Classical Scholarship—Anti-Black and Anti-Semitic?

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Whether ancient Egyptian civilization reflected an essentially black culture has recently been the subject of a spirited exchange in the pages of BR’s sister publication, Biblical Archaeology Review.^a This discussion, however, is but a relatively faint echo of an intense debate heard most frequently in black academic circles and on black campuses, and lately spilling into the national press. The issues range from the question of the racial identity of the Egyptians to encompass the very roots of classical civilization, specifically the extent to which Greek, and thus Western, culture derives from Egyptian civilization, and the degree to which mainstream scholarship in this area has been biased and racist—in a word, Eurocentric.

These issues form the focus of a full-scale assault on classical historiography of the last two centuries set forth in Martin Bernal’s Black Athena.^b In this passionately argued, wide-ranging book, Bernal, a scholar of Chinese history and government at Cornell, a professor of Near Eastern studies and a self-avowed “outsider,” lays serious and sweeping charges against what he views as the “classics establishment,” the classicist “insiders.”

Classicists, of course, engage in the study, interpretation and transmission of the ancient Greek and Roman Cultures, which played a leading role in shaping the institutions, aesthetics and value systems of the Western world.

According to Professor Bernal, classical scholars over the past two centuries have suppressed or ignored the weight of what he considers to be overwhelming evidence for substantial Semitic and Egyptian participation in the development of Greek language and civilization. (Hence, the subtitle of this volume, which is part of an even larger study: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985.) This, he claims, is the result not only of scholarly inertia and exaggerated respect for authority, 033but also of residual racism and anti-Semitism.

Bernal poses his challenge to classics as an outsider and maverick, a nonspecialist in a field growing increasingly specialized and hostile to outsiders. A polyglot and polymath, Bernal came late from East Asian studies to the Eastern Mediterranean, a study inspired at first, according to the author, in part by an interest in his ancestry, the Jewish components of which “would have given nightmares to assessor trying to apply the Nuremberg laws.”¹ He is also a self-proclaimed “lumper” (Bernal’s own term for a broad synthesizer) in a discipline in which it is more common and certainly safer to be “splitter” (Bernal’s epithet for the narrow specialist).

Despite Bernal’s renegade status, his book has aroused great interest among classicists. Not only has it been widely reviewed in the intellectual press, but it was given star billing at the 1989 meetings of the American Philological Association (APA), the national association of American classicists that represents, if anything does, the very heartland of the classics establishment. At the APA meetings, Black Athena was the subject of an interdisciplinary panel of scholars whose papers were later published in a special issue of the prestigious classics journal Arethusa.²

Bernal has, as one reviewer put it, turned “the weapons of academia … against itself, with fifty-eight pages of notes and forty-two of bibliography,“ and more to come.³

Bernal traces the shift in Greek historiography from the Greeks’ own ancient model of their prehistory to a 19th-century paradigm that he calls the “Aryan Model.” The ancient Greeks’ own model traced their roots to a synthesis of Indo-European (Pelasgian), West Semitic (Phoenician) and Egyptian elements. Bernal calls this the “Ancient Model.” The most extreme version of the Aryan Model that replaced the Ancient Model in the 19th century explained Greek civilization as the result of a conquest of native “pre-Hellenic” peoples in Greece by Indo-European speakers. For supporters of the Aryan Model, these native pre-Hellenic peoples, although non-Indo-European speaking, were white, and definitely not Semitic or African.

Bernal summarizes the Ancient Model:

“Greece had originally been inhabited by primitive tribes, Pelasgians and others, and had then been settled by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had built cities and introduced irrigation. The latter [the Phoenicians] had brought the alphabet and the former [the Egyptians] had taught the natives the names of the gods and how to worship them. The earliest [Greek] royal dynasties were supposed to have had both divine and Egyptian or Phoenician descent.”⁴

The Aryan Model, which steadily supplanted this Ancient Model since the last quarter of the 18th century, sought to purge Greek prehistory of Semitic or African influences. Born, at least in part, of the new spirits of romanticism, racism and progress, the Aryan Model was used to deny any fundamental role to Canaanites or Egyptians in the making of Greek civilization. In its heyday, from 1927 to the 1960s, the most extreme version of the Aryan Model was used to expunge systematically all non-Indo-European influences on Greece previously identified by earlier scholars. Since then, the less extreme Broad Aryan Model, which cautiously admits some influence from the Levant while denying any outright Egyptian influence, has made a comeback as a result of two factors: new archaeological discoveries and the ebb of anti-Semitism in academia.

