BLACK ATHENA CONTROVERSY
Black History draws
attention to evidence that mainstream historians consider unimportant and omit
from the historical mythos that assumes, without much thought, that
people with white skins made the important events. What brought this home to me
almost a quarter century was a column written for Black History month in a
Seattle newspaper by a black journalist. He cited that American Revolution as
an example. It might have happened eventually in any case, but what sparked the Declaration of
Independence when it did was the return of Benjamin Franklin from Britain with
the report that Britain had abolished slavery. The
Mansfield Judgement handed down by the Court of King’s Bench in 1772 that there was no legal basis for
slavery must have aroused the big slaveholders in Verginia such as Lee,
Jefferson and Washington. Their property
could be in danger. So must also must have been the news Franklin brought that
France, stung by her massive defeat in the Seven Years War, was willing to
finance a rebellion. “French francs”
made a more potent rallying cry that did “Liberty”. All that is omitted from
mainstream history of the American Revolution.
Were the Blacks written out of Greek
and Roman history in the same way? Bernal presents the evidence. But how
plausible is it?
I made on other contribution to the Black History debate: a review of Jaques Berlinerblau’s Heresy in the University, for the Literary Review of Canada. I have forgotten the reference.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy Maclean Rogers. Black
Athena Revisited.
Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. 1996. pp. xxi + tt
Mary R. Lefkowitz. Not Out of Africa. How
Afrocentrism Became an Excuse
to Teach Myth as History.
A New Republic Book. New York Basic Books. 1996. Pp.
xvii + .
Echos du Monde Classique/Classical Views XllI. n.s. 17.1998, pp.677-696 (Edited by
Robert Todd).
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I regret that my software program
did not allow me to use French accents or German umlauts.
J. A. S. EVANS
The relationship between history and
myth is a delicate one. We use
mythology in order to adjust the past into a pattern
acceptable to the
present. and a certain amount of mythmaking is
probably necessary to
keep modern nation states glued together. (I) National histories. ethnic
histories and "victim group" histories
regularly blur the boundary
between well-attested evidence and fiction. often
because their creators
allow themselves to be blinkered by
"models" which tend to shake
themselves loose from the evidence and become
"doctrines." Yet, as
Lucian of Samosata reminded us, the historian's
goal is to tell the truth.
and anyone who wants to pass for an historian must
lay claim to the
same purpose with some degree of plausibility.
Otherwise. he must
abandon history and write historical novels or.
better still. epics which
no one expects to be encumbered with bibliography.
No modern
mythmaker can claim the success of Vergil's Aeneid.
which wove the
past into an enduring imperial myth. But Vergil was
a poet. and in the
modern world poets have moved away from mass
audiences. University
survey courses supplemented by electronic media
have moved
into the vacuum thus created.
However, there is a new element in the
modern "Culture Wars"
which rouses the academic exasperation evident in
these two books from the battlefront,
Mary Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa and Black Athena
... Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy Maclean Rogers. Black Athena
Revisited.
Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press.
1996. pp. xxi +
522.
Mary R. Lefkowitz. Not Out of Africa. How Afrocentrism Became
an Excuse
to Teach Myth as History.
A New Republic Book. New York Basic Books. 1996. Pp.
xvii + 222.
I I should like to thank Robert Todd. for
encouraging me to undertake this review
essay. and the University of Washington. where I
was able to take advantage
of the resources of the Suzzallo Library while I
was a visiting professor of
history there in 1997.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Revisited. which Lefkowitz edits along with Guy MacLean. It is that the
same mythopoeic process that nation states have used in
the past has
been rejigged to produce an adhesive that allows racial groups to rohere
within the modern multicultural state. In this
case. it is post-World
War II classical studies that is being
rejigged. Martin Bernal's
Black Athena. of which
we have two volumes now and two more
promised, is a learned example of the process.
Bernal charges that
classical scholars have slighted the Asian and
African contribution to
Greek culture for racist motives. notably
anti-Semitism. Thus the interpretations
of past scholars should be judged by their racial
background.
To this, Bernal adds the concept of "useful"
history: for
instance: Aeschylus' view of myth in the Suppliants
was clouded by
"what can usefully be called Hellenic
nationalism"2 and Dynasties I.
XI. XII and XVIII from Upper Egypt were "made
up of pharaohs
whom one can usefully call black. "( 3). To be
sure. as Bernal pointed out
in a special issue of Arethusa devoted to
the Black Athena debate. classicists
are mending their ways. In the 1950s, he asserted.
classics was
still a "male. WASP club." but in the
1980s. he noted. more than half
the members of the American Philological
Association are women. and
there is a high proportion of Jews. "It is no
longer possible to maintain
the old. clubby. sexist. racist and anti-Semitic
atmosphere. ". Bernal
presents his reading of Euro-American classical
scholarship as part of
a new wave, a correction of the past.
Now. since it is Bernal's view that any
classicist's scholarship is
tainted by his ethnicity and politics. I should
confess my own background.
I was born on a farm in southern Ontario during the
Depression,
went to a one-room school until the eighth grade.
learned my
Latin and Greek in the collegiate-institute of a
small Ontario city and
went to university on scholarships. I began my
career in the "sexist,.
racist and anti-Semitic atmosphere" of the
fifties. Yet as I recall. there
were a number of formidable scholars in the field
who were women
or Jews. or even both. There was still the
conviction in Canadian academia
that Canada did not produce first-rate classical scholars
on its
home turf. though some who wisely emigrated did surprisingly well. and
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2 Martin Bernal. Black Athena. The Afroasiatic
Roots of Classical Civilization.
I. The Fabrication of Ancient Greece.
1785-1985 (London 1987. repro with new
introduction London 1991) 90. Black Athena will
be abbreviated as BA. cited with
volume and page number.
3 BA I. 242.
The Theban pharaoh Kamose. who initiated an offensive against
the Hyksos. says in an inscription which has
survived as a school exercise that he
finds himself between an Asian prince in Avaris and
a negro prince in Ethiopia.
that is. Nubia. from which we may
"usefully" infer that he considered himself
neither: see Sabatino Moscati. The Face of the
Ancient Orient (Garden City 1962)
109-110: A. Erman. ed.. tr. Aylward M. Blackman.
The Ancient Egyptians: A
Source Book of their Writings (London 1927.
repro New York 1966) 52-54.
• The Challenge of Black Athena. Special
Issue. Arethusa (Fall 1989) 19.
there was also the pervasive conviction that women
could not combine
motherhood and academic careers.
But there were exceptions. and in spite of the cliche to the contrary. no exception ever proves the rule.
