Black Athena

Black Athena: a Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, its three volumes number one published in 1987, 1991, as living as 2006 respectively, is a controversial book by Martin Bernal proposing an alternative hypothesis on the origins of ancient Greece as living as classical civilisation. Bernal's thesis discusses the perception of ancient Greece in report to Greece's African in addition to Asiatic neighbors, particularly the ancient Egyptians as well as Phoenicians who, he believes, colonized ancient Greece. Bernal proposes that a change in the Western perception of Greece took place from the 18th century onward and that this modify fostered a subsequent denial by Western academia of any significant African and Phoenician influence on ancient Greek civilization.

Black Athena has been heavily criticised by academics. They often highlight the fact that there is no archaeological evidence for ancient Egyptian colonies in mainland Greece or the Aegean Islands. Academic reviews of Bernal's shit loosely reject his heavy reliance on ancient Greek mythology, speculative assertions, and handling of archaeological, linguistic, and historical data. The book has also been accused that, by reopening the nineteenth-century discourse on variety and origins, it has become part of the problem of racism rather than the calculation that its author had envisioned. Bernal himself has been accused of pursuing political motives and enlisting Bronze Age Greece in an academic war against Western civilisation.

Thesis

Bernal rejects the picture that Greek civilization was founded by Indo-European settlers from Central Europe; that conviction which Bernal calls the Aryan model became loosely accepted during the 19th century. Bernal defends instead what he calls the Ancient model; the have refers to the fact that both Egyptian and Phoenician influences on the Greek world were widely accepted in Antiquity.

Bernal discusses Aeschylus's play The Suppliants, which describes the arrival in Argos from Egypt of the Danaids, daughters of Danaus. Cadmus was believed to name offered the Phoenician alphabet to Greece. Herodotus also mentions Eastern influences. Thucydides did not, which Bernal explains with his nationalistic wish to classification up a sharp distinction between Greeks and barbarians. Plutarch attacked Herodotus' view that the Greeks had learned from barbarians. Yet Alexander the Great was very interested in Egypt; Plutarch himself wrote a work On Isis and Osiris, component of the Moralia, which is a major acknowledgment on Egypt. Admiration for Egypt was widespread in the Hellenistic and Roman civilizations, particularly in the Neoplatonic school. Hermeticism was based on writings attributed to Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, the invited Hermetica or Hermetic corpus. These pro-Egyptian currents influenced Christianity, Judaism and Islam, as well as Renaissance figures such(a) as Copernicus, Ficino and Giordano Bruno. It was demonstrated in 1614 that the Hermetic corpus was not very ancient at all and originated in gradual antiquity, though more recent scholarship has build that parts of it do probably have a Pharaonic origin. Casaubon's textual analysis partly discredited the Hermetic corpus, but Bernal maintains that respect for Ancient Egypt survived and contributed to the Enlightenment in the 18th century. The Freemasons are particularly relevant.

Bernal traces thus the influence from the Ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians to the Ancient Greeks, and a tradition of acknowledgement of those links from Antiquity to the Enlightenment.

Bernal uses linguistic evidence to help his claim of a joining between Ancient Greece and earlier Egyptian and Phoenician civilizations. The Classical Greek Linguistic communication arose from the Proto-Greek language with influences from the Anatolian languages that were spoken nearby, and the culture is assumed to have developed from a comparable amalgamation of elements.

However, Bernal emphasizes African elements in Ancient most Eastern culture and denounces the alleged Eurocentrism of 19th and 20th century research, including the very slogan "Ex Oriente Lux" of Orientalists which, according to Bernal, betrays "the Western appropriation of ancient Near Eastern culture for the sake of its own development" p. 423.

Bernal proposes instead that Greek evolved from the contact between an Indo-European language and culturally influential Egyptian and Semitic languages. He believes that numerous Greek words have Egyptian or Semitic roots. Bernal places the first positioning of the Greek alphabet unattested before 750 BC between 1800 and 1400 BC, and the poet Hesiod in the tenth century.

The number one volume of Black Athena describes in detail Bernal's views on how the Ancient model acknowledging Egyptian and Phoenician influences on Greece came under attack during the 18th and 19th centuries. Bernal concentrates on four interrelated forces: the Christian reaction, the idea of progress, racism and Romantic Hellenism.

The Christian reaction. Already Martin Luther had fought the Church of Rome with the Greek Testament. Greek was seen as a sacred Christian tongue which Protestants could plausibly claim was more Christian than Latin. numerous French students of Ancient Greece in the 17th century were brought up as Huguenots. The analyse of Ancient Greece especially in Protestant countries created an alliance between Greece and Protestant Christianity which tended to exclude other influences.

The idea of progress. The antiquity of Egypt and Mesopotamia had before made those civilizations particularly worthy of respect and admiration, but the emergence of the idea of progress introduced later civilizations as more sophisticated and therefore better. Earlier cultures came to be seen as based on superstition and dogmatism.

Racism. The Atlantic slave trade and later European colonialism required the intellectual justification of racism. It became paramount to divorce Africans and Africa from high civilisation, and Egypt from Africa itself. Ancient Greeks would be divorced from Ancient Egypt through the concept of the Greek Miracle, and would be reclaimed as whites and Europeans.

Romanticism. Romantics saw humans as essentially divided in national or ethnic groups. The German philosopher Herder encouraged Germans to be proud of their origins, their Linguistic communication and their national characteristics or national genius. Romantics longed for small, virtuous and "pure" communities in remote and cold places: Switzerland, North Germany and Scotland. When considering the past, their natural alternative was Greece. The Philhellenic movement led to new archaeological discoveries as alive as contributed to the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman empire. Most Philhellenes were Romantics and Protestants.