A Professor of Classics’ Refutation of the Afrocentrist Doctrine that Ancient Greece Stole Its Culture from Ancient Egypt

Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became An Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books 1996)

Afrocentrism is the pseudo-academic discipline that claims that ancient Egypt was Black and the ultimate source of the cultures of Europe and Africa. One of its doctrines is that major figures in the ancient world, such as Cleopatra and Socrates, were Black and that the ancient Greeks stole Egypt’s advanced culture and civilisation and passed it off as their own. According to Afrocentrists such as Yosef A.A. Ben Yochannan, Aristotle accompanied Alexander the Great on his invasion of Egypt, where he plundered the great library of Alexandria before it was destroyed by Alexander. Lefkowitz is a professor of Classics and teaches Greek at Wellesley College in America. In this book she destroys these claims, and traces the Afrocentrist ideas of ancient Egyptian civilisation back to Black Freemasonry and the 18th century novel Sethos by the French writer, the Abbe Terrasson and their influence on George G.G. James’ 1950’s book, The Stolen Legacy.

Lefkowitz Not Motivated By Racism

Lefkowitz states very clearly in her book that she is not motivated by racism. She believes that Egypt was a Black civilisation, and in her epilogue suggests ways in which Egypt may have influenced ancient Greek culture that could be properly explored and researched by historians. Her objection to Afrocentrism comes from the fact that it is simply wrong. She also points out its dangers to history and society, as it posits different races can write their own history without concern for objective truth, provided that what they are taught serves an ideological function. In this instance, it’s the promotion of Black pride and achievement. But she points out that the same utilitarian approach to history can be used by other people, whose aims the Afrocentrists would definitely not approve of. And teaching such false doctrines also isolates its students in a ghetto of false knowledge away from the mainstream. Needless to say, her critics claimed she was acting out of some kind of racist motive. Despite being Jewish, she was an Aryan supremacist and even part of a ‘Jewish onslaught’.

Lefkowitz states she had no idea of the existence of Afrocentrism until one of its leading academics came to speak at her college. He was billed as an Egyptologist despite having done no proper Egyptological research. When it came to questions, she challenged one of his assertions by asking him how Aristotle could possible have looted the great library of Alexandria, when Aristotle didn’t accompany Alexander on his expeditions outside Greece and the library was built several years after Aristotle’s death.

Cleopatra, Socrates and North African Peoples Not Black

The book also tackles the similar ahistorical claims that Socrates and Cleopatra were Black, as were the inhabitants of North Africa including the Carthaginian general Hannibal, that the Greek city states were founded by the ancient Egyptians, who had invaded the country c. 750. No author actually describes Socrates as Black, and the only times he had travelled outside Athens was when he was part of the army in its wars with other Greek city states. The only evidence that he had Black ancestry were jokes by his students and opponents that he had satyr’s ears, a snub nose, big nostrils and a wide mouth. Yes, the Greeks did depict Black Africans as having snub noses, big nostrils and wide mouths, but so did the paint many Greeks.

Cleopatra was a Ptolemy, descended from one of Alexander’s generals, who seized the Egyptian throne. They took up the Egyptian custom of marrying their sisters. When they didn’t do this, they married other Greeks. Cleopatra’s lineage is thus reasonably well-known, except for the identity of her grandmother. She may well have been Black, except no-one mentions that she was. This contrasts with Didyme, a Nubian woman, who was taken as a concubine by one of her ancestors, but whose child, if she had one, did not inherit the throne. The Greeks were keenly sensitive to difference, and it Cleopatra’s gran had been Black, it would have been remarked upon.

As for the inhabitants of North Africa, the Berbers, they are lighter skinned than sub-Saharan Africans and the Libyans, as they were called by the Egyptians, were portrayed as such in ancient Egyptian art. Carthage was a Phoenician colony. The Phoenicians were a Semitic people from what is now Syria and Lebanon. They were not Black, and neither was Hannibal. One of the founders of one of the Greek city states, Cadmus, was also a Phoenician and so also not Black as claimed by the Afrocentrists. The legendary founders of many of the Greek states did come from Egypt, and were described as dark-skinned, as claimed by the Afrocentrists, but they were Greeks who had fled there a generation or so previously. There is no material evidence for an Egyptian invasion of Greece, but there is plenty of evidence for a Greek presence in the Nile delta from pieces of mosaic.

Ancient Greek Beliefs of the Egyptian Basis of Their Culture

The idea that ancient Egypt was a Black civilisation was held by the Black Masonic organisations that emerged in America. But they took their idea of the civilisation from very dated and outmoded accounts by European writers before Napoleon’s invasion and archaeological expedition started proper, scientific research. Their ideas of ancient Egypt were based on the description of the country by the pioneering Greek historians, Herodotus and Diodorus of Sicily. She states that Herodotus is generally accurate in what he says about Egypt, but there are instances where he is profoundly mistaken, particularly in matters of religion. The Greeks believed the Egyptians had secret mystery cults, whose members had to be initiated, like theirs. But there were no such cults. The confusion came from the ancient Egyptian priests having to be initiated, but the cults themselves were public. The Greeks also associated their gods with those of Egypt on superficial similarities. The Greek goddess Demeter was identified with Isis partly because the worship of both goddesses included processions of women bearing model phalluses.

Both Herodotus and Diodorus took care to question the Egyptian priests themselves. However, this must have been through interpreters as neither could speak or write Egyptian, and so could and did not consult the civilisation’s ancient documents and literature. The Greeks immensely respected Egypt because of its antiquity, and were keen to associate themselves with the older culture. And the Egyptians on their side were willing to confirm this belief. This may partly have been a strategy for maintaining national pride, particularly after their conquest by the Greeks. A similar tactic was used by the Alexandrian Jewish writers Artapanus and Aristobulos, who also claimed that the Jews were the ultimate source of Greek civilisation, so that it was said that Plato’s Republic was simply Moses in Attic Greek. They were wrong, and are now almost forgotten. Why should the similar claims made by the Egyptians be any different?

