 Precisely locating the start of this early period once more raises potentially knotty metaphysical and empirical puzzles. Before the idea of Africa as a unitary entity gained sufficient traction (precisely when this happened is the empirical puzzle), nothing interestingly identifiable as African or Africana philosophy existed. There was a great deal of philosophizing in the place that would come to be called Africa, and there may be reasons to link those early activities to the self-consciously African-oriented reflections that would emerge later. But Gordon is surely right to say that reading ancient Egypt or Kush as what some scholars call a classical African civilization “must … be a modern imposition onto the past” (Gordon 2008, 15). He is also right to point out that we typically allow this imposition, often without comment, in other contexts—in studies of Asian philosophy, for example, or in assuming the organic coherence of western philosophy from Greece to, say Germany.