From Manitoba to the Atlantic coast. the role of
the churches in university
education was still an open wound. In Ontario. this
battle from the
preceding century reached its final stage in the
1950s. McMaster University
ceased to be Baptist. the University of Windsor
relinquished its
ties with the Roman Catholic church. and the old
University of Western
Ontario affiliate. Waterloo College. lost a final
struggle to remain
Lutheran. giving birth in the process to two
universities, Wilfrid
Laurier and the University of Waterloo. The group
in Canada at
mid-century that suffered the greatest
discrimination was the native
Indians; in the victimhood stakes they left all
other groups far behind,
even though their record of service in World War II
was better than
that of any other group.
There were many prejudices on Canadian
campuses in the fifties and sixties. including some
that would be labelled
"sexist. racist and anti-Semitic"
according to the standards of the
1990s. But in general, the prejudices set their
sights in other directions.
So a critique of the Black Athena debate.
which has spawned these
two books. should perhaps proceed on two levels.
First, how accurate
are Bernal's charges and what is his aim in making
them? Second. how
does the debate fit into the sociology of the
nineties. Specifically the
sociology of the United States. for in Canada.
where the first large influx
Negroes was the black Loyalists after the American
Revolution,
the popular image of the Canadian negro was as a
deserving member
of society. He had a decent grasp of politics even
though the colour of his
skin might render him distinct. In the United States,
however. almost a
a century passed between the Emancipation and the
Civil Rights movement.
and though the progress of the U.S. Blacks in the
last generation
has been great. the cultural scar tissue that
remains is not easy for an
outsider to appreciate.
"Culture." wrote Walter
Burkert. "is not a plant sprouting from its
seed in isolation; it is a continuous process of
learning guided by curiosity
along with practical needs and interests. It grows
especially
through a willingness to learn from what is
'other,' what is strange
and foreign." The quotation comes from
Burkert's The Orientalizing
Revolution. which was
first published in German in 1984.5 and it uses
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5 Walter Burkert. trans. M.E. Pinder and W.
Burkert. The Orientalizing Revolution.
Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age
the results of extensive research over the past
forty years or so. The
common label for the interval in ancient history
when Greece took her
alphabet from the Phoenicians is now the
"Orientalizing Period,"
though Oswyn Murray was, I believe, the first to mint
the title only in 1980
in the first edition of his Early Greece. Burkert
continued, "The
'Miracle of Greece' is not merely the result of
unique talent. It also
owes its existence to the simple phenomenon that
the Greeks are the
most easterly of Westerners .... Greece has
remained in an uneasy
intermediary position. Hellas is not Hesperia.
"
The quotation is relevant to the
controversy surrounding Black
Athena. For it is
a debate on more than one level. First, there is the
question of what influence Africa and Asia had on
the Greek cultural
achievement. Here Bernal is a relative latecomer to
the debate which
started more than a century ago with Oscar
Montelius and Salomon
Reinach. Even Bernal's hypothesis that the myth of
the Danaids is
based on an actual incursion of Hyksos refugees
from Egypt was suggested
before him by Frank Stubbings in the Cambridge
Ancient History,
VI, and
Bernal's contribution to the theory, that the Greek word for
"suppliants" derives from
"Hyksos," does not add to its credibility.
Second,
there is the question of "Orientalism" as defined by Edward
Said: how much has the stereotype of the oriental
inherited from
nineteenth-century imperialism coloured our
thinking about the classical
period? Bernal gives perfunctory acknowledgement to
Said, who is
a Palestinian and a PLO supporter, but he seems
reluctant to join his
camp.(8) Yet Bernal's manifestations of
"anti-Semitism" in classical scholarship
are often simply examples of
"Orientalism" as defined by Said,
and Orientalism has been a recurring theme in
classical studies,
though I think it was Xenophon's Anabasis rather
than Herodotus' Histories
which launched it.( 9) Then there are two other,
nastier levels.
(Cambridge MA 1992): first published in Sitzungsberichte
dc:r heidelberger
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984.
6 CAH 3rd ed. II/ I (1973)
pp. 633-638. For Bernal's hypothesis. see BA I, pp.88-98: BA II.
pp.361-408, and the critique of John E. Coleman in Black
Athena Revisited pp. 181-288. The
argument that the Greek hiketides derives
from "Hyksos" seems to assume that
the Hyksos called themselves by that name. The word
means something like
"rulers of foreign lands," and it is no
more likely that the "Hyksos" would apply
this Egyptian name to themselves than that a
European or American in China
would refer to himself as a gwielo.
7 Orientalism (New York
1978).
8 BA I. xvii:
p.185.
9 To be fair, it should be pointed out that
"Orientalism" has another meaning
among prehistorians that is quite different: it
describes the "model" of Montelius and V. Gordon Childe. which
regarded the Orient as the catalyst for European civilization.
influenced by the Aryan myth which the Nazis
developed, though
they did not
invent it? And finally there is the indictment by which Bernal updates the
propaganda war of the thirties for reuse in the culture
wars of the nineties: that the classical culture
which inspired the
Renaissance in Europe, and informed the art and
literature of the Enlightenment
and the architecture of the Greek Revival is an
unacknowledged
theft from black Africa.
Here
Bernal has a cautious foot in the camp of the late
Cheikh Anta
Diop of the University of Dakar.
whose The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or
Reality is a favourite
text for African Studies in U.S. universities.
Bernal has denied
that he is a disciple of Cheikh Anta Diop and has
given a curious justification
for his title Black Athena: he did suggest
it initially. but later
repented. only to have his publisher admonish him
that "Blacks no
longer sell. Women no longer sell. But black women
do sell."(11)
Black Athena deals far
more with the anti-Semitism which Bernal
perceives in classical studies than with Africa.
which. except for Egypt.
he largely ignores. but he seems to have made the
shrewd. and
probably correct, judgement that classics
professors would never require
his book for their courses purely on its intrinsic
merits, and African
Studies programmes would ignore it. Hence he
positioned
his book with an astute eye on the market-place.
Diop's
doctrines provide light seasoning for Black Athena. Diop's reading of
Egyptian
history has it that the Third and Fourth Dynasties
of the Old Kingdom
were negro. and so too were the pharaohs of Upper
Egypt in the Middle
and New Kingdoms. But the north was subject to
invasion from
Asia whenever authority broke down: the
white-skinned invaders
from Asia were supplemented by white slaves who
added their genes
to the melting pot in the north, though throughout
antiquity Egypt was
able to remain ethnically black. The efforts of the
black twenty-fifth
dynasty to restore Egyptian greatness were
overtaken by Assyrian
invasion and betrayal by Egypt's alien vassals.