Black Freemasonry and 18th Century Fiction

Black Freemasonry’s idea of the sophistication of Egyptian civilisation was shared with that of the White Freemasons. During the 18th century it was heavily influenced by the Abbe Terrasson’s novel. This describes how its hero, Sethos, was initiated into the worship of Osiris, Isis and Horus in a huge pyramid, and led to the underground city in which the religion’s priests dwelt. The description of the temple above ground is that of an idealised French university, with lecture halls, an art gallery, a music gallery, research laboratories and a zoo. The initiation ceremony described in the book was adapted and taken over by Masonic lodges in Austria and elsewhere, and influenced the plot and setting of Mozart’s opera, the Magic Flute. The difference between the White and Black Freemasons was that the Whites believed, despite Herodotus, that the Egyptians were White.

Lefkowitz deals with the claim that Europeans rejected the idea of Egypt as the foundation of their culture through ancient Greece because of growing racial prejudice in the 19th century. In fact, European enthusiasm for ancient Egypt remained strong, as shown in the massive popularity of operas set there, such as Verdi’s Aida. One of these, Thamos, was about the love affair between the Pharaoh and a Nubian woman, showing how little fears of racial intermixing affected the popularity of these works. What caused Europeans to become sceptical of Egypt as the foundation of their own culture was the findings of Egyptologists and linguists that showed how different Greek and Egyptian cultures really were.

George G.G. James and The Stolen Legacy

The rising Black liberation of movements of the 19th and 20th century nevertheless held onto the claim that Egypt was the source of White culture, leading to the emergence of the claim that the Greeks had stolen it from the Egyptians. Marcus Garvey, the founder and head of the United Negro Improvement Association, claimed this had happened, but didn’t explain how. It was George G.G. James, a professor of Greek at one of the Black colleges, who supplied the details in his influential book, the Stolen Legacy, of 1954. Apart from claiming that Aristotle and Alexander had looted and destroyed the great library of Alexander, with Aristotle passing off the books he had stolen as his own, James made a number of other claims that are also simply wrong. For example, he claimed that Aristotle’s On The Soul was based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead. But On The Soul is a rational examination of the concept of the soul. The Book of the Dead, or to give it it’s Egyptian title, The Book of Going Forth by Day, is a collection of spells for the deceased to use in order to overcome that obstacles they will find in their journey to the Field of Reeds, the Egyptian paradise, in the afterlife. The two have precious little in common. Many of the supposed similarities between ancient Greek texts and that of Egypt can be explained as simply explorations of similar themes, or based on earlier accounts of Egypt so that the authors of the later works need never have been to the country, let alone been Egyptians themselves. James’ book was rediscovered and republished in the 1980s by Ben Yochannan, and it is suggested that there are 500,000 copies circulating by the time Lefkowitz wrote her book.

In her epilogue Lefkowitz also describes the criticism she faced when the book was published, and answers it, often pointing to an earlier book she co-writer that attacked Bernal’s Black Athena. Bernal took over some of the mistakes of the earlier Afrocentrists while adding a few of his own. He claims that some Greek terms were loan words from ancient Egyptian. Thus, the Greek word bia, meaning force, is supposedly taken from the Egyptian word for soul, ba. Except that scholars of ancient Egyptian state it isn’t, and that there are very few Egyptian loanwords in ancient Greek.

Lefkowitz and Stephen Howe’s Attacks on Afrocentrism

The book predates Stephen Howe’s Afrocentrism, which was published by Verso in 1998. Howe’s book deals with the origins of Afrocentrism more widely in Ethiopianism and pan-Africanism and its similarly mistaken views of the origins of Black African culture in ancient Egypt, as well as the idea that Blacks were the first people in Britain, Europe, China, Japan, Vietnam and the New World, as well as its connections to Black radicalism and nationalism in the 60s and 70s. Lefkowitz deals exclusively with the origin of its claim that ancient Greece was founded on stolen Egyptian culture. In her epilogue, Lefkowitz states that there may well be instances where Egypt influenced ancient Greece, as in its early art, but such influences do not mean that the Greeks stole or appropriated from the neighbours across the Med.

Afrocentrism’s Influence on Black Historiography

Apart from its specific concentration on Afrocentrism, Lefkowitz and Howe are also important for showing the possible source of other false historical claims made by Black writers. These are that various scientific and technological inventions and discoveries were made by Blacks when they weren’t; that various British historical figures were also Black, when they were definitely White, and that Stonehenge was really built by Blacks. The claims that the ancient Britons were Black and that Stonehenge was built by Blacks ultimately derive from Afrocentrism, and based on discredited 19th century White European authors, although given some support from the dark colouring of Cheddar Man.

Afrocentrism seems to have passed on to Black History the attitude that Blacks were responsible for many of the technological advances of the West, including smart phone and helicopters, when they were not, and that they have been robbed of their due credit. It is also responsible for the disregard for the accepted rules of historical research, in that racial pride and social utility is put before historical truth, and that various historical figures may be claimed for Black identity on the flimsiest of evidence.

This is a danger to historical research as a whole, and also to Black History itself. Properly researched Black History has produced some surprising and inspiring figures, such as genuine Black and Asian politicians, medical men and women and lawyers, for example, that predate the wave of new Black British politicos like Diane Abbott in the 1980s. There is a danger that the false claims made by Black Historians and Afrocentrists will lead to unwarranted scepticism towards Black History’s findings and its status as a proper academic discipline as a whole.

Afrocentrism’s Similarity to Fascist Attitudes to History

The situation has become worse through the expansion of identity politics, or IdPol as some of its sceptics are calling it and the pernicious influence of Postmodernism. Based on Foucault, this rejects notions of progress and scientific and historical truth for social utility, the influence of language and power and oppression narratives. The result can include the call for western science to be removed from its place at the centre of scientific discussion and research, in order to include and incorporate the prescientific knowledges of indigenous peoples. The problem with this, as Lefkowitz hints, is that the Nazis and the Fascists also believed in racial science. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was rejected because Einstein was Jewish. And they believed that members of the Volk or the nation would automatically and instinctively recognise the truth of their doctrines simply through their shared membership of the race or nation. This is different from saying, as the Afrocentrists claimed, that Lefkowitz was comparing their doctrines to Holocaust denial. But the racial assumptions regarding history and its uses are the same between postmodern Afrocentrists and Nazis.

