Black Athena

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Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization
ISBN
978-0-8135-1277-8

Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, its three volumes first published in 1987, 1991, and 2006 respectively, is a controversial book by

academia
of any significant Egyptian and Phoenician influence on ancient Greek civilization.

Black Athena has been heavily criticised by academics. They often highlight the fact that there is no archaeological or historical evidence whatsoever for ancient Egyptian colonies in

mainland Greece or the Aegean Islands. Academic reviews of Bernal's work generally reject his heavy reliance on ancient Greek mythology, speculative assertions, and handling of archaeological, linguistic, and historical data. The book has also been accused that, by "reopening the nineteenth-century discourse on race and origins," it "has become part of the problem of racism rather than the solution that its author had envisioned." Bernal himself has been accused of pursuing political motives and enlisting Bronze Age Greece in an academic war against Western civilisation.[1]

Thesis

Origins of Ancient Greek civilization

An archaic Greek Kouros from Thebes in the so-called Orientalizing style.

Bernal rejects the theory that Greek civilization was founded by

Mesopotamian and Anatolian
) on the Greek world were widely accepted in Antiquity.

Bernal discusses

Freemasons
are particularly relevant.

Bernal traces thus the influence from the Ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians to the Ancient Greeks, and a tradition of acknowledgement of those links from Antiquity to the Enlightenment.

Bernal uses linguistic evidence to support his claim of a link between Ancient Greece and earlier Egyptian and Phoenician civilizations. The

Hattian
that were spoken nearby, and the culture is assumed to have developed from a comparable amalgamation of elements.

However, Bernal attempts to emphasize

Near Eastern
culture for the sake of its own development" (p. 423).

Bernal proposes instead that

Indo-European language and culturally influential Egyptian and West Asian Semitic languages. He believes that many Greek words have Egyptian or Semitic roots. Bernal places the introduction of the Greek alphabet (unattested before 750 BC) between 1800 and 1400 BC, and the poet Hesiod
in the tenth century.

Ideologies of classical scholarship

The first volume of Black Athena describes in detail Bernal's views on how the Ancient model acknowledging Egyptian and Phoenician influences on Greece came under attack during the 18th and 19th centuries. Bernal concentrates on four interrelated forces: the Christian reaction, the idea of progress, racism and Romantic Hellenism.[5]

The Christian reaction. Already

Church of Rome with the Greek Testament. Greek was seen as a sacred Christian tongue which Protestants could plausibly claim was more Christian than Latin. Many French students of Ancient Greece in the 17th century were brought up as Huguenots.[6]
The study of Ancient Greece especially in Protestant countries created an alliance between Greece and Protestant Christianity which tended to exclude other influences.

The idea of progress. The antiquity of Egypt and Mesopotamia had previously made those civilizations particularly worthy of respect and admiration, but the emergence of the idea of

progress
portrayed later civilizations as more advanced and therefore better. Earlier cultures came to be seen as based on superstition and dogmatism.

Racism. The Atlantic slave trade and later European colonialism required the intellectual justification of racism. It became paramount to divorce Africans and Africa from high civilisation, and Egypt from Africa itself. Ancient Greeks would be divorced from Ancient Egypt through the concept of the Greek Miracle, and would be reclaimed as whites and Europeans.

Romanticism.

Ottoman empire
. Most Philhellenes were Romantics and Protestants.

Reception

The response to Bernal by orientalists, classicists and archaeologists has been overwhelmingly negative and critical.[7][8] Linguists have faulted his linguistics, historians his history, and archeologists his tendency to ignore relevant archeological data.[7] Egyptologists, too, reacted negatively to Bernal's book.[7] As of 1999, over 100 negative reviews had been published about Black Athena, as well as two books refuting its assertions.[9] According to Jacques Berlinerblau:[10]

By my rough estimate, negative scholarly reviews of Black Athena have outweighed positive or moderate ones by a margin of approximately seven to three. It might be inferred that this ratio testifies to the inherent implausibility of Bernal's hypotheses. After all, an ideologically disparate collection of academicians concur that Bernal's theories are simply untenable. Yet the existence of this scholarly consensus must be qualified by one telling fact. What is significant — note this — is that the majority of Bernal's defendants have emanated from the radical tier of the academic world.

