Black Athena Revisited

by Mary R. Lefkowitz (Editor), Guy Maclean Rogers (Editor)

Was Western civilization founded by ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians? Can the ancient Egyptians usefully be called black? Did the ancient Greeks borrow religion, science, and philosophy from the Egyptians and Phoenicians? Have scholars ignored the Afroasiatic roots of Western civilization as a result of racism and anti-Semitism?

In this collection of twenty essays, leading scholars in a broad range of disciplines confront the claims made by Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. In that work, Bernal proposed a radical reinterpretation of the roots of classical civilization, contending that ancient Greek culture derived from Egypt and Phoenicia and that European scholars have been biased against the notion of Egyptian and Phoenician influence on Western civilization. The contributors to this volume argue that Bernal's claims are exaggerated and in many cases unjustified.

Topics covered include race and physical anthropology; the question of an Egyptian invasion of Greece; the origins of Greek language, philosophy, and science; and racism and anti-Semitism in classical scholarship. In the conclusion to the volume, the editors propose an entirely new scholarly framework for understanding the relationship between the cultures of the ancient Near East and Greece and the origins of Western civilization.

The contributors are: John Baines, professor of Egyptology, University of Oxford Kathryn A. Bard, assistant professor of archaeology, Boston University C. Loring Brace, professor of anthropology and curator of biological anthropology in the Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan John E. Coleman, professor of classics, Cornell University Edith Hall, lecturer in classics, University of Reading, England Jay H. Jasanoff, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Linguistics, Cornell University Richard Jenkyns, fellow and tutor, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and university lecturer in classics, University of Oxford Mary R. Lefkowitz, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Wellesley College Mario Liverani, professor of ancient near eastern history, Università di Roma, 'La Sapienza' Sarah P. Morris, professor of classics, University of California at Los Angeles Robert E. Norton, associate professor of German, Vassar College Alan Nussbaum, associate professor of classics, Cornell University David O'Connor, professor of Egyptology and curator in charge of the Egyptian section of the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania Robert Palter, Dana Professor Emeritus of the History of Science, Trinity College, Connecticut Guy MacLean Rogers, associate professor of Greek and Latin and history, Wellesley College Frank M. Snowden, Jr., professor of classics emeritus, Howard University Lawrence A. Tritle, associate professor of history, Loyola Marymount University Emily T. Vermeule, Samuel E. Zemurray, Jr., and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor Emerita, Harvard University Frank J. Yurco, Egyptologist, Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago.

Mary R. Lefkowitz is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College. She is author of Not Out of Africa and coeditor of Women's Life in Greece and Rome. Guy MacLean Rogers, professor of Greek and Latin and history at Wellesley College, is author of The Sacred Identity of Ephesos: Foundation Myths of a Roman City.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Africa, Politics, Greece, Ancient

544 pages, Paperback

Published April 29, 1996

About the author

Mary R. Lefkowitz (born April 30, 1935), American scholar of Classics. She studied at Wellesley College before obtaining a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Radcliffe College in 1961. Lefkowitz has published on subjects including mythology, women in antiquity, Pindar, and fiction in ancient biography.
She came to the attention of a wider audience through her criticism of the claims of Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization in her book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History. In Black Athena Revisited (1996), which she edited with Guy MacLean Rogers, her colleague at Wellesley College, the ideas of Martin Bernal are further scrutinized.

Reviews

[Colin]

An excellent refutation of Martin Bernal's "Black Athena" books, which basically claim that all of Western Civilization is somehow "stolen" from Africa, and that racism and anti-Semitism prevent this from being more generally known. Bernal's shaky linguistic fantasies are thorougly demolished!

[Артемис Сашенька]

This is an amazing work conducted by Mary Lefkowitz. It was my first personal real touch with afrocentrism and Martin Bernal. I would later read and study more on afrocentrism and I've never came across such a powerful research that says things as they are. Lefkowitz here addressed dogmatism in the historical field and dogmatic ideologies which have as their offsprings sciolism and propaganda.

[Ann]

I had the (dis)pleasure of going to a lecture given by Lefkowitz and she's just as boring and her opinions and scholarship is just as obtuse (I literally cannot remember what her thesis about the Trojan Women even was) as you would expect from reading (her introduction in particular to) this collection. The funniest thing was that my professor blithely skipped over Lefkowitz's blatant racist scholarship by calling it "interesting."

Yeah. Interesting.

She disavows ANY and ALL Egyptian influence on ancient Greek ANYTHING, including thought and architecture, which is just mind-blowingly wrong. Lefkowitz is also not above ad hominem attacks against Bernal himself, citing his background as NOT a trained classicist as somehow proof he doesn't know what he's talking about. Come on, that doesn't prove anything. Get it together, Mary.

[Alex]

Contributors of varying quality so far. Nothing in the intro or conclusion that is really damaging to Bernal's case... they mostly exaggerate his claims and then accuse him of not being reflective as to his own multiculti agenda. Would be more effective if less high-strung.

