeks never brought together regress and progress (reversible development), they never formulated evolutionary ethics (like the Egyptian anti-selectionist one), they never conceived of an epistemology like the Shabaka (and Kantian) ones (beyond empiricism and rationalism), they never made tolerance and solidarity a part of the foundations of philosophy and they never conceived an ontological or semantic primacy of relations.²⁰

This quotation should tell us some interesting things about both Löwstedt and Bernal.

• Being all written in German makes peer-review by English-speakers rather difficult.

• The fact that the source of Löwstedt’s quotation is a privately circulated paper suggests that it may be very short.

• The fact that it was privately circulated hints that the author may not have been able to secure acceptance by either a book or journal publisher.

• It is curious that given Löwstedt’s claims, the contents of his 1998 monograph certainly warranted eight or ten pages in BAWB, and since it was available in 1998 and BAWB was published in 2001, there should have been time to include such a selection.

• On the page in the text (BAWB: 390), where Bernal made his only mention of Löwstedt’s name, he does not state that an excerpt from him will appear in Debating Black Athena (DBA). An unidentified Professor Flory’s chapter in DBA is supposed to be covering the questions posed by Löwstedt.

• At least in the citation from Löwstedt, the latter employs a methodology of evasion often used by Martin Bernal. Löwstedt is just chockfull of one-way declarative sentences about the alleged deficiencies of Greek philosophy, e.g., the Greeks never brought together regress and progress (reversible development).

• The Reader is given no information regarding the Egyptian documents Löwstedt supposedly consulted. If his parade of claims is based upon the Egyptian cosmologies and/or the funerary texts, then we would suggest that, like beauty, Egyptian philosophy is exclusively in the eye of the beholder!

• Löwstedt proclaimed that the Greeks never conceived of an epistemology like the Shabaka (and Kantian) ones (beyond empiricism and rationalism). Why he mentioned Kantianism in this context is unknown, save, perhaps, like Bernal, to parade his alleged erudition. Having suffered and survived but once—and once was enough in this lifetime—the procrustean bed of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, we can affirm that we never found anything as convoluted in Greek philosophy, but we would account that a blessing for the latter. [That trial certainly inoculated this victim against the dread malady of epistemology!] Contrary to Löwstedt, no mere spectator can be sure that the magnificent rational sensitivity and expansiveness of the Platonic Guardians could not have experienced the elaborate Kantian categories of ontological organization.

• How one can entertain an epistemology that is beyond both empiricism and rationalism is a mystery totally enveloped in mythology and not likely to be either contrived or resolved by any corps of traditionalistic Egyptian priests.

• Shabaka text is simply an ancillary name for the Memphite Theology (MT), which we discussed at some length in volume 1 of WA. In the translation by Miriam Lichtheim,²¹ there is a detailed statement of the Ptahite creation myth. Search as we might, no epistemology leaps out from those pages. Ptah does use words to create the subordinate gods and goddesses and all inferior beings and things. The text does say, although the meaning varies with the translation, that there is the teaching that Ptah is in every body and in every mouth of all gods, all men, all cattle, all creeping things, whatever lives, thinking whatever he wishes and commanding whatever he wishes. [For a more elaborate analysis of this passage, see pages 371-374 in WA 1]

The above is a statement—maybe—of cosmological determinism, but not of an epistemology. Does Löwstedt understand that the term epistemology is not associated with any empirical knowledge of the physical world supposedly received by any god? Such an information process would be simply an innate and unilateral attribute of the deity. Common to the many philosophical definitions of epistemology is the central notion that real and imagined cogitations of external phenomena are limited to receptive human minds. There is no explication in the MT of any view or theory of individual persons experiencing any reciprocal observation and communication of ideas, which would be the paramount charge of any genuine epistemology.

8.

Second, this question is as vital as the first, i.e., would he finally recognize the obvious greatness and cultural creativity of the Classical Greeks? All of their cultural, artistic, and intellectual products did not come with a MADE IN EGYPT label on the back. The conspicuous intensity of Bernal’s drumfire attack on every aspect of Greek culture, society, language, and history, even down to the trivial, begins to