Conclusion

Lefkowitz is keen to promote the proper investigation of ancient Greece and Egypt by the public, and Egypt is a fascinating civilisation regardless of what one believes the colour of their skin was. But Afrocentrism is an obstacle to gaining such knowledge and needs to be rejected. As does its influence on Black History, so we can gain a proper knowledge of Black heritage and achievement.

Black Nationalists Now Claiming that Jerusalem Was Really in Africa

I’ve posted up a number of pieces attacking Afrocentrism and its whacky and ahistorical ideas. Afrocentrism has its roots in 19th century Black American authors, who believed that ancient Egypt was a Black civilisation. I don’t think at the time this was an unreasonable claim. Watching some of the videos by Afrocentrists on YouTube, it appears they got some of their ideas from contemporary scholarly writings. One such video began by asserting that Champollion, the French linguist who finally cracked Egyptian hieroglyphics, believed they were a Black civilisation. The ancient Egyptians in their art clearly portrayed themselves as darker than Europeans, but not as dark as the Nubians, whom they depicted as really Black. Where it becomes unreasonable is when it asserts that ancient Egypt was the fount and source of Greek, and hence western civilisation, and claims that Black people were the original inhabitants of Britain, America, Vietnam, China, Japan and elsewhere.

There’s also a very strong belief in the Black community that Jesus must have been Black. At one level it’s kind of natural, as White Europeans have seen him in the terms of their own race, and portrayed him as White. He wasn’t either, of course. The Jews were a Semitic people, related to the Arabs and other related peoples in the Middle East, such as the Assyrians and Aramaeans. Hebrew is very closely related to Ugaritic, the ancient language of Byblos now in Syria. Christ would have had an olive complexion like these people, rather than that of a sub-Saharan Black African.

But there are rumours that a Black director is planning a film about Christ, in which not only Our Lord but everyone in Jerusalem will be Black. I don’t know if this will include Pontius Pilate, who was a White Roman. This seems to follow Black racial doctrine rather than historical reality.

But the desire to promote all the Biblical figures as Black Africans seems to have gone a step further. I found a video yesterday of a group of Black people discussing a video they had found claiming that the various locations in the Bible were really in sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, the video they were discussing claimed it was on the border with Namibia.

This is bonkers, but no more bonkers than Ahmed Osman, who claimed that the Bible had really been set in Saudi Arabia, or the 19th century British author E. Cummings Beaumont. Beaumont had decided that the various states and civilisations in the Bible couldn’t possibly be those of the modern countries of Egypt, Palestine and Greece. No! Those ancient nations could only have been located in modern Britain. I found a copy of his book once in one of the secondhand bookshops in Cheltenham, and haven’t been able to find it since. It’s a classic of barmy literature.

Behind these claims are ethno-nationalism and the idea that only one’s own people are sufficiently great and noble enough to have been these great nations. In the case of Afrocentrism, it’s partly a backlash against the extremely low view of Black people as a race and their civilisations and cultures up to the middle of the 20th century. The Black American founders of Afrocentrism wrote their books in order to show that Blacks were also capable of creating great civilisations like ancient Egypt, and were therefore the equal of Whites. It’s an entirely noble motive, but has led to the appropriation of the history and achievements of other cultures. Early this week I found a video by Black American conservative Amala Ekponobi in which she put right a video by a smug American Black girls claiming that the Amerindians were wrong and Blacks were the first people in America.

There is a problem in that in America, Afrocentrism has entered the academy with universities teaching courses on it. And it seems to be influencing Black history over here, as when a book on Black British history claimed that Black people had built Stonehenge.

This needs to be stopped, and genuine history taught instead of racial, and racist myths.

Video About the Afro-Centric Pseudo-History Behind the Claim Stonehenge Was Built By Blacks

This is my response to the furore earlier this week about the claim made in the book, Brilliant Black British History, written by a Nigerian author and published by Bloomsbury, that Britain has always been a Black country, the first Brits were Black, and Stonehenge was built by Black people. A few years ago now archaeologists and DNA specialists provided some support for the assertion that the first Brits were Black when they analysed the DNA from Cheddar Man and concluded that he had black or dark coloured skin. However Cheddar Man dates from the Mesolithic, the period between the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age and the Neolithic, or New Stone Age. During the Neolithic Europe and Britain were settled by White skinned farmers from Turkey and the Fertile Crescent, who entered the continent via two routes, one which went up through the Balkans and another which went across North Africa then up through Spain to Britain. Stonehenge was built by Bronze Age White farmers. Even the suggestion that Cheddar Man was Black isn’t as secure as it is sometimes claimed to be. One of the team that analysed the DNA later issued a retraction, stating that it was impossible to tell what skin colour he had.

It’s clear why such a pseudo-historical claims should be made by Black authors and appeal to a Black readership. Black Brits identify with Britain and wish to see themselves in its history. But the appropriation of White history like this seems to ignore real Black history and Black achievement. For example, in Africa there were the historic great civilisations of Aksum, Meroe, Nubia and the Swahili, as well as the great Muslim states of the savannah and west Africa. And Black West Indians have also achieved much since the abolition of slavery. In the first generation after abolition there were Black politicians in these countries’ legislatures, elected by Black voters to defend them against the White planters.

Behind the claim that Black people built Stonehenge are various Afrocentric claims that are ultimately based on the theories of two 19th century White Brits, Gerald Massey and David Macritchie. Massey was a campaigner for Spiritualism and Christian Socialism, and was possibly the model for the hero of the novel Felix Holt: The Radical. He believed that Britain had originally been colonised by the Egyptians, who were responsible for the construction of Stonehenge and other monuments.

