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Black Athena

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Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization
AuthorMartin Bernal
LanguageEnglish
SubjectAncient Greece
PublisherRutgers University Press
Publication date
1987
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint
ISBN978-0813512778

Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, its three volumes first published in 1987, 1991, and 2006 respectively, is a controversial work by Martin Bernal. He discusses ancient Greece in a new light. Bernal's thesis discusses the perception of ancient Greece in relation to Greece's African and Asiatic neighbors, especially the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians who, he believes, colonized ancient Greece. Bernal proposes that a change in the Western perception of Greece took place from the 18th century onward and that this change fostered a subsequent denial by Western academia of any significant African and Phoenician influence on ancient Greek civilization.

Black Athena has been criticized by academics. They often highlight the fact that there is no archaeological evidence 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 thesis

The 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 Indo-European settlers from Central Europe; that theory (which Bernal calls the Aryan model) became generally accepted during the 19th century. Bernal defends instead what he calls the Ancient model; the name refers to the fact that both Egyptian and Phoenician influences on the Greek world were widely accepted in Antiquity.

Bernal discusses Aeschylus's play The Suppliants, which describes the arrival in Argos from Egypt of the Danaids, daughters of Danaus. Cadmus was believed to have introduced the Phoenician alphabet to Greece. Herodotus also mentions Eastern influences.[1] Thucydides did not, which Bernal explains with his nationalistic wish to set up a sharp distinction between Greeks and barbarians. Plutarch attacked Herodotus' view that the Greeks had learned from barbarians. Yet Alexander the Great was very interested in Egypt; Plutarch himself wrote a work On Isis and Osiris, part of the Moralia, which is a major source on Egypt. Admiration for Egypt was widespread in the Hellenistic and Roman civilizations, especially in the Neoplatonic school. Hermeticism was based on writings attributed to Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, the so-called Hermetica or Hermetic corpus. These pro-Egyptian currents influenced Christianity, Judaism and Islam, as well as Renaissance figures such as Copernicus, Ficino and Giordano Bruno. It was demonstrated in 1614 that the Hermetic corpus was not very ancient at all and originated in late antiquity, though more recent scholarship has established that parts of it do probably have a Pharaonic origin. Casaubon's textual analysis partly discredited the Hermetic corpus, but Bernal maintained that respect for Ancient Egypt survived and contributed to the Enlightenment in the 18th century. The 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 Egyptians and Phoenicians civilizations. The Classical Greek language arose from the Proto-Greek language with influences from the Anatolian languages that were spoken nearby, and the culture is assumed to have developed from a comparable amalgamation of elements.

However, Bernal emphasizes African elements in Ancient Near Eastern culture and denounces the alleged Eurocentrism of 19th and 20th century research, including the very slogan "Ex Oriente Lux" of Orientalists which, according to Bernal, betrays "the Western appropriation of ancient Near Eastern culture for the sake of its own development" (p. 423).

Bernal proposes instead that Greek evolved from the contact between an Indo-European language and culturally influential Egyptian and 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.

The 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.[2]

The Christian reaction. Already Martin Luther had fought the 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.[3] 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. Romantics saw humans as essentially divided in national or ethnic groups. The German philosopher Herder encouraged Germans to be proud of their origins, their language and their national characteristics or national genius. Romantics longed for small, virtuous and "pure" communities in remote and cold places: Switzerland, North Germany and Scotland. When considering the past, their natural choice was Greece. The Philhellenic movement led to new archaeological discoveries as well as contributed to the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman empire. Most Philhellenes were Romantics and Protestants.

Reception

Criticism

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.[4]

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”.[5] 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.[6]

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 B.C. which doesn't have any historical backing. It is well known that the Greeks weren't unified until the Hellenistic period and the tensions between different polises was sometimes so great that it escalated into wars like the Peloponnesian War.[7]

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.[8]

Critics voice their strongest doubts over Bernal's approach to language and word derivations (etymologies).[9] Cambridge Egyptologist John D. Ray has accused Bernal's work of having a confirmation bias.[10] Edith Hall compares Bernal's thesis to the myth of the Olympian gods overwhelming the 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.[11]

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.[12] 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.[12]

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

Although Bernal's hypotheses have been widely rejected, his work has still had a significant impact on classical scholarship and Egyptology. Some classicists have praised him for putting a spotlight on what they consider to be a Eurocentric bias in classical scholarship. Some Egyptologists have praised him for the fact that he studied ancient Greece in a wider cultural and geographical context, which they assert classicists tend not to do.[13] 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."[14]

