Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence

by Martin Bernal

Book Overview

Winner of the American Book Award, 1990. This volume is the second in a projected four-part series concerned with the competition between two historical models for the origins of Greek civilization. The model current today is the Aryan Model, according to which Greek culture arose as the result of the conquest from the north by Indo-European speakers or "Aryans" of the native "pre-Hellenes." The Ancient Model, which was the model maintained in Classical...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081351584X
• ISBN13: 9780813515847
• Release Date: June 1991
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 736 Pages
• Weight: 2.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.4" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Biased reviews

It is strange that so many so-called educated Europeans cannot look at the evidence presented in this book objectively. Even now when western science has proven that civilization started in Africa. No matter how far back in Greece or Rome that people search, they can find nothing older that civilization in Africa. You can't go back millions of years in Greek history and find skeletal remains, but you can in Africa. Even the early Greeks themselves told you that they got their knowledge from Egypt, which by the way was an African civilization. And by the way to prove that the Egyptions were black Africans until after many invasions people need to read the works of Cheihk Anta Diop who proved with the melanin dosage test that the Egyptian mummies were indeed black Africans. Go to your museums in Germany, France and England and you will see the artifacts that prove that the Egyptians were black. Gerald Massey, Albert Churchward and many other European scholars have also stated that civiliztion, writing, religion and the sciences started in Africa. Do your research and understand that history as it is taught today is wrong.

The Afroasiatic Roots outdating Classics Programs

"As a fault Bernal has muddied already muddied waters with attempting to ask the wrong questions ...and, those who have been 'refuting' him, have likewise addressed the wrong concerns. ... (but) If nothing else has come out of this debate, it is a realization that the notions of race as expressed by modern scholars reflect a modern industrial world and must be understood in that context." Eugene Cruz-Uribe Black Athena, in a nutshell: In Black Athena, Martin Bernal attempts to prove that the roots of Greek civilization and language came from Egypt and the Levant. Bernal argued in his first volume, 1987, that 18th and 19th century White scholarship, biasedly favored an 'Aryan/ Indo-European Model,' denying ancient Egyptian contributions. He attributed the European root search results to a racist dominated mentality. While Bernal proposal that ancient Egyptians were dark Africans, there is no proof of their Negroid classification. His work drifted to the extreme left supporting the wider allegation of Afrocentrism. The second volume of this projected four-volume work arouses fundamental questions of awe and skepticism, that touch almost every issue in American daily life: lack of logical dialogue, residual racism, failure of university programs. To state that because Egypt is located on (NE corner of) of Africa, it is African, is merely simplistic. Does geography hold the only key to this classification? Dean Eugene Cruz-Uribe adds that, "... for many scholars that the anti-Bernal crusades that have evolved often have faulted Bernal ... and have thus downplayed the questions raised (that his outrageous theses addressed squarely one area of scholarship that Egyptologists and Classical historians had preferred not to address)". Black Athena II: Martin Bernal supports his thesis, by many Egyptian or Semitic roots for Greek words, while more recent discoveries in upper Egypt, indicated Phoenician alphabet could have evolved from Proto-Sinaitic into a more linear form during about the 12th century BC. The immediate offspring of Phoenician were the old Hebrew alphabet, and Aramaic, as well as Archaic Greek. No matter where and when the adoption of Egyptian signs onto a Semitic language occurred, the process of adoption is quite interesting. Bernal's striking examples, may exert a stronger potential in light of recent finds, but there is too much to be developed before his weaker cases could be supported by conclusive archeological reconstruction. Much of the Bernal's archaeological interpretations though boldly genius, still lack solid evidential examples to convince. Bernal woven model of a "Pax Aegyptiaca" populations with cultural infilteration in the Aegean Bronze Age is no new idea. Bernal advances such cases that have been neglected or minimized by the Hellenocentricts. Bernal's blunt reconstructions go much further than warranted, comments John Lenz, "In fact he rejects a model of multiculturalism in favor of a scenario of widespread Eg

Although sketchy in some areas Bernal gives good references.

Adolf Erman is one of Bernal's sources which sums up the quality and legitimatcy of his book. This quote shows how true his facts really are. "The question of the race-origin of the Egyptians has long been a matter of dispute between ethnologists and philologists, the former maintaining the African theory of descent, the latter the Asiatic. Ethnologists assert that nothing exits in the physical structure of the Egyptian to distinguish him from the native African, and that from the Egyptian to the negro population of tropical Africa, a series of links exist which do not admit of a break. The egyptians, they maintain, cannot be separated from the Berbers, nor the latter from the Kelowi or Tibbu, nor these again from the inhabitants round Lake Tsad; all form one race in the mind of the ethnologist, differentiated only by the influence of a dissimilar manner of life and climate. Therefore, they say, many old customs of the ancient Egyptians are now found amongst the people of the Upper Nile. I will only instance the curious head-rest still used in the east of the Sudan to protect the wig, and the peculiar sickle-shaped sword, still carried by the Monbuttu princes with the same dignity as it was of old by the Pharaohs. On the other side philologists maintain that the language of ancient Egyptians has distinct kinship with that of the so-called Semitic nations.Spread over anterior Asia, and the east and north of Africa, is found a great root-language, which has been called after its chief representatives, the Egypto-Semitic. The Semitic languages of Arabia, Syria, and Mesopotamia belong to this group, as well as the allied Ethiopian dialects of east Africa, the languages of Beharis, Gallas, and Somalis. Further removed is the Libyan, spoken by the people of Berber in north Africa as far as the Atlantic; and still more perculiarly constituted is the ancient Egyptian. Nothing certain has been or probably will be ascertain, for the Libyan and Ethiopian languages are only known to us in their present much-changed forms. But the fact remains that philologists consider that the people who speak these languages belong to one and the same race. Other reasons tend to show us that the Semitic races migrated from one part of Asia to the districts in which they afterwards settled, and therefore the theory has been accepted that the Ethiopian, Libyan, and Egyptian people all forsook their Asiatic homes during the dim ages of the past, and seized possession of north and east africa. This theory is directly opposed to that of the ethnologists, according to whom these races are purely African. If we free ourselves, however, from the prejudices which have long held sway over this domain of science, we shall be able to reconcile these two theories. It seems a very doubtful hypothesis that ancient races should dwell quietly in one inhospitable region until the idea should suddenly seize them to forsake their homes and,

groundbreaking work of remarkable scholarship

This is the second volume of Bernal's controversial, paradigm-shifting research in the field of classical studies. Working from the thesis that Hellenic civilization was profoundly influenced by Egypt, Bernal introduces linguistic, archaeological, and even astronomical evidence in a presentation which leaves the reader dazzled. Wonderful stimulus for further study.