The only realm in which Bailey seems to be clearly out of his depth is that of philology. In the area of graphonomy, he equates scripts with alphabets, despite the fact that most scripts are not alphabets, confuses hieroglyphic Hittite with cuneiform Hittite, and states that ancient Greek had no w, although many non-Attic dialects did (the name for it having been "digamma"). In the area of phonology, he talks of "glottal p" in Minoan and Mayan – a phonetic impossibility, unless he means glottalized p. In the area of etymology, he suggests the cognation of the three Classical words okeanos, "ocean current," aqua, "water," and oikoumenê, "inhabited world," when no Indo-Europeanists support these equations. In the area of linguistic classification, finally, he describes Ancient Egyptian as "partly Semitic," which is the taxonomic equivalent of referring to horses as "partly cattle." Egyptian was closely related to Semitic, as horses are to cows; but hybridization, in the strict sense, is no more feasible in the one case than in the other. My negative assessment here is, I think, due less to the fact that I am a linguist by trade than to the fact that Bailey, like many good amateur scholars, mistakenly assumes that language is capricious and lawless, so that one man's opinions about it are as good as another's. In fact, language is probably the most rule-governed sphere of human behaviour, with the result that we can often trace the history of individual words and speech-sounds back to a time-depth of five millennia – even when the history of the peoples who spoke the languages involved is not known for half that long. Fortunately, however, none of Bailey's linguistic errors affect his major historical contentions.

One matter on which Bailey remains inexplicit is one about which I continue to feel curious, and that is the social structure of the Bronze Age thalassocracy he so glowingly re-creates. As the editor of African Drum, he was known as an ardent civil libertarian and racial egalitarian. By implication, on the other hand, his White thalassocrats were so arrogantly monopolistic of power that they treated not only non Whites but even Whites of lower caste as domestic animals or midgets, in relation to whom they themselves acted as gods or giants. Quite apart from the moral issues involved, one wonders how such an extreme cultural polarisation came about. For, prior to the sixth millennium B. C., social stratification among hunting peoples seems to have been non-existent and even among horticultural peoples to have been minimal. Does this puzzle leave room for yet more extravagant hypotheses, such as that of Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods?