On Martin Bernal’s book Black Athena (1987)
In this book is that Bernal attempts to recontextualize Greece as a culture strongly influenced by other regional cultures in NE Africa and SW Asia. George James, Sheikh Anta Diop, John Henryk Clarke, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and other Afrocentric writers long preceded Bernal in asserting the Egypt’s priority and far-reaching influence. Other scholars tracked the influence of Phoenicia and Anatolia in the Archaic era, under the label of “Orientalizing.”
In my opinion Bernal is right on the thesis of African influence, but very often wrong on the facts, particularly his proposed chronology of Egyptian colonization of Greece, and on his linguistics. He does a good job of demonstrating the great prestige of Egyptian culture, not only in antiquity but up through the European “Enlightenment.”
What I found most valuable in the book is Bernal’s analysis of how “scientific” racism developed, from Gobineau and Blumenthal on down—most people don’t know about the far-reaching influence of these white supremacist ideologies in “science.” [See Nell Irwin Painter, ”The History of White People (2010), which talks more about intra-European racism, particularly the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, than about white racism toward Africans, Asians or Indigenous peoples in the Americas and elsewhere.] Bernal demolishes the fantasies of 19th century Aryanists who concocted a Hellenic supremacy rooted in “blood.”
Below I’ll excerpt some comments from the very interesting anthology Black Athena: Ten Years After ed. by Wim van Bimsbergen. Canadian Journal of African Studies, 1999, Vol. 33, No. 1 (1999), pp. 168-170]
In my book I cited Arno Egbert’s criticism of Bernal’s derivation of Athena from Ht Nt (a criticism which I share) but he also dislikes its appeal to the Afrocentrists. [Bechaus-Gerst, 169] Marianne Bechaus-Gerst is aghast at “Bernal’s arbitrary and unfounded etymologies,” on which I also agree. She concurs with Wim Van Bimsbergen that a non-Eurocentric reassessment is in order, and concludes with “the important point that, strictly speaking, Africa plays no role in Black Athena has again been overlooked.” [170, in Bechaus-Gerst, Marianne (review). This very apt observation was my own reaction upon reading Black Athena. There is very little in the book about Africa, or Egypt, in its own right. It is about European perceptions of Africa, and on the influence of Egypt in particular on Hellenic culture.
For those interested in Arno Egberts’ philological critique of Bernal’s derivation of Athena from Neith (scroll down if this is too technical for you), it is here: Egberts, Arno. “Consonants in Collision: Neith and Athena Reconsidered.” Black Athena: Ten Years After. Talanta. Vols. XXVIII-XXIX, ed. by WMJ van Binsbergen. Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, 1997, 149-163
Egberts gives an overview of the history of the ancient Egyptian language, and then dives into how Bernal’s proposal that Athena derives from Neith ignores known sound changes in the language. A dropping of the final feminine T starts to be observed by 1500 bce, for example in Assyrian transcriptions, and possibly even earlier. But the name of Neith did not undergo this process, since much later Greek transcriptions still show Nēith or Nit, and so does Coptic Nēth: “the final dental was exceptionally retained in the pronunciation of this divine name.” [155] So did the name of the mother goddess Mut, which Greek renditions show retaining the final T.
Egberts mentions two homonyms for nt, meaning “water” and “crown,” both of which are attributes associated with the goddess Neith. 155 (I would add the verb ntt (netet), “to weave.”) Then he asks, “where did the final dental [t] go after its arrival in Greece?” He rejects Bernal’s explanation that Greek had no final t, because the name Thoth was transcribed with final t or th. Not only that, Greeks freely added their own endings, as they did with Aigyptos and Nepthys. (Egyptologists have informed me that the final t in Auset was lost in pronunciation, though not in writing, by the Middle Kingdom period, before 1600 bce; then Greeks added their own feminine suffix -is, which they were in the habit of doing to other foreign names.)
