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[
A much shorter version of this paper was published as: van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, ‘With Black Athena into the third
millennium CE?’, in: Docter, R.E., & Moormann, E.M.,
eds., Proceedings of the XVth International Congress of
Classical Archaeology, Amsterdam, July 12-17, 1998: Classical
Archaeology towards the Third Millennium: Reflections and
Perspectives: [ Volume I: ] Text, Amsterdam: Allard
Pierson Museum, Allard Pierson Series, vol. 12, pp. 425-427 ]
Despite unmistakable hopes to the
contrary on the part of the editors of the 1996 collection of
critical essays Black Athena revisited,[2] the Black
Athena debate is still alive and kicking. With
understandable delay, more volumes of Black Athena[3] have been projected by
Martin Bernal, as well as a defiant answer[4] to the Black Athena
revisited, under the title Black Athena
writes back.[5] The collection I edited in 1997, Black
Athena Ten Years After, reopened the debate again
after Black Athena Revisited. Meanwhile the
sociologist of religion Jacques Berlinerblau published his Heresy
in the University,[6] a reliable exegesis and balanced (so
fairly positive and constructive) critique of the work of Bernal.
Enough material, debate and reflection has now been generated for
us to try and sort out whatever lasting contribution Bernal may
have made, sifting such support and acclaim as he has received
— from his obvious errors and one-sidedness which the mass
of critical writing on this issue since 1987 has brought to
light. In what ways, on what grounds, and under which stringent
methodological and epistemological conditions, does Martin Bernal’s
crusade deserve to have a lasting impact on our perception of the
ancient eastern Mediterranean?
I shall reserve for another occasion the assessment of Bernal’s
impact on our perception of Africa. I have just completed a
400-page book devoted to this topic.[7]
British-born
Martin Bernal (1937- ) is a Cambridge (U.K.)-trained Sinologist.
His specialisation on the intellectual history of Chinese/
Western exchanges around 1900 CE,[8] in combination with his — at
the time — rather more topical articles on Vietnam in the New
York Review of Books, earned him, in 1972, a
professorship in the Department of Government at Cornell
University, Ithaca (N.Y., U.S.A.). There he was soon to widen the
geographical and historical scope of his research, as indicated
by the fact that already in 1984 he was to combine this
appointment with one as adjunct professor of Near Eastern Studies
at the same university. Clearly, in mid-career he had turned[9] to a set
of questions which were rather remote from his original academic
field. At the same time they are crucial to the North Atlantic
intellectual tradition since the eighteenth century CE, and to
the way in which this tradition has hegemonically claimed for
itself a place as the allegedly unique centre, the original
historical source, of the increasingly global production of
knowledge in the world today. Is — as in the dominant
Eurocentric view — modern global civilisation the product of
an intellectual adventure that started, as from scratch, with the
ancient Greeks — the unique result of the latter’s
unprecedented and history-less achievements? Or is the view of
the Greek (read European) genius as the sole and oldest source of
civilisation, merely a racialist, Eurocentric myth? If the
latter, its double aim has been to underpin delusions of European
cultural superiority in the Age of European Expansion (especially
the nineteenth century CE), and to free the history of European
civilisation from any indebtedness to the (undoubtedly much
older) civilisations of the region of Old World agricultural
revolution, extending from the once fertile Sahara and from
Ethiopia, through Egypt, Palestine and Phoenicia, to Syria,
Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Iran — thus encompassing the narrower
Fertile Crescent — and the Indus Valley. Here Minoan,
subsequently Mycenaean Crete occupies a pivotal position as
either ‘the first European civilisation in the Eastern
Mediterranean’; or as an ‘Afroasiatic’-speaking
island outpost of more ancient West Asian and Egyptian cultures;
or as both at the same time. Foreboding the later dependence of
medieval European civilisation on Arab and Hebrew sources, bernal
claims a vital ‘Afroasiatic’ (or rather, African and
Asian; Afroasiatic is only one of the language families likely to
be involved) contribution to the very origins of the Greek,
subsequently European, now North Atlantic, and increasingly
global, civilisation.
Bernal’s monumental Black Athena,
projected as a tetralogy of which so far the first two volumes
have been published, addresses these issues along two main lines
of argument. The first volume, besides presenting an extremely
ambitious but deliberately unsubstantiated and scarcely
referenced preview of the promised findings of the project as a
whole, is mainly a fascinating exercise in the history and
sociology of European academic knowledge. It traces the
historical awareness, among European cultural producers, of
ancient Europe’s intellectual indebtedness to Africa and
Asia, as well as the subsequent repression of such awareness with
the invention of the ancient Greek miracle since the 18th century
CE. The second line of argument, of which volume two has been the
first instalment, presents the converging historical,
archaeological, linguistic and mythological evidence for this
indebtedness. This historical dependence is then symbolised by
Bernal’s re-reading (after Herodotus)[10] of
Athena, apparently the most ostentatiously Hellenic of ancient
Greek deities, as a peripheral Greek emulation of the goddess
Neith of Saïs — as Black Athena.
Reception of the two volumes of Black Athena
so far has been chequered. Classicists, who read the work not so
much as a painstaking critique of North Atlantic Eurocentric
intellectual culture as a whole but as a denunciation of their
very discipline by an author who continues to insist on his
outsidership, have often been viciously dismissive; less so
— especially before the publication of Volume II —
specialists in archaeology, the cultures and languages of the
Ancient Near East, and comparative religion. Virtually every
critic has been impressed with the extent and depth of Bernal’s
scholarship and puzzled by his aloofness from current debates not
initiated by himself.[11] And
all complain of his lack of methodological, theoretical, and
epistemological sophistication.
Where Bernal’s central thesis was picked up most
enthusiastically, was in the circles of African American
intellectuals. Here the great present-day significance of Black
Athena was rightly recognised: not so much as a purely
academic correction of remote, ancient history, but as a
revolutionary contribution to the global politics of knowledge in
our own age and time. The liberating potential of
Bernal’s thesis has been that it has accorded intellectuals
from outside the politically and materially dominant North
Atlantic, White tradition an independent, even senior, historical
birth-right to full admission and participation under the global
intellectual sun. Egypt is claimed to have civilised Greece, and
from there it is apparently only one step to the vision that
Africa, the South, Black people, have civilised Europe, the
North, White people. Admittedly, this ideological triumph is only
produced by sleight-of-hand, for it is very far from obvious that
ancient Egypt can be equated, by pars pro toto,
with Africa, let alone sub-Saharan Africa; in fact this is not
the case at all.[12]
Nonetheless, coming from a White upper-class academician who is
socially and somatically an outsider to Black issues, Black
Athena’s impact has been considerable. Black
Athena is built into the ongoing construction of a
militant Black identity, offering as an option — not
contemptuous rejection, nor parallel self-glorification as in the
context of Senghor’s and Césaire’s négritude,
in the face of the dominant, White, North Atlantic model, but
— the explosion of that model. And much of the aggression
leveled against Bernal is based on alarm over the politicising
and erosion of scholarship in the face of militant Afrocentrism.