(12) As evidence of
Egypt's progressiveness. Diop points to Akhenaton.
who conceived of
a universal god before Socrates. Plato or Zeno.(13)
On the Hyksos. however,
Diop and Bernal part company. Bernal regards these
Asian invaders. Bernal’s view
of them is
positive. Diop says that “ their barbarism was indescribable.”(14)
10 Tr. Mercer Cook (New York/Westport 1974).
II The Challenge of Black Athena (above. n.
4) 32.
12 Diop. The African Origin of Civilization.
2-4-223.
13 Diop. L'Afrique noire précoloniale (Paris
1960) 29-30.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Towards the end of the nineteenth century.
archaeologists in the
English-speaking world accepted the view that
development in prehistoric
Europe was stimulated by the diffusion of culture
from the Near
East. 15 The great forebear of diffusionism was the
Swedish archaeologist
Oscar Montelius. who pointed out, reasonably enough
on the basis
of the evidence he had available, that the Orient.
particularly the valleys
of the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile rivers. had a
flourishing culture
at a time when Europe was still in state of
barbarism.(16) So it was
logical to argue that the arts of civilization
moved from east to west. Exoriente Lux-, the title of one of his books, became the slogan of Montelius' disciples,
though one of the more curious charges in Black
Athena suggests that
it was a gibe invented by Montelius' enemies(17)
Sir Arthur Evans
speculated that. at the beginning of the Early
Minoan period. some
colonists from predynastic Egypt may have provided
the catalyst for
the Minoan civilization.(18) Montelius in his last
work pointed out that the
architect of the tholos tomb at Menidhi in Attica
used a device to relieve
weight from the lintel block that can be duplicated
in the Great
Pyramid of Khufu.(19) It would be hard to be more
explicit than Margaret
Murray. a disciple of Sir Flinders Petrie. who
wrote in 1949:
"Egypt was the Home-land of Science as we know
it: it was passed on
to the Greeks who recorded it in writing and so
gave it to the world. "20
From the end of the nineteenth century until the
years immediately
following World War II. British prehistorians
accepted the doctrine of
ex oriente lux as gospel
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
14 Diop. African Origin (above. n. 12) 208.
15 Bruce Trigger. "Alternative archaeologies:
nationalist. colonialist. imperialist."
Man 19/3 (1984) 364-365.
16 Glyn Daniel and Colin Renfrew. The Idea of
Prehistory (Edinburgh 1988)
55-56.
17 BAIl. 66.
18 The Palace of Minos at Knossos 1(1921) 13: 17.
19 La Grece preclassique I (Stockholm 1924)
158-160.
20 The Splendour That Was Egypt (London
1949): "Four Square" pbk. (1962) 20.
21 Trigger (above. n. 15) 364-365. On the
diffusionist controversy. see Trigger.
Time and Traditions. Essays in Archaeological
Interpretation (Edinburgh
1978)
216-228. and G. Elliott Smith. Bronislaw
Malinowski. Herbert J. Spinden and Alex
Goldenweiser. Culture: The Diffusion Controversy
(New York 1927) passim. The
phrase ex oriente lux could also be used by
the Aryanists. since it was Sanskrit
literature which had led to the discovery of the
Aryas: Jacques Barzun. Race. A
Study in Superstition (New York2 1965) 101-102.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
nowadays.(22). Sir Grafton Elliott Smith was born
in Australia. where he
trained as a doctor. but his interest tended more
to research. In 1900
he became professor of anatomy at the Government
Medical School in
Cairo and fell in love with Egypt. He was convinced
that it was the
cradle of civilization. It was there that homo
sapiens sapiens made the
breakthroughs that became the "cultural
capital"(23) of civilization: the
techniques of boat-building. masonry.
mummification. irrigation and
so on, and from Egypt this "cultural
capital" spread to Mesopotamia. to
India and southwestern Asia. through Micronesia and
Polynesia across
the Pacific to the Americas.
This was diffusionist doctrine with a
vengeance. It
rested upon the dogma that inventions were made only
once. and if "Culture Y" used technology
which was much the same as
what "Culture X" had used at an earlier
date. then "Culture Y" must
have acquired it from "Culture X."
Contact between the two cultures
could be taken for granted. The opposing view was
termed evolutionist.
and it allowed for independent breakthroughs by
early societies
that were not in contact with each other.
Grafton Smith's position was
Extreme, but the diffusionist hypothesis that he
preached was by no
means absurd. It fell to another Australian. V.
Gordon Childe. to
whom Bernal dedicates the second volume of Black
Athena, to restate it
in reasonable terms which recognized that
independent breakthroughs
could occur but nonetheless reiterated the doctrine
of Montelius,
that the "cultural capital" of
prehistoric Europe came from Egypt
and Mesopotamia(.24). Childe's hypothesis became
accepted belief, particularly
in Britain, until it fell victim to nuclear
physics. It was not
anti-Semitism that brought it down. Rather it was
Carbon-14 dates.
However.
the opposition to the "ex oriente lux" school took on ugly
overtones in the 1930s, for it became associated
with the Aryans: not
the Aryans of the linguists but the"
Aryans" of Nazi propaganda. The
"Aryan Myth" of the Nazis, like the
diffusionist doctrine. had nineteenth-
century roots. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
22 BA I,
270-272: BA II. 66-67.
23 The phrase comes from The Growth of
Civilization by one of Smith's disciples.
W.J. Perry (New York 1923) I. On Elliott Smith. see
Daniel and Renfrew
(above. n. 9) 79-88. Smith's contribution to Culture:
The Diffusion Controversy
(above. n. 21) states his hypothesis succinctly.
24 See Childe. Progress and Archaeology (London
1944) 5~. On Childe's career.
see Peter Gathercole. "Childe in
history," Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology
31 (1994) 25-52: Barbara McNairn. The Method and
Theory of v: Gordon
Childe (Edinburgh, 1980)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
nica. published
before World War I, has a brief but substantial entry
under "Aryan" which quotes Max Muller.
eminent mythographer and
Sanskrit scholar: "Aryans are those who speak
the Aryan language.
whatever their clan. whatever their blood."
and "Aryan" was a synonym
for the "Indo-European" or
"Indo-Germanic" family of languages.
(25) The thirteenth edition of the Britannica (1922)
omits the
entry. but the fifteenth edition (1974) includes it
again: the term
"Aryan" now; we are told. belongs only to
linguistics. But the article
finds room to add that in the nineteenth century
Comte Joseph Arthur
de Gobineau. followed later by Houston Stewart
Chamberlain. had
propagated the notion that there was an Aryan race.
endowed with
leadership qualities which Semites and non-whites
lacked. and this notion
was taken up and developed by Hitler and the Nazi
Party.