Ronald H. Fritze expands on Berlinerbau's statement, writing that:[11]

Actually, what seems even more significant, if one continues to believe in the existence of scholarly expertise and authority, is that most of Bernal's positive reviews were written by people who are not scholars of the classics, Egyptology, ancient Near Eastern history studies, archaeology or European intellectual history. As radicals they found Bernal's arguments to be politically congenial and they were not equipped or particularly interested in critically evaluating the evidence he presented. An observation of this nature raises the issues of authority, credentials and evidence – all aspects of the scholarly enterprise that Bernal seeks to ignore, minimize or reject.

According to Christina Riggs, Black Athena was embraced by Afrocentrists and postcolonial studies even as archaeology, Egyptology and classical scholarship rejected much of Bernal's evidence and, implicitly or explicitly, his central thesis.[12]

There is no archaeological evidence that would clearly indicate a colonization which Bernal suggests. He himself says: “Here again, it should be made clear that, as with archaeological evidence, there are no smoking guns. There are no contemporary documents of the type 'X the Egyptian/Phoenician arrived at this place in Greece and established a city/kingdom (t)here', explicitly confirming the Ancient Model. Nor, for that matter, are there others denying it”.[13] Bernal also devotes Black Athena to V. Gordon Childe and his book does fall into Childe's outdated paradigm of culture-historical archaeology. Michael Shanks criticized this outdated approach to archaeology stating:

Imagine a peasant in a Cretan field in the second millennium BC. Just because they come across things from a very different society does not mean they pack up and start building the extraordinary edifices archaeologists have called Minoan palaces. [...] What did the articles mean to the peasant? Were they considered as being from another ‘society’ at all? Perhaps the boundaries which we apply to the geography of the eastern Mediterranean are not sensible for understanding the second millennium BC when there was a widespread cultural mix joining Aegean, Levant and Egypt in a social system which included all three as essential components.[14]

In her review "The Use and Abuse of Black Athena" Professor of Classics Molly Myerowitz Levine states that:

Volume 1 of Black Athena is an extraordinarily interesting and dangerous book: interesting in its sweeping sociology of the historiography of early Greece from the fifth century B.C.E. to the present; dangerous, because in reopening the nineteenth-century discourse on race and origins, the work, sadly, inevitably, has become part of the problem of racism rather than the solution that its author envisioned... every element of the enormously complex plot meshed perfectly to create a story with good guys (Herodotus, Egyptians, Semites) and bad guys (Aryans, racist German philologists); in which the hero-author, the indefatigable neophyte detective, rereads the files and reworks the clues to uncover the truth that had long been covered up by a contemptibly corrupt and lazy police department (contemporary classicists).[15]

Paul Oskar Kristeller, writing in the Journal of the History of Ideas, states that Bernal’s work is full of gross errors and that it has not received the criticism it deserves due to political reasons.[16]

Scholars also criticized the fact that Bernal speaks of a unified Ancient Greek people and speaks of "Hellenic nationalism" and "national pride" in the 5th century BC which does not have any historical backing as the Greeks were not unified until the

poleis was sometimes so great that it escalated into wars like the Peloponnesian War.[17]

The book also ignited a debate in the academic community. While some reviewers contend that studies of the origin of Greek civilization were tainted by a foundation of 19th century racism, many have criticized Bernal for what they perceive to be the speculative nature of his hypothesis, unsystematic and linguistically incompetent handling of etymologies and a naive handling of ancient myth and historiography. The claims made in Black Athena were heavily questioned inter alia in Black Athena Revisited (1996), a collection of essays edited by Mary Lefkowitz and her colleague Guy MacLean Rogers.[18]

Critics voice their strongest doubts over Bernal's approach to language and word derivations (etymologies).

Titans and Giants, which was once thought of as a historical recollection of Homo sapiens taking over from Neanderthal man. She asserts that this historical approach to myth firmly belongs in the 19th century.[21]

Others have challenged the lack of archaeological evidence for Bernal's thesis. Egyptologist James Weinstein points out that there is very little evidence that the ancient Egyptians were a colonizing people in the third millennium and second millennium BC.[22] Furthermore, there is no evidence for Egyptian colonies of any sort in the Aegean world. Weinstein accuses Bernal of relying primarily on his interpretations of Greek myths as well as distorted interpretations of the archaeological and historical data.[22]

