The Kingdom of Armenia: New Edition (Caucasus World) Review

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(More customer reviews)Of all the concise English-language books that I have read on the ancient and medieval history of Armenia, none have come close to match Mack Chahin's eloquent style of writing, research, and attention to detail in his "Kingdom of Armenia." Chahin is clearly aware that the majority of Western scholars have often dismissed Armenia as just another minor vassal state, straddling on its borders much more larger, and far more interesting apparently, powers, such as Assyria, Rome, Greece, Byzantium, and the Arabs.
It is precisely this notion that Chahin attempts to dispel, as he documents the rich cultural, political, and social characteristics of Armenia, beginning from the ancient Kingdom of Urartu. The fact that Chahin chose to start from here (circa 1300 BC) is significant enough, considering that many scholars choose to ignore Armenian history until the late medieval era (circa 900 AD), when the Bagratuni Kingdom was established. And yet, he devotes roughly 2/3 of the book to Urartian history, richly describing the cultural and political legacy it left behind and showing that, far from being a weak state subject to the whims of the Assyrians, it always provided to be a thorn in the soft northern belly of Assyria, and, at certain points in its history, as well as its regional equal.
There were only a few faults I found in this book: I was a little distressed of how Chahin broached the topic of the transition from Urartian to Armenian rule. Chahin takes the word of ancient historians, most notably Herodotus, at face value, and concludes that the Armenian people must have been colonists from Europe. This may be easier to forgive since new studies proving that Armenians were original inhabitants of the region only came to light in the 1980s, and that this book was published only in 1987. Chahin could have also devoted more space to the other kingdoms of Armenia; i.e., the Yervanduni, the Artashesyan, the Arshakuni, the Bagratuni, and the Cilician kingdoms. In the grand scheme of things, 230 pages on the Urartian kingdom seems significant, but it falls somewhat short when 1500 years of history is summarized in a space of only 90 pages. Nevertheless, it's an engaging read and a great introductory tome on the little known kingdoms that were founded in the Armenian highlands.

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While the majority of contemporary works on Armenia concentrate on the modern era, The Kingdom of Armenia takes its beginning in the third century BC, with the ancient literate peoples of Mesopotamia who had commercial interests in the land of Armenia, and continues with a comprehensive overview through to the end of the Middle Ages.

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Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, Volume 1) Review

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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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