INVENTING ANCIENT GREECE

Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth

as History. By Mary Lefkowitz. New York: Basic Books, 1996, Pp. xvii, 222.
Black Athena Revisited. Edited by Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean
Rogers. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press,
1996, Pp. xxi, 522.

What the two books under review have in common is that both are responses
to the question: to what extent was classical Greek culture influenced by, or,
in a more extreme formulation, derivative of, the cultures of ancient Africa,
above all that of Egypt? In itself, this is the kind of academic controversy that
may excite the passion and venom of scholars but which does not ordinarily
reach the pages of the popular press. The issue is charged, however, insofar as
Africa, including Egypt, is taken as a timeless representative of black culture.
Minimization of the African or Egyptian contribution to classical Greek civili-
zation is thus liable to be construed as a sign of racism and as part of a continuing
effort to mask the cultural achievements of black people, thereby depriving
them of a heritage that is rightfully theirs.
The intersection of scholarly and political agendas that the problem of Greek
origins inspires is starkly manifested in the different focus of the two books.
Mary Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa is directed at the so-called Afrocentrist
movement, some of whose more extreme proponents have advanced dubious
claims about black history and defended them as points of faith, such as the
thesis that Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt, was black (the evidence for this
view is thin almost to the vanishing point), or that “Aristotle robbed the library
of Alexandria” (see Not Out of Africa, 2), which, as Lefkowitz rightly notes,
was constructed after Aristotle’s death. Errors of this sort are readily contro-
verted, as Lefkowitz does in her book by marshalling scholarly evidence and
appealing to methods of proof enshrined within the discipline of classical phi-
lology.
Correcting popular or learned misapprehensions, however, is not Lefkowitz’s
main object in Not Out of Africa. Rather, she is concerned about the resistance
to traditional criteria of historical truth that she has encountered among Afro-
centrists and their sympathizers, who, she observes, at times defend their views
by lambasting critics as racist rather than by engaging in an impartial analysis
of documents. Worse still, Lefkowitz reports, her colleagues in the university
262 DAVID KONSTAN

seem prone to take a laissez-faire attitude toward ethnically interested versions