David Macritchie, on the other hand, believed that the first peoples of the British Isles were what he called ‘melanochroi’, a mixture of White Europeans and a dark-skinned people like Aboriginal Australians. The Black population was reinforced by waves of other dark-skinned invaders, such as Black Huns and Black Danes. It was this Black population that built the dolmens, henges and other Neolithic monuments. Other White writers claimed that the Inuit and the Chinese were originally Black. These theories were further elaborated in 1993 by Ahmed and Ibrahim Ali in their book, The Black Celts. They argued that before the Celts arrived to colonise Britain, the peoples of the British Isles were Blacks descended from the people of Ethiopia, who had moved into Europe via North Africa and Spain. This has been further developed by Indus Khamit Kush, who has claimed that Black Africans were the original Chinese, Japanese, Malays, Vietnamese, Thai, Greeks, Romans, Spanish, British and Americans. This last claim is particular noxious. There was a young Black woman complaining on social media a few months ago that Indigenous Americans were as racist as Whites. She’d been talking to one of them, and was outraged that they didn’t accept that Blacks were the original population of America. I can’t think of anything more likely to cause offence than telling a member of the American First Nations, who have suffered persecution, dispossession and displacement, that they weren’t the first people in America.

Some of the more extreme claims of the Afro-Centrists are extremely similar to those made by White supremacists. Regarding primacy as the first people of a nation or country, there’s more than a little similarity between these claims and a book published in 1978 in Paraguay, then under a quasi-Fascist dictatorship, that the Ache Indian people were descended from the Vikings. In the 19th or early 20th century, a German anthropologist claimed that one of the South African peoples must have been descended from the Vandals, the Germanic people that conquered and colonised part of Roman North Africa. You can go on, and add the way great North American Indian monuments, like the Serpent Mound in Ohio, were attributed to any number of civilisations except the Indians themselves. Or how the fortress at Great Zimbabwe was attributed to the Chinese and Arabs, rather than the local Shona people, who really built it.

And the Afrocentrist claim that Blacks have a unique, spiritual connection with the universe which grants them greater insight and intellectual abilities also seems to me to be very similar to some of the bizarre theories of the Germanic Neo-Pagan cults in late 19th and early 20th century Germany and Austria. One of these claimed that the Aryans had originally possessed ‘radio-telepathic’ organs, but these had been lost through interbreeding with the untermenschen.

Pseudo-historical claims that Blacks really built Stonehenge look harmless and liberal, because they’re advanced in the cause of Black liberation. But behind them there’s a very nasty edifice of racist pseudo-history and scholarship that should not be touched by the mainstream press.

Video on Archaeology’s Challenge to Enlightenment Accounts of Origins of States and Inequality

This is a fascinating video I found on Novara Media’s channel the other day. In it, host Aaron Bastani talks to archaeologist David Wengrow about the origins of the state and the development of social inequality. Wengrow argues that the evidence from archaeology challenges assumptions that prehistoric and preliterate peoples were incapable of rationally deciding for themselves what kind of societies they wished to live in. He gives examples from prehistoric Europe and North and South America to show that ancient and indigenous peoples not only did decide on the kind of societies they wanted, but were perfectly capable of reversing trends in their societies towards authoritarianism. One of the examples of this, which I found truly jaw-dropping, was one of the city states the conquistador Hernan Cortes made alliance with against the Aztecs. Unlike the Aztec empire, that state city was a democratic republic. He also talks about the influence on Enlightenment critiques of western society of a Huron Indian chief in Canada, who was an intelligent conversationalist able to hold his own in conversations about the nature of society to such an extent that French, British and Dutch colonial authorities invited him to dinner to talk this matter over.

Wengrow starts off by stating that modern political theory about the origins of society, as taught in politics courses, is completely divorced from archaeological accounts. The theory is based on the speculations of foundational Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Rousseau, who admitted that they were speculating. But these accounts are now taught as fact. Archaeological research, however, is overturning previous ideas about the origins of urban society. For example, it was believed that agriculture and urbanisation were linked and appeared together as part of the Neolithic Revolution. But this is not the case. Excavations of the ancient city of Catalhuyuk in Turkey show that while it was an urban centre, although Wengrow hesitates to call it a city, show that its people were still hunter-gatherers, living by foraging rather than agriculture. And the same is true of the settlement at Amesbury at the time Stonehenge was being built. The people then had given up agriculture, although they retained animal husbandry. It appears they had tried growing crops and then rejected it in favour of foraging.

He then goes on to talk about the Huron Amerindian chief. He inspired a colonist from New France, who had been expelled from the colony, to write a book based on the chief and his dinner conversation when the colonist was penniless in Amsterdam. This became a massive Enlightenment bestseller, and inspired other books by Voltaire and others in which Chinese, Tahitians and other outsiders criticise European society. Wengrow states that the Indian societies surprise western Europeans because they were much less hierarchical than they were, and contact with these societies and the indigenous critics of western civilisation did influence European political philosophy. We easily accept that Europe took over many material products from these nations, but are much less ready to accept the idea that they influenced our ideas, even though the Enlightenment philosophers said that they had.

He also talks about Cahokia, a great pyramid and city state in the Mississippi valley in America. This appears to be another example of a society, in which people rebelled or simply walked away from authority and hierarchy. It was also another indigenous monument that was ascribed to everyone else but the native peoples when it was first discovered, and is now disrespected by having a road driven through it. When it was constructed, the local society seems to have been hierarchical. At the top of the mound is a structure from which all of the city could be viewed. But sometime after its heyday it was abandoned. The traditional reasons are that the climate changed, but Wengrow finds that unconvincing. What seems to have happened instead is that people simply got tired of living in such a society and walked away.

Tenochtitlan, one of the great cities in ancient Mexico, is another example of a strongly hierarchical society that underwent profound social change and became more democratic. Wengrow states that it’s a massive state, and they owe a debt to the French scholar who produced detailed maps of it. When it first emerged, it was hierarchical but then the nature of society changed. People started living in high-quality, single-floor homes. These were so good they were originally thought to be palaces, but now it appears they were villas occupied by ordinary citizens. At some point, the people of Tenochtitlan decided that they wanted a more equal society, to the extent that some scholars believe that there was a revolution.

Then there is the case of the democratic city state Cortes encountered. This really was democratic, as there are accounts of the debates in its assembly. This astonished the conquistadors, as there was very little like it in Europe at the time, except some of the Florentine republics. This all challenges the notion that once society develops to a certain extent and becomes complex, inequality also emerges and is very difficult to challenge or remove. These cases show that indigenous peoples could and did. He also argues that the same may have been true of slavery. The only successful slave revolt that we know of is Toussant L’Ouverture in Haiti. But Wengrow suggests there could have been thousands of other successful slave revolts in prehistory of which we are unaware. Slavery came about, he argues, from the expense of laying out offerings for the dead. In order to leave food and drink for the dead, the bereaved had to have access to the foods themselves and so they became indebted and dependent on the people who owned those resources.