[Jean Piriou]

A piece by piece demolition of the major claims of Bernal's arguments concerning the continuous and fundamental influence of ancient Southeast Mediterranean cultures on Greece from the third millennium BCE all the way to the 5th century. No rational and objective person can read this book and not see just how weak Bernal's major arguments are, or infer just how ideologically motivated they are as well. This motivation extends to Bernal's response to his critics. A primary example is an epistolary exchange he has with the archeologist Emily Vermeule in the NY Review of Books (May 1992). There, he rejects Vermeule's claims that in BA 1 he ever argues that the Egyptians conquered Boetia during the Middle Kingdom. Moreover, he cites this as one of numerous misrepresentations on Vermeule's part. Vermeule's reply? Roughly two dozen quotations from BA 1 that show that Bernal argues precisely the thing he denies arguing. Either he was not aware that he made the argument or he is betraying his propensity for lying. Either way, he does not emerge from the exchange in a favorable light. Everyone who thinks Bernal, trained in Chinese history and language, a sincere scholar should read this exchange and draw their own conclusions. And of course they should read BAR.

[Laura]

While pointing out obvious methodological flaws and proposed possibilities that lack solid evidence, or even attempts to find evidence in Bernal’s book, the authors of BAR come across as having mostly hurt egos, with many angrily defending their life’s work. Some authors contradict each other, while some focus mainly on critiquing minutiae in Bernal’s first and second volumes. One even defends an eighteenth-century scholar with the equivalent argument of “he has black friends, so he can’t be racist”.

How the times have changed since the early 90’s when this book was written. I’d like to read BAR Revisited Again. Anyone writing it?

[Walt]

Systematically debunks many of the arguments of Martin Bernal's controversial work.

[John P]

Βιβλίο αντίδοτο στα τάχα μου ιστορικά ντοκιμαντέρ του Νετφλιξ. Καταρρίπτει τον μύθο ότι οι αρχαίοι Έλληνες έκλεψα κομμάτια του αιγυπτιακου πολιτισμού και τα παρουσίασαν ως δικά τους. Απ ότι φαίνεται η woke κουλτούρα υπήρχε ήδη από την δεκαετία το 1990.

[Steven H]

A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS

The editors, Mary Lefkowitz and Guy Rogers, wrote in the Preface of this 1996 book, “Few professional classicists in the 1980s would have imagined … such wide interest in another amateur attempt… to discover the true extent of Greece’s debt to Egypt and the civilizations of the Near east. Nonetheless Martin Bernal’s 'Black Athena' enjoyed considerable popular success, and has been widely discussed and reviewed in scholarly literature as well… [Bernal] is the armchair archaeologist … who travels backward in time to uncover what the experts with all their learning and prejudices could never find…. But there is a more fundamental reason why Bernal’s project has won so many adherents, and that is the appeal of iconoclasm in an age where everything traditional has been questioned and found wanting.” (Pg. ix-x)

They continue, “In this volume several of us will show why Bernal’s etymology of Athens is highly uncertain and improbable… We suggest why Bernal’s term ‘Aryan Model’ is misleading, and perhaps deliberately chosen to imply racial or religious prejudice when none in fact exists. Those of us who have studied Bernal’s claims about European scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries believe that he has considerably overstated his case… In addition, we suggest why the notion of a ‘Black Athena’ is at best misleading… we believe that it can be shown that the ancient Egyptians regarded themselves as ethnically distinct from other African peoples… that although they are ‘people of color’ by modern definition, in their own minds and in the minds of the ancient Greeks they were a different nation from the Ethiopians… The Editors have chosen the essays in this book from a large and interesting literature about ‘Black Athena.’ … Because not all the contributions in this book were written expressly for this collection, we cannot pretend to offer our readers the seamless presentation that they would expect from a volume that was specially commissioned for the purpose… (Pg. xi-xiii)

In the opening article, Lefkowitz [author of 'Not Out Of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became An Excuse To Teach Myth As History'] wrote, “I had a student who seemed to regard virtually everything I said about Socrates with hostility… she explained why… her instructor in another course had told her that Socrates… was black… Further study persuaded this student that most of what she had heard in this other course could not have been strictly accurate. Because Socrates was an Athenian citizen, he must have had Athenian parents… he must have come from the same background as every other Athenian. Even though Greeks in Socrates’ day did not pay much attention to skin color or more generally to physical appearance, they did care about nationality. If Socrates had been a foreigner, from Africa or any other place, he would not have been an Athenian citizen. It was as simple as that.” (Pg. 3-4)

She further asserts, “Bernal relies too much on Herodotus’s treatment of Egypt… It is perfectly correct that nobody before 1600 questioned these historical propositions [of Herodotus, etc.], but that is because nobody before 1600 (or thereabouts) knew much about Egyptian history…” (Pg. 14)