of history, either by taking the critique of positivist historiography to the ex-
treme point of denying that any version of the past is superior to any other,
or by affirming that history may appropriately serve purposes other than that
of simply getting the facts right. For example, history may help to endow a
people with pride, the more so if they have been systematically maligned and
stigmatized as inferior and have lost or been stripped of much of their own
cultural record. In reply to such skeptical or sentimental attitudes to historiog-
raphy, Lefkowitz insists that what is lost in objectivity outweighs any gains in
cultural pride that black students at Wellesley College (where she teaches) may
derive from inspiring fictions about their history: “Good as the myths they were
hearing may have made these students feel . . . , they were being systematically
deprived of the most important features of a university education. They were not
learning 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” (3).
Black Athena Revisited, a collection of papers edited by Lefkowitz and Guy
MacLean Rogers (to whom Not Out of Africa is dedicated), is addressed, as
the title indicates, to the two volumes of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena that
have appeared so far. In these studies, Bernal has argued that the influence
of Egyptian (and also Phoenician) civilizations on Greece during the second
millennium B.C. was in fact much greater than most scholars have allowed. On
the basis of a variety of kinds of evidence, including archaeology, linguistics,
and the Greeks’ own myths and traditions, which speak, for example, of the
Phoenician Cadmus as a founder of the Greek city of Thebes, and of an Egyp-
tian presence in Argos (Danaus and his daughters), Bernal argues that Egyp-
tians and Phoenicians colonized and occupied a substantial part of Greece and
had a massive impact on Greek vocabulary and institutions. Inasmuch as he
conceives of himself as recovering the truths encoded in the Greeks’ own leg-
ends, Bernal calls his hypothesis the “Revised Ancient Model.” The contrary
thesis, which holds that ancient Greek civilization was largely independent of
its Middle Eastern and North African neighbors, flourished in the nineteenth
century, having been in part encouraged by the discovery of the relatedness
of the Indo-European languages and their distinctness from the Semitic and
Hamitic families (though whether the two lines are entirely unrelated is still
debated). However, the real impetus behind theories of the autonomy of Greek
civilization in relation to its immediate neighbors, Bernal argues (especially in
volume one of Black Athena), lay in the racist and imperialist context in which
modern philology arose: scholars implicitly viewed Semitic and African peoples
as inferior and were not prepared to recognize their crucial contribution to the
roots of European civilization. Bernal provocatively dubs the isolationist thesis
of Greek cultural origins the “Aryan Model.”
Bernal himself is an outsider to the profession of classics, since his training
is in East Asian political history, and one might have expected that guardians
of the discipline’s integrity would have closed ranks against the sweeping charges
 INVENTING ANCIENT GREECE 263
of racism and European chauvinism that he has laid against major practitioners
in the field. Nevertheless, and in spite of a certain superficiality or tenden-
tiousness in Bernal’s history of philology, in which he ignores a good many
scholars who have frankly acknowledged Greece’s debt to its neighbors, classi-
cists as a whole (including those represented in Black Athena Revisited) have
welcomed Bernal’s forceful critique of the profession’s implicit prejudices and
its already palpable effect on the way the classics are taught and studied.1 Where
scholars have been more critical, though by no means unanimously so, is in
regard to Bernal’s substantive theses concerning the origins of Greek culture
(the essays in Black Athena Revisited offer a broad sample of such responses).
In the first place, Bernal’s historical methods have been faulted, in particular
his linguistic arguments (his criteria for recognizing borrowings are looser than
those required by current practices) and the confidence he places in classical
myths, although in fact only one strand of Greek foundation stories points to
a massive foreign element in the origin of Greek cities, whereas a complemen-
tary set of foundation legends emphasizes Greek autochthony. A second and
related objection involves Bernal’s assessment of the magnitude of Egyptian
and Near Eastern influences on Greek culture. A third criticism concerns Ber-
nal’s explanation of the oriental and Egyptian impact on Greece, which Bernal
insists must be due to direct occupation rather than other mechanisms of cul-
tural diffusion such as trade, travel, and sporadic settlement. Finally, whatever
the size and nature of extrinsic, and specifically Egyptian, influences on classical
Greece, Bernal’s critics have denied that they have anything to do with the
history of black peoples, on the grounds that ancient Egyptians cannot plausibly
be identified with those populations which today are recognized and recognize
themselves as blacks. Indeed, the attempt to separate out a specifically black
cultural identity in antiquity has been seen as reflecting nineteenth-century
assumptions about race such as those attacked by Bernal in his critique of the
founders of classical philology.
It is true that Afrocentrist writers have drawn some encouragement from
Bernal’s work, at least in respect to the role played by Egypt (they have not
revealed an equal interest in evidence for Semitic influences on Greek culture),
and Bernal, in turn, has self-consciously emphasized the relevance of his views
to black history, although he naturally rejects extravagant claims such as Aris-
totle’s plagiarism of Egyptian texts housed in the as yet unbuilt library of Alexan-
dria (on Cleopatra’s color he is prepared to withhold judgment). In one respect,
however, Bernal’s argument contradicts the Afrocentrist premise that whites
have deliberately appropriated a legacy that in fact belongs to blacks, or at all
events Egyptians. For, as has been noted, one of Bernal’s key theses is that the
Greeks themselves celebrated their foreign origins, and saw them as augmenting
the prestige of their own culture.

1. For a sympathetic and intelligent appraisal, with full bibliography, see Molly Myerowitz
Levine, “Bernal and the Athenians in the Multicultural World of the Ancient Mediterranean,” in
Classical Studies in Honor of David Sohlberg, ed. Ranon Katzoff et al. (Ramat Gan, 1996), 1–56.
264 DAVID KONSTAN