Egberts turns to the sound changes around ht, the word “house.” He shows the derivation of Aigyptos from Ht-k3-Pth, which becomes even clearer in the ancient Linear B version of the name Ai-ku-pi-ti-yo. 157 He gives fourteen examples of this construction, and demonstrating that the final t drops out, or changes to th when followed by an h (“laryngeal spirant”). This is what happened with Het-Heru (literally “house of the falcon”) which Greeks transcribed as Hathor, and Nebt-Ht (“lady of the house”) transformed into Greek Nephthys. 158
Egberts comments: “the ancient Egyptians themselves we’re aware of the special status of these names in comparison with other compounds, for late hieroglyphic and demotic spellings sometimes insert T between there are two constituents. Mostly, this tea is expressed by means of the hieroglyph for t3 (> Co[ptic] to), ‘land.’” 158
He adds, “we can be absolutely sure there around 2000 BC E Ht-Nt what is pronounced as nvnvt, in which V denotes a vowel of unknown quality. Bernal’s derivation of ‘Athena’ from hvnvt forces him to smuggle in a dental in the middle after smuggling away the dental at the end.” 159
His final objection “concerns the presence of the stressed long vowel in the middle of Greek Athānā.” He calls it “preposterous” and “inconceivable” that “a prothetic vowel” such as Bernal proposes, “which is by definition short and unstressed, would end up by being stressed and long.” 159
Bernal also posited that Greek parthenos was derived from Egyptian Pr-then(t), a one-off name for a temple of Osiris at Sais. Egberts questions why maidens would come to be designated by this god’s name. 160
Egberts concedes that Black Athena “may have helped open the eyes of those sleepy scholars (mainly classicists) who have not yet realised the importance of cultural interconnections in the ancient world,” 161 He also questions why it is that Bernal keeps delaying his promised explanation of how Athena can derive from Ht Nt. 153 Admittedly, “generations of classical scholars have been unable to come up with a satisfactory explanation” for the origin of the name Athena. [153] But he finds Bernal’s method without basis.
In his response, Bernal fails to address Egberts’ main points in any substantial way. He throws up a blizzard of deflections, including two pages on Maya Studies and two more on Stalinist repression of scholars. Then he attacks the comparative method of historical linguistics, which Egberts so effectively used to challenge his thesis that Athena derived from Neith. Bernal concludes with a defense of his Egyptian derivation of parthenos on an even less convincing tangent. [Talanta 1997: 165-71]
Wim van Binsbergen agrees with the phonological critique, calling it “effectively refuted on grounds of historical linguistics.” In a more recent article, he also objects to Bernal’s proposal of a bronze age Egyptian (or Hyksos) colonization of Greece, “playing havoc with the established chronologies of the ancient Near East.” However, he sees value in Bernal’s challenge to old school classics doctrines, saying that there is a real issue with “the sociology of knowledge” and the hostility with which many of Bernal’s critics view attempts to substantiate linkages with Africa and Asia: “all they can see is an obsession with provenance, with intercontinental cultural displacement, and with late 20th century CE identity politics…” [van Binsbergen 2009: 15: “Black Athena: Yes And No.” Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy. Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum
Back to the 1999 anthology Ten Years After:
Josine Blok critiques Bernal from a different angle, his characterization of the German scholar K.O. Müller as anti-Semitic. She proves that some of Bernal’s claims are outright falsehoods, such as his claim that Müller “disregarded” the Egyptological work of Champollion, when in fact Müller followed his decipherment closely. She details other misrepresentations in what she calls an “extremely selective” analysis of Müller’s research. [Block, “Proof and Persuasion in Black Athena: the Case of K.O. Müller.” Talanta 1997: 173ff]
I was surprised at Blok’s intervention, since I think the strongest part of Bernal’s book is his critique of European Romantics and the rise of “scientific” racism. He provides a valuable historiography that explains the ideas of Gobineau, Blumenthal and others who constructed new rationales for white supremacist ideas. Blok admits that Müller’s work had elements of this thinking, but not to the degree that Bernal claims, making him into a villain figure when he was actually more progressive than many of his contemporaries. Reading her critique did give me pause, though, since some of Bernal’s claims were false, as he was forced to recognize.
