The Marginalization of Martin Bernal

Review Article: The Marginalization of Martin BernalBlack Athena Revisited by Mary R. Lefkowitz; Guy MacLean RogersReview by: Molly Myerowitz LevineClassical Philology, Vol. 93, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 345-363Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/270397 .

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REVIEW ARTICLE

THE MARGINALIZATION OF MARTIN BERNAL

In 1987 Martin Bernal concluded the introductory survey of his projected Black Athena series with the following statement:

More importantly, however, it [the entire project] raises many interesting new questions and generates hundreds of testable hypotheses. As I said at the beginning of the overall Introduction to this work, this is precisely what differentiates fruitful radical in- novation from sterile crankiness. The scholarly purpose of Solving the Riddle of the Sphinx is the same as that of the other two volumes: to open up new areas of research to women and men with far better qualifications than I have. The political purpose of Black Athena is, of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance.I

To judge by the essays in Black Athena Revisited, Bernal's invitation to scholars has been accepted cordially or not according to the temper and taste of the contributor. As for Bernal himself, the impression left by the volume under review is that he is well on the way to marginalization into his own specter of a figure of "sterile crankiness."2

To recall: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, the first volume of Bernal's Black Athena tetralogy, argued five major points: First, taken together, the ancient evidence from the fifth century B.C.E. to the fifth century C.E. indicates that the ancient Greeks had a relatively monolithic ancient historical model of their own origins (Bernal's "Ancient Model") which recog- nized a debt to Egypt and the Near East. Second, this debt to Egypt and the Levant remained an unbroken part of the European historiographical tradition on Greek origins until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Third, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and coincident with the establishment of "Classics" as a modern academic profession, partly due to the intrinsic evidence of Indo-European linguistics, but mainly due to extrinsic European social and intellectual forces, the Ancient Model was

Black Athena Revisited. Edited by Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers. Chapel Hill and Lon- don: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. [xxi]+522.

1. Black Athena 1, 73. In the discussion and notes that follow, these short titles will be used: Black Athena I = Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1, The Fab- rication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 (London and New Brunswick, 1987); Black Athena 2 = Martin Ber- nal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 2, The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence (London and New Brunswick, 1991); Palter I = "Black Athena, Afrocentrism, and the History of Science," in Black Athena Revisited, pp. 209-66; Palter 2 "Eighteenth-Century Historiog- raphy in Black Athena," in Black Athena Revisited, pp. 349-402; J & N J. H. Jasanoff and A. Nussbaum, "Word Games: The Linguistic Evidence in Black Athena," in Black Athena Revisited, pp. 177-205; Arethusa Special Issue = M. Levine and J. Peradotto, eds., "Special Issue: The Challenge of Black Athena," Arethusa (fall 1989).

2. The point is explicitly made by J & N, p. 201.

Permission to reprint this review article may be obtained only from the author.

345



346 MOLLY MYEROWITZ LEVINE

supplanted by what Bernal calls the "Aryan Model," which denied first Egyptian and then Semitic contributions to Greek civilization. Fourth, although Semitic influences have been increasingly acknowledged, the ancient tradition of Egyptian influence on Greece is still denied, again for extrinsic reasons; thus, a Modified Aryan Model persists in classical scholarship and teaching today. Finally, although "conception in sin" does not invalidate the Aryan Model as a heuristic scheme, it does call its inherent superiority into question.3

In Volume Two of Black Athena, which appeared three years later, Ber- nal went on to argue for his own Revised Ancient Model using mainly documentary and archaeological evidence to support his arguments for massive Egyptian and Near Eastern influences on Bronze Age Greece while allowing for some Indo-European influences. In this work, Bernal makes his case (inter alia plurima) for strong Egyptian influence in Crete and Boeotia during the late third millennium B.C.E.; for the historicity of the northern campaigns of the Egyptian pharaohs Sesostris I and Ammenemes II into Anatolia in the twentieth century B.C.E.; for a Hyksos presence on Crete and the Greek mainland (including Mycenae) during the late eighteenth century B.C.E.; for a pax Aegyptica established by Thutmose III and his eighteenth dynasty successors as a major factor enabling the full participa- tion of Greece in the cosmopolitan cultural world of the east Mediterranean during the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries B.C.E. The focus of this volume is on Egypto-Greek relations. The methodology is what Bernal (borrowing Clifford Geertz's term) calls "thick description," a layering of many different types of evidence simultaneously. The historical narrative is com- bined with a trenchant critique of the historiographical assumptions of his predecessors and opponents. Future volumes of the projected four-volume series will focus on language, religion, and mythology as Bernal continues to argue for the superiority of his Revised Ancient Model over competing historical models.

By the time of the publication of Black Athena 2, Bernal's favorite pos- ture of buzzing gadfly seemed finally to have roused from its moribund state whatever today exists as a "Classics Establishment" to move with some de- termination to marginalize him: at best as a charming crank, at worst as a duplicitous charlatan. The seismic shift in tone best can be perceived by rereading J. Ray's coda to his 1990 review of Black Athena 1, which today- post Black Athena Revisited has a quaintly generous ring:

It is unpleasant, and unnecessary, to end with philological carping. Such is not the spirit of this remarkable book, nor of its author. At the moment it looks as if the Scottish verdict of "not proven" is the required comment, but it is equally necessary to point out that this book educates, enthralls, and above all forces a fundamental reappraisal of one's very approach to ancient history. It may not be possible to agree with Bernal, but one is the poorer for not having spent time in his company. May he live, prosper and be healthy (as the Egyptians put it), and may he continue to keep us thinking.4