Whatever the truth may be concerning Near Eastern and Egyptian influence
on the formation of Greek civilization, the controversy between Bernal and
his critics (which continued by way of e-mail lists and public debates) raises
significant historiographical questions, above all in regard to the uses of his-
tory. 2 In this connection, many writers, including Lefkowitz, have observed that
claims for the black origins of classical Greek culture (whatever is meant by
“black”) betray a tacit acceptance of Greek cultural superiority and a failure
to appreciate the achievements of Egyptian or other ancient civilizations in
their own right. The thesis of a “stolen legacy” is thus in danger of backfiring.
To be sure, evidence of past glories, whether indigenous or transmitted by way
of Greece, will give the lie to racist suppositions about the inherent inferiority
of blacks, provided that one accepts the assumption of racial continuity between
ancient and modern populations (as racists themselves are prone to do). But
this kind of argument too can prove to be insufficient as a basis for cultural
self-esteem, as the complex experience of modern Greece’s own relation with
the heritage of the classical world shows. A high regard for ancient Hellenism
has not automatically implied respect for its presumed descendants.3
No doubt, a myth of past achievements may under certain circumstances
mobilize the energies of a people. Leaving contemporary analogies aside, there
is an intriguing illustration of the phenomenon in Aristophanes’ comedy, The
Birds (produced in 414 B.C.). Two Athenians, Peisthetaerus and Euelpides,
are depicted as abandoning their city in search of a place to live that will be
free of lawsuits and internal conflict. When they arrive in the country of the
birds, Peisthetaerus suddenly perceives that, in place of their idle, aimless lives,
these creatures are in a position to acquire power over mortals and the gods
themselves. The reason is their strategic location, since by controlling the air-
ways the birds can impose an embargo on the passage of sacrificial odors and
starve the Olympian gods into submission. The problem, however, is to moti-
vate the birds, who have hitherto been content with their simple way of life, to
take the measures necessary to assert their authority, which include building a
wall around what they have just been made to realize is their territory and
submitting to a monarchical state apparatus.
Peisthetaerus’ solution is to invent a mythic history, according to which the
birds once were lords of the universe, before the Olympian deities usurped their
power: “obviously,” says Peisthetaerus, “if you birds existed before the Earth
and before the gods, the sovereignty belongs rightly to you.” The evidence
adduced for this proposition is comical, for example the gods’ traditional avian
emblems (Zeus’ eagle, Athena’s owl), and the fact that people rise obediently
to the cock’s crow every morning. But the birds are electrified by Peisthetaerus’
version of their past: “Hard, friends, hard is the tale that he has told us; how

2. Metahistorical issues involving the recoverability of the past are less germane to this debate,
since all parties affirm the facticity or at least the plausibility of their reconstructions.
3. See, for example, Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing
National Literature (Minneapolis, 1991).
 INVENTING ANCIENT GREECE 265
I weep for the folly of our fathers! Oh, what a crime to cast away a kingdom!
Thank you, sir, for coming here to save us. Life henceforth will hardly be worth
living if we can’t regain our former glory.” 4 The birds proceed to recite a new
theogony according to which Eros sprang from a primal egg and the birds were
hatched before the earth existed.
Aristophanes has brilliantly captured the way an image of bygone splendor
can be made to induce a passion for power and a renewed sense of collective
purpose, and also the extent to which such myths are susceptible to demagogic
manipulation (it is a human Athenian who ends up being king in the birds’ new
polity). Needless to say, Aristophanic farce is a dubious model for practical
politics, but the play cannily suggests that the question of whether or not an
account of a people’s history is factual may be beside the point (traditional
Greek theogonies are, after all, no more accurate than that invented by the
birds), and calls attention to the more fundamental issue of the role of narrative
as such—with whatever mixture of truth and fiction—in constituting national
identity.
In Not Out of Africa, Lefkowitz herself slips casually at times from the
question of truth to that of value. As part of her case against the idea of a
“stolen legacy,” 5 Lefkowitz remarks that “there is simply no reason to deprive
the Greeks of the credit for their own achievements” (7). In her view, “it does
matter to all of us whether or not Aristotle stole his philosophy from Egypt
. . . because, if Aristotle had done such a thing, we should give the ancient
Egyptians, rather than the ancient Greeks, credit for the development of concep-
tual vocabulary and formal argument” (6). Leaving aside the issue of whether
the ancient Egyptians did not in fact have a conceptual vocabulary (Lefkowitz
speaks with alarming glibness in this connection of “the ability of the Greek
language to express impersonal abstractions” [124], as though ancient Egyptian
were incompatible with abstract thought), one may wonder why it should matter
to anyone whether the Greeks do or do not receive “credit” for this achievement.
Later, Lefkowitz is more specific: “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” (126; cf. 168). The ancient Greeks will
not, one supposes, take undue umbrage at the slight, but the idea that modern
Greeks have a right to claim the cultural heritage of the classical period is not
an innocent one. By what right is this heritage theirs, rather than that of all
humankind? Does it depend on racial or linguistic continuity, or on continuous
occupation of the same piece of land? Apart from the vast theoretical problems
attaching to definitions of ethnic identity that are too smoothly glossed over in
Lefkowitz’s book, it is worth recalling that claims to cultural continuity with
the classical past have served specific and generally conservative purposes in

