Was Greek Culture Stolen from Africa?

[Goswinus]

Was Greek Culture Stolen from Africa?
Modern Myth vs. Ancient History

by Mary Lefkowitz


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.

A point by point debunking of the alleged supposed debt of Greece to Egypt:
http://www.historyplace.com/pointsofview/not-out.htm

A debate and contention of debate over Afrocentrism. Requires Real Media to listen:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1010999

[Loki]

The people who write these articles always seem to suggest that "African" means "sub-Saharan African black". Africa's history is far more complicated than that, and Africa north of the Sahara was never dominated by blacks. It's historical dishonesty.

[Stygian Cellarius]

That book, Black | At**na (part I), sits in the classics section at the used book store I frequent. I may ask them to relocate it to the Negro section (a pitiful section if I ever saw one).

EDIT:


The people who write these articles always seem to suggest that "African" means "sub-Saharan African black". Africa's history is far more complicated than that, and Africa north of the Sahara was never dominated by blacks. It's historical dishonesty.

I believe that Afro-centrist, or others who advocate these kinds of historical distortions, acquire a good deal of their argumentation power by that one semantic trick in particular. That one semantic trick holds a good deal of their fabrications together.

[San Galgano]

Afrocentrists are making a dick of themselves today.
They don't want only as their own some west achiviements(that could be rare but not impossible)they want Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Phoenicians and i have read even Chinese, Vickings as well as the discovery of America.
This make me think that they are like those stupid liar kids who once they start to tell some lies can't stop themselves anymore.

[Agrippa]

Ancient Egyptians were closer to Europeans than to Negrids proper anyway...

And if looking at all the influences going forth and back between the Near East - the real centre then - Europe and Northern Africa, who can say for sure which element was more important at this or that point in history.

My guess would be the Minoic culture, which is really crucial for that question, was more influenced by the Near East than by Egypt, the Alphabet alone is a clear proof for one very important aspect of this.

[Psychonaut]

That book, Black | At**na (part I), sits in the classics section at the used book store I frequent. I may ask them to relocate it to the Negro section (a pitiful section if I ever saw one).

I see the same kind of intentional miscategorization at work in my own philosophy textbooks. Does a chapter on Ewe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewe_people) proverbs like, "one hand cannot hold a bull's horns" or "the chicken is never declared innocent in the court of the hawks," really deserve to be placed alongside Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature? Really?

[Loddfafner]

Bernal, who started out as a Chinese specialist who found himself immersed in, and inspired by, the Cultural Revolution, was simply putting Greece in a Mediterranean context but happily relied on the conflation of the Southern Mediterranean with Subsaharan Africa to play into Afrocentric reified fantasies. In this aspect he has been accused of appropriating (to use the postcolonialists' term) a Senegalese scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop who did reinterpret Greece within a Negrocentric model:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheikh_Anta_Diop

[Eldritch]

As long as we can keep our universities from becoming Marxist indoctrination camps, Afrocentricism is not a threat at all.

And among blacks it actually works in our favour.

[blan]

yes there was a connection between Greece and africa but it was mainly rooted between the egyptians and greeks, not sub Saharan blacks,
black afro centrists love to claim the achievements of the egyptians who were semitc, and arab admixtures and Caucasians as the achievements of there own.
i have tried to engage them face to face about this subject they will just shake there heads and tell you that all those light skinned egyptians are a result of greeks and arabs attacking them and mixing with there people, and that berber tribes are some sort of immigrant.

[Agrippa]

The old Egyptians were not Semitic, but Afro-Asiatic in their own right.

Saying they were Semitic is like saying Balts are Germanic just because they are Indo-European.

Actually even the closest darker skinned people, f.e. from the kingdom of Meroe and the like, were still more Europoid than Negrid proper in most cases.

Its funny if especially blacks in the USA, coming from West African slaves for the most part, take pride in what the Egyptians achieved, because they are among the furthest removed people from the original Egyptians in all of Africa and have through recent admixture (at least individually - and most higher standing colored people in the US are mixed people) more in common with Europeans than with Egyptians as a rule of thumb ;)

[Óttar]

Even if the Greeks had "stolen" (how is that even possible!? Ever heard of trade?) culture from Egypt, it would be entirely irrelevant because Egypt was peopled predominantly by North African 'Semites.'

[Osweo]

North African 'Semites.'

:eek:

In Khufu's day, Semites were kept where they belong, way back beyond Sinai!

Here, for your edumacative purposes, see these;
http://mlahrouchi.free.fr/images/family%20tree.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Afro-asiatic_tree.png
http://mathildasanthropologyblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/afro-asiatic.png

Egyptian is a fully fledged sibling of Semitic. As is Hamitic (Berbers).

Wipe all the stinking blue off Africa here, and join up the islands of surviving red, and you'll have the old distributions;
http://starling.rinet.ru/maps/maps/Afro-Asiatic.gif