3. Black Athena 1, 439-43. 4. J. D. Ray, "An Egyptian Perspective," JMA 3 (1990): 81.



THE MARGINALIZATION OF MARTIN BERNAL 347

The recent change in tone is a regrettable aspect of responses to Bernal's work, fed more, I believe, by Bernal's tactical and moral error in refusing to distance himself from the many "misuses" of his work and the attendant publicity than by his own substantive errors.5 Adding another dimension to the "establishment" backlash is Bernal's irrepressible habit of responding promptly and at length to his many critics; some scholars seem annoyed by the man's simple and dogged persistence, his refusal to take "no" for an answer.6 A man with a cause and apparently unlimited energy, the unintim- idated Bernal won't be silenced; responses and responses to responses continue apace.7

This change in tone mars Black Athena Revisited's collection of what has been otherwise an undeniable benefit of Bernal's two published Black Athena volumes: the many thoughtful responses. Elsewhere, I have discussed at length the types of criticism that Black Athena ] met, together with Ber- nal's responses to his critics.8 Most, but not all, early criticisms focused on methodological issues of which many points are reiterated or emphasized in the essays in Black Athena Revisited. In summary, these are: Bernal's focus on race as anachronistic vis-'a-vis antiquity and obsessive vis-a-vis modem historiography on antiquity (Bard, Snowden, Brace et al., Coleman, Jenkyns); his use of ancient sources, particularly ancient myth, as unso- phisticated and naive (Hall); more generally, his historiographic methodology, particularly, his much maligned (and I think misconstrued) use of "competitive plausibility" (Coleman, Tritle, Vermeule); his overemphasis on diffusionism, however "modified" (Baines); his linguistic methodology (Jasanoff and Nussbaum); overgeneralizations and errors in his characterization of modern European intellectual figures and trends (Palter 2, Norton, Jenkyns, Rogers); his Eurocentrism (Baines, Liverani, Jenkyns, Rogers); his Afrocentrism (Lefkowitz, Morris, Snowden, Palter 1).

When Bernal provided fuller and more sustained arguments in Black Athena 2 for his "Revised Ancient Model," scholars began to criticize directly his reading of the evidence for Near Eastern-Egypto-Greek relations in the Bronze Age Aegean. This comes as no surprise, since, in contrast to

5. On abuses, see M. Levine, "The Use and Abuse of Black Athena," American Historical Review 97 (1992): 440-60.

6. See R. S. Boynton, Lingua Franca 6 (1996): 42-52. 7. Forthcoming is Black Athena Writes Back (Duke University Press) with the responses of Bernal and

others to Black Athena Revisited. For some earlier published collections of essays by critics with responses by Bernal, see Arethusa Special Issue; "Discussion and Debate" sections of Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 3.1 and 3.2 (1990); Archaeology 45.4 (1992); Journal of Women's History 4.3 (1993); Vest: Tidskriftfor Vetenskapsstudier vol. 8, n. 4 (1995) (on Bernal's Black Athena and more generally, the con- struction of Eurocentrism in scholarship); W. M. J. van Binsbergen, ed., "Black Athena: Ten Years After," Talanta: Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society 28-29 (1996-97) (the most interesting, constructive, and substantive treatment of Black Athena to date); Two films also survey the debate: Black Athena (1991), a television film originally presented on Britain's Channel 4, and Who Was Cleopatra? (1992), produced under the auspices of The Learning Channel (U.S.) and the Archaeological Institute of America.

8. M. Levine, "The Challenge of Black Athena to Classics Today," Arethusa Special Issue, 7-15, "Use and Abuse" (see n. 5 above), and "Bernal and the Athenians in the Multicultural World of the An- cient Mediterranean," in Classical Studies in Honor of David Sohlberg, ed. R. Katzoff with Y. Petroff and D. Schaps (Ramat-Gan, Israel, 1996), 1-56. See also J. Berlinerblau, Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals (New Brunswick, in press).




Black Athena 1, the contents of Bernal's Black Athena 2 fall directly within the various areas of expertise of most classicists, archaeologists, Egyptolo- gists, and ancient historians. The argumentation of Black Athena 2 also re- verts to familiar ground. The earlier inflammatory mantra of "competitive plausibility," taken by some critics to be Bernal's catchphrase for "any- thing goes," and defended by Bernal as taking "the least unlikely scenario as a working hypothesis"9 yields in Black Athena 2 to a more conven- tional scholarly mode of argumentation by which a hypothesis stands or falls on the basis of whether it offers a better or worse explanation of the extant evidence.10 No surprise then that the scholarly long knives were un- sheathed only after the appearance of Black Athena 2. Even among Bernal's most enthusiastic readers there seems to be a certain sense of profound dis- appointment evident in the reception of Black Athena 2: the problem is that Volume 1 promised more than Volume 2 seems able to deliver; it is far from the "knock out" punch to alternative historical models for Greek prehistory. Alas, it is always easier to "deconstruct" than to "construct." If nothing more, Black Athena 2 compels us to confront this truism once again. And until the appearance of Bernal's published responses and future volumes, his opponents, who are well represented in Black Athena Revisited, hold the day.

Perhaps recalling repeated cautions that you need a committee to review Bernal,"1 editors Lefkowitz and Rogers have assembled a "committee" of nineteen respected scholars (Palter offers two essays) who are represented in this collection of twenty critical essays many previously published, some new contributions. The essays themselves are conveniently grouped by topic: Egypt (3: Baines, O'Connor, Yurco); Race (3: Bard, Snowden, Brace et al.); The Near East (1: Morris); Linguistics (1: Jasanoff and Nuss- baum); Science (1: Palter 1); Greece (3: Vermeule, Coleman, Tritle); Histo- riography (6: Hall, Palter 2, Norton, Jenkyns, Liverani, Rogers) with "Introduction" by Lefkowitz and "Conclusion" by Rogers. The last, entitled "Quo Vadis," is a kind of Lefkowitz-Rogers "Guide to the Perplexed." This "handy reference to the state of expert judgment on some difficult scholarly questions" (p. 448) itemizes and answers many of the questions raised by Bernal's books with the consensus opinion of the contributors to Black Athena Revisited (although discrepancies will be apparent to determinedly agnostic readers).12 There is also an extensive bibliography coded with a system of asterisks and daggers to indicate respectively reviews or critiques

9. Black Athena 1, 7-9; Black Athena 2, 3-4; For critique in Black Athena Revisited see Coleman, p. 292 (= Coleman, Archaeology 45.5 [1992]: 80) with Bernal's response quoted from Archaeology 45.5 (1992): 83. For discussion of competitive plausibility, see Levine, "Challenge," 7-11.