But we have not come back far enough, argues Bernal. He would go further and reinstate what he calls the “Revised Ancient Model.” This accepts the 19thcentury identification of Greek as an Indo-European language and its implications of northern influence on Greece at some early stage, but at the same time, it also accepts the ancient Greek stories of Egyptian and Phoenician settlements in the Aegean. (Bernal, however, would redate these settlements to the first half of the second millennium B.C.E.^c instead of to the 1500s, where ancient Greek tradition places them.) Bernal maintains that these as well as other contacts during the Bronze Age (conventionally dated for Greece from about 2900 to 1100 B.C.E.) and the Iron Age (from 1100 B.C.E. on) led to massive infusions of Afro-Asiatic influence on Greek civilization. Thus, most of what supporters of the Aryan Model call the non-Indo-European or pre-Hellenic aspects of Greek civilization should be seen as Egyptian or West Semitic.

In Bernal’s view, residual racism and anti-Semitism are two major reasons that classicists have not noted what he believes to be so obvious. Far more important factors are simple academic inertia and the respect for authority that is widespread in all disciplines.

The focus of this first volume of Black Athena (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985) is historiography: ancient Greek vs. modern European historiography, and the sociology of knowledge that created, permitted and preserved the Aryan Model as a historical paradigm. In Bernal’s opinion, it was the idea “progress” with its presupposition that “later is better” that led, by the middle of the 18th century, to the elevation of the Greeks at the expense of the Egyptians.⁵ This strand of thought merged with two other contemporary ideas: Romanticism and racism. Eighteenth-century European Romanticism stressed organic connection between people and place. 034Romantics especially admired as a superior race the vigorous, virtuous primitive folk nurtured by the supposedly superior cold climate and remote landscape of Europe. Thus, the Greeks, widely admired for their virtue, could not have derived their culture from the South and East.⁶ Moreover, by the end of the 18th century, in the context of the need of Northern Europeans to justify the slavery and colonization of other non-white peoples, systematic racism arose, particularly the belief that virtue is somehow connected with skin color:⁷

“The paradigm of ‘races’ that were intrinsically unequal in physical and mental endowment was applied to all human studies, but especially to history. It was now considered undesirable, if not disastrous, for races to mix. To be creative, a civilization needed to be ‘racially pure.’ Thus it became increasingly intolerable that Greece—which was seen by the Romantics not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood—could be the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites.’⁸

The effect of these 18th-century ideas was increasingly felt in classical studies in the often vitriolic attacks of scholars on the ever dwindling number of supporters of the Ancient Model, which had openly acknowledged Semitic and Egyptian influences on Greek civilization. One of Bernal’s more striking examples is this quote from the German historian Ernst Curtius’s refutation of the ancient traditions of Phoenician settlement in Greece:

“It is inconceivable that Canaanites proper, who everywhere shyly retreated at the advance of the Hellenes, especially when they came into contact own homes; and who as a nation were despised by the Hellenes to such a degree as to make the latter regard inter-marriage with them in locations of mixed population, such as Salamis or Cyprus, as disgraceful: it is inconceivable, we repeat, that such phoenicians ever founded principalities among a Hellenic population.”⁹

Few scholars today would disagree with the general content of Bernal’s painstaking account of the effects of racism on European classical scholarship during the last two centuries, although many may dispute his emphasis on its dominant role in historical scholarship. Tamara Green, chairperson of the Department of Classical and Oriental Studies at Hunter College, cautions that the Greeks themselves exhibited a spirit of “nationalism” bordering on racism, which must have infected their own picture of their past; after their fifth-century B.C.E. victory in the Persian wars, the Greeks themselves began to revise their history to glorify whatever was Greek even as they vilified whatever was barbarian.¹⁰

Bernal himself has acknowledged this point,¹¹ but points out that “this [hostile attitude of Greek to barbarian] makes it still more remarkable that legends of settlement and profound cultural contacts should have been preserved.”¹² Thus, the intense Greek chauvinism from the fifth century on, it can be argued, only contributes to the credibility of ancient Greek witnesses for Phoenician and Egyptian influences on their own history and culture, in the face of the prevailing ideological climate of hostility to the non-Greek.