Bernal’s response to Egberts and Blok is insubstantial, though he had to admit the serious errors that Blok pointed out. He even says she “has revealed the sloppiness of my scholarship” on Müller, but denies that that affects his claim that Müller destroyed what he calls “the Ancient Model,” in which Egyptian civilization was held in great esteem. [Talanta 1997: 215] Bernal says that he invented the term Hellenomania to describe the obsession with European, in this case Greek, culture. That did exist, it must be said. As did anti-Semitic prejudice among European (not only German) scholars of the 19th century.
Another important critique of Bernal is that of S.O.Y. Keita: “Black Athena: ‘Race,’ Bernal And Snowden.” Arethusa, Fall 1993, Vol. 26, No. 3, The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 295-314
He says that the achievement of early African-America classicist Frank Snowden (Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience, 1970, and Before Color Prejudice. The Ancient View of Blacks) was “to show that not even the societes of the ‘white’ Greeks were racist like the societies which claim to be their cultural descendants.” [Keita, 296]
Keita recommends to look, rather than at “race,” instead at “genetic relationships and patterns, clusters of populations.” He says the ancients “only depict the ethno-nationalities which they knew, not ‘race,’ a more recent idea.” [297-98] He critiques the application of modern Euro race categories to the ancients, which includes Snowden’s fencing off of Ethiopians as Blacks which others, including Egyptians, cannot be. “He in effect reifies a Graeco-Roman construct, by empowering it with the ‘science’ of the early twentieth century.” as if humanity were non-overlapping types. [[Keita, 301]
Keita then goes into the Euro-invented racial classifications of [white] Mediterraneans elsewhere called Caucasoid, Hamitic, Europid or Euroafricanoid, and Hamitic as dark ‘whites.’ Here, following Diop’s critique] he mentions that early Egyptologists saw Egyptians as Hamites, compared with Somalis, Beja, etc. None of this is mentioned in the Black Athena debate. “Petrie (1939) stated long before Bernal that the Third Dynasty, among others, had come from the Sudan (Kush).” [[Keita, 302-3]
“Elongated African”skulls are featured in Morton’s (1844) earliest study on Nile Valley crania. He “defined Egyptian as Asiatic Caucasian. In other words, only crania approaching the ‘Caucasian’ ideal were truly Egyptian. He viewed ‘Negroes’ by definition as intrusive into the valley and as always having slave status.” [Keita, 304] His students Nott and Gleddon (1854) did admit that Morton’s ‘Negro’ crania were the Old Egyptian type, foundational; but they wouldn’t call them “Negroes,” [in the language of the day] but “Negroid.” Keita observes, “The bias is in the descriptors,” and with an artifically narrowed usage for ‘black.’ He says that there is no archaeological evidence for non-Africans moving into Nile Valley; but rather it is the Nubian South that is foundational. [Keita, 306]
The literature is full of observations like “the negro type, that is, the low type.” Brace 1863 compared directly to “the low Irish type. [306-7] This kind of prejudice is addressed in depth by Nell Irwin Painter (cited above). There were an abundance of preconceptions about what real Africans should look like. Keita critiques the “typological thinking” of Snowden. 308 “the early 20th century racial typology” projected back on ancient. “Snowden (1989.89) seems to imply that Egypt and ‘Black’ are almost mutually exclusive.” His earlier work did admit “a variety of brown, dark and black peoples. ” Keita adds, “Even ‘blond’ Berbers ‘share’ in the tropical African marker gene pool more than southern Europeans do.” [Keita, 307-11]
He concludes that Bernal is correct (as earlier Afrocentric scholars were) that ancient Egypt was fundamentally African. The culture is centered on African flora and fauna. “Linguistically Egyptian is a full member of Afro-Asiatic, whose ancestry is of Saharan or East African origin, not Near Eastern.” Keita laos notes that following foreign conquests of Egypt, there was “a revival of older forms under Ethiopian (Kushite) pharaohs.” [Keita, 311]
The real argument was “about what kind of people or cultural systems can ‘achieve’.” [Keita, 311]
URl for this page given in the book: www.veleda.net/greekmyth/commentaries/Bernal