10. Black Athena 2, 3. 11. E.g., Baines, p. 43; Ray, "Egyptian Perspective," 77 (see n. 4 above). 12. Discrepancies result from the perilous oversimplification, decontextualization and/or changed em-

phasis inherent in this type of summary (the three blind men and the elephant syndrome). Compare Rogers' summary answer-setting off Egypt biologically from the rest of Africa-to "Who were the ancient Egyp- tians?" (p. 448; cf. Brace et al., p. 158): "Although the population of ancient Egypt had ties to the north and to the south, and was also intermediate between populations to the east and the west, the population of ancient Egypt was distinct and basically Egyptian from the Neolithic period right up to historic times" with contributor Yurco (pp. 65, 67): "Certainly there was some foreign admixture, but basically a homogeneous African population had lived in the Nile Valley from ancient to modern times.... The peoples of Egypt,




of Black Athena and "recommended further reading" together with three in- dices (Personal Names, Places and People, Subjects).

To judge by the essays of the Greek Bronze Age historians and archaeologists (Morris, Vermeule, Coleman) in Black Athena Revisited, the scholarly verdict regarding many of Bernal's substantive conclusions is "no" (with "thank you" optional), although there have been some reviews and essays more favorable than those included in Black Athena Revisited.13 E. Vermeule's review of Black Athena 2 reprinted here (pp. 269-79) from The New York Review of Books is particularly scathing and certainly the most impassioned: quoting Milton, she implies a comparison between Ber- nal and Lucifer, characterizing his book inter alia as a "whirling confusion of half-digested reading" (p. 277); any points made by Bernal in his earlier responses to her are ignored.14 J. Coleman's response to Black Athena I and Black Athena 2, reprinted here (with some changes) from Archaeology, is equally dismissive, albeit less colorfully written; Coleman, too, ignores Bernal's previously published responses.15

As a group, the essays most useful to classicists are those that treat the substance of Bernal's evidence for an Egyptian presence in late Bronze Age Greece (Baines, O'Connor, Yurco); it is to the credit of Black Athena Revisited that it has made these detailed responses by professional Egyp- tologists accessible to a wide audience.16 These Egyptological essays are uniformly substantial in content, rich in ideas, clear in style, and refreshingly

the Sudan, and much of East African Ethiopia and Somalia are now generally regarded as a Nilotic conti- nuity, with widely ranging physical features (complexions light to dark, various hair and craniofacial types) but with powerful common cultural traits including cattle pastoralist traditions (Trigger 1978; Bard, Snowden, this volume)."

Or compare author Rogers (pp. 430-31): "Anyone who believes that Bernal has exaggerated at least one part of the historiographical record has only to read through a few pages of the rogues' gallery of rac- ists and anti-Semites in the first volume of Black Athena to recognize the justice of historiographical claims about some lines of historiography during the nineteenth century" with editor Rogers (p. 451): "In sum, Bernal's presentation of European classical historiography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as pervaded by racism and anti-Semitism that prevented scholars from accurately assessing the Afro- Asiatic roots of classical civilization, is oversimplified and unconvincing."

13. Reviews of Black Athena 2 have ranged from scathing (L. A. Tritle, Liverpool Classical Monthly 17.6 [1992]: 82-96, reprinted in Black Athena Revisited; E. Vermeule, New York Review of Books, 26 March 1992, 40-43, reprinted in Black Athena Revisited; J. Weinstein, AJA 96.2 [1992]: 381-83); to dismissive (R. Pounder, AHR 97 [1992]: 461-64); to mixed (J. Baines, "Was Civilization Made in Africa?", New York Times Sunday Book Review Section, 11 August 1991, 12-13 [Review of Black Athena 2 and C. A. Diop, Civilization or Barbarism, 1991]; B. Trigger, Current Anthropology 33.1 [February 1992]: 121-23; P. Walcot, G&R 39 [1992]: 78-79; T Reiss, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 19.3 [1992]: 429-35). J. Ray's ("Levant Ascendent," TLS, 18 October 1991, 3-4) and S. Burstein's (CP 88 [1993]: 157-62) more positive evaluations of Black Athena 2 have thus far proven to be the minority view.

14. For Bernal's response to the Vermeule review, see Bernal, "Bernal Responds to New York Review Attack," Bookpress 11.3 (April, 1992): 2, 4, 9, 13-14 and "An Exchange on Black Athena," New York Re- view of Books, 14 May 1992, 52-53.

15. J. E. Coleman, "Did Egypt Shape the Glory That Was Greece?" Archaeology 45.5 (September/ October 1992): 48-52, 77-81; cf. the more condensed version "Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean," Bostonia (Summer 1992): 44-46. For responses by Bernal to Coleman, see "The Case for Massive Egyp- tian Influence in the Aegean," Archaeology 45.5 (1992): 53-55, 82-86; "A Response to John Coleman, I," Bookpress 11.1 (February 1992): 2, 4, 16; "A Response to John Coleman, II," Bookpress 11.2 (March 1992): 2, 13; "A Response to John Coleman, III," Bookpress 11.3 (May 1992): 12-13.