Given the phenomenal expansion of Ancient Near Eastern and
Egyptological studies in the course of the twentieth century, we
should not have needed Bernal, in the first place, to broadcast
the insight of multicentred cultural development in the ancient
eastern Mediterranean, and as a consequence the fact of classical
Greek civilisation’s indebtedness to West Asia and to
northeastern Africa including Egypt. Ex oriente lux
has been the slogan of an increasing number of students of the
Ancient Near East since the beginning of the twentieth century.[13] Ex Oriente Lux
of course has also been, for decades, the name of the Dutch
society for the study of the Ancient Near East, and of its
journal.[14] M. Liverani[15]
meanwhile calls our attention to the essential Eurocentrism
implied in the slogan, which he therefore refuses to accept as a
valid guideline for ancient history today:
‘The shift
of cultural primacy from the Near East to Greece (the one dealt
with in Bernal’s book) was interpreted in line with two
slogans: Ex Oriente Lux (...) mostly used by
Orientalists) and ‘The Greek miracle’ (mostly used by
classicists). These slogans appeared to represent opposing ideas
but in fact were one and the same notion: the Western
appropriation of ancient Near Eastern culture for the sake of its
own development’ (p. 423).
The message of Europe’s cultural indebtedness to the Ancient
Near East however was scarcely welcome when it was first
formulated, and imaginative Semitist scholars like Gordon and
Astour found themselves under siege when they published their
significant contributions in the 1960s. Even if Europe’s
great cultural indebtedness to the Ancient Near East is no longer
the secret it was a hundred years ago, given the hostile
reception this insight received right up to the 1980s Bernal may
be admired for popularising this crucial insight. Black
Athena has done a lot to make it available to circles
thirsting for it while building and rebuilding their own
identity. Meanwhile Bernal himself does not claim excessive
originality for his views:
‘...it
should be clear to any reader that my books are based on modern
scholarship. The ideas and information I use, do not always come
from the champions of conventional wisdom, but very few of the
historical hypotheses put forward in Black Athena are original.
The series’ originality comes from bringing together and
making central, information that has previously been scattered
and peripheral’.[16]
Does Bernal’s thesis on the European history of ideas
concerning Egypt, and his stress on the role of Egypt in the
context of actual cultural exchanges in the eastern Mediterranean
in the third and second millennium BCE, stand up to the
methodological and factual tests of the various disciplines
concerned?
The
controversial nature of the Black Athena thesis,
combined with the unmistakable methodological and theoretical
oddities of its author, have tempted many critics to resort to
caricature when summarising Bernal’s position. One such a
caricature is that he tries to reduce Greek culture to the
flotsam of intercontinental diffusion. However, the problematic
of cultural creativity in a context of diffusion is far from lost
on Martin Bernal,[17] whose
self-identification as a ‘modified diffusionist’
precisely seeks to capture the difference between the obsolete
model of mechanical transmission and wholesale adoption of
unaltered cultural elements from distant provenance, and the far
more attractive model that insists on a local, creative
transformation of the diffused material once it has arrived at
the destination area.[18] Despite
his occasional Egyptocentric lapses into a view of diffusion as
automatic and one-way, Bernal often shows that he is aware of the
tensions between diffusion and transformative localisation:[19]
‘While I am
convinced that the vast majority of Greek mythological themes
came from Egypt or Phoenicia, it is equally clear that their
selection and treatment was characteristically Greek, and to that
extent they did reflect Greek society.’[20]
Admittedly, part of the production systems, the language, the
gods and shrines, the myths, the magic and astrology, the
alphabet, the mathematics, the nautical and trading skills, of
the ancient Greeks were not their own original inventions but had
clearly identifiable antecedents among their longer established
cultural neighbours. Already the truncated previews of
prospective results in Black Athena I —
previews which should never have been seriously discussed before
their full argument in the Black Athena volumes
yet to be published — created heated debate as to the
possible Egyptian antecedents of classical Greek science and
philosophy. Here Bernal finds against not only implacable foes
like Robert Palter,[21] but
also the Egyptological archaeologist Trigger who is otherwise
very sympathetic to the Black Athena project
as a whole.[22] The evidence from the Ancient Near
East, however, has also been read to support Bernal’s view,
and polemics concerning the Afroasiatic roots of Greek philosophy
and science have gained prominence in the Black Athena
debate; as a professor of intercultural philosophy the issue is
of great interest to me, but a congress on classical archaeology
is not the most suitable setting to pursue it any further.[23]
The
publication of Volume II in 1991 meant not only a further
increase of the number of disciplines involved in the debate,[24] but also a marked change of tone.
As long as the Black Athena project remained
(as in Volume I) essentially a review of the image of Egypt in
European intellectual history, the project was by and large
welcomed for its solid foundation in scholarship, and critical
sense of Eurocentric and racialist prejudices informing previous
generations of classicists now long dead.[25] Glen
Bowersock, the leading American classicist, proved far from blind
to the oddities even of Volume I, yet he
could declare:
‘This is an
astonishing work, breathtakingly bold in conception and
passionately written. It is the first of three projected volumes
that are designed to undermine nothing less than the whole
consensus of classical scholarship, built up over two hundred
years, on the origins of ancient Greek civilization. (...) Bernal
shows conclusively that our present perception of the Greeks was
artificially pieced together between the late eighteenth century
and the present. (...) Bernal’s treatment of this theme is
both excellent and important.’
However, when Volume II was published four years later, it
addressed the specifics of eastern Mediterranean ancient history
— a topic constituting the life’s work of hundreds of
living researchers. And it did so in a truly alarming fashion,
less well written than Volume I, invoking yet more contentious
Egyptian etymologies for ancient Greek proper names and lexical
items (yet by and large much sounder than the Ht Nt one),
insisting on the cultic penetration not only of Neith but of
specific minor Egyptian gods to the Aegean, relying on
mythological material as if whatever kernels of historical fact
this might contain could readily be identified, claiming physical
Egyptian presence in the Aegean by reference to irrigation works,
a monumental tumulus, and traditions of a Black pharaoh’s
military campaign into South Eastern Europe and adjacent Asia,
playing havoc with the established chronologies of the Ancient
Near East, attributing the Mycenaean shaft graves to Levantine
invaders identified as early Hyksos yet bringing Egyptian
culture, and reiterating a sympathy for Afrocentrist ideas which
meanwhile had become rather more vocal and politicised in the
U.S.A. It was at this stage that many scholars parted company
with Bernal and that genuine and justified scholarly critique was
combined with right-wing political contestation against the
unwelcome, anti-Eurocentric, intercultural and intercontinental
message of the Black Athena project as a whole — a
development formalised and meant to be finalised by the
publication of Black Athena revisited in 1996 under the
editorship of Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers.
