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Rating: 
Summary: Were the Egyptians Black?
Review: "Black Athena" (BA) will tax the staying power of any reader. It is a complicated and convoluted book that has generated countless impassioned rebuttals and counter rebuttals. The author, Martin Bernal, is an agitator of rare talent. The stated purpose of his book is "to lessen European cultural arrogance." The title suggests that the Greek God Athena, patron of the glorious city of Athens, was black-skinned. The subtitle, "The Fabrication of Ancient Greece" suggests that generations of fawning classical scholars have wrongly proclaimed Greece the fount of Western Civilization because of their racial and ethnic prejudices. (For a typical view of the classicists read Edith Hamilton's famous book, "The Greek Way." She gives the Greeks credit for inventing rational thought, humanistic philosophy, mathematics, science, drama, democracy, medicine, and the atom.) Bernal wins the argument hands down that the scholars have underestimated the contribution of Egypt to Greek civilization. His argument in favor of Semitic influences on the Greeks is not nearly so persuasive -- although the alphabet is undeniably an invention of the Semitic Phoenicians. But Bernal's thesis that Greece was invaded by a Semitic people called the Hyksos in the second millennium B.C. is unconvincing. What of course interests everybody about "Black Athena" is the suggestion that European civilization evolved from an African -- and possibly black -- civilization. That leads to some interesting speculation (which Bernal does not fully explore). According to the Bible, the "Children of Israel" were held captive in Egypt for several hundred years. It seems probable some racial mixing between Egyptians and the Israelites occurred during those generations. Therefore, were the Israelites black? If Hollywood remakes the movie "The Ten Commandments" should Denzel Washington be cast as Moses? What a hoot that would be! Bernal is uncustomarily brief and unspecific when he discusses the color of the ancient Egyptians. In this volume he says only that "one can usefully call" some pharaohs "black." Now, what does "usefully black" mean? In a later volume, "Black Athena Writes Back," he explains a bit more by saying he "never suggested that the Ancient Egyptian population as a whole looked like stereotypical West Africans." Well, it seems to me that Professor Bernal wimps out on the race issue. We want Bernal to examine in detail the evidence about the skin color of the ancient Egyptians and related civilizations, including the Greeks and the Semites. Why does he brush past this subject with such haste? Can it be that the fearless Doctor, who spends hundreds of pages flagellating white and European classical scholars for their racial and ethnic prejudices, fears to offend Afro-centric scholars? "Black Athena" is one of the most controversial books of the last two decades. However, my wife probably has the best perspective on the whole subject, "Why in the world," says she, "would anyone care what the ancient Egyptians looked like? They've been dead 3,000 years."
Rating:
Summary: Were the Egyptians Black?
Review: "Black Athena" (BA) will tax the staying power of any reader. It is a complicated and convoluted book that has generated countless impassioned rebuttals and counter rebuttals. The author, Martin Bernal, is an agitator of rare talent. The stated purpose of his book is "to lessen European cultural arrogance." The title suggests that the Greek God Athena, patron of the glorious city of Athens, was black-skinned. The subtitle, "The Fabrication of Ancient Greece" suggests that generations of fawning classical scholars have wrongly proclaimed Greece the fount of Western Civilization because of their racial and ethnic prejudices. (For a typical view of the classicists read Edith Hamilton's famous book, "The Greek Way." She gives the Greeks credit for inventing rational thought, humanistic philosophy, mathematics, science, drama, democracy, medicine, and the atom.) Bernal wins the argument hands down that the scholars have underestimated the contribution of Egypt to Greek civilization. His argument in favor of Semitic influences on the Greeks is not nearly so persuasive -- although the alphabet is undeniably an invention of the Semitic Phoenicians. But Bernal's thesis that Greece was invaded by a Semitic people called the Hyksos in the second millennium B.C. is unconvincing. What of course interests everybody about "Black Athena" is the suggestion that European civilization evolved from an African -- and possibly black -- civilization. That leads to some interesting speculation (which Bernal does not fully explore). According to the Bible, the "Children of Israel" were held captive in Egypt for several hundred years. It seems probable some racial mixing between Egyptians and the Israelites occurred during those generations. Therefore, were the Israelites black? If Hollywood remakes the movie "The Ten Commandments" should Denzel Washington be cast as Moses? What a hoot that would be! Bernal is uncustomarily brief and unspecific when he discusses the color of the ancient Egyptians. In this volume he says only that "one can usefully call" some pharaohs "black." Now, what does "usefully black" mean? In a later volume, "Black Athena Writes Back," he explains a bit more by saying he "never suggested that the Ancient Egyptian population as a whole looked like stereotypical West Africans." Well, it seems to me that Professor Bernal wimps out on the race issue. We want Bernal to examine in detail the evidence about the skin color of the ancient Egyptians and related civilizations, including the Greeks and the Semites. Why does he brush past this subject with such haste? Can it be that the fearless Doctor, who spends hundreds of pages flagellating white and European classical scholars for their racial and ethnic prejudices, fears to offend Afro-centric scholars? "Black Athena" is one of the most controversial books of the last two decades. However, my wife probably has the best perspective on the whole subject, "Why in the world," says she, "would anyone care what the ancient Egyptians looked like? They've been dead 3,000 years."