16. Published reviews and responses by Baines ("Civilization"), Ray ("Egyptian Perspective" and "Le- vant"), and Weinstein (see n. 13 above) are to my knowledge the exceptions that prove the rule. A panel on Bernal called "Egypt and Greece: Discussion and Perspectives" took place at the ARCE annual meeting at




courteous in tone. D. O'Connor, "Egypt and Greece: The Bronze Age Evi- dence" (pp. 49-61), tests and rejects Bernal's hypothesis of Egyptian "su- zerainty" in the Aegean during the second millennium B.C.E. with a careful rereading of the relevant Egyptian inscriptional evidence from the twelfth and eighteenth Dynasties. The essay by O'Connor is, in particular, a model of professional integrity and intellectual seriousness: "To the extent that Bernal has already changed his mind on some points that I have presented here as being his, I apologize. My concerns are the data discussed and the issues raised in the first volume of Black Athena, published in 1987" (pp. 50-5 1). The petulance of classicist G. Rogers makes a poor showing in comparison. Discounting any subsequent refinements of his theory by Bernal, Rogers remarks: "And it is to his positions as stated in Black Athena and not to subsequent private qualifications that he, just as any other scholar, must be held" (p. 435).

E Yurco, "Black Athena: An Egyptological Review" (pp. 62-100), paints with a broader brush, testing several of Bernal's hypotheses against current Egyptological knowledge and raising several points of agreement and disagreement. Yurco writes at his best both in his informative history of the nineteenth-century "discovery" of Egypt and Mesopotamia and in his discussion of contacts between Mesopotamia and Egypt due to the rise of a wealthy class and the desire for foreign goods (pp. 95-97). On a more the- oretical plane, J. Baines, in his essay "On the Aims and Methods of Black Athena" (pp. 27-48) offers inter alia a nuanced examination of ideological agendas operative both in Near Eastern studies and in Bernal's own inter- pretive framework. The essays by Baines and Yurco take up some of the slack left by S. Morris ("The Legacy of Black Athena," pp. 167-74). It is regrettable that although her essay appears as the sole representative of "The Near East," Morris whose work in many ways complements Bernal's devotes only a few pages to her major points of difference with Bernal regarding her own arguments for intensive Near Eastern contacts with Late Bronze Age Greece: priority of trade over conquest and the Northern Le- vant over Egypt as the focus of contact; and the significance of calquing as opposed to loaning as linguistic evidence for contact. Instead Morris chose to focus on the reception of Black Athena, which she revisits against the context of "the resurgence of virulent nationalism and interethnic violence on an international scale" (p. 172). Readers will have to turn to Morris' earlier published evaluations of Bernal's work as well as her own magisterial Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art, together with Bernal's published responses and his review of her book, in order to appreciate their points of difference and agreement.17

Berkeley in 1990 and included papers by Bernal, O'Connor, Loprieno, Hollis, Burstein, Bianchi. Papers by O'Connor and Baines, originally slated as part of a planned and later cancelled Egyptological publication based on the panel, subsequently found a home in Black Athena Revisited.

17. S. P. Morris, "Daidalos and Kadmos: Classicism and 'Orientalism,"'Arethusa Special Issue, 39-52; "Greece and the Levant," JMA 3.1 (1990): 57-66; Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art (Princeton, 1992). Cf. Bernal, "Black Athena and the APA," Arethusa Special Issue, 20-23, "Responses to Critical Re- views of Black Athena," JMA 3.1 (1990): 113-18, and "Review of S. Morris, Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art," Arethusa 28.1 (1995): 113-35.




Each of the three articles grouped under "Race" approaches the topic from a different perspective (Bard: Who the ancient Egyptians thought they were; Snowden: Who the ancient Greeks and Romans thought the Egyptians as distinguished from Ethiopians were;18 Brace et al.: Who modern anthropologists think the Egyptians were) and uses different types of evidence (Bard: mainly Egyptian iconography; Snowden: mainly Greek and Roman texts; Brace et al.: skeletal remains). Happily, they basically arrive at the same conclusion, which differs only in emphasis from Bernal's, that is, that the Egyptians were "black" only in the modern (anachronistic) ra- cialist sense of the word, but that neither they nor anyone else in the ancient world knew it. That is the short answer. Egyptians then as now considered themselves Egyptians, which in their view to quote my colleague Egyp- tologist Ann Macy Roth quoting Goldilocks was "just right."19 Ancient Egyptians distinguished themselves from "others" not only by color, facial features, and body types but also by ethnic markers such as clothing (Bard, pp. 107-9). Long discredited by modern anthropologists, the "race concept" did not exist in ancient Egypt; race is a modern social category ret- rojected onto physiology (Brace et al., p. 162).20 "Attempts to force the Egyptians into either a 'black' or a 'white' category have no biological justification" (Brace et al., p. 158). The skeletal analysis reported by Brace et al. (pp. 129-64) conforms to the standard view of contemporary physical anthropologists, who while avoiding the term "black" as imprecise, and skeptical of "race" as a useful biological category-recognize the Egyp- tians as one end of a continuum of interrelated populations stretching across the African continent, whose own composition over time exhibited great population diversity.21 What this means in contemporary social terms is that, as Egyptologist F Yurco has observed, "many people today who consider themselves Afro-American or 'black,' particularly those of mixed ra- cial ancestry, would have no trouble finding physical types resembling their own in contemporary Egypt."22

This is essentially Bernal's position.23 Bernal's decision to title his series "Black Athena" (although in Black Athena 1 [241] he remarked on the

18. Cf. F M. Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cam- bridge, MA, 1970), Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View? of Blacks (Cambridge, MA, 1983), "Ber- nal's 'Blacks,' Herodotus, and Other Classical Evidence," Arethusa Special Issue, 83-95, and "Response to S. 0. Y. Keita," Arethusa 26 (1993): 319-27.

