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63 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not for the Timid, April 24, 2007
After having had enough caffeine to float a ship, I finished Mary Lefkowitz's "Not Out of Africa." The arguments of the book are compelling; it was the author writing like an academic that required shots for the attention span. Nevertheless, her scholarship and knowledge of ancient Egypt is obvious.
Her reason for writing the book was simple. She saw history being revised to enhance racial and cultural esteem by the introduction of fantastic and nonsensical theories that she enumerates in detail.
The revisionism taking place today follows an inductive pattern of thought. Egypt is in Africa; therefore it was a Nubian culture. Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt was obviously black because one of her parents probably conceived with a slave. "Proof" of her African heritage comes from a nineteenth century painting by a black artist depicting her as being black, and a description of her in William Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" where she is described as being "tawny brown."
Professor Lefkowitz correctly counters that Cleopatra was a Ptolemy, not Egyptian, a descendent from a Macedonian conqueror who ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great. William Shakespeare's description of her had nothing to do with her skin color, and that the Bard had never left England, let alone traveled to Egypt. (How would he have known?) She refutes the theory that Cleopatra was (likely) conceived by a slave.
She presents compelling arguments against the notion that the Greeks stole the alphabet and philosophy from Egypt pointing out the obvious evidence that both cultures had contrasts on every level. It is like the other theory that Plato stole the African philosophy and ideas from the library at Alexandria and then burned it to the ground, quite a feat since the library wasn't started until Plato was long in the tooth, and then took years to complete. Besides, how do you steal ideas and thought? Even if you do, don't more ideas simply return to those who thought of them in the first place?
Some charge Lefkowitz and her supporters with racism. This is an act of desperation that is tantamount to academic extortion. It is the same as saying that if you don't support the president, you are hurting our troops. Both challenges are nonsense. The good professor is not intimidated.
Warning: the book is not an easy read for those looking for lively narrative. This is very scholarly but academic, and may give new meaning to the word dry.
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200 of 226 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
ouch, December 4, 2001
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. -Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa One is torn by two competing emotions in reading Not Out of Africa. On the one hand, there's the visceral thrill of watching idiotic ideas get an old-fashioned butt-whipping. But, on the other hand, there's something poignant about the need of black scholars to claim the accomplishments of the Greeks and Egyptians as their own. It is very nearly painful to watch the ease with which Ms Lefkowitz disposes of the lunatic ideas that make up Afrocentrism, though she deserves great credit for taking them seriously enough to lay them out systematically, and demonstrating that they actually do have ancient sources, before annihilating them. Still, as you near the end of the book, the contest has been so uneven that it's natural to wonder if this bloodbath was really necessary. However, in her conclusion, Ms Lefkowitz makes the case for why it is necessary to utterly destroy Afrocentrism, and here she is equally persuasive. Her reasons are as follows : (1) By claiming European civilization as a product of Africans, Afrocentrism has the perverse effect of making blacks responsible for the culture which justified their enslavement and oppression for centuries. (2) By focussing solely on the achievements of the Egyptians, Afrocentrism fails to consider genuinely black African cultures, like that of Nubia. (3) By teaching black students that white Europeans stole their culture, Afrocentrism fosters racial animosity. (4) Afrocentrism is not only antihistorical it is also antiscientific--denying genetic, archaeological, linguistic, and other forms of data. (5) It wastes precious educational time; the time that students spend learning the lies of Afrocentrism is time that they are not spending learning the truth. And she closes with a very strong statement : 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. That's pretty bracing stuff, but it cuts to the quick : are we truly prepared to sacrifice our universities and our students on the altar of political correctness, self esteem, and multicultural hogwash? One would certainly hope not, and we can only thank Ms Lefkowitz for having the courage to take on the racially charged task of confronting these issues head on. She has done us all a great service. GRADE : A
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69 of 77 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Slam dunk for Lefkowitz., November 13, 2005
The Afrocentrist argument seems to proceed as follows:
Egypt was located in Africa, hence Egyptians were negroid.
Egypt exerted an enormous influence on Greece.
Greek accomplishments were "stolen" from Egypt, i.e. from Black Africa, and many famous Greeks were in fact black Africans, including Socrates and Cleopatra.
Therefore, (white) European civilization, built on that of Greece, actually stole the heritage of black Africa and claimed it for itself.
The argument is absurd, of course, for a great number of reasons. Firstly, Egypt had far more in common culturally with its Middle Eastern neighbors (which included Jews, Arabs, Midianites, Edomites, Nabateans, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Akkadians, Hittites, etc.) than with sub-Saharan Africa. Interestingly, the civilizations to the south of Egypt, Nubia and Ethiopia, could also be characterized as having greater ties with the Middle East than with sub-Saharan Africa. The ancient Egyptian language, and the descended Coptic language of the Coptic Christians in Egypt, was a Hamito-Semitic language (as is Ethiopic), rather than Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Congan, or Khoisan. A cursory glance at the Copts of Egypt (e.g. Bhoutros Bhoutros Ghali) will indicate that they are certainly not negroid. The art of the Egyptians depicts a people with large almond-shaped dark eyes, tan to reddish-tan skin (not black), and black hair. Some admixture with sub-Saharan Africans is undeniable, yet the Egyptian language was undeniably Hamito-Semitic and culture was Middle Eastern. And why is the race of the Egyptians so important, anyway?
The Egyptians certainly had an influence on the Greeks, as did other peoples. But to erroneously claim that the Greek religion, art, music, mathematics, science, philosophy, literature, and government all came from Egypt or from anywhere else, and with no evidence, is absurd. Egyptian mathematicians were capable of solving linear equations, for example, but not quadratic equations (as could the Babylonians), nor did they know of the binomial theorem (as did the Chinese). The Greeks, on the other hand, developed mathematics to the point of a rudimentary calculus, and were capable of measuring the radius of the Earth to within 1%. Greek philosophy or literature had no rival in its sophistication. To claim that Socrates, an ethnic Greek, or Cleopatra, also an ethnic Greek of the Hellenistic period, were black, is ridiculous.
This is not a racial thing. It is a matter of an ideology attempting to twist history and reality to conform to its theses. We saw it when Nazi Germany said that Slavs had stolen all the accomplishments of their cultures from the Germans, or that Jewish composers (like Mendelssohn) were cold and uncreative (and a lot worse things than that). Interestingly, we also saw it when Prussian racists claimed that the ancient Greeks were a largely blond people (so that they would be like the Germans), whereas Greek art (look at the amphorae) depicts a tan-skinned, dark eyed, black curly-haired people. This form of "scientific" racism is sick and dangerous, and I hope people will not be duped by it.
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