Rating: 
Summary: Greeks are European not African... No supported Evidence...
Review: All views and opinions are based on afrocentricism. Obviously the author is indeed black and hence bias is inherent in his writing. Greeks and Egyptians will not tolerate this kind of speculation. READ "BLACK ATHENA: REVISITED" to get the right information.
Rating: 
Summary: Spurious first review needs rebuttal
Review: Black Athena was and is one of the most important challenges to mainstream academia. It is by far the most fascinating "counter history," the best informed "against-the-grain" reading of Western History written in this era. The absurd cant that passed the Lefkowitz crowd about how Bernal violated academic norms and so forth should be taken for what it is: a rearguard attempt by establishment types to undermine his credentials. The truth of the matter is probably unattainable by human beings, but the truth of this book is equal to and perhaps more germaine than the "classical Greece" myth still taught in high schools all over the world. Germaine especially today, I would say. A Professor of History somewhere. Dig my public name, a Dadaist selection.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating for all the wrong reasons
Review: 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?
Rating:
Summary: A Very Modern Myth
Review: Few books have caused as much scandal and controversy in the cloistered world of the classics as Black Athena. In this book, Martin Bernal argues with great clarity and a formidable amount of learning that the roots of classical Greek civilisation depended to a far greater extent than is generally acknowledged in Egypt and Phoenicia and that, from the late eighteenth century onwards, the racism (conscious or otherwise) of European scholars resulted in a kind of academic "cover-up", to the extent that nowadays this Eurocentric tradition has become so firmly entrenched in the canons of classical scholarship that it has contaminated all subsequent research.
Therein lies the virtue of this book. Any work which comes along and challenges the basic assumptions of any discipline is of great intrinsic value, as it forces the scholars to sit up and reconsider the foundations of their beliefs, and since Black Athena was first published there has been much "soul-searching" done by many classicists and ancient historians. Unfortunately, the book is deeply flawed in numerous respects. Firstly, the quality of the evidence he quotes is, at a generous assessment, flimsy. Bizarre and deeply questionable etymologies from Egyptian and the Semitic languages are no substitute for the complete lack of any archaeological evidence for a significant Egyptian presence in Greece in the period in question. His "unholy trinity" of Christianity, Romanticism and political conservatism which created the Eurocentricism supposedly inherent in the classics does not work - the best example of a historical person who subscribes to these views he could find was the poet Shelley, who was a radical atheist. Moreover, the entire premise of the book is entirely Eurocentric - why should African or Semitic civilisation need to be vindicated by contributing to European civilisation? Both the Hebrew culture of the Near East and the kingdoms of ancient Egypt were impressive enough in their own right - why does Bernal feel that in order to be valued they ought to have contributed to the roots of Europe? When Bernal devotes so much of his work to condemning 19th century scholarship for succumbing to "externalist" pressures, one can't escape the feeling that this is what vitiates "Black Athena" too. I am not closed to the possibility of Eastern influences on Greek culture - I accept that in terms of architecture, the visual arts, the social make up of the Minoan and Mycenean kingdoms and even the epics of Homer were to an extent influenced by Near Eastern or Egyptian precedent. But I cannot believe that the Greeks were incapable of innovation, which Bernal seems to imply, and nor do I accept that Egypt and Phoenicia need Europe in order to be admired. All in all, Black Athena is a fascinating and valuable book - the only flaw is that it is wrong.
Rating:
Summary: Martin Bernal's powerful critique of Classical studies
Review: Martin Bernal's Black Athena contains two major portions: a linguistic argument about non-Indo-European word roots in Greek (a phenomenon clear to anyone who has studied the Greek language, which is filled with non-IE roots), and a detailed indictment of the anti-Semitic shift in modern Classical scholarship in the 18th-19th centuries. This shift led modern scholars to perversely reject the Greeks' own veneration of Egyptian culture, covering up the Greeks' acknowledgment of their dependency on Greek culture with modern prejudices (driven by colonialism). Bernal's careful and detailed study of the major linguists and classicists of the 18th and 19th centuries reveals deep prejudices masquerading as scholarship, a masquerade that 20th century Classical scholars, by and large, have failed to redress. This is a brilliant book - although if you have been indoctrinated in a kind of narrow-minded adoration of the ancient Greeks as white marble gods before whom you worship, you will probably not enjoy reading Bernal. But you should still read him anyway. Whether or not you agree with his answers, the questions he poses are vital.