But Green is more generally skeptical of Bernal’s total enterprise. She questions Bernal’s premise that the past as a record of what actually happened is ever recoverable; the ancient sources, too, must: first be read as social constructs transmitted primarily to create a symbolic universe that validated contemporary reality. Thus, while. Bernal’s study of the shifts from one historical model to another may be valid, his attempt to prove anyone model more historically factual than any other, or to set up yet another “new” model of the past, is fraught with pitfalls and is perhaps even a quixotic enterprise.¹³

Green underscores the fact that what we call history is constructed inevitably by the ideological needs of the historian and his audience. Bernal, too, acknowledges that historical reality is a social contruct and in many ways agrees with Green that “truth” is a “collective hunch”; nevertheless, he says:

“There are objective, external constraints while ‘truth” may not be a place, it is a direction that one can be closer to or farther from. I am not a complete relativist. I do not agree that any view is as good as any other. While I concede that one can never reach ‘reality’ itself, I prefer better views, even if perfect ones are unattainable.”¹⁴

Bernal’s “better” view is his Revised Ancient Model.

Despite its focus on Europe’s shifting picture of the distant Greek past, Bernal’s book marshals considerable epigraphic, linguistic and archaeological evidence to support his own mandate for historical revision. Future volumes promise to test, in even greater detail, the plausibility of competing historical models against documentary, archaeological, linguistic, iconographic, religious and mythological evidence

Bernal’s own sociology of knowledge suggests that “when reacting to a fundamental challenge, disciplines first of all ignore, then dismiss peremptorily, and only finally attack the challenge.”¹⁵ This, however, has not been the case with Bernal’s own fundamental challenge. In addition to the panel at the 1989 APA meetings, already mentioned, the journal of Mediterranean Archaeology (Cambridge, England) plans to devote extensive treatment of Bernal’s ideas by eminent archaeologists. Bernal himself has been deluged with invitations to lecture at colleges and universities, and his book has been widely reviewed.

Clearly classicists are interested in Bernal. This interest contrasts markedly to the professional cold shoulder given to predecessors like Cyrus Gordon and Michael Astour, two prominent Semitists who were regarded as “intruders” or “partisans” when they argued for cultural diffusion from the Near East to Greece, Astour in 1967 and Gordon as early as 1962.¹⁶

Bernal himself, slightly bemused by the attention he is getting, attributes his unexpected reception to several factors: One is the relative coherence and accessibility of Black Athena itself, in contrast to earlier works taking a similar position. Another is a shift in the intellectual environment since the 1960s, making academia more sensitive to gender and ethnic awareness. Still another, possibly related, factor is a change in the composition of the members of the classics profession, namely 035the high proportion of Jews at all levels. All this must be seen within the context of general “mood of uncertainty and introspection” as many in the profession question more broadly the development and even the existence of classics as a discipline. Finally, there Bernal’s own academic persona as a member of the “universal Geschlecht [species], … not only white, male, middle-aged, and middle class, but also British in America” which gives him “a tone of universality and authority that is completely spurious” but nonetheless overwhelmingly present.¹⁷

To add a personal note to the sociology of knowledge that may account for the interest of many classicists in Black Athena: My first encounter with Bernal’s book occurred with a chance glimpse of the title on the desk of a friend. I was allowed to borrow the book only for a weekend. I relish the memory of that weekend as one of the great intellectual odysseys of my life. I greedily read the book in bed, in the bathtub and aloud to my bemused parents at the dinner table. Not since Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational or Gouldner’s Enter Plato had I been treated to that rarest of intellectual phenomena, the academic page-turner. As Bernal states, his work was accessible and coherent, but more important, Bernal’s ideas were interesting!