4. Translated by David Barrett, in Aristophanes: The Knights and Other Plays, transl. Alan
H. Sommerstein and David Barrett (Harmondsworth, 1978), 171–173.
5. The term derives from George G. M. James, Stolen Legacy (New York, 1954), a book that
has had a considerable influence on Afrocentrist thinkers.
266 DAVID KONSTAN

modern Greek ideology, eclipsing, as they do, both the contributions of the
Byzantine epoch and, more importantly, the role of Turkish, Balkan, and Ar-
abic elements in the construction of modern Greek culture.
An attack on Afrocentrist claims to precedence and originality that is cast
in terms of who gets “credit” for past achievements reflects the supposition,
central to arguments that defend the role of history in inspiring national pride,
that a people gains a kind of cultural capital on the basis of the presumed
accomplishments of their ancestors. Legacies are subject to be stolen only if
they are imagined to have worth, and Lefkowitz’s talk of credit suggests that
she views the classical Greek inheritance as having intrinsic value. On such an
account, modern Greeks stand to lose something if it becomes widely ac-
cepted—irrespective of the truth of the matter—that Socrates was in fact black
(as some Afrocentrists have asserted), or that black peoples, understood as
being distinct from Greeks, invented democracy, philosophy, science, and his-
tory, along with slavery. What Greeks lost, blacks would, presumably, gain,
and who is to say that the exchange was not worth the candle? The argument
that the falsification of history robs peoples of their rightful heritage is thus a
poor means of opposing a utilitarian or political conception of historiography
as, among other things, a means of fostering national consciousness.
Besides the doubtful strategy of defending historical objectivity on the
grounds that it gives peoples and nations their due, which blithely ignores the
problem of what constitutes ethnicity and ethnic continuity, Lefkowitz adum-
brates another reason why an indifference to the truth or falsity of historical
claims should matter to all of us: “most of us,” she writes, “are just beginning
to emerge from the fog far enough to see where history-without-facts can lead
us, which is right back to fictive history of the kind developed to serve the Third
Reich. It is not coincidental that ours is the era not just of Holocaust denial
but of denial that the ancient Greeks were ancient Greeks and creators of their
own intellectual heritage” (50). The suggestion is that a loss of faith in historical
verifiability or objectivity has opened the way to admitting as historical any
narrative whatever, including those that have been constructed retrospectively
to legitimize or at all events minimize the Nazi genocide, as well as the appropri-
ation by blacks of ancient Greek cultural achievements.
Now, it is facile but wrong to associate modernist doubts about the status
of facts in history with the denial of the Holocaust: those who deny or affirm
the Holocaust, like those who defend or challenge ancient Greek cultural de-
pendency on Egyptian or Near Eastern influences, are committed precisely to
the truth of their theses. Besides, cultural myths, like that of the uniqueness of
classical Greek culture and its continuity with modern European democracies,
inevitably involve particular emphases and selection of data, however much
they may be buttressed by approved methods of documentary analysis. But
the ethical import of Lefkowitz’s comment lies, I think, elsewhere. People who
are committed to facts are presumed to be willing and able to accept evidence
that runs counter to their own ethnic or national values. The defense of historical
 INVENTING ANCIENT GREECE 267
objectivity is thus perceived as fundamental to a general stance of epistemic
tolerance, a willingness to suspend passionate ethnocentrism in the service of
the truth.
As an academic historian myself, I am professionally sympathetic to Lefkow-
itz’s elevation of historical rigor to the status of a moral principle, although it
seems to me that a general attitude of skepticism would serve the cause of
social tolerance as well or indeed better. Those who are convinced that any
reconstruction of the past is necessarily faulty will entertain doubts about claims
to racial identity and continuity, and may be less inclined to exploit the results
of historical research for the purpose of forging such beliefs. The sources of
Greek culture matter politically only if one accepts, like the birds in Aristoph-
anes’ comedy, that origins can be authenticated, and thus justify claims to power
or privilege.
The idea that populations have their several histories, which is congenial to
certain conceptions of multiculturalism, presupposes the continuity and inde-
pendence of national or ethnic identities even where they coexist in the space
of a single state, as in the case of the United States. One might have thought
that Bernal’s thesis, according to which Greek culture arose as a result of the
occupation of Greece by north African and west Asian peoples in the second
millennium B.C., would in principle run counter to the multicultural view, since
such a linguistic, territorial, and ethnic melange would have submerged indi-
vidual cultural contributions in a flux of interactions and the continual concoc-
tion of new cultural forms. Indeed, the fusion of particular or national traditions
in a single world narrative seems natural to the modern profession of history
in the context of a global economy and cultural integration on a world scale.
Historiography has not always been so inclusive in its ambitions. Even in the
great classical epoch of universal history, for example, the geographer Strabo,
a native of the town of Amasia (in present-day Turkey) who wrote during the
reign of the emperor Augustus, observed that “it would not be remarkable if
one geographer [khôrographos] were suitable for the Indians, another for
the Aethiopians, and still another for the Greeks and Romans” (1.1.16). Each
geographer, Strabo notes, is expected to provide a richer account of places that
are nearer and better known to his readers, and a less detailed account of more
distant regions.
In a more divided and embattled world, the Byzantine writer Theodoros
Metochites (1270–1332), who was an associate of the emperor Andronikos II
Palaiologos (1282–1328), wrote a short essay entitled “Brief Note that Every-
thing Concerning the Greeks has been Preserved for us in Memory and Writing,
Both the Greatest Things and those Worthy of a Passing Mention,” in which
he remarks:
it is naturally the Greeks who have remembered their own history, written it down and
honoured it, deeming it worthy to be recorded in full and handing it down to us who
are participants and successors to their race and speech. (2) But perhaps among other
268 DAVID KONSTAN