The
Aryan mirage in European prehistory antedates the Nazis.
however. Its apostle was Gustav Kossina. whose Die
deutsche Vorgeschichte
was first published in 1912. A quotation from
Holderlin
beginning "0 heilig Herz der Volker. 0
Vaterland'" introduces his
preface. Pushing Montelius' dates earlier in time.
he made northern
Europe and its inhabitants. the Aryans. the
forebears of European
prehistory. He rejected outright the Phoenician
origin of the alphabet.
(26). Kossina was an able practitioner of
archaeology. and before the
Nazi ideologues appropriated his ideas, he
attracted followers outside
Germany. Even Gordon Childe produced a book titled The
Aryans in
1926. where he too accepted the proposition that
the Aryans were the
founders of western civilization. It was a view he
rapidly abandoned
as he realized the uses to which the "Aryan
myth" was put.
Kossina died in 1931; imbued in
Teutonic romantic nationalism though he was.
it remains uncertain whether he would have entirely
welcomed the
Nazi embrace. But the preface to the seventh
edition of Die deutsche
Vorgeschichte (1936)
quotes Hitler's speech in Karlsruhe on 5 December
1934. where he claimed that German civilization
antedated Rome's
foundation by a thousand years. We owe nothing,
Hitler asserted, to the
Greeks or the Romans or the Gauls or the Britons
.... The roots of Hitler's
thousand-year-old Reich were Kossina's
assemblages of prehistoric
artifacts.
World
War II discredited the Aryan mirage. and until Bernal resurrected
it ,"Aryan" subsisted as a label for
skin-heads and neo-Nazis.
The diffusionist model which made the valleys of
the Nile and
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
25 This represents Miiller's position at the end of
his career. Earlier he had
implied an identity between the "Aryan"
language and race. and his late retraction
had little effect on the Aryan-believers: Barzun
(above. n. 21) 101-102.
26 Die deutsche Vorgeschichte, Leipzig 1941)
pp.12-13.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
revised edition of Childe's What Happened in
History gave Mesopotamia
priority: it provided the catalyst for Egypt.
"However indirectly,
Sumerian ideas were surely influencing Upper Egypt:
Nilotic
barbarism was being fertilized by contact with
Mesopotamian civilization."
Childe wrote,(27) and he refers in passing to the
legend of conquest
by the "followers of Horus" which other
Egyptologists
developed into an hypothesis of an invasion of
Egypt by a dynastic
race from the Persian Gulf. Frank Yurco and Kathryn
Bard both deal
briefly in Black Athena Revisited with the
"dynastic race" theory
which began with Flinders Petrie and was surely a
manifestation of
diffusionism rather than the" Aryan
Model." as Yurco and Bard seem
to believe: the evidence now indicates that the
culture of the Nile Valley
was developed by an indigenous people with physical
resemblances
to the people of the northern Sudan, but differing
from those
of Anatolia, the Near East and sub-Saharan Africa.
But
the priority of the Afroasiatic world remained historical dogma until the first
radiocarbon
dates showed that agriculture in Anatolia. the
Levant and the
Danube region was earlier than archaeologists had
believed, and that
neolithic Egypt was relatively backward. Tree-ring
calibration of the
radiocarbon dates only increased skepticism for
Childe's diffusionist
model. The earliest stone buildings in the
Mediterranean region are
not, it turned out, in Egypt, but on Malta. The
west European Bronze
Age is older than anyone imagined. and its debt to
the Aegean world
is less.(28) "Evolutionism" (Bernal
prefers the label "isolationism"(29),
which argues for a model that allows for
independent technological
breakthroughs, has emerged again as a respectable
theory. and the
Aryans, like Lazarus, have risen from the graveyard
of discarded
hypotheses in a book by Cambridge professor Colin
Renfrew, an
"Ultra-Europeanist" according to Bernal's
labelling.(30) Black Athena is
an attempt to breath new life into a model which
commanded the
imagination of prehistorians longer than he claims,
and collapsed only
in the face of new evidence supplied by nuclear
physics.
Bernal's outline of the plot is this. The ancient
Greeks saw their
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
27 Gordon Childe. What Happened in History. Rev.
ed. (Harmondsworth 1954).
p. 113·
28 See Colin Renfrew. Before Civilization (London
1972) passim: see also 1.A.S.
Evans. "Redating prehistory in Europe." Archaeology
30 (1977) 1'6-85: and "How
radiocarbon dating has revolutionized our ideas
about prehistory." Science Forum
10/3 (1977) 30-32·
29 BA II, pp. .64-67
30 BA ll. p. I5.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
own prehistory within "a framework that I
believe can usefully be
called 'The Ancient Model.' "(31) This model
posited a Phoenician and
Egyptian settlement in Greece in the second millennium B.C. This
model continued to be accepted without much
question until the eighteenth-
century Enlightenment, though for reasons of
"cultural pride"
the ancient Greeks themselves played down their
debt to the East.J2
But by the mid-nineteenth century a new hypothesis
appeared which
posited an invasion from the north analogous to the
conquest of India
by people who called themselves "Aryas."
This new "Aryan Model"
took two forms. the "Broad" and the
"Extreme." The "Broads" accepted
Phoenician influence on Greece but denied a place
to the Egyptians.
The "Extremes" eliminated the Phoenicians
as well.
The
villains of the piece. the intellectual forebears of Gustav
Kossina and his ilk.
were F.A. Wolf and. in particular. Karl Otfried Muller.(33)
whom Bernal
calls a "founder of modern classics" and
fingers as the person who
overthrew the "Ancient Model." But Julius
Beloch, Reinach. J. B. Bury
and, last but by no means least, Rhys Carpenter all
contributed coffin
nails. Carpenter diminished the Semitic
contribution by lowering the
date when the Greeks acquired their alphabet to 720
B.C. He also said
"unpleasant" things about the Semitic
alphabet. such as that the Semitic
"Z" was "low and squat with a
slanting bar." and that the "H" had two
instead of three bars "and these are
slanting"(!34). Routed by this
unpleasantness,
the champions of the orientalizing view left the
academic
battlefield.
Black
Athena Revisited is
Bernal's confrontation with the experts.
who examine his theories in the light of their
erudition in their own
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
31 Martin Bernal. Cadmean Letters. The Transmission
of the Alphabet to the
Aegean and Further
West before 1400 B.C (Winona Lake 1990) p. 6.
32. BA I, p. 84.
33 For a corrective to Bernal's handling of MUller
and Wolf. see Josine H. Blok.
