The author – then a Classics professor at Wellesley College – was galvanized into writing this book by a series of interconnected episodes which had led her to realize that students in her college were being taught some very dubious ancient history in some of the classes offered and that “hardly a week goes by when an article does not appear by an Afrocentrist writer observing that the discoveries attributed to the Greeks rightly belong to the ancient Egyptians.” Moreover, when Lefkowitz went to the dean of the college with her concerns, the dean “replied that each of us had a different but equally valid view of history.” And so Lefkowitz wrote this book to demonstrate that “virtually all the claims made by Afrocentrists can be shown to be without substance.”

I was surprised to learn in the course of this book that the roots of the misconception regarding the true origins of Ancient Greek philosophy and knowledge in general go far into antiquity. The author describes how the desire of some Ancient Egyptians to show that Ancient Greek culture was more indebted to theirs than it really was, coupled with some Ancient Greeks’ lack of understanding of Ancient Egyptian language and religion and their own desire to show that their culture had sprung from a more ancient one and thus was more ancient itself, led to erroneous information being passed down in some Ancient Greek treatises. She details how the stories grew in the telling as centuries passed by, with more and more details being added on by subsequent writers, until we finally have an anonymous Greek from the late Roman Empire era writing a manuscript which he presented as a translation from an Ancient Egyptian philosophical manuscript composed “at the beginning of time.” This manuscript was rediscovered by Europeans during the Renaissance, taken at its face value and inspired a religion of its own which by the 17th century became the Masonic movement. Lefkowitz describes how an 18th century classical scholar wrote a historical novel about Ancient Egypt based on the ancient erroneous or forged sources and on his own ideas about a perfect enlightened state, and how this novel gained enormous popularity in Europe and continued to be believed by a fair number of Masons and educated Blacks even after Champollion’s decipherment of Ancient Egyptians’ scripts showed what their civilization was really like. Apparently, these tales found a fertile soil in today’s Afrocentric movement, as the author encountered professors who taught their students that all Ancient Greek philosophers first studied in Ancient Egypt, and as for Aristotle, he simply plagiarized his multifaceted books from the Library of Alexandria, forget that it was founded after his death.

I first learned about this book from a guest essayist’s article in a mainstream city newspaper back in 1996 when this book was published. The essayist decried a number of books which “criticized Africa,” including this one, and urged people to “honor the mother continent.” My immediate reaction was to jot down all the titles and authors mentioned, intending to read them eventually, because the fact that a book could be criticized by a contributor to a respectable newspaper for failing to honor a continent made me feel that it should be read. However, after I had finally read it – 5 years later – I made a search in databases of academic articles and didn’t find a single article making the sort of claims Lefkowitz describes. So, despite all the abuse she had endured after the publication of this book, she did win in the long run, for it clearly looks like it was her book that put a stop to such pseudo-historical treatises – and, possibly, to the whole idea that history is something anyone can make up to his/her liking. ( )