One thing which the editors of Black Athena revisited have
certainly managed to bring about, is a state of alarm and
embarrassment among all scholars and lay people seriously
interested in pursuing the perspectives which Martin Bernal has
sought to open in the Black Athena volumes.
And this is a real problem also in the context of my own current
work, precisely because it finds itself in sympathy with Bernal’s.
How could one honestly and publicly continue to derive
inspiration from an author whose work has been characterised in
the following terms by a well-informed critic like Robert Palter:
‘...those
today who are seriously concerned with formulating a radical
political critique of contemporary scholarship (...) might wish
to think twice before associating themselves with the methods and
claims of Bernal’s work; (...) for his lapses in the most
rudimentary requirements of sound historical study —
traditional, critical, any kind of historical study — should
make one wary of his grandiose historiographical pronouncements.
(...) In the absence of adequate controls on evidence and
argument, the view of history presented in Black Athena is
continually on the verge of collapsing into sheer ideology.’[26]
Sarah Morris praises the critical self-reflection Black
Athena has brought about among classicists, but finds
this too dearly paid for in terms of unwarranted politicising of
the scholarship of the Ancient Near East:
‘On the
other hand, it has bolstered, in ways not anticipated by the
author, an Afrocentrist agenda which returns many debates to
ground zero and demolishes decades of scrupulous research by
excellent scholars such as Frank Snowden. An ugly cauldron of
racism, recrimination, and verbal abuse has boiled up in
different departments and disciplines; it has become impossible
for professional Egyptologists to address the truth without
abuse, and Bernal’s arguments have only contributed to an
avalanche of radical propaganda without basis in fact’.[27]
Mary Lefkowitz says she does not doubt Bernal’s good
intentions yet finds him criminally guilty of what must be,
especially in her eyes, the greatest crime: providing apparently
serious, scholarly fuel to what otherwise might have remained the
Afrocentrist straw fire:
‘To the
extent that Bernal has contributed to the provision of an
apparently respectable underpinning for Afrocentric fantasies, he
must be held culpable, even if his intentions are honorable and
his motives are sincere.’[28]
Yet all this cannot be the entire story. How else to account, for
instance, for the praise which the prominent Egyptologist and
archaeologist B.G. Trigger piles on Black Athena?
He sees Martin Bernal’s project certainly not as a mere
exercise in consciousness-raising meant for Blacks in search of
identity,[29] but as a
serious contribution to the history of archaeology — one of
his own specialisms[30] —
and as a stimulating pointer at the possibilities of innovation
in that discipline, which he considers to be bogged down by
processual scientism.[31] Yet
even Trigger stresses Bernal’s methodological inadequacies,
rejects his contentious chronology particularly with regard to
the Hyksos. As an Egyptologist Trigger remains healthily
unconvinced by Bernal’s argument in favour of the
possibility of extensive Asian and European campaigns by
Senwosret I or III in the early second millennium BCE. and
criticises the way in which he tends to take ancient myth as a
statement of fact. Given the large numbers of both Egyptian and
Greek myths, Trigger argues, it is easy for any scholar to take
his pick and claim historical connections between selections from
both sets — again the point of methodology. In 1997, I
adopted the same position as Trigger,[32] but m
eanwhile I have grown convinced, on the basis of a far more
detailed study of Egypto-Hellenic mythical parallels,[33] that with a better methodology
Bernal’s intuitions concerning the Egyptian and Phoenician
provenance of the majority of Hellenic myths may yet be salvaged.
The factual, chronological and methodological chords struck by
Trigger as a thoroughly sympathetic reviewer reverberate, with
dissonants and fortissimi, throughout Black Athena
revisited and the other venues of the Black
Athena debate. Many complain of the defects and even
of the absence of methodology in Bernal’s writings. Yet such
criticism often turns out to be difficult to substantiate, e.g.
the utterly unconvincing two methodological case studies by
Palter.[34] However, E. Hall[35] convincingly shows the
methodological naïvety of Bernal’s handling of mythical
material. Meanwhile, Bernal prides himself, and not entirely
without justification, precisely on the explicitly theoretical
nature of his approach and his attention for factors relating to
the sociology of knowledge, which, he argues[36] constitutes
the main difference between his work and e.g.: Morenz’s Die
Begegnung Europas met Ägypten.[37]
Many critics are appalled by what they consider to be Bernal’s
confusion of culture, ethnicity and race.[38] They
suspect him of a nineteenth-century, lapidary belief in physical
displacements of people through migration and conquest as prime
explanatory factors in cultural change. They blame him for an
unsystematic and linguistically incompetent handling of
etymologies.
Many critics do not so much find fault with his specific points
but simply — and clearly for disciplinary, internal, rather
than political and external reasons — refuse to recognise
his approach as legitimate, up-to-date ancient history.[39] Thus the eminent ancient historian
James Muhly,[40] who summarises his methodological
objections in Bernal’s own words:
‘it is
difficult for the scholar without a discipline ‘‘going
it alone’’, to know where to stop’ .[41]
According to Baines[42] the
notion of paradigms may be scarcely applicable in the field of
ancient history:
‘Despite the
extended applications of Kuhn’s term that have appeared
since the publication of his book [Kuhn’s, i.e. The
structure of scientific revolutions, o.c.],
ancient Near Eastern studies are not a ‘science’ or a
discipline in the Kuhnian sense. Rather, they are the sum of a
range of methods and approaches applied to a great variety of
materials from a particular geographical region and period; even
definitions of the area and period are open to revision. So far
as the ancient Near East relates to ‘paradigms’, these
are, for example, theories of social complexity and change, or in
other cases theories of literary form and discourse. This
point is where Bernal’s aims depart farthest from those of
many specialists in ancient Near Eastern studies.’
Many critics
question whether Bernal’s stated intention of trying to
understand Greek civilisation is sincere: all they can see is an
obsession with provenance, with intercontinental cultural
displacement, and with late 20th century CE identity politics,
but certainly no coherent and empathic appreciation of the inner
structure, the moral and aesthetic orientations, religious
experience and life world of the Ancient Egyptians, Levantines
and Greeks.[43] This is a fair criticism, to which
we shall; come back below.
