Page 10

who in 399 B.C. sentenced Socrates to death (Zeller's Hist. of Phil., p. 112; 127; 170-172) and subsequently caused Plato and Aristotle to flee for their lives from Athens, because philosophy was something foreign and unknown to them. For this same reason, we would expect either the Ionians or the Italians to exert their prior claim to philosophy, since it made contact with them long before it did with the Athenians, who were always its greatest enemies, until Alexander's conquest of Egypt, which provided for Aristotle free access to the Library of Alexandria.

The Ionians and Italians made no attempt to claim the authorship of philosophy, because they were well aware that the Egyptians were the true authors. On the other hand, after the death of Aristotle, his Athenian pupils, without the authority of the state, undertook to compile a history of philosophy, recognized at that time as the Sophia or Wisdom of the Egyptians, which had become current and traditional in the ancient world, which compilation, because it was produced by pupils who had belonged to Aristotle's school, later history has erroneously called Greek philosophy, in spite of the fact that the Greeks were its greatest enemies and persecutors, and had persistently treated it as a foreign innovation. For this reason, the so-called Greek philosophy is stolen Egyptian philosophy, which first spread to Ionia, thence to Italy and thence to Athens. And it must be remembered that at this remote period of Greek history, i.e., Thales to Aristotle 640 B.C.-322 B.C., the Ionians were not Greek citizens, but at first Egyptian subjects and later Persian subjects.

Zeller's Hist. of Phil.: p. 37; 46; 58; 66-83; 112; 127; 170172.

William Turner's Hist. of Phil.: p 34; 39; 45; 53.

Roger's Student Hist. of Phil.: p. 15.

B. D. Alexander's Hist. of Phil.: p. 13; 21.

Sandford's The Mediterranean World p. 157; 195-205.

A brief sketch of the ancient Egyptian Empire would also make it clear that Asia Minor or Ionia was the ancient land of

---