She argues, “One hopes that in his forthcoming volumes he will finally assess how much of the Afro-Asiatic legacy to the Greeks involved BLACK Africans, or as the Greeks called them, ‘Ethiopians.’ So far Bernal has simply ducked the issue. Or rather, he has tried to have it both ways, allowing the Egyptians to stand for the rest of Africa, whatever their racial type or types… Bernal would prefer to emphasize that Egypt is a part of Africa, rather than try to determine the exact proportion of darker-skinned central Africans in the population. For to speak of the ancient (or modern) Egyptians as ‘black’ is misleading in the extreme. Not that it would have mattered from the Greek point of view, since the Greeks classified people by nationality rather than skin color.” (Pg. 20-21)

David O’Connor acknowledges, “Indeed, an Egyptian embassy MAY have visited Crete and the mainland under Amenophis III… although whether a temple was founded as a result and a prototypical Eleusinian Mysteries established seems much less likely. But such contacts are not equivalent to ‘suzerainty’ and do not imply the substantial cultural impact of Egypt upon the Aegean required by Bernal’s theory.” (Pg. 60)

Frank Yurco also notes, “In … the second volume of ‘Black Athena’ Bernal takes an approach that more scholars can agree with: that Egyptian and Levantine impact on Greece was strongest during the Mycenaean age… known also as the Late Bronze Age. There truly is strong evidence of contacts in that era.” (Pg. 89) He adds, “Bernal’s thesis that Egyptian and Hyskos colonies existed on Crete and Mycenaean Greece remains highly speculative and is not convincingly demonstrated. But his claims of substantial influence from Egypt and from the Levant upon the Aegean world, albeit mostly through the agency and trade and political diplomatic contacts, are in essence reasonable.” (Pg. 95)

An essay on “Clines and Clusters” notes, “Attempts to force Egyptians into either a ‘black’ or a ‘white’ category have no biological justification. Our data show not only that Egypt clearly had biological ties both to the north and to the south, but that it was intermediate between populations to the east and the west, and that Egypt was basically Egyptian from the Neolithic right on up to historic times… Egyptians are Egyptians, and in a society where the perception of human biological identity is distorted to the point where it can only be rendered in black and white, any rational denial that an Egyptian is one thing must also be accompanied by denial that an Egyptian is the other..” (Pg. 158-159)

Jay Jasanoff and Alan Nussbaum assert, “Bernal has already revealed enough of his claims and method for it to be clear to any trained historical linguist that his evidence for ‘massive’ Egyptian and Semitic borrowing in Greek is a mirage.” (Pg. 178) Later, they add, “Contrary to what Bernal implies, it is universally recognized that there are both Semitic and Egyptian loan words in Greek.” (Pg. 187)

Robert Palter points out, “The Egyptians never invented a mathematical astronomy in the sense that the Babylonians and the Greeks did. Such an astronomy must include BOTH (1) some form of systematic… observation of sun, moon and planets, and (2) some observationally based procedures for computing new celestial observations from known ones… Egyptian mathematics never approached the depth of understanding revealed in the most advanced Babylonian mathematics, which was in turn far surpassed by the Greeks, so that it is difficult to see how the peak Egyptian achievements… could ever have led to Greek mathematics with its clear conception of rigorous demonstration and its characteristic methods of formulating and solving problems.” (Pg. 255)

John Coleman notes, “Thucydides, who knew of Herodotus’ histories, makes no mention of invasions or influence from Egypt or Syria-Palestine. Furthermore, Plutarch explicitly disagrees with many of Herodotus’ claims of Egyptian influence on Greece … Even Diodorus Siculus, whose account of Egypt resembles that of Herodotus, is highly skeptical about claims of Egyptian invasions.” (Pg. 287)

Lawrence Tritle states, “the best method of revealing linguistic borrowing is to demonstrate parallelisms in the grammatic structures---and in this it would appear that there are none between Greek and Egyptian. Bernal, then, is working from the least satisfactory level of linguistic analysis, which should be sufficient cause to consider his linguistic arguments as at most tentative, at worst tendentious.” (Pg. 317)

Guy Rogers asserts, “Why… has Bernal ignored or dismissed the evidence for contacts with or contributions to early Greek civilization other than by two cultures of the ancient Near East? I shall argue… that the absence or dismissal of evidence in ‘Black Athena’ for widespread Near Eastern influence upon and contacts with early Greek civilization exposes both the explicit and implicit contemporary political agenda of ‘Black Athena.’” (Pg. 436) Later, he adds, “In 1975 Bernal rediscovered his own Jewish roots… It was therefore no accident at all, or the result of an impersonal scientific inquiry, that when the new foundation myth first saw the light of day, its identity was Afro-Asiatic… The Hittites and others were also excluded because Bernal could not trace his own personal roots or changing intellectual interests to the Hittites, the Hurrians, or the Babylonians.” (Pg. 440-441) But he acknowledges, “to his credit, Professor Bernal … has exposed how some of the actors in that wider Mediterranean context were written out of the story of early Western civilization … for reasons of racism and anti-Semitism.” (Pg. 443)

This volume needs to be balanced out with Bernal’s own 'Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics'; but it is overall an excellent contribution to the ongoing debate.