Although Volume I of Black Athena contains
numerous previews, only sparingly referenced, of the conclusions
envisaged for the subsequent volumes dealing with the ancient
history of the eastern mediterranean basin, that volume is first
of all an exercise in the European history of ideas. Various
critics have deplored what they consider the incompetence with
which Bernal treats what he considers a flow of Egyptian
knowledge which — often under the name of hermetism —
allegedly has permeated the European culture of esoterism ever
since Late Antiquity. It is difficult to say whether the
dismissive views of these critics do not simply dervie from their
own dismay to see so-called ‘pseudo-sciences’ as
astrology, geomancy and alchemy, or invented traditions like
freemasonry, elevated to the respectable status of vehicles of
the secret transmission of Egyptian knowledge.[44] This is, incidentally, how many
occultists across the centuries have viewed the situation. Some
recent studies of the Hermetic tradition, respectable and without
the slightest connection with the Black Athena debate,[45] would tend to a related view: they
see European esoterism as a vehicle, not directly of Ancient
Egyptian thought during the dynastic period spanning the three
millennia before the Common Era, but certainly as a vehicle of
esoteric thought in Late Antiquity, whose detailed relations with
the dynastic period remains, admittedly, to be assessed by
Egyptologists. Whatever the case may be, from Late Antiquity to
the Enlightenment Europe’s intellectual production has been
massively (not to say predominently) in the esoteric field,
producing an enormous literature which relatively few researchers
can claim to overlook with competence;[46] if
Bernal is not one of them, his expolorations are at least
courageous and stimulating.
With the intellectual history of the 18th and 19th century we are
on much more familiar errain. Here the specialists have little
difficulty showing that some of Bernal’s allegedly racist
villains (Kant, Goethe, Lessing, Herder) were in fact — at
least at the height of their career — heroes of
intercultural learning and modernity’s theoreticians of
tolerance, recognised as such in the whole world.[47] Josine Blok offers a penetrating
discussion of this dimension of Bernal’s work.[48] Bernal’s limited mastery of
the German language — alredy manifet in the considerable
number of typographical errors marking the German entries in his
bibliographies — is perhaps partly responsible for his
errors on this point: he was forced to base his analysis on
English translations and on the secondary literature.
We may
appreciate, at this point, a number of critical themes which
apply to the Black Athena debate as a
whole.
In the first place, the search for origins (which are
often imperceptible anyway) belongs to the realm of parochial,
ethnocentric identity construction more than to the realm of
detached scholarship. Bernal argues — grosso
modo convincingly despite too many errors in detail
— how one particular view of ancient Greek history has
served Eurocentric interests, but of course, his alternative
inevitably serves other ideological interests, as demonstrated by
his rapprochement to the Afrocentrist movement among Black
intellectuals. Ironically, the very title and slogan Black
Athena reveal that Bernal employs the language of race
in order to drive home his anti-racist, anti-Eurocentric message;
clearly there is some more liberation to be done here.
Secondly, identification of provenance does not
preclude the crucial importance of transformative localisation
after the borrowed cultural product has reached — as a
process of diffusion — its destination area.
There is plenty of evidence that Greek lexical items, the proper
names of Gods, the myths in which they feature, and elements of
philosophy and science — as well as many tangible traces of
these cultural domains such as enter the field of classical
archaeology — do derive from Ancient Near Eastern (including
Egyptian) prototypes, but that does not preclude at all that
these cultural achievements, once arrived in the Aegean, have
gone through a complex and unpredictable local history which
truly made them into eminently Greek achievements.
The same reasoning applies to Bernal’s central show-piece,
the Greek goddess Athena herself. To the many etymologies of her
name which scholarship has produced over the centuries[49] Bernal has added a new one deriving
from the ancient Egyptian /Ht Nt, ‘temple
of Neith’. Libyan Neith was a major Egyptian goddess in the
Archaic period (3100 BCE)[50] and
went through a revival under the seventh century BCE Twenty-sixth
Dynasty from Saïs, when Greek mercenaries were prominent. Even
though the specific etymology must be considered effectively
refuted on grounds of historical linguistics,[51] the wealth of iconographic and
semantic detail which Bernal adduces makes is quite conceivable
that the link between the Greek goddess Athena, patron goddess of
the major city of Greek civilisation in its heyday, and her
Egyptian counterpart Neith, did go rather further than a mere
superficial likeness cast in terms of the interpretatio
graeca. Was the goddess Athena the product of the
adoption, into some Northern Mediterranean backwater, of splendid
and time-honoured Egyptian cultural models — as a result of
colonisation and military campaigns, of Hyksos penetration, of
trade? Can such adoption serve as an emblem for far more massive
Egyptian civilising action in the Aegean during the Bronze
Age? Then why do we find so tantalisingly little of
this in the archaeological record from the Bronze Age Aegean, the
evidence even for Egyptian influence on Minoan Crete being
extremely limited and indirect?[52]
Of course, a considerable part of volume II of Black
Athena is devoted to an argument to the effect that
this paucity of archaeological traces is in fact a result of
scholarly myopia, exhorting us to consider the available evidence
in a new light.[53] But few specialists have been
convinced by this.
What theory do we need in order to accommodate both
the lexical and mythological continuities between ancient Egypt
and the Aegean, and the lack of archaeological traces of such
continuity? To what concrete ethnographic situation, to what
specific social mechanism does such a stragely selective process
of cultural transmission correspond? Perhaps to that of
travellors who have migration unvoluntarily and temporarily from
Crete to the Egypt of the Middle or New Kingdom: indentured
artisans (perhaps like those who created the minoan frescoes
recently discovered in the city of Avaris, in the delta)[54] who remained long enough in Egypt
to be sufficiently exposed to cultural (including mythological)
and linguistic influences, but who were at the same time to poor,
too closely supervised, or too much under the spell of their own
ethnic chauvinism or of some religious prohibition, to prevent
them from importing foriegh artefacts into minoan Crete. Another
possibility which might explain the abondance of linguistic,
religious and mythological traces of a cultural flow from Egypt
to the Aegean combined with the paucity of traces in the field of
material culture, is that of a model of cultural diffusion
revolving on immigrant strangers, relatively isolated from their
birth land (notably Egypt and Egyptianised regions such as
Phoenicia) and without military and economic power; such
strangers might have installed themselves on Aegean soil offering
to the locals the only resource at their command: their expertise
in a mythical-cultic system deriving from Egypt and having gained
a great prestige in the entire ancient eastern Mediterranean.
This is in fact the model which best fits the mythological
accounts of Kadmos, Danaos etc., which feature centrally in the Black
Athena debate. For a historical parallel we may think,
for example, of the role which individual marabouts (holy men)
have played in the repeated re-islamisation of the North African
countryside in the course of many centuries, or of the Christian
missionaries from the British Isles who converted Northwestern
Europe in the second half of the first millennium of the Common
Era; in both cases, the immigrant religious specialists left an
enormous religious, mythological (or hagiographic, as the case
may be) and linguistic influence, unmatched with a great deal of
imported artefacts from their respective countries of origin.
Whatever model may fit the postulated influence of ancient Egypt
upon the Aegean, the important point here is both to acknowledge
the Egyptian, or in general Ancient Near Eastern, essential
contributions to Greek classical civilisation (the argument of
diffusion), and to recognise at the same time that
Athena outgrew her presumable Egyptian origin,
increasingly severing such Egyptian ties as she may once have
had, integrating in the emergent local culture, and transforming
in the process (the argument of subsequent localisation). She
ended up as an important cultic focus and identity symbol of
local cultural achievements which were, in the end, distinctively
Greek.[55]
The third observation to be made concerns methodology.