He also talks about the problems in describing some of these urban centres as cities. There are huge sites in the Ukraine, but archaeologists are hesitant about calling them cities with some preferring other terms such as ‘mega-sites’ because they aren’t centralised.

Bastani asks him at one point about the problem of pseudo-archaeology. I think this came up because Graham Hancock is currently fronting a series on Netflix claiming that way back in prehistory there was an advanced society, but that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm. Wengrow states that quite often pseudo-archaeology is based on old and discarded idea, such as Atlantis. The people involved tend not to be anyone who’s ever been on an archaeological dig, and view archaeologists as spending their lives trying to hide some momentous secret from everyone. But it can act as an entry for some people to archaeology, and he doesn’t really like the sneering attitude of some archaeologists towards it.

Wengrow himself is an interesting character. He didn’t want to be an archaeologist originally, but came to it from acting. He also worked in the BBC Arabic service. He decided at one point he wanted to get a degree, applied to the best university he could, Oxford, and sent reams of applications to its various colleges. They turned him down. Then he was told that he should apply for a place on a course that was just being set up. One of the colleges was just setting up an archaeology course, so he did. When it came to the interview, he told the interviewer that he had always wanted to be an archaeologist. At which point she held up all the previous letters he’d written. But they admitted him, and he has now had a career teaching and excavating in places like Egypt.

He states that sometimes the pseudoarchaeology about a period or culture misses the point about what’s really interesting about it. He talks about the idea that the Sphinx was constructed before the pyramids, and admits that it’s actually a reasonable question. But if you go back to the predynastic period a thousand years before the pyramids were built, you come to the burial sites of one of Egypt’s first kings. This is fascinating, although you wouldn’t know it from the dry way it has been discussed in conferences and museums like the Petrie Museum. Excellent though these are, they talk about highly specialised subjects like pot typography which is excruciatingly dull if you want to know the wider picture. The early king’s tomb is composed of room after room of the bodies of the people and occasionally the animals that were slaughtered to accompany the king into the afterlife.

The interview is based on a book Wengrow wrote with a colleague, The Dawn of Everything. Sadly, after spending a decade writing it, the co-author died just a few weeks after its completion. The book has been widely praised, and has even inspired artistic pieces. He talks about a French woman, who composed a piece of music based on it. He regrets he was unable to attend its performance thanks to jet lag coming back from somewhere, but later met the lady when she came to Britain.

I know a little about some of what he’s talking about to have no doubt that he’s absolutely right. One of the seminars in the archaeology department at Bristol, which I attended, was about how cities like Catalhuyuk were established before the appearance of agriculture. One of the huge Neolithic sites in the Ukraine is discussed in the La Rousse Encyclopedia of Archaeology. The great mound of Cahokia is also discussed in a book I bought years ago on North American Indian archaeology. I wasn’t aware that the people of Stonehenge had given up growing crops, nor of the democratic city states in South America and Mexico. This is fascinating stuff.

He’s right about archaeology contradicting the ideas of Enlightenment philosophers about the origins of society, though I’m not sure how much of a problem this is. The philosophers he discusses – Hobbes and Rousseau – were Social Contract theorists. Social Contract theory is the idea that the state and society were set up when men came together to select an authority under whom they would live, so that their lives and property would be protected. Thus the first kings. These princes are the representatives of the people, and so from the 17th century onwards the idea developed that sovereignty lay with the people, who could revoke the power they had delegated to the prince. This was the view of John Locke. However, subsequent philosophers showed that this was just conjecture, and that it could have happened like that as the people at the time were using concepts that only subsequently developed after the foundation of states and kingdoms. I thought Social Contract theory was dead, and he closest it had to a modern advocate was John Rawls in his Theory of Justice. Rawls argued that if people were just disembodied entities wishing to chose the kind of society in which they would care to live, they would choose one that had the maximum freedom and justice for everyone, as that would also include them. Away from centrist politics, the anarchists have been keenly interested in anthropology and those indigenous societies where there is no central authority.

I’m not sure how well some of this would go down with Sargon of Akkad and the Lotus Eaters. They’ve developed an interest in archaeology, recently posting a video discussing Homo Erectus, along with the Norman Conquest and ancient Rome. But Sargon is a huge fan of John Locke and describes himself as a classical liberal. I don’t know whether archaeology’s findings about the origin of early states would contradict his ideas or not.

Starmer’s Flag-Waving and Fixation on Celebrities Shows Hollowness of New Labour

I know this is another piece of old news, which Mike has commented on already but there are a few more things to say about it. A few days ago Mike posted up a piece about an idea from the Labour party about winning more members and votes. This new, exciting strategy for gaining the support of the British public was for Starmer to be seen more with the Union Jack. Yep, Starmer’s leadership, which is already determined to copy Tory economic policies, also wants to follow them and be seen as the party of flag-waving – some critics called it’ flag-shagging’ patriotism.

The Tories have been draping themselves in the flag and waving it at every opportunity just about since they emerged in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Their aggressive projection of themselves as the party of British patriotism became particularly acute under Maggie in the 1980s. Thatcher was deeply inspired by Winston Churchill’s heroic vision of the British people and their history, and so was constantly invoking his memory and legacy. Thus we had Torygraph headlines quoting the Leaderene, screaming ‘Don’t Call Them Booj-wah, Call Them British’, while the spirit of the Battle of Britain was invoked in the Tory 1987 election broadcast. This featured Spitfires zooming about the sky, while an excited voice intoned ‘We were born free. It’s our fundamental right’. It’s a misquotation of the great Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His book, The Social Contract, one of the first works advocating democracy and a major influence on the French Revolution, begins: ‘Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains’. You can see why Thatcher didn’t want to include the second part of that sentence. Commenting on it on Radio 4’s News Quiz, the late Alan Coren drily called it ‘the Royal Conservative Airforce’ and made the point that all the servicemen, whose memory and sacrifice Thatcher was exploiting all came back and voted Labour. Now Starmer apparently wants to wave the flag as well in order to win over Tory voters.

