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History Lesson: A Race Odyssey Mary Lefkowitz. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 202 pp. $25
Shortly after the 1987 publication of the first volume of Martin Bernal's Black Athena, my wife, now Dr. Terry Hauptman, whose professional interests include African and African American art and literature, brought it home and read it. After I spent some time considering its thesis, and fortified by my knowledge of Middle Kingdom Egyptian, classical Hebrew, and ancient Greek literature, philosophy, and science, we discussed the author's claim that Greek philosophy (that is, Greek learning and culture) derives from Egypt, whose leaders and citizens were black Africans rather than the Hamitic people (including the nomadic Berbers) who now inhabit all of north Africa from Morocco and Algeria to Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt; all of these people are unequivocally not black Africans such as those found in sub-Saharan countries, and their languages (ancient Egyptian, Coptic, and the Berber tongues) are unrelated to the languages spoken in, for example, Chad, Birkina Faso, or the Sudan. My wife sympathized with Bernal; I was unconvinced. African specialists, both those familiar and in concert with Bernal's sometimes racist predecessors (e.g., George G.M. James, author of Stolen Legacy) as well as more objective...