We have no direct knowledge of the pattern of the past. If our
historical pronouncements are scientific, it is because they are
based on the processing of all available evidence in the light of
explicit and repeatable methods and procedures, before the
international forum of academic peers. So much for the outsider
going it alone, like Bernal; he even constructs himself to be an
outsider to an extent impossible for someone who, ever since
1984, has been a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell.
His pride in reviving scholarly views of the early twentieth
century, his doggedly sticking to the /Ht Nt-Athena
etymology even while admitting that it can only be sustained by a
recourse to contingency, not systematic linguistic law, in
general his responsive overkill vis-à-vis his critics, and the
ready accusation (by reference to what Bernal monopolises as
‘the sociology of knowledge’) of ulterior, Eurocentric
or racialist ideological motives as ultimate argument against his
many opponents — all this shows a strange mixture of
empiricist realism and political idealism, a shocking lack of
method and epistemology, and a tragic denial of the social,
collective component as a necessary for scholarship.
Yet method is not everything in the field of research, and the
most precious ideas often derive, beyond posaic and routine
rules, from an intuition which after all, in the words of
Spinoza, is the highest form of knowledge. Bernal possesses a
mysterious talent for producing profoundly illuminating, sound
intuitions which he subsequently seeks to substantiate with
unacceptable methods. Of course this is not as it should be, but
it is eminently forgiveable in view of the alternative:
scientific research which is methodologically impeccable and
sound, but lacks true intellectual challenge and progress. After
several years of intensive participation in the Black
Athena debate, in the course of which I have
familiarised myself with Egyptian mythology and with the ancient
Egyptian language, it is Bernal’s claims in the mythological
and etymological domain which, to my mind, stand out most
convincingly.
‘Naturally,
I maintain that the reason it is so remarkably easy to find
correspondences between Egyptian and Greek words is that between
20 and 25 percent of the Greek vocabulary does in fact derive
from Egyptian!’[56]
This precise
statistical statement is often repeated (but with different
outcomes!) in Bernal’s work, Yet the numerical procedures
underpinning it have so far not been made explicit by him.
Meanwhile the sample of proposed Egyptian etymologies of Greek
words as included in his ‘Responses to Black
Athena’[57] may
convince the reader that, at least at the qualitative level, the
claim is not without grounds. But here again it is the utter
absence of an explicit and approved method — ignorance even
of such methods are have been developed in these fields —
which produces unsystematic and unconvincing results. Bernal’s
proposed etymologies have to be browsed together from all over
his published work,[58] and
they usually remain at the level of isolated lexical atoms,
— his greatest handicap after all is his lack of
sociological and cultural imagination which allows him to conjure
up a coherent image of a living culture, rather than a loose
bundle of provenances that have virtually died in transit.
By the same token, he handles myth as if its historical contents
is self-evident and non-problematic, and is entirely unaware of
the great advances in the science of myth analysis since the
nineteenth century. One would be justified, from a theoretical
and methodological point of view, to reject Bernal’s
conclusions on these points. Yet I now find that I have to come
back upon my earlier scepticism concerning an alleged Egyptian
provenance, in this case of Athenean foundation myths. [59] In my forthcoming book Global
bee flight I have meanwhile produced detailed and
theoretically informed analyses of the transformations of
Egyptian (and Libyan) myths on their way into the Aegean and into
Africa.[60] I am as convinced of the soundness
of Bernal’s general intuition on these points, as of the
methodological defects of his specific analysis.
The fourth observation to be made, finally, concerns the
mechanical juxtaposition of the Indo-European and the Afroasiatic
language families as if this would sum up all there is to be said
about cultural interactions in the ancient eastern Mediterranean.
The juxtaposition springs from Bernal’s obsession with
language as a key to cultural history, which is also responsible
for the misnomer ‘Afroasiatic roots of classical Greek
civilization’. The juxtaposition creates a sense of ‘either/
or’ which eminently befits the political rhetoric underlying
the Black Athena debate (Black versus
White; radical and liberation-orientated versus ethnocentric; the
rest of the world versus Europe) but which obscures such
continuity as may underlie (in Sumerian, Nostratic etc.) the
actual cultural dynamics in this region. More importantly, that
continuity may extend to what now remains an uninvited guest: an
ancient Mediterranean linguistic and cultural substratum,
wedging in between Indo-European and Afroasiatic, which
specialists have invoked time and again for etymological and
religious reconstructions of the ancient Mediterranean, and which
provides a far more convincing model of cultural exchanges —
within a region already displaying fundamental
continuities and similarities from Neolithic times —
than a simple diffusion, as late as the Bronze Age, from one
privileged source notably ancient Egypt. Thus I find it much more
attractive to view Athena and Neith as closely related branches
from a stem which, throughout the ancient eastern Mediterranean,
has produced Great Goddesses with connotations of underworld,
death, and violence — connotations which were often
(although not in Athena’s case) emblematised in bee
symbolism. In this way one may bring forward a bit the problem of
the etymology of the names of Athena and Neith: the two female
deities, and their names, are not derivations from one another,
but both are probably derivations from a deity which is not so
much Egyptian or Libyan but West Asiatic, -- a goddess whose name
we know under the form of Anat or Anath.[61] The
argument of GLobal bee flight —
although inspired by Bernal — effectively explodes the Black
Athena thesis, since it dissolves the very
contradiction between Indo-European and Afroasiatic as the source
of Aegean civilisation, and would draw on a substratum which,
contrary to the Afroasiatic one, could not readily be relegated
to an African provenance.[62] It was
the interaction between an African and an eastern mediterranean
cultural tradition which produced, in the first place, the
political system, the culture and the society of ancient Egypt.
Once in place, this ancient Egyptian culture has, in its turn, in
the course of three millennia exerted a decisive influence (with
predictable feed-back phenomena, considering the original
cultural indebtedness of ancient Egypt to these region) on the
eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and subsaharan Africa. Of
all these ramifications, Global bee flight
will only explore those relating to sub-Saharan Africa,
especially in the fields of sacred kingship and myth.
All this
leads on to a re-assessment of the Black Athena project.
Volume I was an eminently successful explosion of the Eurocentric
myth of the autonomous origin of Greek civilisation — a
liberating act of deconstruction of previous scholars’ myths
worthy of the greatest respect (and, incidentally, one in which
specifically Bernal’s skill as a trained historian employing
an implicit but time-honoured methodology produced an argument
largely[63] away from myth).