The new strategy was proposed by a focus group, which were used by Blair’s New Labour to devise party policy, or put the rubber stamp on those the Dear Leader had already decided upon, when the grinning butcher of Iraq was in office. It was part of the Blairite’s centralisation of decision-making, their managerialism and their pointed determination to ignore the demands and recommendations of grassroots members. Now it seems we’re back to the same tired old attitudes and strategies.

Mike and the peeps on Twitter saw past this threadbare strategy immediately. They quoted Dr. Johnson, who said that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’. But I remember Jon Downes, the frontman for the Devon band Jon Downes and the Amphibians from Outer Space making another observation: ‘a patriot is a man with nothing left to say’. This was in a song entitled ‘Land of Dopes and Tories’. It was a commented on Major’s Conservative party, which carried on the flag-waving while handing over vast tracts of Britain’s historic landscape to English Heritage, which promptly erected fences around them to keep the British public out, as at Stonehenge. Major’s Tories were ideologically bankrupt. It was Thatcherism with the nasty bits cut off and a marked paucity of ideas. His big notion for galvanising the British public behind his party was a ‘Cones Hotline’. This was a number you could call if you thought their were too many cones clogging up the roads. It’s hardly a grand vision, and was rightly ridiculed by Spitting Image and the rest of the media.

And Starmer’s leadership really doesn’t have any ideas. His policy so far has been to agree with the Tories, then criticise them in retrospect. He seems determined to copy their disastrous economic and social policies of privatisation, including that of the NHS, the destruction of the welfare state, and low wages, just like Blair. The only difference is that Blair and Starmer claimed that they would be able to carry out these Tory policies better than the Tories themselves.

Starmer really, really doesn’t have anything left to say. A fact also confirmed by another recommendation. This was that he should be seen with celebrities. Well, that was another feature of Blairite New Labour, which was also very relaxed, as Peter Mandelson put it, about people getting rich. Hence Blair’s desire to be seen with such celebrity businessmen as Beardie Branson and Alan Sugar. But Mike and the other Twitter peeps pointed out that, thanks to his attack on Corbyn, Starmer might find recruiting other celebs to endorse him difficult. Robert Webb apparently has torn up his Labour membership card.

I realise Angela Rayner also returned to make a speech claiming that Labour was still behind the policies laid out in last year’s election manifesto – nationalised public services and welfare state, strong unions, workers’ rights and so on, but Mike asked the pertinent question of whether you could trust her or him on this issue. And you can’t. They’ve shown repeatedly that they’re not prepared to honour the manifesto.

The flag-waving and celebrity-seeking isn’t going to win over traditional Labour voters, who will see past it. Some may even be repelled by it because of the way the Tories appropriated British patriotism and mixed it with aggressive imperialist nostalgia and xenophobia. And it isn’t going to win over Tories. There is a hard rump of extreme right-wing Tory types, who regard the Labour party as the enemies of Britain. The anti-immigrant YouTube channel, We Got A Problem, refers to asylum seekers and illegal immigrants as ‘imported Labour voters’. There are people who honestly believe the allegation that Blair deliberately encouraged mass non-White immigration to this country to destroy the largely White society at the heart of Tory visions of Britain. The same type of people, who believe that the Jews are also encouraging non-White immigration to destroy the White race, the Kalergi plan and the Great Replacement. These people aren’t going to be won over by Starmer waving the flag. They are, of course, probably not going to vote Labour anyway because of Labour’s avowed commitment of multiculturalism. Blair also waved the flag during ‘Cool Britannia’, but it also included Blacks and Asians along with more traditionally British images to project the view of a new, multicultural Britain. That was two decades ago, and while it impressed many, the super-patriotic right still regard it as some kind of betrayal of British identity through its inclusion of non-White culture. Starmer waving the flag won’t get them to change their political allegiances.

In fact, there is a sense that traditional Labour was and has always been the true party of patriotism. George Bernard Shaw pointed it out years ago in his book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism and Sovietism. He stated that socialists wanted money to be spent here, in Britain, developing its industries and aiding its working people. The Tories, on the other hand, allowed the idle rich to spend their wealth abroad, while undercutting domestic industry with products from the colonies, whose people could be exploited more cheaply. Just like under slavery.

Mike made the point that you could connect British patriotism to a desire for a fairer society where people were supported by a proper welfare state. You could also begin by presenting the Labour party as the party of true British patriotism by saying that it was opposed to the rich hiding their immense wealth away in offshore tax havens, as well as benefiting from tax cuts while the rest of the population have to shoulder the tax burden. Oh yes, and industries that, instead of being owned by the British people, were owned by multinational corporations which simply took their profits without reinvesting in them.

But that would be seen as horribly xenophobic and attacking the free trade and foreign investment the Neoliberals are trying to promote, and so would probably be denounced as horribly racist. Even as the Tories continue to demonise immigrants and asylum seekers.

Archaeologists Discover Bronze Agent Musical Instrument Made of Human Bone

This is an interesting piece of archaeological news from Tuesday’s edition of the I for 1 September 2020. The article ‘Bronze Age people turned human thigh bone into musical instrument’ by Nina Massey reported that archaeologists from Bristol University had discovered the instrument buried with other fragments of bone and tusk and axes buried as grave goods with a man near Stonehenge. The article reads

Researchers have uncovered evidence of a Bronze Age tradition that saw human remains retained and curated as relics over several generations.

The findings indicate a tangible way of honouring and remembering individuals some 4,500 years ago, experts say.

Led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Antiquity, the study used radio-carbon dating and CT scanning.

Lead author Dr Thomas Booth said: “Even in modern secular societies, human remains are seen as particularly powerful objects, and this seems to hold true for people of the Bronze Age. However, they treated and and interacted with the dead in ways which are inconceivably macabre to us today.

“After radiocarbon dating Bronze Age human remains alongside other material buried with them, we found many had been buried a significant time after the person had died, suggesting a tradition of retaining and curating human remains.”

He added: “People seem to have curated the remains of people who had lived within living or cultural memory, and who likely played an important role in their life or their communities, or with whom they had a well-defined relationship, whether that was direct family, a tradesperson, a friend or even an enemy.