19. A. M. Roth, "Building Bridges to Afrocentrism: A Letter to My Egyptological Colleagues," NARCE 167 and 168 (September and December 1995). Republished in The Flight from Science and Rea- son, ed. P. R. Gross et al., Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 775 (New York, 1996), 313-26. Roth's essay offers some excellent observations on how Egyptology and Afrocentrism can work together to their mutual benefit.

20. On the "race concept," see also the superb discussion of Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Illusions of Race," in In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York and Oxford, 1992), 28-46.

21. On the biological identity of the Egyptians, see the excellent discussion of S. 0. Y. Keita, "Is Studying Egypt in Its African Context 'Afrocentric'?" in Were the Achievements of Ancient Greece Bor- rowed from Africa? Proceedings from a Seminar sponsored by the Society for the Preservation of the Greek Heritage (Washington, D. C., 1997), 35-46.

22. E Yurco, "Were the Ancient Egyptians Black or White?" Biblical Archaeological Review 15.5 (1989): 29.

23. Bernal, "Black Athena and the APA," 31 (see n. 17 above); cf. Black Athena 1, pp. 241-42, and "Response to S. 0. Y. Keita," Arethusa 26 (1993): 315-17.




"dubious utility of the concept of race"), made his political point and sold books, but too often led to the transformation of his work into what the author himself lamented as "a talisman of an unthinking Afrocentrism."24 In particular, the title of his series earned him the warm endorsement of many Nile Valley Afrocentrists whose lobbying for change in public school curricula alarmed many. This group had long independently asserted two major tenets of his arguments: the biological identity of the ancient Egyptians as "black"; and their cultural identity as the source of ancient Greek wisdom.25 In his survey of the reception of Black Athena 1 prefacing Black Athena 2, Bernal distances himself somewhat from the way in which his ideas are being used; he does not consider himself an Afrocentrist.26 At the same time, he refuses to see the excesses of some Afrocentrists as any more than a marginal nuisance, nowhere near the same menace to historical truth as the prevailing distortions that are the legacy of European racism, romanticism, and antisemitism.27 Bernal has paid a high price for adopting this position which although historically true seems to many morally questionable.

In relation to his scholarship, the race and color of the ancient Egyptians is directly relevant only to Bernal's deconstruction of modern historiography on the Egyptians and their connections to ancient Greece. The skin color of the Egyptians has nothing directly to do with his own arguments for a Re- vised Ancient Model. At this stage after the publication of Black Athena 2, color has turned into something of a "red herring" in the Bernal debate. Nonetheless, unfortunately for Bernal-to judge by many essays in this collection28-the race issue continues to color the reception of his own historical reconstruction of Greek prehistory as much as if not more than it col- ored the nineteenth-century historians whom he surveyed in Black Athena 1.

Although Bernal may have suffered from the backlash, in the long run, we readers may have actually learned something from all the Sturm und Drang generated by Bernal's title. I take it as a good sign that ten years after the appearance of Black Athena 1 the recycled essays by Bard, Snowden, and Brace et al. have a quaint ring to me. For non-Egyptologists who never thought much about the race of the Egyptians-or if we did, still were wan- dering in the haze of the outdated Dynastic Race Theory of the early twentieth century (Yurco, pp. 65-68)-the biological identity of the Egyptians

24. Bernal quoted in Chronicle of Higher Education, 31 July 1991, A6. 25. On Afrocentrism in the public school curricula see most recently E. Martel, "History or Heritage: The

Challenge of Afrocentrism in Our Schools," in Achievements of Ancient Greece, 15-20. On the history and essentially reactive nature of Afrocentric historiography, see the excellent essay by S. Burstein, "Egypt and Greece: Afrocentrism and Greek History," in Achievements of Ancient Greece, 21-33. (See n. 21 above.)

26. Black Athena 2, xvi; cf. Bernal's "Response to M. Lefkowitz, 'Not Out of Africa,"' The New Republic, 9 March 1992, 5.

27. See, e.g., Black Athena 2, xxii; Bernal, "Response to L. A. Tritle," Liverpool Classical Monthly 18.2 (1993): 27.

28. E.g., Palter's critique (Palter 1 = Palter, History of Science 31 [1993]: 227-87) of the claims for Egyptian contributions to Greek science confusingly lumps together Bernal, Afrocentrists, and others (inter alia, Diop, James, and Pappademos) in an essay which bears only tangentially on the contents of Black Athena I or Black Athena 2, relating to what Palter calls Bernal's "scattered comments on science," ... "general drift" (p. 209). The essay was originally prepared in response to Bernal's article "Animadversions on the Origins of Western Science," Isis 83.4 (December 1992): 596-607; cf. Bernal, "Response to Robert Palter," History of Science 32.4 (1994): 445-64; Palter, "Comment on Bernal 1994 [response to Palter 1993]," History of Science 32.4 (1994): 464-68.




as African/Nilotic has become a fact of life, no matter how qualified. As a result of the uproar, we have been compelled to study the history of the modern anthropological and social categories and to define clearly, at the onset, the terms in which we debate: do we use the terms "black" and "white" and "race" as biological categories, now rendered meaningless in any but a historical sense or as cultural categories, less relevant to the reality of the ancient world than to its historiography and unhappily still of great contemporary significance, especially in the United States? These dis- tinctions have become clarified for classicists as they have, I believe, for many Nile Valley Afrocentrists. This is to the benefit of all. Perhaps, then, Bernal's "shock treatment" of a title will prove in the end not to have been such a bad thing.29

Among Black Athena Revisited's offerings under Historiography, the articles by Palter (Palter 2, pp. 349-402) and Norton (pp. 403-10) in particular respond substantively to Bernal's invitation to specialists to follow up lines opened by his hypothesis in Black Athena 1. Each particularizes the observations made by Jenkyns (pp. 411-20) and many others that Bernal overemphasizes the race factor in his sociology of European historiography on ancient Greece.30 Norton finds an error in Bemal's use of a second- ary source and politely accuses him of misrepresenting Herder as a racist; Palter's long essay less politely attacks Bernal for oversimplifying and exaggerating the views of many European intellectuals on race and on the relationship between Egypt and Greece. Rogers devotes a few pages of his historiographical essay to what he considers Bernal's misrepresentation of George Grote as a "racist" (pp. 431-34).31 These essays are often convincing on particulars, but none seems to me to refute Bemal or to "demolish" his general case regarding the intellectual climate of Europe throughout recent centuries. Rather they continue with the necessary and welcome work of refining Bernal's tendency to the "scattergun" generalizations of a congenital "lumper."32 Where they make necessary corrections, they are to be welcomed.

