Militant Afrocentrism has stirred up poisonous resentment against the supposed European suppression and erasure of Egyptian culture. In point of fact, it was Africans who almost immediately looted and smashed up the royal tombs and afterward neglected or stripped and dismantled the sacred monuments. The great Egyptian sites, including Deir el Bahri, Karnak and Abu Simbel, were piles of rubble buried in sand for 2000 years until Europeans took an interest in them.

Rogues and cheats there certainly were among the early excavators of Egypt. But it was Europeans who painstakingly deciphered hieroglyphics and who first explored, mapped and catalogued the magnificent ruins of Egypt. Indeed, archaeology as a systematic technique of analysis and conservation ultimately descends from Greek science.

Egypt and all of Africa deserve a much expanded place in the academic curriculum—but not at the expense of European intellectual history, which invented the very tools that multiculturalism needs to understand the world.