Classical Scholarship—Anti-Black and Anti-Semitic?
Have classical historians suppressed the black and Semitic roots of Greek civilization?
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
Already a library member? Log in here.
Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username
Footnotes
See Frank J. Yurco, “Were the Ancient Egyptians Black or White?” BAR 15:05, and Queries & Comments, BAR 15:03, Queries & Comments, BAR 15:05, Queries & Comments, BAR 16:01 and Queries & Comments, BAR 16:02.
The full title is Black Athena; The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985.
B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) are the religiously neutral terms used by scholars, corresponding to B.C. and A.D.
See Frank M. Snowden, letter, “Did Herodotus Say the Egyptians Were Black?” in Queries & Comments, BAR 16:02.
Endnotes
Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (London: Free Association Books/New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987), preface, p. xiii.
The Challenge of Black Athena, Arethusa Special Issue, Fall 1989, may be ordered for $15 + 1.50 for handling and postage from Arethusa, Dept. of Classics, SUNY at Buffalo, 712 Clemens Hall, Amherst Campus, Buffalo, NY 14260.
Jasper Griffin, “Who Are These Coming to the Sacrifice?” The New York Review of Books, June 15, 1989, p. 25.
Bernal, “Black Athena: The African and Levantine Roots of Greece,” African Presence in Early Egypt, Journal of African Civilization 7.5 (1985), p. 67.
Bernal, Black Athena, p. 335, quoting Ernst Curtius, Griechische Geschichte (1857–1967), vol. 1, p. 41; transl. (1886), vol. 1, p. 58.
Tamara M. Green, “Black Athena and Classical Historiography: Other Approaches, Other Views,” in The Challenge of Black Athena, pp. 55–65: see also, Sarah Morris, “Daidalos and Kadmos: Classicism and ‘Orientalism,’ ” in The Challenge of Black Athena, pp. 50–51.
Bernal, “Black Athena, pp. 36–37, 416–422, see Michael Astour, Hellonosemitica: An Ethnic and Cultural Study in West Semitic Impact on Mycenean Greece (Leiden: Brill, 1967); and Cyrus Gordon, Before the Bible: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). See also George F. Bass, “Response,” in the Challenge of Black Athena, p. 112.
Morris, “Daidalos and Kadmos”; Morris, “Greece and the Levant: A Response to Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization,” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, forthcoming.
Herodotus, History 2.104; Frank M. Snowden, Jr., “Bernal’s ‘Blacks,’ Herodotus, and Other Classical Evidence;” in The Challenge of Black Athena, pp. 83–95; compare Bernal, Black Athena, p. 242, note 68.
Bernal, Black Athena, pp. 242–243; Bernal, “Black Athena and the APA,” p. 31. On the archaeological evidence for the color of the Egyptians’ skins, see David O’Conner, “Ancient Egypt and Black Africa—Early Contacts,” Expedition: The Magazine of Archaeology/Anthropology 14 (1971), pp. 2–9; Frank J. Yurco, “Were the Ancient Egyptians Black or White?” BAR 15:05.
Gary Rendsburg, “Black Athena: An Etymological Response,” in The Challenge of Black Athena, pp. 67–82.
Cyrus Gordon, The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (New York: Norton, 2nd ed. 1965), p. 5.