The publication by Martin Bernal in 1987 and 1991 of the two volumes of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization gave widespread attention to a series of claims about the relationship between ancient Greek civilization and, therefore, of the Western Civilization that sprang from it, and that of ancient Egypt. Bernal was not trained as a classical scholar nor as a historian of the ancient world, but his position as a professor at Cornell University and his two volumes, packed with footnotes and intricate arguments, lent a respectability to a set of assertions and an interpretation of the past that had previously been ignored almost entirely. These claims include, among other notions, that the people who developed and lived in the ancient Egyptian civilization were black Africans and that the Athenian Socrates and the Macedonian Cleopatra descended from black African ancestors. Some writers assert that Egyptians invaded Greece in the sixteenth century B.C., taught the Greeks agriculture and metallurgy, and in other ways directly and powerfully influenced Greek civilization. There are also claims that the Greek philosophers Thales, Pythagoras, Democritus, and Plato studied with Egyptian masters and that Aristotle accompanied Alexander the Great to Alexandria in 333 B.C., looted the great library there, using the collection as the foundation of his entire system of philosophy and science. All of this is seen not as cultural influence but as the theft of a “stolen legacy” whose traces have been carefully obliterated by subsequent generations of white