As for the "entirely new scholarly framework" for "understanding the relationship between the cultures of the ancient Near East and Greece and the origins of Western civilization" promised in Black Athena Revisited's

29. G. Bowersock, "Review of Black Athena, Vol. 1," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19 (1989): 490, described Bernal's title as "arresting but grossly misleading"; cf. P. Walcot, "Review of Black Athena, Vol. 2," G&R 39 (1992): 79.

30. Among the first was F. M. Turner, "Martin Bernal's Black Athena: A Dissent," Arethusa Special Is- sue, pp. 97-109. Most recently, see S. Marchand and A. Grafton, "Martin Bernal and his Critics," Arion, 3d ser., 5.2 (1997): 1-35; J. Blok, "Proof and Persuasion in Black Athena 1: The Case of K. 0. Miller," in "Black Athena: Ten Years After," 173-208, with Bernal's response, 209-218 (see n. 7 above).

31. Readers of Rogers on Bernal's (mis)characterization of Grote would do well to consult Bernal's article on "The British Utilitarians, Imperialism, and the Fall of the Ancient Model" (Culture and History 3 [1988]: 98-127) in which Bernal treats the coexistence of liberalism, progressivism, and racism as only an "apparent" paradox.

32. Black Athena 1, 417. Bernal, to use his own terms, is too much a "lumper" ("broad synthesizer favored by lay opinion"), too little a "splitter" ("narrow specialist, favored by professionals"); "Black Athena and the APA," 26; cf. Turner, "Martin Bernal's Black Athena." On the terms, see J. H. Hexter, On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Makers of Modern History (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 241-43. For an eminently sensible discussion of these issues, see M. 1. Finley, "Generalizations in Ancient History," in The Use and Abuse of History (1975; reprint New York, 1987), 60-74.




sales blurb,33 the only discernible tilt in this direction is in the essays by Liverani (pp. 421-27) and Rogers (pp. 428-43). Liverani calls for "a historical model of the origin and growth of Greek civilization within the framework of eastern Mediterranean cultures" (p. 425), but doesn't tell us how to do it, except to remark that the evidence of archaeological and textual data should be privileged over etymology and myth (p. 425) and that the project "cannot be left to classicists alone. The Orientalists have just as much to say . . ." (p. 427). For his part, Rogers dismisses "the entire enter- prise of Black Athena as a massive, fundamentally misguided projection upon the second millennium B.C.E. of Martin Bernal's personal struggle to establish an identity during the later twentieth century" (p. 441). Roger's "new framework" is his suggestion that we not favor Egyptians or Phoeni- cians, but stir other Near Eastern peoples into the ancient Mediterranean melting pot-for example, Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, all characterized by Rogers as significant predecessors to or influences on ancient Greek culture who have been slighted by Bernal for ideological and/or political reasons (pp. 435-39).

Since the next part of this review will focus on Black Athena Revisited's editorial policy, I state here in the interest of fairness that I was an invited contributor who prior to publication questioned Black Athena Revisited's editorial policy to exclude any response from Bernal.34 Ultimately, I re- moved my own contribution from the collection, more because I feared that reprinted essays would ignore Bernal's already published responses (which he could have cited in his own contribution, had it been included) than because I felt that he would find no place to respond to new criticisms. It was for the former reason that I did deliver my Bernal bibliography-which itemized and identified the multitude of responses-for the editors to use as they saw fit.35 Both before and since publication, I have heard and read many justifications for this editorial decision; after closely examining the finished project, I am more than ever convinced that the omission was a grave error that seriously undermines both the credibility and usefulness of what otherwise could have been a very strong collection. As it turns out, too many Black Athena Revisited essayists have repeated their earlier points without taking into consideration Bernal's usually substantial rebuttals and rejoinders or even candid admissions of error. The fact that the reprinted

33. The full sentence in the notice of new and recently published books in Classical Studies from The University of North Carolina Press advertising Black Athena Revisited as forthcoming in April 1996 reads: "The editors conclude by proposing an entirely new scholarly framework for understanding the relationship between the cultures of the ancient Near East and Greece and the origins of Western civilization." Note the omission of Egypt.

34. See The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 April 1994, A10. "Black Athena: Ten Years After," (see n. 7 above), which appeared after Black Athena Revisited, included a preliminary response by Bernal (65- 98) to the linguistic essay of Jasanoff and Nussbaum discussed below.