Rating:
Summary: ancient African diaspora
Review: One reviewer here noted that African Americans have self esteem issues and need to rip of ancient civilizations for a sense of self history. True enough, African Americans have only been learning about their heritage for the past few decades-BECAUSE it was robbed and rapped by European Imperialist. However, I'm not claiming that ripping of the origins of others is the way to obtain a sense of self. This is why there are books like these, which EXPLAIN the relations of other civizations with Africans. The same "blasphemy" mentality of people today hearing that Greeks were black was the same mentality people had of Egypt. However, most contemporary scholars have admitted to Egypt as being at LEAST considerably black in origin. Which is a start. However, though I'm sure some semetic intermixing existed, Egypts were black. They left enough documentation, look at Akhenaton. Look at Menkaure, the builder of one of the Great Pyramids. Look at them all. In time, the mentality of Greeks having black origins will be seen. The truth always wins. I dont think the argument in this book is suggesting the Greeks were essential blacks, like Egyptians. It's suggesting that because the Egyptians (who were black) found Greece ( a mixture of Semetic and European)then blacks had a major influence on Greece. It is a fact, as told by Herodotus, that Greece derived much of it's early culture from Egypt. Egypt being black, then influenced the Greeks. I'm sure there were black Greeks, such as Alexander's General, but I dont think he's saying blacks were the dominate racial make-up. The mediterrannean has always been home to much mixing, and I think the book is only emphasing that blacks were a part of this mixing. No, Greeks and Romans were not black, but influenced since the most ancient times. That's all the book is saying. The people who challenge those are only one's who disagree that the Egyptians were essentially a black race. Which one must agree on before understanding the black relationship to ancient Greece.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: The basic idea here is that much of current Greek/Western Civilization historical literature is based on the work of overt racists who have suppressed evidence of a non-Aryan origin of the Greek civilization. Bernal presents his thoughts and evidence for a different view than that of the standard. It should come as no surprise that something as speculative as ancient history has been greatly influenced by the extreme prejudices of the recent past. Bernal's evidence that the Greeks owe much of their culture to ancient Egypt is worth considering and is certainly more compelling than some of the emotional/illogical (racist)conclusions espoused by the 19th and 20th century scholars that he quotes and attempts to debunk. Five stars for being a useful discussion starter and exposing some oft-cited historical texts as useless.
Rating:
Summary: I like the militants
Review: There are a lot of uninformed reviews on this forum, by people who clearly have
not read, let alone understood the book, Black Athena. This book is not about whether the Ancient Egyptians were Black, or whether
Greek civilization as it exists today and became known to the Romans was a
wholesale copy of Egyptian civilization, as it obviously wasn't. So, what is Black Athena about? This book carefully sets out Martin Bernal's hypothesis, that ancient history
can be seen as having been molded into specific narratives, depending on
the age when that narrative was created and found it's uses.
He defines three different Models or narratives, namely the Ancient Model,
The Aryan Model, and his own Revised Ancient Model. He includes some
suggested timelines, but basically, the Ancient Model of Greeks like
Herodotus, suggested that in 15th century BC, Egyptians and
Phoenicians had set up colonies in Greece and the Aegean, creating Greek
civilization. The Aryan Model suggests that civilization started with the
indigenous creation of a civilization in Greece, and that there were
Nordic invasions of Indo-European speakers who mixed in with
the non-Indo-European speaking indigenous population
Bernal's Revised Ancient Model places the Egyptian and Phoenician
invasions in the 21st-19th century, pushes back the introduction of the
alphabet to the 17th century (from the 9th century), but maintains
that there were Nordic invasions and that the indigenous population
spoke a related Indo-Hittite language. All ten chapters in this book are documented to a different period and
the changing perspectives and emphasis that is put on a particular origin
of history or culture (from the Ancient Model In Antiquity (I), through
this model's transmission during the dark ages and the renaissance (II),
The Triumph of Egypt in the 17th and 18th Centuries (III) and
the beginning Hostilities To Egypt In The 18th Century (IV) (long _before_
Champollion's decypherment of Egyptian in the first quarter of the19th century).
These hostilities had no small part of their origins in the existing race based slavery,
colonialism and the challenges from within Europe to the transatlantic slave trade
as a catalist of the need for a defense of the first two institutions. Chapters V through IX deal with the Romantic Linguistics (V) the discovery of
Sanskrit as a related, Indo-European language and the rise of the Indian-Aryan model.
Hellenomania (VI) deals with the rise of Greece as a fount of European
civilization and ideals, under the German school of von Humboldt and Wolf.
Hellenomania 2 (VII) deals with the takeup of this school of thought in England
and the growing pre-eminence of the Aryan model in the middle of the 19th century.
The Rise And Fall Of The Phoenicians (VIII) deals with the recognitions of
the Phoenicians and the influence of antisemitism, as does chapter (IX). The book concludes with The Post-War Situation (X) and discussion
of the influences of Gordon and Astour and their reclaming of the legacy
of the Phoenicians. In the end we have to ask: is it really so difficult to believe that Ancient Egypt
at the height of it's power, it's age of expansion, created small Egyptian colonies
in the Peleponnese and around the Aegean (20th century BC), that these colonies
helped to transfer some of it's culture and civilization, and that the Greeks had myths
that said so? No linguist today disputes the Phoenician origin of the Greek alphabet.
A small step pyramid has been found in Thebes, Greece. Most ancient Greek
philosophers paid homage to Ancient Egypt and studied there, in the 5th century. A classic book and a must read for anyone interested in the topic, especially
of Aegean relations and the history of history itself.
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