"Proof and persuasion in Black Athena: The
case of K.G. Muller." ]HI 57 (1996)
705-724. The romantic love affair with Greece which
developed in the nineteenth
century can, in fact, be dated to the publication
of Joachim Winckelmann's
Gedanken uber die Nachahmung der
Griechen in der Malerei and Bildhauerkunst
(Dresden 1755). Before that, Lord Chesterfield
expressed the conventional wisdom
when he wrote in 1751 to Lord Huntingdon. "The
broken pyramids and ruined
temples [of Egypt and Greece] are below your
attention" (quoted from G. Bagnani,
"Winckelmann and the second Renascence.
1755-1955." AJA 59 [I955] pp. 107-118).
As the passion for Greece grew. esteem of Egypt as
a source of ancient wisdom
declined. but at the same time. after Napoleon's
expedition opened the country to
western savants. respect for Egyptian technological
expertise increased and has
remained high even though Carbon-14 dating has
revised views of Mediterranean
prehistory.
34 Cadmean Letters (above. n. 31) 3-4: cf. BA I pp. 1-3.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
totally unsympathetic. Bernal's reading is vast. In
only one sphere
does he appear incompetent. and that is
linguistics. His command of
various languages is impressive. but his linguistic
method is inconsistent
and impressionist: if a Greek word appears to sound
like one in
Egyptian or in a Semitic language, then it must be
a borrowing. even
if the words in question have quite different
meanings.
Bernal is not above
assigning his own glosses to Greek words: Jay H. Jasonoff and
Alan Nussbaum ("Word Games: The Linguistic
Evidence in Black
Athena") point out
that he glosses Greek kudos as "divine glory"
rather than "renown" in order to connect
it with the Semitic root
meaning "sacred"; the derivation of the
Greek word for chariot
(harma) from the
Semitic root for "net" is made more plausible by
assigning it the additional meaning
"tackle." and the Greek ker is
given the meaning "soul" in order to
derive it from the Egyptian ka
(k). "soul"
or "spiritual companion." Lawrence A. Tritle in a later essay
in this book remarks on another oddity of Bernal's
method here:
he uses late Greek and Coptic inscriptions to
elucidate the derivation of
ker from ka.
leaping over the millennia with insouciant abandon.
More damaging
is the criticism of Bernal's methods: he has ignored the developments
in linguistic science of the last hundred years.
and uses
much the same methods as the learned Jesuit in
early eighteenth-century
Quebec. Fr. J.-F. Lafitau. who connected the
Iroquoian of the
Kahnawake Reserve at Montreal with Hebrew. with
results no less plausible
than Bernal's. Bernal has not discovered
"hundreds" of
Greek-Egyptian and Greek-Semitic etymologies. as he
claims. The
opinion of Jasonoff and Nussbaum is that he has
uncovered no
etymology that was not already known. Moreover. as
Tritle points out.
Bernal has failed utterly to exploit the most
convincing method of
proving Greek linguistic borrowing from Egyptian.
which is to demonstrate
parallelisms in grammatical structure.
Edith
Hall's contribution. "When is a Myth not a Myth? Bernal's
'Ancient Model,'" is a cautionary essay which
examines the central doctrine
of Black Athena: that the ancient Greeks
regarded their own civilization
as an offshoot of Egypt and the Levant. and that this"
Ancient
Model" survived until it was overthrown by
the" Aryan Model" in the
late eighteenth and nineteenth century. For
evidence Bernal points to
Greek mythology, specifically the myths of Cadmus
the Phoenician.
the founder of Thebes, the story of the Danaids.
which he connects
with a Hyksos invasion of Greece, and of Europa,
daughter of Phoinix,
which he glosses as "the Phoenician." But
myths change and develop to
remain relevant to the contemporary world. Variant
renditions jostled
each other off the stage. There was no authorized
version. Bernal's
"Ancient Model" had a rival in the
"Pelasgian theory." which claimed
that the Greek aborigines were Pelasgians, speakers
of a non-Greek
language. according to Herodotus (1.57). who
asserted that the Athenians
were Pelasgian by origin.(35) Hall's message is that myths change
according to time. place and climate of opinion.
and historians who
would use them must be sensitive to the mentality
that produced them.
Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe in their
Myths? does not appear
in Bernal's bibliography. It should.
Tritle's
essay "Vision or Dream of Greek Origins?" includes a brief
section. with photographs, on the hilltop
"Tomb of Amphion and
Zethus" outside Thebes; Theodore Spyropoulos(36)
excavated this in 1971
and reported a mini-stepped pyramid with a tomb on
top. which he
compared to the Dynasty III pyramid of Djoser at
Saqqara. and conjectured
that the "Minyans" who drained Lake Copais
were Egyptians,
whom he, like Grafton Smith. considered irrigation
experts. Bernal
recognizes this as important evidence for his
thesis. The "pyramid"
that Spyropoulos published does look like a mastaba
surmounted by a
much smaller mastaba to make a mini-stepped
pyramid, but as far as I
know, no mastaba ever served as the platform for
a tomb. Tritle. who
visited the site in 1993, claims that the hill of
Amphion and Zethus is
simply a tumulus-style mound of the sort that is
common in Greece.
and compares it to the more impressive tumulus
tombs at Cerveteri in
Italy.
Yet
one should not be too skeptical. The draining of Lake Copais
required technical skill that may have been
imported from Egypt.
where the pharaohs of Dynasty XII partially drained
the Fayum in a
similar engineering feat. But conditions for
irrigation in Egypt were
unique. The Fayum could be drained simply by
manipulating the
flow of water through the Bahr Yusuf from the Nile.
Greece had no
Nile river with its regular floods, and I suspect
that the Minyans might
have found more versatile irrigation experts in the
Tigris-Euphrates
valley. The "Tomb of Amphion and Zethus"
looks more like a
mini-ziggurat than a pyramid, but the only mini-ziggurat
surmounted
by a tomb that I know is the tomb of Cyrus at
Pasargdae. which is far
too late to provide an exemplar. But its design may
have drawn on
earlier models. One suspects that Tritle has
discarded Spyropoulos'
hypothesis too hastily because Bernal pounced on it
as evidence for his
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
35 Bernal (BA I. pp. 75-83)
attempts to fit the Pelasgians into his
"Revised Ancient
Model" but finds Herodotus' asseveration that
they spoke a non-Greek language
difficult to explain.
36 "Aigyptiakos epioikismos en Boiotia." AAA
5/1 (1972) 16-26: cf. BA II, pp.128-.
135
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Egyptian connection. for on the whole Tritle's
contribution is solid and
well researched.