35. Acknowledged on p. xiv. Thus although references to many of Bernal's responses are not as a rule even cited in the Black Athena Revisited essays, most are buried in the bibliography. Lost in transit was Bernal's fourteen-page response to the extremely critical essay of Tritle (pp. 303-30): Bernal, "Response to L. A. Tritle," Liverpool Classical Monthly 18.2 (1993): 18-32. This also occurred in the case of one of Bernal's two responses to Vermeule: Bernal, New York Review of Books, 14 May 1992, 52-53.




essays do not advance the argument makes them of little use for one who is familiar with their original contents. The situation is worse in the case of a reader who is encountering these essays for the first time, for this omission creates the misleading impression that these critics have met with uncondi- tional surrender by Bernal. This invariably was not the case.36 Thus what I miss in Black Athena Revisited is the acknowledgement of any ongoing debate, that is, any attempt (either serious or halfhearted) to confront, inte- grate, evaluate, and either refute or accept Bernal's responses to the first round of criticisms.37

One particularly egregious example is the essay by Hall (pp. 333-48). In this important essay (which is reprinted almost word for word from the original 1992 version),38 Hall developed a sustained and strong argument against Bernal's use of Greek myth as a historical source, a line of argumentation that remains a staple of Bernal criticism. In Hall's view, Bernal's fatal flaw is that he ignores the problems raised by the political context of Athenian myths of origins (which comprise the lion's share of the Greek myths that Bernal uses).39 Finally, she describes Bernal's reading of myth as containing a core of historical truth as hopelessly nineteenth century and passe.40 However, according to Bernal's twelve-page response, printed in the same volume in which her twenty-one page essay was first published,41 Hall has misrepresented his position. To Hall's arguments that Bemal ignores modern theories of myth interpretation in favor of a nineteenth- century literal reading of myth for history, Bernal responds that it is not an either/or situation. Modern analyses of myth do not preclude any questions of historicity. What of stories such as the Trojan War cycle of myth, once thought to be pure fabrication, that have been confirmed by archaeology to have that "elusive kernel" of historical truth?42 In the same piece Bernal responds to very specific points of Hall's arguments against possible

36. Although I have cited many of Bernal's responses throughout the notes to this review, I will sum- marize them here in toto. In print are responses to Lefkowitz in The New Republic, 9 March 1992, 4-5; to Palter 1 in History of Science 32.4 (1994): 445-64; to Vermeule in New York Review of Books, 14 May 1992, 52-53 and Bookpress 11.3 (April, 1992) 2, 4, 9, 13, 14; to Coleman in Archaeology 45.5 (1992): 53- 55, 82-86 and Bookpress 11.1 (February 1992): 2, 4, 16; 11.2 (March 1992): 2, 13; 11.4 (May 1992): 2, 12- 13; to Tritle in Liverpool Classical Monthly 18.2 (1993): 18-32; to Hall in Arethusa 25 (1992): 203-14. Elsewhere Bernal has offered counterarguments to the views expressed in Snowden and the first part of Morris: to Snowden's views, in "Black Athena and the APA," Arethusa Special Edition, 30-32; cf. Bernal, "Response to S. 0. Y. Keita," Arethusa 26.3 (1993): 15-317; to the views of Morris, see references cited above, n. 17.

37. Only two essays even mention subsequent responses in a headnote: Palter (Palter 1, p. 256) and Coleman (p. 297) who acknowledges Bemal's written comments to an early draft of the 1992 Archaeology version of his Black Athena Revisited piece, but does not cite his several published responses. As far as I can discern, neither responds in Black Athena Revisited in any serious way to Bernal's subsequent rejoinders, although Palter states in his headnote that part of his response to Bernal has been included in his Black Athena Revisited summary and gives the citation for the full version of his response in History of Science 32.4 (1994): 464-68.

38. E. Hall, "When Is a Myth Not a Myth?" Arethusa 25 (1992): 181-201. 39. As examples, Hall suggests that Athenian tragedies such as Aeschylus' Supplices or Euripides'

Phoenissae, which emphasize the foreign origins of Argos and Thebes, are drawing an implicit contrast between the autochthonous Athenians and the motley Thebans or Argives.

40. Cf. Hall's statement in the film Black Athena. 41. Bernal, "Response to Edith Hall" (see n. 36 above). 42. Ibid., 204. Cf. my own discussion of Athenian myths of autochthony and diffusion, "Bernal and the

Athenians," 28-43 (see n. 8 above).




Bronze Age historical implications of Aithiops or Phoinix in Greek myth with specific evidence of his own.43

"Word Games: The Linguistic Evidence in Black Athena" by J. Jasanoff and A. Nussbaum (pp. 177-205), is without doubt the most important contribution to Black Athena Revisited. As such, this essay serves as my prime example of the intellectual impoverishment of this book resulting from the decision to disallow any invited response from Bernal to new criticisms.

Not only do J & N make a devastating attack on the linguistic evidence that, as both J & N and Bernal well understand, is "no mere accessory to the archaeological and historical evidence but an integral and indispensible [sic] part of Bernal's case" (p. 189), but they are the first Indo-Europeanists to do so in print. Indeed, this essay is particularly welcome because most of the many reservations about Bernal's etymologies expressed by classicists and others have been prefaced by the phrase, "I'm not a linguist but . . ." in humble anticipation of J & N's caution that the study of a particular language is not equivalent to the study of linguistics (p. 201).44 Previous to Black Athena Revisited, Bernal's etymologies had been treated at some length only by G. Rendsburg, a Semitist who "was more impressed by the gains made than . .. troubled by the errors committed."45 In a shorter essay, Egyptologist J. Ray found some of Bernal's etymological points "im- pressive," others "certainly interesting," several "very hard to accept."46 Thus, Black Athena Revisited offers its readers the first published evalua- tion of Bernal's etymological evidence by Indo-European linguists.47

J & N's essay, seasoned with delicious tidbits of venomous character assassination, opens with a lucid exposition of the basic principles of his-

43. Bernal, "Response to Edith Hall," 206. 44. For linguistic reservations by contributors to Black Athena Revisited, see Lefkowitz, pp. 15-16;

Yurco, pp. 78-79; Tritle, pp. 316-17, 319. From the start, harshest criticism of Black Athena I by classicists focused on Bernal's linguistic arguments. "I am not persuaded," was the general response of the experts to Bernal's arguments for Semitic (25%) and Egyptian (20-25%) roots for Greek words, see, e.g., S. Morris, "Daidalos," 39; cf. "Greece and the Levant," 62, and Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art, 98 (on calquing as opposed to loaning) (see n. 17 above).