Editions of Black Athena

Volume 1

Volume 2

  • Black Athena: Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence Vol. 2 (Paperback) Publisher: Free Association Books (1 Jan 1991) ISBN 1-85343-054-4 ISBN 978-1853430541
  • Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Vol. 2 (Hardcover) Rutgers University Press (Jul 1991) ISBN 0-8135-1584-X ISBN 978-0813515847

Volume 3

  • Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence Vol. 3 (Hardcover) Rutgers University Press (25 Nov 2006) ISBN 0-8135-3655-3 ISBN 978-0813536552
  • Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence Free Association Books (1 Feb 2006) ISBN 1-85343-799-9 ISBN 978-1853437991

Books and articles about Black Athena

Selected publications

What follows is a list of relevant publications listed on the www.blackathena.com website.

  • 1976 Chinese Socialism Before 1907, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
  • 1987 Black Athena The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985. London: Free Association Books. and New Brunswick: Rutgers University.
  • 1988 "The British Utilitarians, Imperialism and the Fall of the Ancient Model," Culture and History 3: 98-127.
  • 1989 "Classics in Crisis: An Outsider's View In," Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis? Ed. P. Culham and L. Edmunds. University Press of America. pp. 67–76.
  • "Black Athena and the APA." in "The Challenge of Black Athena" Special issue of Arethusa. pp. 17–37.
  • 1990 "Responses to Critical Reviews of Black Athena: Volume I: in the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 3/1:111- 137.
  • Cadmean Letters: The Westward Diffusion of The Semitic Alphabet Before 1400 B.C. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.
  • 1991 Black Athena 2: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. London, Free Association Books; New Brunswick: Rutgers University.
  • 1992 "Animadversions on the Origins of Western Science," Isis 83, 4 (December): 596–607.
  • 1993 "Response", to "Dialogue: Martin Bernal's Black Athena." Journal of Women's History 4.3, (Winter):119-135.
  • "Phoenician Politics and Egyptian Justice in Ancient Greece." in Kurt Raaflaub ed. Anfänge politischen Denkens in der Antike: nahöstliochen Kulturen und die Griechen. Schriften des Historischen Kollegs. Kolloquien 24. München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag. pp. 241–252.
  • "Reply to L. A. Trittle," Liverpool Classical Monthly 18.2: whole issue.
  • 1994 "Response to Robert Palter," History of Science 32:1-20.
  • 1995 "Race, Class and Gender in the Formation of The Aryan Model of Greek Origins." South Atlantic Quarterly. 94.4. (Fall): 987–1008.
  • "Politically Correct: Mythologies of Neo-Conservatism in the American Academy," New Political Science. 38/39:17-28.
  • 1997 "Responses to Black Athena." Black Athena: Ten Years After. Special edition of Talanta vols. 28 and 29. pp. 65–99, 165-173 and 209–219.
  • 2005 "Martin Bernal," by Kinohi Nishikawa. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Ed. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey, Jr. 5 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 114–15.
  • Journal of Arethusa.[page needed]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Herodotus, The Histories, Book V
  2. ^ Volume 1, Chapter 4.
  3. ^ 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.
  4. ^ Riggs, Christina (2014-04-10). Unwrapping Ancient Egypt. A&C Black. ISBN 978-0-85785-677-7.
  5. ^ Bernal, Martin (1991). Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume II Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. p. 187.
  6. ^ Shanks, Michael (1996). Classical Archaeology of Greece. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 89–90. Retrieved 24 June 2019.
  7. ^ Hall, E. (2002). "When is a Myth Not a Myth? Bernal's Ancient Model". Greeks and Barbarians. Edinburgh University Press (1): 181–201. JSTOR 26308565.
  8. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2009-02-14. Retrieved 2009-02-03.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  9. ^ Yurco, F. (1996). "Black Athena: An Egyptological review". Black Athena Revisited.
  10. ^ Interview with John Ray, at 5:29, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sarKVo5wVCU
  11. ^ Interview with Edith Hall, at 3:19, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sarKVo5wVCU
  12. ^ a b Interview with James Weinstein, at 2:16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBPlENmnWiE
  13. ^ Baines, J. (1996). "On the aims and methods of Black Atehna". Black Athena Revisited: 27.
  14. ^ Thomas McEvilley. The Shape of Ancient Thought. New York 2002, page 666
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