Another reason for the urgency of my own response to Black Athena and that of other classicists may stem primarily from our responsibility as teachers—to tell the truth, as far as it is known, to our students. Like myself, most classicists today often find themselves teaching large classical civilization courses in translation to a student body of rapidly shifting ethnic and racial composition, indeed, often to the very victims of the inherited scholarly racism as outlined in Black Athena. Bernal’s charges have radical import for the way these students learn to see the contribution of their own cultural history and traditions to Western civilization—not simply a matter of facts but of emphasis. In excavating the strata of the 18th- through 20th-century historiography, Bernal calls into question the assumptions that often underlie classroom presentations of the “glory that was Greece.” Thus, many classicists are as much interested in the expert and fair evaluation of Bernal’s arguments as in Bernal’s work itself. This is especially true for those classicists for whom Greek history is not their area of specialization, yet who find themselves teaching Greek history on the front lines before scores of untutored young students for whom they are not the first and last source of instruction in the contribution of the Greeks to Western civilization. Their interest is pedagogical: They want to teach Greek civilization in good conscience.

Thus far, expert responses to Bernal’s challenge to classics range widely: from genial embrace, to tentative handshake, to decidedly cold shoulder, to punch in the nose.

The most enthusiastically sympathetic, on occasion poignant, support at the APA panel came from archaeologists—scholars such as George Bass, Patricia Bikai and Sarah Morris. How can we explain this? Perhaps Mediterranean archaeologists, focusing on the mechanics of actual interchange for the cultures they study, are more acutely sensitive to continuity than to discontinuity.

In his Revised Ancient Model, Bernal hypothesizes that sometime toward the end of the 18th century B.C.E., when a Semitic Asiatic people known as the Hyksos first dominated Egypt, there was a Hyksos Egypto-Canaanite conquest of Crete. The conquerors thereafter established Egypto-West Semitic settlements in the Aegean. Although archaeology “is too blunt a tool to give answers on its own to the questions with which Black Athena is concerned,”¹⁸ it does not, according to Bernal, contradict his picture of a great cultural mingling, at least materially, around the East Mediterranean during the late 18th and 17th centuries B.C.E.

Sarah Morris, an archaeologist from UCLA, maintains that the most recent archaeological findings argue for more extensive Semitic and Egyptian influences on Greek prehistory than even Bernal has assumed. At the same time, Morris is not persuaded by Bernal’s arguments for Egyptian and Semitic “colonization” or even formal diplomatic relations; instead she favors a more informal social and economic intermingling. Morris also questions Bernal’s focus on Egypt as a primary source of direct influence; she thinks that the Egyptian influence on Greece in the Bronze Age was more often mediated by and through contacts with the Levant.¹⁹

Frank M. Snowden, Jr., emeritus professor at Howard University and long-time pioneer in scholarship on blacks in classical antiquity, argues that Bernal’s equation of Egyptians with Negroes or blacks (as implied by the title of his book) is contradicted not only by the Greek historian Herodotus (in a passage that has long served—erroneously, according to Snowden—as the locus classicus for claims that the Greeks identified the Egyptians as black);²⁰ but by other classical sources as well as by Egyptian evidence. On the basis of the classical sources, Snowden concludes that if we are attempting—probably anachronistically—to find classical equivalents for the concept of black or Negro as generally understood today, it is strictly to the people described in classical sources as Ethiopian that we must turn.^d By Snowden’s argument, Herodotus would never have understood Bernal’s association of Egyptians with blacks, although Herodotus noted that their skin—like that of many other peoples—was darker than his own Greek epidermis. Moreover, to impute contemporary color-based racial consciousness to classical sources, maintains Snowden, is to misread the ancient texts through the prism of modern notions of race based on skin color. Thus, Black Athena, in Snowden’s view, is a misnomer for “Egyptian Athena.”

Bernal himself would partially agree. “I am now convinced that the title of my work should have been “African Athena,” he states, but only because “black” to his mind has been understood too narrowly to represent purely West African physical types, rather than the whole spectrum of “nonwhite”—beige to black—skin hues and physical types that grow darker and more Negroid the farther south, or up the Nile, one goes.²¹

At a time of national debate over the Eurocentrism of humanities curricula and canons in general, the “blackness” of Black Athena stands as the most politically charged issue of the book. The racial identification of 036the Egyptians as black has become the linchpin of impassioned arguments-heard primarily in Afro-American studies and among some black students—for a black origin for much of Greek civilization, and thus Western culture. In its most extreme—and most popular—form, the claim is made that the pre-Hellenes whom the Greeks identify as the Pelasgians were of North African origin, that Homer, Socrates and Euclid, among others, were black Africans.

