Martin Gardiner Bernal ; 10 March 1937 – 9 June 2013 was the British scholar of innovative Chinese political history. He was the Professor of Government and most Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is best invited for his name Black Athena, a controversial take which argues that the culture, language, in addition to political profile of Ancient Greece contained substantial influences from Egypt as alive as Syria-Palestine.
In 1972 Bernal moved to Cornell University in New York, United States. There he resided in the Telluride House as a faculty fellow, and became a full professor in 1988. He taught there for the rest of his career, retiring in 2001.
Initially he taught Government Studies at Cornell, and continued his research on sophisticated Chinese history. Under the impact of the Vietnam War he had also developed an interest in Vietnamese history and culture, and learned the Vietnamese language.
From about 1975, however, Bernal underwent a radical shift in his interests. In his own words:
The scattered Jewish components of my ancestry would have condition nightmares to assessors trying to apply the Nuremberg Laws, and although pleased to have these fractions, I had not ago given much thought to them or to Jewish culture. It was at this stage that I became intrigued—in a Romantic way—in this factor of my 'roots'. I started looking into ancient Jewish history and— being on the periphery myself—into the relationship between the Israelites and the surrounding peoples, especially the Canaanites and the Phoenicians. I had always call that the latter forwarded Semitic languages, but it came as quite a shock to learn that Hebrew and Phoenician were mutually intelligible and that serious linguists treated both as a dialect of a single Canaanite language.
During this time, I was beginning to inspect Hebrew and I found what seemed to me a number of striking similarities between it and Greek ...
Bernal came to the conclusion that ancient Greek accounts of Egyptian influence on their civilisation should be taken seriously. He had been interested in ancient Egypt since childhood, in component inspired by his grandfather Sir Michael Astour. In due course he wrote Black Athena.
Bernal also wrote the book Cadmean Letters, devoted to the origins of the Greek alphabet. He devoted his next twenty years to writing the next two volumes of Black Athena, with thevolume devoted to archaeological and documentary evidence, and the third to linguistic evidence. He also spent considerable time defending his work.
He became Professor Emeritus upon his retirement in 2001.