Neither
space nor. for that matter. my own abilities will permit a
full overview of all the essays in this volume.
Frank Yurco approaches
Black Athena as an
Egyptologist. Like Tritle. he doubts a Hyksos empire
that extended into Greece, though he notes the
recent discovery of
Minoan frescoes of bull-leapers at Tell el-Dab·a.
ancient Avaris. the
Hyksos capital. This, at least, shows that Cretan
artists worked in
Egypt., whether as itinerant craftsmen or as
captive slaves. Sarah P.
Morris. in her contribution "The Legacy of Black
Athena." notes that
these bull-leaper fragments were found in a
disturbed context. The
dominant culture at Avaris was Canaanite, as it
also is at Tell Kabri in
northern Israel where fragments of Minoan-style
frescoes have also
been found. It is no surprise to find Minoan influence in ancient Canaan.
Robert
Palter contributes two essays. The first is on Egyptian science
where he defends Otto Neugebauer against Bernal and
argues
that Egyptian mathematics never reached the level
of the Babylonians,
much less the Greeks. and that they never invented
mathematical astronomy
at all. The second titled, "Eighteenth-Century
Historiography
in Black Athena”, deals with an area where
Bernal has escaped serious
criticism. His
technique has been to skip through the fields of
history, snipping off a quotation here and an
inference there,
which he then arranges into a pattern of increasing
hostility to Egypt.
Emily
Vermeule. in her "The World Turned Upside Down." reacts to
Black Athena as an
archaeologist. Bernal is an eclectic "archaeologist"
who has skimmed archaeological literature to find
evidence he likes
but declines to allow lack of documentation to
crimp his conceptual
model. How do we know that the shaft graves at
Mycenae were Hyksos
burials? Vermeule wants to know. Bernal rises above
such questions.
for to expect archaeological science to provide the
evidence to answer her question is to
commit the sin of "positivism." It fits
Bernal's "Revised Ancient
Model" to have Hyksos king s buried at
Mycenae.
Frank
Snowden Jr.'s "Bernal's 'Blacks' and the Afrocentrists" is a
scholarly essay on negroes in the world of ancient
Greece, written by
an expert on the subject. He deals briefly with
Herodotus 2.104, a favourite
gobbet of what W.K. Pritchett(37) calls "The
Liar School" of
Herodotean studies. The historian reports that the Egyptians had
dark skins and curly hair like the Colchians whom
he considered to be
Egyptian settlers left at the eastern end of the
Black Sea by the campaigns
of Sesostris. Egyptians do, in fact. have curly
hair and darker
skins than the Greeks. and in modern Georgia there are still, I
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
37 The Liar School of Herodotos (Amsterdam, 1993, pp. 12-16; cf. Detlev Fehling.
Herodotus and his
Sources (Leeds 1989> 17-21.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
that it is unacceptable to use "black,"
"Egyptian" and "African" as
synonyms of "blacks/Negroes in the modern
sense." Yet. should anyone
wish to believe that Eurybates. the
broad-shouldered, swarthy,
curly-haired herald whom Odysseus greatly esteemed (Od.
19.246).
owed his genetic code to Africa, nihil obstat. Richard
Jenkyns deals
briefly with Egypt in the imagination of the
nineteenth century. and
Guy MacLean Rogers' "Multiculturalism and the
Foundations of Western
Civilization" is partly a defense of George
Grote against Bernal's
charge of anti-Semitism, and partly a note on
Bernal's purblind vision
of the contributions of ancient Mesopotamia and
Babylon. He is kind
enough not to suggest that while black women sell,
as Bernal's publisher
reminded him, the Gulf War has jinxed sales of any
book crediting
Greek culture to ancient Iraq for the immediate future.
Bernal's
reading is wide and his views challenging. There is no
doubt that classicists should look at their fields
of research in a multicultural
context. and in Late Antiquity that has already
happened.
Moreover. Bernal has thrust classics into the
mainstream media. for
which he deserves thanks. I have met persons for
whom classical studies
used to mean only the half-forgotten declension of puella,
who now
think that the field has something to offer the
contemporary Weltanschauung.
But
Bernal's method is disturbing. First. he seems to assume
that cultures are like computer software
programmes: they are copyright
and can be stolen. Behind this idea there seems to
lurk the concept
of pure" Ur-cultures" which ethnic groups
can claim as their
property. Second. it appears that what is important
about a "culture" is
its roots rather than its ultimate development. as
if the proper way to
study modern United States culture were in terms of
a "theft" from
Britain which took place in the colonial period.
Third. he applies
"models" to intellectual history, and
armed with them makes a Cook's
Tour through scholarship of the last three
centuries. snipping segments
of ideas with authors’ names attached, that can be
fitted into his preconceived
models. Finally. he has revived the last century's
vocabulary of
racism. Examples of "Orientalism" in
Edward Said's sense of the term
are labelled "anti-Semitism," and as for
Houston Stewart Chamberlain(38), though he
may have used "Semite" in its broader
sense. and even considered
the Jews the best of the Semites. the fact is that
in this century at
least "anti-Semitic" has meant simply
"anti-Jewish."
The
term "Aryan"is assigned a broader meaning than even the Nazis gave
it. "Aryas"
(the noun) and "Aryan" (the adjective)
were labels which the
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
38 Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. tr. John Lees (London/New
York
1912) 116.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
but as far as I know. no other ancient Indo-Europeans
used the
term. It is time to be more careful about our
usage. To be sure, the age
that began with the American and French Revolutions
released a
heady mix of nationalism, imperialism and
romanticism, and a new
variety of racism to accompany them, but we need
not be subservient
to the tyranny of past "isms." The Aryan
people are the Iranians and
Hindi-speaking Indians. No one else.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mary
Lefkowitz's award-winning Not Out of Africa(39) falls into five
main sections. In the first of them she metes out
rough treatment to
some of the "myths" peddled by
Africanists. Was Socrates black? What
about Hannibal, Aesop and the Roman playwright Terence?
Was
Cleopatra black? This last question is worth a
second look. Lefkowitz
takes issue with Shelley P. Haley. a black
professor of classics at Hamilton
College. whose essay "Black Feminist Thought
and the Classics:
Re-membering, Re-claiming, Re-empowering"
appeared in an anthology
on feminist theory and the classics(40). Haley relates that her
grandmother told her. "Remember. no matter
what you hear in
school, Cleopatra was black." We should recall
the context. Haley's
grandmother lived at a time when a drop of negro
blood made a person
black. She was the product of a melting pot which
had West African.