While such “charter myths” may well be useful to their constituencies, they may also be profoundly ironic, for they painfully recall the zealous excess with which 19th-century Europe appropriated and remade ancient Greece in its own “Aryan” image—the very phenomenon Bernal so impressively charts and decries. Indeed, these charter myths may be helping to fuel the new racism that is seen today on many college campuses. A recent, compelling analysis sees the resurgence of 1980s racism as a complex but direct response to a “politics of difference” that does not merely emphasize racial identity, but lays claim to empowerment and entitlement on the basis of race alone.²²

So the wheel swings round, and the paradoxes multiply. Although Bernal’s avowed intention is to argue for a more ethnically pluralistic picture of early Greece, Black Athena can and is being used to underscore differences rather than similarities, to further separation rather than mingling, to propose otherness rather than sameness. Its arguments are being adopted enthusiastically and uncritically by many nonclassicists precisely because of it’s ideological congeniality impressively buttressed by the academic credentials and broad learning of its author.

Bernal’s linguistic arguments provide another arena of sharp controversy. According to Bernal,²³ the origins Greek words are up to 25 percent Semitic, 20–25 percent Egyptian and 40–50 percent Indo-European. Scholars have been reluctant to recognize the linguistic connections between Greek, on the one hand, and Semitic and Egyptian, on the other; only because of their dogged allegiance to the Aryan Model of Greek prehistory, which sought to keep the Greeks as pure—in other words, as Indo-European—as possible, minimally “contaminated” by African and Semitic elements. Bernal offers Semitic and Egyptian etymologies for many Greek words for which scholars have hitherto failed to find an explanation in Indo-European or other pre-Hellenic sources. Bernal’s most prominent examples are toponyms, names of rivers, mountains and cities. Thus, he derives Mykeµnai (Mycenae, traditionally derived from mykeµs, “mushroom”) from West Semitic Mahaáneh (camp) or MahÉaánayim (two camps). Thebai, Thebes, he derives from Canaanite teÆba½h (ark, chest), which itself came from the Egyptian tb’i or dbt (box).²⁴ His title Black Athena is itself an allusion to Bernal’s derivation of the name of the city Atheµnai and the divine name Atheµneµ or Athena (a word unexplained in the standard etymological dictionaries of Greek) from the Egyptian H|t Nt, Temple of Neit, an Egyptian goddess.²⁵

The etymologies stand at the heart of Bernal’s case. In this first volume of his study, we have only a sampling of the linguistic evidence. Much more is planned for a separate volume to appear at a later date. But even sampling has not only provoked harsh criticism from Bernal’s detractors, but also been generally dismissed by otherwise sympathetic supporters among classicists. A common response to Black Athena has been, “I like the historical parts, but the etymologies are weak (ridiculous, crazy or worse),” followed by the comment, “But I don’t know anything about Semitic or Egyptian etymologies, or etymology in general.”

This reaction is by no means limited to nonlinguists; an eminent linguist commented to me, “Bernal’s etymologies are soft, but then so are my own.”

To judge Bernal’s etymologies, one must have a thorough intimacy with Semitic, Egyptian and Indo-European roots. A certain temerity is required to attempt the type of etymologies that Bernal proposes. It is extremely difficult to find a scholar with sufficient expertise in Semitic, Egyptian and Indo-European linguistics to provide an informed response. This is even more true of most general classicists, ancient historians and archaeologists—not to mention those with no background in any of the relevant ancient languages—who can only be baffled by the rules of this type of etymological game. And so we have few players on the field (usually labeled—euphemistically—“eccentric”) who propose Afro-Asiatic etymologies for Indo-European words, while great number of onlookers in the stands boo “nonsense” to the proposed etymologies.

