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(More customer reviews)By all reports Martin Bernal is a respected scholar. Although his professional studies have focused on China, he attacks the problems of ancient Mediterranean history, archaeology, linguistics, and modern European intellectual history with enormous verve, great erudition and amazing breadth. It's therefore fascinating to follow the thread of his argumentation and note at every turn just how wrongheaded it all is. Here is a serious scholar who seems to believe that everything written by Europeans in the 19th and 20th centuries is corrupted by their conscious or unconscious racism, but that Greek myths or the self-aggrandizing monument inscriptions of Egyptian pharaohs are to be taken as literal truth. Yes, racism played a role in the development of 19th- and 20th-century historical thinking, but so did increasing knowledge. It was possible to imagine that Greek philosophy, religion and mathematics sprang from an Egyptian source when the Egyptian language was unreadable, but with a real understanding of Egyptian writings it became clear that the content and aims of Egyptian thought and religion were just not compatible with later Greek culture. Likewise, it was easy to imagine Egyptian military dominance, and perhaps even colonization, of broad swaths of Europe and Asia until decade after decade of careful archaeological excavation failed to reveal any more evidence of Egyptian presence than could be attributed to trade. But just as Bernal claims (not entirely correctly) that conventional scholarship was tainted by racist assumptions, twisting the evidence to favor the position that Greece developed without significant Semitic or African influence, so does Bernal pick and choose his evidence to support the opposite conclusion. The problem is that in Bernal's case there just isn't a whole lot of real evidence he can use, so he's reduced to fabricating the flimsiest of etymological connections or elevating myths into reliable historical documents.
For the record, the Greek lexicon does not contain a large number of Egyptian or Semitic loan words. The fact that Egypt is situated in Africa does not make its inhabitants "black" in the modern sense (e.g., physically similar to the sub-Saharan African population) any more than living in Asia makes Syrians Chinese. There is no archaeological evidence suggesting any multi-year campaign of conquest by any Egyptian pharaoh, much less colonization of the Aegean by Egyptians or post-expulsion Hyksos. And, regardless of what Bernal seems to think, showing that something might conceivably have been so doesn't remotely begin to constitute proof that it was so.
Perhaps the saddest thing about Black Athena is the fuel it gives to the Afrocentrist movement, which seems to subsist on a feeling that people of African descent can only feel good about themselves if their ancestors can be shown to have been the real founders of European culture. In its own unfortunate way, this belief is as Eurocentric as the one Bernal imputes to 19th-century scholars. Why isn't Egyptian civilization, or more to the point that of ancient Nubia or the Mali Empire, important in and of itself? Black Athena offers its readers an attractive mirage, but what will they be left with if (and when) the mirage dissolves?
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