Caucasian and Iroquois genes in its genetic mix,
but she was
considered black. Cleopatra VI, had she been living
in Washington.
D.C. in the late 1940S. might have had to sit at
the back of the bus even
though the line of her ascendants went back to
Macedonia. Lefkowitz
assembles the evidence against the black Cleopatra
theory with scholarly
precision. Yet it will make no difference, for
Haley is presenting
history as her grandmother perceived it. and as
others have. too.
whose number may include Shakespeare and. as
Afrocentrist J. H.
Clarke(41) has pointed out. Believe It or Not
(Ripley).
Yet
Haley's description of how the black Cleopatra hypothesis won
her as a convert is a fascinating exercise in
logic. Cleopatra's father.
Ptolemy Auletes. was illegitimate. Who was
his mother? Haley seems
to consider this a question never voiced by white male
classicists. But
in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient
History, Martin Charlesworth
called Cleopatra half-Macedonian and half-Greek
"with a
slight tinge of Iranian," and in a footnote he
speculated that in view of
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
39 .Not Out ofAfrica has been selected for the Peter Shaw award
from the National
Association of Scholars.
40. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin. Feminist
Theory and the
Oasssics (New
York/London 1993) pp. 23-43·
41 Quoted by
Snowden in Black Athena Revisited p. 120.
the peregrinations of Cleopatra's grandfather,
Ptolemy IX Lathyrus,
his mistress might have been Syrian(42). But for Haley, Cleopatra's unknown
grandmother could have been black by the standards
which
put her own grandmother at the back of the bus, and
that must be
admitted. Since the hypothesis is not impossible,
her logic leads her to
the conclusion that it is probable, and finally,
that the African oral tradition
which her mother transmitted to her was right.
Houston Stewart Chamberlain
once upon a time used a similar logical progression to
show that Jesus was of Aryan stock.(43). It went like this: when Christ was
born in Galilee, it was populated by a mixed ethnic
stock, and so it is
possible that some pure Aryan blood had been
transplanted there. The
possibility rapidly developed into a probability,
which matured in a
few paragraphs of prose until, a page or so later,
the probability "that
Christ had not a drop of genuinely Jewish blood in
his veins is so great
that it is almost equivalent to a certainty."
Logic of this sort mixes perception
with prejudice, and transmutes the product into
historical fact.
It is a
dangerous procedure. White classicists who three generations
ago used to accept the "fair-haired
Achaeans" as beyond dispute
should not be too quick to throw stones at
"black Cleopatra" or "black
Socrates" assertions, but they are right to
dissent, firmly, publicly, but
with understanding and courtesy.
Lefkowitz
deals next with ancient myths of cultural borrowing.
Afrocentrists who argue for massive infusion from
ancient Egypt into
the culture of ancient Greece can point to the
second book of Herodotus'
Histories and the
first book of Diodorus for proof. Herodotus'
later reputation for mendacity was based in part on
his account of
Egypt, which has inspired a succession of attacks
that stretch from Manetho
to Detlev Fehling. The Dynasty XXVI Saite pharaohs
saw to the
training of professional interpreters who served as
"Intourist guides"
for Greek visitors and immigrants whom the
Egyptians disdained, but
also needed as mercenaries and traders, and possibly
they "dumbed
down" their information to tailor it to the
Greek mentality.
Why did Herodotus (2.50.1) relate that the names of
nearly all the
Greek gods came from Egypt? The simplest answer,
which neither
Bernal nor Lefkowitz gives, is that Herodotus himself
knew only Greek names
for most of the gods of Egypt, and since Egypt's
antiquity was beyond
doubt, it followed that these gods were discovered
there. Herodotus
knew the warrior goddess of Sais, Neit, the mother
of the crocodile
god Sobek, only by the name “Athena”. No Egyptian
told him, "But we call her Neit,"
let alone hinted that she was not a virgin.
=======================================================================
42 Reprinted with the title From Republic to
Empire (New York 1996) 45.
43 Chamberlain (above. n. 38) 174-250
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
excellent "finishing school" for their
savants. Lefkowitz argues that the
Egyptian priests. conscious of Egypt's decline.
were eager to present
themselves as the teachers of the Greeks. and no
doubt that is true. but
the Greeks themselves were willing to accept the
same view. One reason
was the persona cultivated by the early Greek
philosophers. which
Louis Gernet described in a half-forgotten essay.(44)
Philosophers were
professional intellectuals whose dress and
demeanour bespoke their
calling. and in Egypt, there were in the temples
whole communities of
apparently similar "intellectuals" whose
shaved heads and white linen
garments marked them off as votaries of wisdom.
Moreover. these
temples had libraries. It is hard for us to
recapture the sense of awe
with which Herodotus must have listened to the hierogrammateus(45)
of
the temple of Neit. the keeper of its book
collection. as he gave him a
potted history of Egypt while consulting a scroll
which may have contained
a king list like the Turin Canon. By contrast, Greece's
earliest written record
seems to have been the homicide law of Drakon! The
Ptolemaic
temple of Horus at Edfu had its catalogue inscribed
on the walls of its
library room(46) and the books it once contained
seem far removed
from Greek philosophy. But it must have seemed
extraordinary even
to a Greek of the Ptolemaic period. much more one
of the fifth century
B.c., that temples had libraries at all.
Lefkowitz's
last two topics are the "Egyptian mystery system" and
the myth of the "Stolen Legacy." The myth
of "mystical Egypt" has its
roots in Freemasonry. which in turn borrowed from
"Thrice-Great
Hermes" and Horapollo. the first of whom was
particularly influential
in the Renaissance: Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was
burned at the
stake for preaching Hermeticism. The connection
between Hermeticism
and education was made in the eighteenth century in
a
three-volume fictional account by Abbe Jean
Terrasson: Sethos: A History
or Biography based on Unpublished Memoirs
of Ancient Egypt.
The idea germinated in a number of intellectual
byways, particularly
Freemasonry. until it flowed into the mainstream of
Africanist studies
with the "Stolen Legacy" doctrine,which
is expounded in a little book
published first in 1954 and ignored by all
classical scholars: George G.
M. James' Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy is
Stolen from Egyptian Philosophy.(47)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
44 Cf. The Anthropology of Ancient Greece. tr.
John Hamilton and Blaise Nagy
(Baltimore 1981) 352-364.
45 On the duties of the hierogrammateus, see
J.A.S. Evans. "A social and economic
history of an Egyptian temple in the Greco-Roman
period," YC5 17 (1961), pp.
190 - 191.