Volume II, lacking such methodology and venturing into a domain
where the production, recirculation and reproduction of scholarly
myth was only too tempting, has not yet produced the science it
set out to produce. The great debate it has generated is
essentially a struggle to formulate the conditions and the
procedures under which Bernal’s claims (or the alternative
statements that can supersede them) can be allowed to be true;
under which their myth content can be kept low. Even if meant to
be destructive and dismissive, even the most critical reactions
therefore are inherently constructive, and Bernal’s later,
specific responses (often more precise, clear, subtle and
palatable than his original published statements), bring out once
more the fact that scientific truth is the — usually
ephemeral — product of a social process between peers.
What is needed is that his sheer unbearable, self-imposed burden
is now shared with others, working under an epistemology more
readily recognised as suitable to tell myth from truth, but
within the spirit of his vision of interculturality and
multicentredness as the central challenge of our age, and of his
standards of interdisciplinary breadth and scholarly imagination.
If Martin Bernal produces truth inextricably mixed with myth; if
his naïve epistemology is conducive to this; if he has not
adopted more widely acceptable methodologies for mythical and
etymological analysis; if his reconstruction of the modern
history of ideas may be too schematic and partly wrong; if he
shows himself more adept at the tracing of the trajectories of
isolated cultural and religious items than at the understanding
of the complexity of localising cultural and religious
transformations; if there are a hundred other things more or less
wrong with Black Athena, — then these
are merely so many items for a research agenda that ought to keep
as many of us as possible occupied well into the twenty-first
century CE.
In mid-life and without the required specialist academic training
in classical and Ancient Near Eastern languages, archaeology, and
ancient history, Martin Bernal has set himself a truly Herculean
task. A fundamental dilemma has attended the Black
Athena project from the beginning: its scope is far
too comprehensive for one person, its political, ideological and
moral implications are far too complex than that one person could
possibly be trusted to thresh them all out. Whatever
error has crept in is more than compensated by his scope of
vision, which made him realise that, inside as well as outside
scholarship, creating a viable and acceptable alternative to
Eurocentrism is the most important intellectual challenge of our
time.
One obvious strategy for reducing the state of alarm which Black
Athena has brought about among specialists on Ancient
Greece and the Ancient Near East, has been to try and refute the
details of its scholarship, and to subsequently, smugly, withdraw
from the debate. The other way out, and one which I passionately
advocate, is to continue in the spirit of Martin Bernal’s
project, with vastly increased personal, disciplinary, financial
and temporal resources, and see where this will lead us: far
beyond the Black Athena thesis, no doubt,
but with new inspiring questions towards a new nuderstanding of
the ancient world, and more effectively equipped for our global
future.
[1]This
paper is in part a much shortened, but in other respects rather
expanded version of: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ‘Black
Athena Ten Years After: Towards a constructive re-assessment’,
in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ed., Black Athena:
Ten Years After, Hoofddorp: Dutch Archaeological and
Historical Society, special issue, Talanta: Proceedings
of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society,
vols 28-29, 1996-97, pp. 11-64.
[2]M.R.
Lefkowitz & G. MacLean Rogers, eds., Black Athena
revisited, Chapel Hill & London: University of
North Caroline Press, 1996.
[3]Bernal,
M., 1987, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical
Civilization, Vol. I, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece
1787-1987, London: Free Association Books/ New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press; Bernal, M., 1991, Black Athena: The
Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. II, The
Archaeological and Documentary Evidence, London: Free Association
Books; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
[4]Bernal,
M., in preparation, Black Athena writes back,
Durham: Duke University Press.
[5]Now
in press with Duke University Press.
[6]Berlinerblau,
J., 1999, Heresy in the University: The Black Athena
controvery and the responsibilities of American intellectuals,
New Brunswick etc.: Rutgers University Press.
[7]Van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., forthcoming, Flight of the Bee:
Sub-Saharan Africa, Ancient Egypt, and the World — Beyond
the Black Athena thesis
[8]Bernal,
Martin,. 1975, Chinese Socialism to 1907. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1975.
[9]Cf.
Black Athena I, p. xiiff.
[10]On Egyptian Athena: Hist. II 28,
59, 83 etc., and in general on the Greeks’ religious
indebtedness to Egypt: Hist. II 50ff. The
identification of Neith with Athena was not limited to Herodotus
but was a generally held view in Graeco-Roman Antiquity.
[11]J. Berlinerblau, o.c., pp. 93f,
esp. p. 105, seeks to demonstrate that the massive reaction which
Black Athena has produced must be attributed to the fact that its
author implicitly touches on the central problems of our times:
the struggle of minority identities, multiculturalism,
postcolonial theory, the discovery of the hegemonic nature of
North Atlantic knowledge systems, in general the rise of an
explicit sociology and politics of knowledge, etc. However, this
is scarcely convincing because Bernal only very rarely identifies
these debates, their authors, and their epistemological and
philosophical foundations.
[12]Van Binsbergen, Flight, o.c.
[13]Scholarly studies outside the context of the Black
Athena debate yet insisting on the essential
continuity between the civilisations of the Ancient Near East,
include e.g., Kramer, S.N., 1958, History begins at
Sumer, London; Neugebauer, O., 1969, The
exact sciences in Antiquity, New York: Dover, 2nd
edition; first published 1957; Gordon, C., 1962, Before
the Bible: The common background of Greek and Hebrew
Civilizations, New York: Harper & Row; Gordon,
C.H., 1966, Evidence for the Minoan language,
Ventnor (NJ): Ventnor Publishers; Saunders, J.B. de C.M., 1963, The
Transitions from ancient Egyptian to Greek medicine,
Lawrence: University of Kansas Press; Astour, M.C., 1967, Hellenosemitica:
An ethnic and cultural study in West Semitic impact on Mycenean
Greece, 2d ed., Leiden: Brill; Fontenrose, J., 1980, Python:
A study of Delphic myth and its origins, Berkeley
etc.: University of California Press; paperback edition, reprint
of the 1959 first edition. These approaches have revived the
ancient adage ‘Ex oriente lux’, which for Bernal
contains in truncated form the ‘ancient model’ of an
indebtedness of Greece — and therefore of the whole of
Europe — to the Near East; this adage was rejected during
the Enlightenment: ‘Today it is from the North that the
light comes to us’ (Voltaire, Letter to Catherina II, 1771).
[14]Also cf. Bernal’s rather telling admission of
initially overlooking the significance of this rallying cry, Black
Athena II, p. 66.
[15]M. Liverani, 1996, ‘The bathwater and the baby’,
in: Lefkowitz & MacLean Rogers, o.c.,
pp. 421-427.
[16]Bernal, M., in press, ‘Review of ‘‘Word
games: The linguistic evidence in Black Athena’’, Jay
H. Jasanoff & Alan Nussbaum’, forthcoming in Bernal’s
Black Athena writes back, o.c.
[17]Also see the ‘third distortion’ of his work
as identified in: Bernal, ‘Responses to Black
Athena: General and linguistic issues’.
[18]Bernal, ‘Phoenician politics and Egyptian
justice’, 241. Cf. Black Athena II, pp.
