The Brunch Table

I just finished reading Not Out of Africa…you will notice that a hardcover copy sells for one shiny dollar on at half.com. Which is more than it’s worth (and I didn’t pay for my copy)…it’s a tame early-nineties forerunner of today’s spunky, chatty right-wing opinion book…on the back, it promises to be a ruthless critical ass-whooping of the Afrocentric history movement.

What this works out to, though, is the author spends most of her time saying nasty things about Egypt. Egypt! After a couple of chapters of this, you suddenly get this vaguely Biblical feeling. I mean, hating Egypt, really passionately not liking it, feels so…how do I put this…B.C. It sounds like it’s a Hittite talking or something.

The author’s main point, which she repeats quite a bit, is that Greece conquered Egypt back in the day, so ancient Egyptian culture must therefore not be any good. And that made me think…Rome conquered Greece, and ended up with Greek culture. So why shouldn’t Greece have conquered Egypt, and ended up with some Egyptian culture? And then the Greeks also conquered the Judeans, so maybe they ended up with some Judean culture too. (The Greek alphabet comes from the Judean, or Hebrew…aleph/alpha, bet/beta, gimel/gamma, dalet/delta…and the Hebrew comes from the Egyptian alphabet, the world’s first.)

But then–I’m totally stepping away from alphabets here–isn’t it odd that the historical Jesus came out of Judea, and the mythological Jesus came out of Egypt (the story of the god Horus is too close a match…virgin birth, murder, resurrection, triumph over evil, establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, althought not in that order). Both of Egypt and Judea were conquered by Greece, and Greece is where Christianity as we know it was born (it’s where the earliest complete Christian bibles come from).

I think that’s pretty interesting…and it would’ve never occurred to me if I hadn’t read part of this petty, borderline-racist little book.