Youngmoon Bhang

Lefkowitz–Bernal arguments In the 1990s, classics professor Mary Lefkowitz emerged as a prominent critic of Afrocentrism and of James. Her critique of Stolen Legacy makes the following arguments: -- Ancient Egypt was racially mixed (and therefore its cultural legacy does not represent an inherently "black" or "African" contribution). -- Stolen Legacy is unscholarly, relying heavily on repetition of claims about Alexander's "theft" of Egyptian material, and lacking precise footnoting. -- Alexandria was founded after Alexander's conquest of Egypt and never integrated into Egyptian society, and the Library of Alexandria was built still later; therefore, it contained no repository of Egyptian culture for the immigrant Greeks to steal. -- James misrepresents his masonic sources, who in discussing the "Egyptian mysteries" actually mean Greco-Roman mysteries operating in Egypt, and cites other outdated sources on Egypt which do not take modern scholarship into account. ("Thus most ironically," she writes, "the 'Egyptian Mystery System' described by James is not African, but essentially Greek, and in its details, specifically European.") -- The Egyptian writings (notably the Hermetic Corpus) that James presents as predecessors to Greek philosophy were composed in the Hellenistic period. -- Similarities found by ancient writers between Greek and Egyptian deities do not imply Egyptian origin. Egyptian philosophy does not include a doctrine of transmigration of souls. Other purported connections in mathematics, science, and philosophy are also insubstantial. -- The great philosophers Socrates and Aristotle are not said to have traveled to Egypt. Martin Bernal, author of the Black Athena trilogy which also argues for Egyptian influence on Greece, in turn criticized Lefkowitz for poor sourcing, double standards for evidence, and omission of key details. Bernal points to modern scholarship indicating pre-Hellenistic origins of the Hermetic Corpus. Bernal argues that archaeological data, as well as Greek and Latin sources, demonstrate a diffusion of the cult of Isis, mystery religion, and initiation ceremonies from Egypt to Greece. Finally, Bernal recapitulates the historiographical argument of Black Athena Volume 1 that the "Ancient Model" of Egyptian influence on Greece was standard until it was eclipsed in the 19th century, for ideological reasons, by the "Aryan Model". Lefkowitz, replying in the same journal, wrote that Greek philosophy borrowed from Egypt, but neither "borrowed massively" nor "stole", and Greece was influenced by other cultures as well. She responds to his critique of her reading of Diodorus and clarifies other points. She remonstrates that Bernal uses needlessly charged terms such as "attack", "rage", and "Aryan", which distract from the matter at hand. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_G._M._James#Lefkowitz–Bernal_arguments)