523f:
‘In the early
part of this century, scholars like Eduard Meyer, Oscar
Montelius, Sir John Myres and Gordon Childe maintained the two
principles of modified diffusion and ex oriente lux. In the first
case, they rejected the beliefs of the extreme diffusionists, who
maintained that ‘master races’ simply transposed their
superior civilizations to other places and less developed
peoples. They argued instead, that unless there was a rapid
genocide, diffusion was a complicated process of interaction
between the outside influences and the indigenous culture and
that this process itself produced something qualitatively new.’
[19]Cf. van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ‘Alternative
models of intercontinental interaction towards the earliest
Cretan script’, in: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ed., Black
Athena: Ten Years After, Hoofddorp: Dutch
Archaeological and Historical Society, special issue, Talanta:
Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society,
vols 28-29, 1996-97, pp. 131-148
[20]Black Athena I, p. 489, n. 59.
[21]Palter, R., 1996, ‘Black Athena, Afrocentrism,
and the history of science’, in: M.R. Lefkowitz & G.
MacLean Rogers, eds., Black Athena revisited, Chapel Hill &
London: University of North Caroline Press, pp. 209-266; reprint
of:Palter, R., 1993, ‘Black Athena, Afrocentrismy, and the
history of science,’ History of Science, 31 (1993), pp.
227-87. However, see the short but convincing argument for
Egyptian/Greek scientific continuity by the great historian of
science and magic W. Hartner (1963, ‘W. Hartner’ [
Discussion of G. de Santillana's ‘On forgotten sources in
the history of science’ ], in: Crombie, A.C., ed., Scientific
change, New York: Basic Books, pp. 868-75): e.g.,
Hellenist Greek astronomers tell us that Egyptian astronomers
(whom we can demonstrate to have been pre-Hellenist) have
calculated the lunation to a figure which, as we know now, is
within 13 seconds of the correct astronomical value, an error of
only 5*10-6.
[22]Trigger, B.C., 1995, Early civilizations:
Ancient Egypt in context, Cairo: The American
University in Cairo Press, first published 1993; p. 93; Trigger,
B.G., 1992, "Brown Athena: A Postprocessual Goddess?"
Current Anthropology 33, 1: 121-23.
[23]Cf. Black Athena I, p. 216, 477,
n. 95; Preus, A., 1992, Greek Philosophy: Egyptian
origins, Binghamton: Institute of Global Cultural
Studies, Research Papers on the Humanities and Social Sciences;
Lefkowitz, M., 1996, Not out of Africa: How
Afrocentrism became an excuse to teach myth as history,
New York, Basic Books; van Binsbergen, W.M.J., forthcoming, Flight
of the Bee: Sub-Saharan Africa, Ancient Egypt, and the World
— Beyond the Black Athena thesis.
The claims affirming Afroasiatic provenance partly go back to the
Afrocentric James, Stolen legacy. Outside
Afrocentrism, cf. West, M.L., 1971, Early Greek
Philosophy and the Orient, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
[24]Various special issues of international journals have
been devoted to the Black Athena debate: Levine, M. Myerowitz,
& Peradotto, J., eds., The challenge of Black Athena, special
issue of Arethusa, 22 (Fall); Journal of Mediteranean
Archaeology, 1990-, 3, 1; Isis, 1992, 83, 4; Journal of Women’s
History, 1993, 4, 3; History of Science, 1994, 32, 4; VEST
Tidskrift for Vetanskapsstudier, 1995, 8, 5; van Binsbergen,
W.M.J., ed., Black Athena: Ten Years After, Hoofddorp: Dutch
Archaeological and Historical Society, special issue of Talanta:
Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society,
vols 28-29, 1996-1997.
[25]Bowersock, G., 1989, [Review of Black
Athena I], Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, 19: 490-91.
[26]Palter, R., 1996, ‘Eighteenth-century
historiography in Black Athena’, in: Lefkowitz, &
MacLean Rogers, o.c., pp. 349-401, p. 350f.
[27]Morris, S.P., 1996, ‘The legacy of Black Athena’,
in: Lefkowitz & MacLean Rogers, o.c., p.
167-175.
[28]Lefkowitz, M.R., 1996, ‘Ancient history, modern
myths’, in: Lefkowitz & MacLean Rogers, o.c.,
pp. 3-23, p. 20.
[29]Pace Cartledge, P., 1991, ‘Out of
Africa?’, New Statesman and Society, 4
(164): 35-36.
[30]Cf. Trigger, B.G., 1980, Gordon Childe:
Revolutions in archaeology, London: Thames &
Hudson; Trigger, B.G., 1989, A history of
archaeological thought, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
[31]Trigger, ‘Brown Athena’, o.c.
[32]Specifically in the long footnote towards the end of
the article, on the interpretation of the Athenean foundation
myths featuring Athena, Hephaistos, Ge and Erichthonios: van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, ‘Alternative models of
intercontinental interaction towards the earliest Cretan script’,
in: Black Athena: Ten Years After, o.c.,
pp. 131-148.
[33]van Binsbergen, W.M.J., forthcoming, Global
Bee Flight: Sub-Saharan Africa, Ancient Egypt, and the World
— Beyond the Black Athena thesis.
[34]Palter, ‘Eighteenth century historiography’,
o.c., pp. 388f.
[35]E. Hall, 1996, ‘When is a myth not a myth:
Bernal’s ‘’Ancient Model’’ ’, in:
Lefkowitz & MacLean Rogers, o.c., pp.
333-348.
[36]Black Athena I, pp. 433f.
[37]Morenz, S., 1969, Die Begegnung Europas met
Ägypten, Zürich & Stuttgart: Artemis.
[38]MacLean Rogers, G., 1996, ‘‘Quo vadis?’’
, in: Lefkowitz & MacLean Rogers, o.c.,
pp. 444-454; Snowden, ‘Bernal’s ‘‘Blacks’’
’; Brace, C. L., D. P. Tracer, L. A. Yaroch, J. Robb, K.
Brandt, and A. R. Nelson, 1996, ‘Clines and Clusters versus
‘‘Race’’: A Test in Ancient Egypt and the
Case of a Death on the Nile’, in: Lefkowitz & MacLean
Rogers, o.c., pp. 129-164; Baines, J., 1996,
‘On the aims and methods of Black Athena’,
in: Lefkowitz & MacLean Rogers, o.c.,
pp. 27-48.
[39]Baines, o.c., p. 39.
[40]Muhly, J.D., 1990, ‘Black Athena
versus traditional scholarship’, Journal of
Mediterranean Archaeology, 3, 1: 83-110.
[41]Cf. Black Athena I, p. 381.
[42]Baines, o.c., p. 42.
[43]Jenkyns, R., 1996, ‘Bernal and the nineteenth
century’, in: Lefkowitz, & MacLean Rogers, o.c.,
p. 413; Baines, o.c., p. 39.
[44]R. Jenkyns (1996), p. 412; J. Baines (1996), p. 44.