In one example from Wiltshire, a human thigh bone, crafted into a musical instrument was included as grave goods with the burial of a man found near Stonehenge.

The carved and polished artefact was found with other items including axes, a bone plate and a tusk. Radio-carbon dating of the thigh bone suggests it belonged to someone this person had known.

Professor Joanna Bruck, principal investigator on the project, and visiting professor at the University of Bristol’s department of anthropology and archaeology, said: “Although fragments of human bone were included as grave goods, they were also kept in the homes of the living, buried under house floors and even placed on display.”

Dr Booth said: “This study really highlights the strangeness and perhaps the unknowable nature of the distant past from a present-day perspective.”

He is also quoted as saying, “Bronze Age people did not view human remains with the sense of horror or disgust that we might feel today.”

This is the first time I’ve read about human remains being turned into a musical instruments in ancient Britain, but I’m not surprised. There are many cultures all over the world that preserve the skulls of dead ancestors and enemies. They included the Mandan and other tribes in the US, some indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea and the ancient Celts. There’s a carving from an ancient Celtic temple from southern Gaul of a monster, whose two front claws rest on severed heads. Around the statue are depressions carved into its base, possibly to hold the real thing. Nigel Barley in one of his books on death around the world notes that in the traditional culture of one of the Pacific peoples, the skeletons of dead relatives are handled and taken apart, so that their descendants can carry bits of it about of them as an act of respect and remembrance.

And there are also cultures that turn human remains into musical instruments. There’s the Chod ceremony in Tibetan Buddhism, in which the priests wear aprons made out of human skin and play drums made of human skulls and, I believe, flutes from bone. Something similar may well have been done here with this instrument.

The Stonehenge connection is interesting and possibly relevant. One of the theories about the standing stones is that they were originally put up as monuments to the ancestors in a process involving secondary burial. This followed the suggestion of a Madagascan archaeologist, who said that they reminded him of the practice among his people. There the remains are interred for a period after death while they decay. After a certain time, they’re taken out, prepared and then re-buried in another set of ceremonies during which a stone or a wooden pole is set up as a monument. It may well be that this instrument was created as part of such a burial rite.

Egyptians Issue Polite Invitation to Musk to See that Aliens Didn’t Built the Pyramids

Here’s a rather lighter story from yesterday’s I, for 3rd August 2020. Elon Musk, the billionaire industrialist and space entrepreneur, has managed to cause a bit of controversy with Egyptian archaeologists. He’s a brilliant businessman, no doubt, but he appears to believe in the ancient astronaut theory that alien space travellers built the pyramids. He issued a tweet about it, and so the head of the Egyptian ministry for international cooperation  has sent him a very polite invitation to come to their beautiful and historic country and see for himself that this is very obviously not the case. The report, ‘Musk invited to debunk alien pyramid theory’, by Laurie Havelock, runs

An Egyptian official has invited Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX tycoon, to visit the country and see for himself that its famous pyramids were not built by aliens.

Mr Musk appeared to publicly state his support for a popular conspiracy theory that imagines aliens were involved in the construction of the ancient monuments.

But Egypt’s international co-operation minister corrected him, and said that laying eyes on the tombs of the pyramid builders would be proof enough.

Tombs discovered inside the structures during the 1990s are definitive evidence, experts say, that the structures were indeed built by ancient Egyptians. On Friday, Mr Musk tweeted: “Aliens built the pyramids obv”. which was retweeted more than 84,000 times. It prompoted Egypt’s minister of international co-operation Rania al-Mashat to respond: “I follow your work with a lot of admiration. I invite you & SpaceX to explore the writings about how the pyramids were built and also check out the tombs of the pyramid builders. Mr Musk, we are waiting for you.”

Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass also responded in a short video in Arabic, posted on social media, saying Mr Musk’s argument was a “complete hallucination”.

Hawass used to be head of their ministry of antiquities, and a very senior archaeologist. He was on TV regularly in the 1990s whenever there was a programme about ancient Egypt. And he doesn’t have much truck with bizarre theories about how or why the pyramids were built. ‘Pyramidiots – that what I call them!’ he once declared passionately on screen.

The idea that the ancient Egyptians couldn’t have built the pyramids because it was all somehow beyond them has been around for some time, as have similar ideas about a lost civilisation being responsible for the construction of other ancient monuments around the world, like Stonehenge, the Nazca lines and great civilisations of South America, Easter Island and so on. Once upon a time it was Atlantis. I think in certain quarters it still is. And then with the advent of UFOs it became ancient astronauts and aliens. One of the illustrations Chris Foss painted for a book cover from the 1970s shows, I think, alien spacecraft hovering around the pyramids.

There’s actually little doubt that humans, not aliens, built all these monuments, and that the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids for which their country’s famous. Archaeologists have even uncovered an entire village, Deir el-Medina, inhabited by the craftsmen who worked on them. This has revealed immensely detailed records and descriptions of their daily lives as well as their working environment. One of the documents that has survived from these times records requests from the craftsmen to their supervisors to have a few days off. One was brewing beer – a staple part of the ordinary Egyptians diet – while another had his mother-in-law coming round. I also distinctly remember that one of the programmes about ancient Egypt in the 1990s also proudly showed a tomb painting that at least depicted the system of ramps the workers are believed to have used to haul the vast stones into place. And the great ancient Greek historian, Herodotus, in his Histories, states very clearly that the pyramids were built by human workers. He includes many tall tales, no doubt told him by tour guides keen to make a quick buck and not to worried about telling the strict truth to an inquisitive foreigner. Some of these are about the spice and rich perfumes traded by the Arab civilisations further west. He includes far-fetched stories about how these exotic and very expensive products were collected by giant ants and other fabulous creatures. But no-one tried telling him that it wasn’t people, who built the pyramids.