Gary Rendsburg, a specialist in ancient Near Eastern studies and Semitic linguistics and Bernal’s colleague at Cornell, has studied a sampling of Bernal’s Egyptian and Semitic etymologies and generally approves.²⁶ On the other hand, Jasper Griffin, a classicist, claims that contrary to the accepted procedure in Indo-European philology, “Bernal exploits resemblances that seem, so far at least, not to be a matter of laws [rules for regular patterns governing the changes of vowels and consonants from one language to another] but ad hoc in each case.”²⁷

Thus, in the unlikely case of linguistics, the great divide between classicists and Semitists seems as chasmic, passionate and politicized as that between supporters and opponents of the view that the Egyptians were black.

Bernal himself unabashedly eschews the ideal of academic objectivity or ideological neutrality. His unambiguously moralistic statement of Black Athena’s political purpose “is, of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance.”²⁸ His enemy is the ideal of racial purity as opposed to pluralism. “Even if I were to concede … relativism [in other words, the impossibility of arriving at any absolute historical truth]” he states, “I would argue that the scheme set out in Black Athena is better on ethical grounds [emphasis mine], that it is more congenial to our general preferences—to the general liberal preferences of academia—than that of the Aryan Model.”²⁹

This, of course, lays Bernal open to charges of manipulating his evidence to prove a priori conclusions in the service of a political goal. In a review in the journal Classical World, Minas Savvas, a professor at San Diego State University, scathingly writes that the book’s “irrelevant detours, its readiness to charge orthodox scholars with racism and conspiratorial tendencies, its biased selection of sources, its questionable juxtapositions and conclusions and its unconvincing thesis add up to a book that sparks and dazzles with some of its twists and turns but which, in essence, is only strident, revisionist, political pamphlet.”³⁰

Lay readers may well be bewildered by Bernal’s unabashed assertion of moral purpose. They, like many scholars in the past, assume there is an objective historical truth that can be discovered on the basis of an objective study of the relevant evidence. Lately, however, this kind of positivism has fallen out of step with the tunes piping through the academy. Scholars of antiquity, most professional archaeologists included, are far more sensitive to the input of the researcher—both as an individual and as the representative of a particular social and ideological context. The work of reconstructing the past is seen less and less as the encounter of an objective researcher with an unambiguous ancient statement of “Well, that’s the way it was,” whether text or artifact. Even archaeologists who deal largely in tangible remains of the past—which, because they are material, seem somehow more solidly reliable and objective as evidence—have grown more sensitive to the fact that everyone—archaeologists included—participates in the interpretation of what he or she sees or touches. Artifacts may be as constructed as texts; indeed, artifacts without texts put less constraint on the interpreter than written words. Today, scholarship is focusing on the critic/interpreter/reader as much as on the text/artifact/witness. The result is often the deconstruction of the certainties of previous generations—a development that should be seen in the social context of the new and insistent voices of populations who were 040hitherto voiceless, and therefore unheard in history. In the American context, these have been especially the voices of women and racial and ethnic minorities, the mute men and women of history.

By the light deconstructionist scholarship, artifacts and texts often seem less the objective Other than the subjective Same, mirrors in which the witness sees his own face, reconstructs his own image—his class, gender and color. As Bernal has shown for the Greeks, evidence abounds, but so do the number of possible interpretations.

To suggest that this is political scholarship—as if politics were a new and unhealthy intrusion into scholarship—is to assume a golden age myth of a past that never existed, an age in which scholarship was apolitical and unrelated to the political concerns or personal predispositions of the scholars themselves. What is new is the self-consciousness of scholarship concerning these matters and the concomitant skepticism about the certainty of the conclusions.

On the final page of his sweeping indictment of the Classics establishment, Bernal states: “All I can claim for this volume is that it has provided a case to be answered.”³¹ The claim may be too modest.

Only time and further study will show whether—to paraphrase Cyrus Gordon—Bernal’s critics should be divided not “into supporters and opponents, but only into those who catch on fast and those who need more time.”³² It is too early to tell whether Bernal has indeed engineered a Kuhnian^e paradigm shift in the study of the Greek origins of Western civilization.³³ But perhaps Bernal the outsider, with his bold deconstruction and reconstruction of Greek history, has catalyzed Classics insiders to Join in his enterprise.