Bernal has also been accused of pursuing political motives and enlisting Bronze Age Greece in an academic war against Western civilisation.[1] Bernal in fact made no secret of his political motives and at the end of his introduction to Black Athena wrote that, “the political purpose of Black Athena is, of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance”. According to historian David Gress:

The truth is that the classicists had no problem whatsoever with Linear B, nor with Egyptian influence on Mycenae. What they could not and cannot accept, however, is continuity of Afroasiatic influences across the Dark Age—not because they are racists, but because all the evidence is against it… Bernal’s denunciations, delivered with a uniformly spiteful tone, give his work the same moral and scholarly status as the Aryan science of the Third Reich or the Lysenkoite genetics of Stalinist Russia; that is, none whatever.[1]

In 2001, Bernal published Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to Critics as a response to criticism of his earlier works.

The Egyptologist John Baines has, while rejecting his overall thesis, praised Bernal for the fact that he studied ancient Greece in a wider cultural and geographical context, which Baines asserts classicists tend not to do.[23] Thomas McEvilley concluded in 2002 that while Bernal's "analysis of earlier periods of anti-Semitic attitude in regard to ancient Near Eastern culture may remain valuable, his attempt ... to derive Greek philosophy from Africa seems so glaringly unsupported by evidence that it is likely to pass without leaving a trace."[24]

Classicist and linguist Jean-Fabrice Nardelli, in one of the very few reviews of Black Athena's third volume, writes that Bernal's "faith in his ability to pinpoint sound shifts in (P)IE matching, or stemming from, Afroasiatic and in the rightness of multilateral lexical comparisons à la Greenberg over the standard comparative method, looks misplaced; for he has not checked his facts and stands at the mercy of sources notorious for their quirks and errors. He notes that Bernal suffers from "proneness to blunders [which] further compromises his construct". Nardelli concludes that Bernal "applies no method but ad hoc reasoning based on contingency" and that "[t]he book is full of red herrings that betray its quality".[25]

A number of archaeogenetic studies have since refuted Bernal's hypotheses of an Egyptian or Phoenician colonisation of Greece. In a 2017 study from Harvard University led by geneticist Iosif Lazaridis, the full genomes of 19 Bronze Age individuals, including Minoans from Crete and Mycenaeans from mainland Greece were extracted and analysed. With regards to Bernal's claims, the authors concluded that:

Proposed migrations, such as settlement by Egyptian or Phoenician colonists, are not discernible in [the] data as there is no measurable Levantine or African influence in the Minoans and Mycenaeans, thus rejecting the hypothesis that the cultures of the Aegean were seeded by migrants from the old civilisations of these regions.[26]

Editions of Black Athena

Volume 1

Volume 2

Volume 3

Books and articles about Black Athena

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Gress, David (1989). "The case against Martin Bernal". The New Criterion. 1: 36–43.
  2. .
  3. .
  4. ^ Herodotus, The Histories, Book V
  5. ^ Volume 1, Chapter 4.
  6. ^ H. Lloyds-Jones. Classical Survivals: The Classics in the Modern World. London 1982, page 19. As quoted by Bernal, Black Athena, Vol. 1, Chapter 4, note 10.
  7. ^
    JSTOR 680325
    .
  8. .
  9. ^ Ayoub, Nina C. (1999). "'Heresy in the University: The "Black Athena" Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals'". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 2023-02-05.
  10. .
  11. .
  12. .
  13. ^ Bernal, Martin (1991). Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume II Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. p. 187.
  14. ^ Shanks, Michael (1996). Classical Archaeology of Greece. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 89–90. Retrieved 24 June 2019.
  15. JSTOR 2165727.
  16. .
  17. .
  18. ^ "Black Athena Revisited". Archived from the original on 2009-02-14. Retrieved 2009-02-03.
  19. ^ Yurco, F. (1996). "Black Athena: An Egyptological review". Black Athena Revisited.
  20. ^ Interview with John Ray, at 5:29, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sarKVo5wVCU
  21. ^ Interview with Edith Hall, at 3:19, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sarKVo5wVCU
  22. ^ a b Interview with James Weinstein, at 2:16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBPlENmnWiE
  23. ^ Baines, J. (1996). "On the aims and methods of Black Athena". Black Athena Revisited: 27.
  24. ^ Thomas McEvilley. The Shape of Ancient Thought. New York 2002, page 666
  25. S2CID 162332956
    – via Cambridge University Press.
  26. .

External links