Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, published in 1987 (vol. 1), 1991 (vol. 2), and 2006 (vol. 3), is a controversial trilogy by the British Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies Martin Bernal proposing an alternative hypothesis on the origins of ancient Greece and classical civilisation. Bernal's thesis discusses the perception of ancient Greece in relation to Greece's North African and West Asian neighbours, especially the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians who, he believes, colonized ancient Greece producing the bulk of Classical civilization. Bernal proposed that a change in the Western perception of Greece in the 18th century led to the denial of any significant Egyptian and Phoenician influence on ancient Greek civilization.
Black Athena has been heavily criticised and rejected by the majority of academics, many of whom consider it pseudoarcheological. They often highlight the fact that there is no archaeological or historical evidence for ancient Egyptian colonization of mainland Greece or the Aegean Islands. Academic reviews of Bernal's work overwhelmingly reject his heavy reliance on ancient Greek mythology and literature, speculative assertions, and handling of archaeological, linguistic, and historical data.
Contents
Thesis
Origins of Ancient Greek civilization
Bernal rejects the theory that Greek civilization was founded by Indo-European settlers from Central Europe. This theory, which Bernal calls the Aryan model, came to be generally accepted during the 19th century. Bernal defends instead what he calls the Ancient model; the name refers to the fact that Egyptian and Phoenician (as well as Mesopotamian and Anatolian) 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 Asiatic Phoenician alphabet to Greece. Herodotus also mentions Eastern influences. 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 including the 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 Egyptian and Phoenician civilizations. The Classical Greek language arose from the Proto-Greek language with influences from the Anatolian languages such as Hittite, Luwian, Hurrian and Hattian that were spoken nearby, and the culture is assumed to have developed from a comparable amalgamation of elements.
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.
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. 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
The original response to Bernal by Near Eastern scholars, historians, classicists, biological anthropologists, linguists, egyptologists and archaeologists was negative and critical. A 2013 article noted that Bernal's trilogy "has been an object of much ridicule and a little curiosity".
As of 1999, over 100 negative reviews had been published about Black Athena, as well as several books refuting its assertions. According to Jacques Berlinerblau:
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 Berlinerblau's statement, writing that:
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.
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". Bernal also dedicates 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:
Editions of Black Athena
Volume 1
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Rutgers University Press (1987) ISBN 0-8135-1277-8)
Black Athena: Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 Vol. 1 (Paperback) Vintage; New Ed edition (21 Nov 1991) ISBN 978-0-09-988780-5
Black Athena: Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 Vol. 1 (Paperback) Free Association Books (29 Nov 2004) ISBN 978-0-946960-56-9
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization: Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 (Paperback) Rutgers University Press Classics (2020) ISBN 978-1978804265
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 978-1-85343-054-1
Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Vol. 2 (Hardcover) Rutgers University Press (Jul 1991) ISBN 978-0-8135-1584-7
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization: Volume II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence (Paperback) Rutgers University Press Classics (2020) ISBN 978-1978804272
Volume 3
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence Rutgers University Press (25 Nov 2006) ISBN 978-0-8135-3655-2
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence Free Association Books (1 Feb 2006) ISBN 978-1-85343-799-1
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence Rutgers University Press Classics (2020) ISBN 978-1978804296
Books and articles about Black Athena
Black Athena 2: History without Rules. Robert L. Pounder The American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 2 (Apr., 1992), pp. 461–464 doi:10.2307/2165728.
Mary R. Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History, 1997, ISBN 978-0-465-09838-5
Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers (eds.), Black Athena Revisited, 1996, ISBN 978-0-8078-4555-4
Mary R. Lefkowitz, History Lesson, 2008, ISBN 978-0-300-12659-4
Martin Bernal, Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics, 2001.
Jacques Berlinerblau, Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals, 1999, ISBN 978-0-8135-2588-4
van Binsbergen, Wim, ed. (2011). Black Athena Comes of Age: Towards a Constructive Re-Assessment. Berlin: Lit Verlag. ISBN 978-3-8258-4808-8.
Skupin, Michael. "Anacalypsis II: A review of Black Athena Vol. I and II by Martin Bernal." Epigraphic Society Occasional Publications, Vol. 20 (1991), p. 28–29.
Duncan Hallas, Absent Friends, Socialist Worker Review, 100 (1987)
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.
"Black Athena and the APA." in "The Challenge of Black Athena" Special issue of Arethusa. pp. 17–37.