nations, in the same way as among us, the individual speeches of their predecessors
and ancestors have been thought worthy of honour and memory in their own writings,
have been handed down to their descendants and are laid out for ready use to their
descendants. (3) Actually, in the same way that their history is unknown to us because
the Greek historians did not concern themselves with their affairs, so perhaps our history
is unknown to them because their historians did not bother to concern themselves with
our affairs (93.1–3).6

Theodoros is not worried that evidence that lies buried in the traditions of
another people might compromise the continuity or autonomy of Greek his-
tory. For him, each culture has its own trajectory, and world history, if it were
conceivable, would be nothing more than the juxtaposition of the several partic-
ular traditions.
Ethnic essentialism seems incongruous with the project of historiography in
a postmodern world in which national and cultural boundaries are increasingly
crossed and redefined. However, universality does not in itself guarantee disin-
terestedness, and the ideal of integration, like separatism, has political implica-
tions. When the skeleton of an apparently Caucasian man washed up on the
bank of the Columbia River in Washington state and proved to be over nine
thousand years old, leaders of the Umatilla Indian tribe claimed that “the re-
mains belong to them because they are those of an ancestor.” 7 The tribe plans
to bury them without permitting further examination by scientists.
“This is a battle over who controls America’s past,” said Dr. Robson Bonnichsen, di-
rector of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Oregon State University.
“We have always used the term paleo-Indian to describe remains of this era. But this
may be the wrong term. Maybe some of these guys were really just paleo-American.” 8

Noting the possibility that American Indians may have a mixed ancestry, Dr.
James Chatters, who first studied the skeleton, remarked that he had seen in the
discovery “an opportunity to look at us as less separate.” 9 Being less separate,
however, threatens to deprive the Umatilla Indians of authority over burial
practices on their own lands.
Ethnic identity is neither an objective condition nor an arbitrary construct
that bears no relevance to contemporary circumstances. Rather, it is a concept
that is subject to continual negotiation, and as its contours shift the image of
the past is necessarily reconfigured. It may be, as Diana Fuss argues, that con-
structionism—the belief that forms of identity are socially rather than naturally
determined—inevitably entails “a fundamental dependency upon essen-
tialism.” 10 Historiography, accordingly, cannot describe the give and take

6. Theodoros Metochites, On Philosophic Irony and Greek History: Miscellanea 8 and 93,
transl. Panagiotis A. Agapitos; ed. and transl. Karin Hult and Ole L. Smith (Nicosia and Gothen-
burg, 1996), 39–41.
7. Timothy Egan, “Tribe Stops Study of Bones That Challenge History,” New York Times (30
September 1996), A12.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York and London,
1990), 4.
 INVENTING ANCIENT GREECE 269
among cultures without acknowledging, however provisionally, the stability of
cultural forms. Perhaps this in part explains why both Bernal and Lefkowitz,
in their argument over who is entitled to lay claim to the heritage of classical
culture, fall back on essentialist versions of ethnicity, despite the fact that each,
in different ways, advances a vision of history that looks to transcend ethnic
parochialism. Thus Bernal, though he defends cultural diffusionism, is nonethe-
less inclined to recognize the continuity of black history over five millennia,
while Lefkowitz, who adopts a posture of scientific distance from the fabrication
of national myths, nevertheless grants Greekness a life that is nearly as long.
Which side they come down on reflects their personal stances with respect to
the politics of culture in our time.

David Konstan
Brown University