On the other hand, the possibility that aliens may have visited Earth and the other planets in the solar system isn’t a daft idea at all. Anton ‘Wonderful Person’ Petrov, a Russian YouTuber specialising in real space and science, put up a video a few weeks ago stating that it’s been estimated that another star passes through the solar system once every 50,000 years. A similar paper was published by a Russian space scientist in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society back in the 1990s, although he limited the estimated to a star coming within a light-year of Earth. That’s an incredibly small distance, and if there have been other, spacefaring civilisations in our Galaxy, they could easily jump off their solar system to visit or explore ours. We can almost do it ourselves now, as shown by projects that have been drawn up to send light-weight probes by solar sail to Alpha Centauri. In addition to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence using radio telescopes to comb the skies for a suitable signal, there is also planetary SETI. This advocates looking for the remains of alien spacecraft or visitors elsewhere in our solar system. It’s advocates are serious scientists, though it suffered a major blow to its credibility with the furore over the ‘Face on Mars’. Which turned out not to be a face at all, but a rock formation as its critics had maintained.

Aliens may well have visited the solar system in the deep past, but it was definitely very human ancient Egyptians, who built the pyramids. Because, as Gene Roddenberry once said about such theories, ‘humans are clever and they work hard.’ Wise words from the man who gave us Star Trek.

Let’s go out in space to seek out new life and new civilisations by all means, but also keep in mind what we humans are also capable of achieving on our own down here.

Prehistoric Hull Traded with an Settled by Ancient Egyptians

This is another clipping from 20 years ago, but on rather a lighter subject. It’s from the Daily Mail, 26th August 2000. Titled ‘Where the Hull have we landed, pharaoh?’, it’s about the discovery of three ancient Egyptian ships in the city. The clipping reads

Egyptians were shipwrecked off the east coast of Britain some 2,700 years ago and settled in Hull, it was claimed yesterday.

Three wooden boats found in mud on the banks of the Humber in 1937 – thought at first to be Viking – are now said to date from 700 BC and be identical to ones which once navigated the Nile. Egyptologist Lorraine Evans says her findings will revolutionise views about our ancestors. “The simple fact that many people of Britain are going about their daily business unaware of their Egyptian heritage is astounding,” she added.

I don’t know if her findings have been corroborated or invalidated by more recent research. The ancient Egyptians used sewn plank boats, which is exactly how they were built. Nails were used, and instead the ship’s timbers were held together by drilling holes in them and sewing them together with rope. A few years later a ship built exactly the same way by indigenous Brits was found in Dover, so this might simply mean that Iron Age Britons were making them earlier than previously believed.

However, archaeologists are amassing increasing evidence that long distance trade was far more established across the world than previously recognised. You can’t see it with the unaided eye, but some of the stones at Stonehenge have the Mycenaean double-headed axe, indicating that the builders were in touch with Bronze Age ancient Greece. And ancient Spain, which was also partly home to Celtic tribes, also traded with ancient Egypt so it’s entirely credible that sailors and traders from the land of the Nile may have made their way farther north.

I mentioned this to a friend of mine at the time. He told me that some geneticists had also discovered the markers for ancient Egyptian heritage in the DNA of White Brits in Birmingham. I really can’t comment, as I haven’t seen anything to confirm this. But what spooked him is that one of the psychic questers around at the time had claimed in one of his books that through his psychic powers he had found out that ancient Egyptians had also settled in the city of Noddy Holder and Black Sabbath.

Another Prehistoric Monument Discovered Near Stonehenge

Here’s a bit of interesting archaeological news. According to Monday’s edition of the I newspaper, for 22nd June 2020, a set of prehistoric pits have been discovered around the Durrington Walls henge near Stonehenge.

The article by Douglas Barrie, ‘New prehistoric monument discovered near Stonehenge’, runs

A major prehistoric monument has been discovered just a short distance from Stonehenge. Fieldwork and analysis revealed evidence of 20 or more massive shafts more than 10m (33ft) wide and 5m deep. they form a circle more than two kilometres in diameter around the Durrington Walls henge – the site of a large Neolithic settlement.

Analysis suggests that the features were excavated more than 4,500 years ago at around the time Durrington Walls was built. It is thought the shafts served as a boundary to sacred area or precinct.

Dr Richard Bates, of the University of St Andrews, said the shafts reveal “an even more complex society than we could ever imagine”.

He added: “Clearly sophisticated practices demonstrate that the people were so in tune with natural events to an extent that we can barely conceive in the modern world we live in today.”

Meanwhile, more than 3.6 million people tuned in to a livestream from Stonehenge for a virtual celebration of the summer solstice.

With the usual celebrations cancelled because of coronavirus, English Heritage broadcast footage from the Wiltshire landmark on its Facebook page instead.

It was only a few years ago that the Durrington Walls henge was discovered. This included evidence that the site had been used for feasting and would have supported a large population. I can’t remember much about it now, but it has been argued that Durrington Walls and Stonehenge formed a huge ritual landscape for the ritual journey of the dead to the afterlife. Or something like that.

Video on My Model of the Neolithic Mortuary House at Loftus in Britain

A bit more archaeology now, for those interested. Four years ago in 2015 I made this video about the model I’d made of the Neolithic mortuary house and palisade around its forecourt discovered beneath a long barrow, also from the Neolithic, at Loftus in Cleveland, Britain by Blaise Vyner during excavations from 1979 to 1981. The Neolithic was the period c. 4,000 BC when hunter-gatherers were settling down into settled communities and farming. The built long barrows to house the remains of their dead. The remains come from many different skeletons, and are often sorted according to body part. Long bones, for example, may be stored in one chamber while other parts of the skeleton were kept in another. Many of the barrows also have forecourts, some of which have traces of burning dating from the time they were built and used. From this archaeologists have suggested that the barrows were also the centres of religious ceremonies in which parts of the skeletons were handled in order to commune with the ancestors.

Mortuary houses are structures in which the bodies of the dead are kept during decomposition, after which they are buried for a second time with appropriate rituals. It’s a funerary practice found in many different society throughout the world, including North American First Nations and the people of Madagascar.

Incidentally, today is the winter solstice, which some archaeologists believe was the real time the stone circle at Stonehenge was built to mark. This is the shortest day of the year, after which the sun returns and the days start lengthening again. This would be seen by the monument’s ancient builders as the return of warmth, light and the revival of life after the cold of winter, and so an important event for early agricultural communities.

But considering how cold and miserable it’s been, I think it’ll be a very brave set of pagans, druids and hippies, who would go down there to celebrate it today. But I’ve no doubt some hardy souls will do it.