46 Garth Fowden. The Egyptian Hermes (Cambridge
1986) 57-59.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
James.
whose Stolen Legacy appeared in 1954. as the Civil Rights
movement in the United States was getting under
way. announces a
noble purpose: "The aim of this book is to
establish better race relations
in the world. by revealing a fundamental truth
concerning the
contribution of the African continent to
civilization." He argues that
Aristotle with the help of Alexander the Great
plundered the royal
libraries and temples of Egypt. notably the Royal
Library of Alexandria.
which Aristotle's school turned into a research
centre. Yet the
temples and their schools survived as centres of
the Egyptian mysteries
until the emperor Justinian closed them, and the
philosophy for
which the Greeks claim the credit was appropriated
from them.
James' sources
are mainly secondary. some of them undergraduate textbooks.
and his book is not serious history. Even Bernal,
who esteems it. does
not praise its accuracy. But he devotes three
chapters to Hermes Trismegistus
and the influence of Hermetic literature. with
which
Lefkowitz takes issue. Isaac Casaubon in 1614 dated
the corpus of
Hermetic texts to the late first century A.D.. and
his arguments are
still sound.(48). But the question of how much they
owe to Egyptian tradition,
and how much to Greek speculation remains open.
Bernal uses the
rise and fall of esteem for Hermetic literature
since the Renaissance as
a barometer of hostility towards Egypt, which is
unfair. for what has
driven scholarly evaluation of it has been the
increase in our knowledge
about ancient Egypt over the past two hundred
years. The
re-evaluation continues: prior to World War II. the
scholarly verdict
was that these texts reflected Greek thought. and
Egyptian input was
confined to the "spirit and temper of the
writers."(49) But the discovery
of a cache of Coptic texts at Nag Hammadi has
broadened our understanding.
and now Prof. Jean-Pierre Mahe(50) argues for a
much greater
contribution from Egyptian religious literature.
Neither Bernal nor
Lefkowitz mentions the work being done at the
Universite Laval on
the Nag Hammadi texts.
In
a valuable chapter titled "The Myth of the Stolen Legacy"
Lefkowitz traces the stemma of this idea. through
Masonic literature
and the black Masonic lodges to the black writers
of the U.S. Recon-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
47 Repr. Trenton. N.J. 1992.
48 Fowden (above. n. 46) xiii-xvii.
49 Walter Scott. ed. and tr.. Hermetica. The
Ancient Greek and Latin Writings
Which Contain Religious or Philosophic Teaching
Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus
(London 1924. repro Boulder 1982) 10-1 I.
50 Hermes en haute
Egypte: Les textes hermetiques de Nag Hammadi et leurs
paralleles grecs et latines
(Quebec 1978).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
struction period and later. The former slave
Frederick Douglass noted
that the ancient Egyptians had skins as dark as
many who were considered
genuine negroes in the United States. W.E.B. DuBois
accepted
the same view. and Marcus Mosiah Garvey. probably
the most important
black leader in the United States before the Civil
Rights Movement.
went further: ancient Egypt became a black utopia
where
Europe did not merely find the roots of her
civilization. she filched it.
This was a fact which white people were at pains to
keep secret from
blacks. With James' Stolen Legacy we get a
developed account of the
conspiracy. Alexander the Great looted the library
he found at Alexandria. Never mind that the library was founded by Ptolemy II
Philadelphus long after Alexander’s death.
Then the "School of Aristotle" moved to
Egypt from Athens
and converted this library first into a research
centre, then a university
and finally a repository of the knowledge the
students gained
from their research,and the oral instruction they
received from the
Egyptian priests. But before that. the pharaoh
Amasis had opened
Egypt to the Greeks with the foundation of
Naukratis. and after him
the Persian conquest threw open all Egypt to Greek
scholars. Without
Egypt, Greek philosophy would never have amounted
to anything.
for the Greeks had limited intellectual capacity.
Lefkowitz's
concluding chapter is recommended reading. She realizes
that there must be room for multiple viewpoints in
any university
community and that the ancient historian needs to
ask the question
"What is history?" more frequently. But
we can. perhaps. define the
parameters of legitimate academic debate.
Hypotheses should be supported
by evidence before they become anything more than
suppositions.
History courses may. as a by-product. empower
certain groups
in society. but that should not be their aim. and
never their sole aim.
Innuendo. a weapon in Bernal's arsenal, and personal
attacks never
destroy a good argument. but they reveal a
totalitarian mindset which
is the enemy of a free society. Lefkowitz pleads
for academics who
teach rather than indoctrinate.
However.
one may wonder what the fuss is all about. My oId high-
school ancient history textbook recognized Egypt as
the cradle of civilization
long before Black Athena. and it added some
complimentary
remarks about ancient Mesopotamia, which Bernal
neglects. Bernal's
conspiracy lacks a plot. Yet I read James' Stolen
Legacy with a sense of
sadness. for it is a black man's appeal for respect
for his people. and at
the same time a back-handed compliment to the
classical tradition
which he valued enough that he wanted an African
contribution to it
recognized. At the same time. when all is said.
what Classical Studies
needed was not Black Athena but a
well-researched book on the effect
51. James (above. n. 47) 1-6; 41-53: 139-155.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
of "Orientalism," as defined by Edward
Said, upon classical studies
and how it has shaped the mentalities of
intellectuals since the Renaissance.
Bernal's anti-Semitic model would be a distorting
mirror for
such a study, for Byzantium was the paradigm of
Orientalism for Edward
Gibbon,(52) and for Aristotle it was the Persians,
whose claim to be
"Aryas" is indisputable. Orientalism
infected the Enlightenment: Gibbon
learned from Montesquieu, and a couple of
generations of Americans
of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
learned it from
the popular histories of the French Jansenist
Charles Rollin.(53) There is
also a place for a book on how the classics have
influenced modern
attitudes towards blacks, and while we are at it,
towards the native
Indians as well. In the United States there have
always been two
melting pots and the one that produces black
persons has a greater
native component than its larger counterpart that
produces whites. In Canada there have been two melting pots, one
English-Scottish and the other French. There is also a new Indigenous melting
pot which will have an interesting future.
Bernal,
for all his learning, gives the impression that he is still fighting
theories concocted by Alfred Rosenberg which
suffered a mortal
blow with the defeat of the Nazis. Let them die.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
52 Cf. J.A.S. Evans, "The shadow of Edward
Gibbon," in Paul Fritz and David
Williams, ed., City and Society in the Eightenth
Century (Toronto 1973, pp. 248-249. Orientalism
in the eighteenth century was coupled with
effeminacy and decay. To the
modern reader, it is curious how gender-specific
decay was!
53 Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics.
Greece, Rome and the
American Enlightenment (Cambridge MA 1994