The Lost Labyrinth

III

Knox and Franklin had reached the Telesterion, the large rectangular courtyard where the Mysteries had anciently been celebrated. The high walls that had once ensured the secrecy of its rites had long since tumbled down, leaving only their outlines, yet it was an atmospheric setting all the same. 'African?' smiled Knox. 'Isn't that rather a bold claim?'

'It is,' admitted Franklin. 'It's a very bold claim. But that doesn't necessarily make it false. It's not as cut and dried as that, of course. Nothing ever is. But I still stand by the core of it, which is that the western world has a dark secret: the golden age of Athens didn't spring fully-formed out of nothing thanks to some extraordinary flowering of Greek genius. It was simply one part of the overall evolution of thought; and much or even most of the breakthroughs that we attribute to the Greeks were actually learned in Egypt and merely publicised by the Greeks. And the remarkable thing is that the ancient Greeks themselves admitted as much. Not only did they explicitly credit the Egyptians with being the pioneers of religion, philosophy and thought, they also travelled in huge numbers to Egypt for their education. Thales, the father of philosophy, spent years there, as did Pythagoras, the father of mathematics, Solon, the father of law and democracy, and Herodotus, the father of history. Archimedes and Anaximander both travelled there, as did Democritus, Hipparchus, Plato and-'

'You don't need to convince me that the Greeks were influenced by the Egyptians,' said Knox, aware that the list could go on for a while yet.

'Forgive me,' said Franklin. 'I forgot that you're an Egyptologist.' He paused a moment to admire the view, down over the perimeter wall and terracotta roofs to a recreational marina, where masts swayed and clacked in the light breeze. 'But your awareness makes you the exception rather than the rule. Though that wouldn't have been the case four hundred years ago, say. Back then, educated Westerners broadly accepted the Greek's own account of Egyptian primacy.' He paused and turned to Knox. 'Europeans try their best to forget, but it wasn't just America that grew rich on slave-labour. It must have been a strange thing, don't you think, for Europe's enlightened aristocracy to own slaves? They liked to think of themselves as good, as we all do; but it must have been hard while they were shipping their fellow men in their thousands to their plantations, then whipping them to death, just for having the wrong coloured skin. The notion that Africans could be their equals or even their superiors would have been intolerable, so they did the obvious thing. They rewrote history to shut Africa out. And that's all my beloved Doric invasion ever was-another of the many theories invented by white people to rewrite the story of classical Greece as a white man's triumph.'

Knox looked curiously at him, sensing the anger burning away beneath the surface. 'Just because a theory doesn't work out,' he pointed out, 'it doesn't mean it was malicious.'

'I'm just telling you what I thought at the time,' said Franklin, somewhat unconvincingly. 'I was a young man who'd dedicated his short academic life to a theory, only to discover that it was wrong. It's not surprising that I felt a little bitter. And there's also something indescribably heady about realising the Emperor is naked, you know. You want to point it out to everyone who'll listen, not always in the most sympathetic fashion.' He broke off as he led the way up a narrow flight of wooden steps to the forecourt of the Eleusis museum, on which the conference pavilion had been erected. 'So I took it upon myself not merely to attack these theories, but also to explain why they'd been devised in the first place, and why some of my colleagues clung to them with such tenacity, in the teeth of all the evidence.'

Knox raised his eyebrows. 'You accused them of racism?'

'Racism, colonialism, imperialism, bad scholarship.' He gave a somewhat rueful laugh. 'That was the one that really rankled, of course. Bad scholarship.'

'So how did it all pan out?' asked Knox, opening the pavilion door for him, ushering him ahead into the cool darkness within.

Franklin turned to him with a charming smile. 'Unexpectedly,' he replied.