Also cf. M. Lefkowitz, Not out of Africa
(1996).
[45]van den Broek, R., & Vermaseren, M.J., 1981, Studies
in Gnosticism and Hellenistic religion: Presented to Gilles
Quispel on the occasion of his 65th birthday, EPRO
[Etudes préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’empire
romain ], vol. 91, Leiden: Brill; Quispel, G., 1951, Gnosis
als Weltreligion, Zürich; Quispel, G., ed., 1992, De
Hermetische gnosis in de loop der eeuwen, Baarn:
Tirion; Yates, F.A., 1978, Giordano Bruno and the
Hermetic tradition, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, first ed. 1964; Yates,
F.A., 1972, The Rosicrucian enlightenment,
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. M.A. Murray’s claims of
a direct continuity between ancient Egyptian religion and the
European esoteric tradition, especially in its popular varieties,
have been largely discredited: Murray, M., 1921, Witch
Cult in Western Europe, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921;
Ginzburg, C., 1992, Ecstasies: Deciphering the witches’
sabbath, tr. R. Rosenthal, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books; repr. of the first Engl. edition, 1991, Pantheon Books,
tr. of Storia notturna, Torino: Einaudi,
1989.
[46]Cf. Thorndike, L., 1923-58, A history of
magic and experimental science: During the first thirteen
centuries of our era, 8 vols, New York: Columbia
University Press; Thomas, K., 1978, Religion and the
decline of magic, Harmondsworth: Penguin; Levack,
Brian, ed., 1992, Renaissance Magic. Vol. II
of Brian Levack, ed. Articles on Witchcraft, Magic, and
Demonology: A Twelve-Volume Anthology of Scholarly Articles.
12 vols. New York: Garland, 1992; Jean-François Bergier,
1988, ed., Zwischen Wahn, Glaube, und Wissenschaft:
Magie, Alchemie und Wissenschaftgeschichte. Zürich:
Verlag der Fachvereine.
[47]Palter, o.c., on Kant, Goethe
and Lessing; Jenkyns, R., 1996, ‘Bernal and the nineteenth
century’, in: Lefkowitz & MacLean Rogers, o.c.,
pp. 411-419; and on Herder: Norton, R.E., 1996, ‘The tyranny
of Germany over Greece? Bernal, Herder, and the German
appropriation of Greece’, in: Lefkowitz & MacLean
Rogers, o.c., pp. 403-409.
[48]Blok, J.H., 1997, ‘Proof and persuasion in
Black Athena I: The case of K.O. Müller’, in: Black
Athena: Ten Years After, o.c.,
pp. 173-208; shortened viersion published as: Blok, J.H., 1996,
Proof and persuasion in Black Athena: The case of K.O. Müller, Journal
of the History of Ideas, 57: 705-724.
[49]Cf. Fauth, W., 1977, ‘Athena’, in: K.
Ziegler and W. Sontheimer, eds., Der kleine Pauly:
Lexikon der Antike. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch
Verlag, cols. 681-686
[50]Cf. van Binsbergen, Flight, o.c.
[51]Egberts, A., 1997, ‘Consonants in collision:
Neith and Athena reconsidered’, in: Black Athena:
Ten Years After, o.c., pp.
149-163
[52]Best, J., 1997, ‘The ancient toponyms of Mallia:
A post-Eurocentric reading of Egyptianising Bronze Age documents’,
in: Black Athena: Ten Years After, o.c.,
pp. 99-129; van Binsbergen, ‘Alternative models’, o.c.
[53]Black Athena II, ch. XI; Cline, E.
1990, ‘An Unpublished Amenhotep Faience Plaque from Mycenae:
a key to a new reconstruction’, Journal of the
American Oriental Society, 110: 200—12; Boufides,
N., 1970, ‘A scarab from Grave Circle B of Mycenae’, Archaiologika
Analekta Athenon, 3: 273-4; Charles, R. P., 1965,
‘Note sur un scarabée égyptien de Perati, Attique’, Bulletin
de correspondance hellénique, 89: 10-14; Weinstein,
J., 1989a, ‘The gold scarab of Nefertiti from Ulu Burun: its
implications for Egyptian history and Egyptian-Aegean relations’,
in G. F. Bass, C. Pulak, D. Collon, and J. Weinstein, ‘The
Bronze Age shipwreck at Ulu Burun: 1986 campaign’, American
Journal of Archaeology, 93: 17-29; Knapp, B., 1981,
‘The Thera Frescoes and the Question of Aegean Contact with
Libya during the Late Bronze Age’, Journal of
Mediterranean Anthropology and Archaeology, 1: 249-79;
Cline, Eric, 1987, ‘Amenhotep III and the Aegean: A
Reassessment of Egypto-Aegean Relations in the Fourteenth Century
B.C.’, Orientalia, 56: 1-36; Brown,
R.B., 1975, ‘A provisional catalogue of and commentary on
Egyptian and Egyptianizing artifacts found on Greek sites’,
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota. For a more extensive
listing of related finds, cf. Winters’ internet site.
[54]Bietak, M. 1992, ‘Minoan Wall-Paintings
Unearthed at Ancient Avaris’, Egyptian
Archaeology: Bulletin of the Egyptian Archaeological Society,
2: 26-28; Bietak M., 1996, Avaris: The Capital of the
Hyksos: Recent Excavations at Tell el-Dab’a,
Londres, British Museum Press.
[55]Cf. the final, long footnote in: Wim van Binsbergen,
‘Alternative models’, o.c.
[56]Cf. Black Athena I, 484 n. 141.
[57]Bernal, M., 1997, ‘Responses to Black Athena:
General and linguistic issues’, in: Black
Athena: Ten Years After, o.c.,
pp. 65-98
[58]For an overview, see: Bernal, ‘Responses to
Black Athena: General and linguistic issues’, in: Black
Athena Ten Years After, o.c.; and
the index to that volume, where I have listed a considerable
number of Greek words for which Bernal proposes an Afroasiatic
(ancient Egyptian or West Semitic) etymology.
[59]van Binsbergen, ‘Alternative models’, o.c.,
[60]Van Binsbergen, Flight, o.c.
[61]Fontenrose, J., 1980, Python: A study of
Delphic myth and its origins, Berkeley etc.:
University of California Press; paperback edition, reprint of the
1959 first edition, pp. 139, 244, 253 n. 48. Of course, the
goddess Anat was an established member of the Egyptian pantheon
in the Ramesside times, cf. Bonnet, H., 1971, Reallexikon
der Ägyptischen Religionsgeschichte, Berlin: de
Gruyter, rprint of the first edition of 1952, pp. 37ff.
[62]Van Binsbergen, Flight, o.c.
[63]Though far from entirely, cf. the criticism by Blok, o.c.;
Palter, ‘Eighteenth century’; Jenkyns, o.c.;
Norton, o.c.
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