45. G. Rendsburg, "Black Athena: An Etymological Response," Arethusa Special Issue, 67-82. Rends- burg finds problematic Bernal's etymologies for harma, Athena, (w)anax, basileus, Poseidon; he suggests his own Semitic etymology for Greek makar in Semitic brk (= bless). Cf. Bernal's response to Rendsburg, "Black Athena and the APA," Arethusa Special Issues, 32-37. J & N cite Rendsburg as "at best a very partial exception" to the absence of published evaluations of Bernal's linguistic arguments, implying that his "partial" disqualification is somehow connected to the fact that he is "a Semitist and avowed 'dear friend' of Bernal" (p. 203, n. 1). It is unclear from this ambiguous statement whether being a Semitist or a friend of Bernal is supposed to represent the more serious handicap. In a letter to Rendsburg dated April 6, 1989 (copy sent to me by Nussbaum), Nussbaum stated that of the thirty-seven etymologies discussed by Rends- burg, "fourteen of them are simply wrong and can be dismissed out of hand. Of about twelve others the best that can be said is that they can't actually be decisively disproved; but there is not the slightest positive indication in their favor either. This is the definition of an etymology that should not-as opposed to must not-be accepted. Finally, eleven of them look plausible."

46. J. Ray, "An Egyptian Perspective," 80-81 (see n. 4 above). Regarding the convincing etymologies, Ray felt that "these resemblances are better explained by the idea of a common linguistic origin" or "alter- natively, as in some well known cases they can be shown to be loan-words" (p. 80). Ray found hard to accept Bernal's Egyptian etymologies for Athena. basileus, labyrinthos, Aphrodite, Apollo, Artemis, Larissa, mainly because in his phonetic system "the rules seem to shift in a way that raises serious doubts" (p. 81). Cf. Bernal's response to Ray's etymological criticisms (JMA 3.1 [1990]: 120-25). See also the linguistic discussion by Egyptologist A. Egberts ("Black Athena: Ten Years After," 149-63, with Bernal's response, 165-71), which appeared after Black Athena Revisited.

47. J & N explain the long silence of Indo-Europeanists on Bernal as due to the fact that the linguistic material in Black Athena 1 and Black Athena 2 is "nowhere systematically presented," "scattered," and




torical linguistics, as developed by nineteenth-century Indo-European scholars, who empirically discovered the language-specific laws for sound change (p. 181) that explain why "a good etymology depends not on phonetic sim- ilarity, but on phonetically regular patterns of correspondence" (p. 182). Like cognates, loan words, too, exhibit a regular process of phonetic "nat- uralization," in which the borrowing language assimilates "with a high de- gree of consistency" the borrowed word according to regular patterns of sound substitutions that reflect the way the borrowed word is heard by the speakers of the borrowing language (p. 185). The "undetermined origin" of many words found in Greek is, pace Bernal, not atypical in the Indo- European family and should be explained either as "a genuine [IE] inherit- ance whose cognates have been lost or obscured" or as a loan word (p. 185) from a nonlE, nonSemitic, nonEgyptian unknown "preHellenic language" spoken on Crete and Mainland Greece (p. 186) and characterized by -nthos/ -(s)sos word endings. This, according to J & N, is the "commonsense position, the nul hypothesis" (p. 186).

Unlike Bernal, "competent scholars" (p. 185) limit early borrowings from Semitic to semantic fields connected mainly with commerce or commercial items.48 These suggest "lively Greek-Phoenician commercial relations going back to the second millennium B.C.E.," but "not ... the kind of prolonged transformative cultural contact that the Revised Ancient Model presupposes" (p. 188). As for early borrowings from Egyptian, J & N admit as "genuinely old," "under any reasonable standard of philological rigor," only one word: the name of Egypt itself, Aiguptios, found in Myce- naean in the adjectival form (p. 188). Most important, J & N set out their definition of "reasonable standard of philological rigor" for a convincing etymology as follows: (1) an exact-not vague-semantic fit; (2) phonetic agreement that while allowing for some loss of detail is "obvious and per- sistent"; (3) compatibility with available morphological and derivational evidence: most borrowings are fitted into "one or another of the common Greek declensional types" (p. 188); rare and/or archaic stem types are entirely absent from the list of assured Semitic and Egyptian borrowings in Greek. Furthermore, "genuine loan words in Greek are for the most part completely isolated, not only in the sense that they lack convincing IE etymologies, but also in the sense they are not visibly derived from other, sim- pler Greek words or roots" (p. 189).

The rest of the article is devoted to attacking two specific categories of Bernal's etymologies: "names" and "ordinary words." As opposed to the

"neither discussed coherently as a group nor supported with detailed linguistic arguments" (p. 178). In addition, I would note that when soliciting such a critique from Nussbaum and others in 1989 for the Arethusa Special Issue, I found it impossible to persuade Indo-Europeanists "to go on the record." At that time the Indo-Europeanist approach seemed to be "let's not dignify this with an answer"; cf. Levine, "The Challenge of Black Athena," Arethusa Special Issue, 14.

48. For 27 "secure fully naturalized borrowings" J & N (p. 187) cite E. Masson, Recherches sur les plus anciens emprunts seimitiques en grec (Paris, 1967), characterized tongue in cheek by the authors as "Aryanist," less playfully as "highly restrictive" by W. Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near East- ern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, tr. M. Pindar and W. Burkert (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 34, who cites the same study for "thirty-seven definite and twelve possible Semitic words in the Greek language (35) with additional "less rigid" studies mentioned and cited (174, n. 5).




caution exercised in this regard by "methodologically sophisticated ety- mologists," Bernal's focus on personal and place names allows him "license for etymological speculations of the most extravagant kind" since "names normally furnish so few clues to their original meaning" (pp. 189-90). Accordingly, the authors characterize Bernal's etymologies for the proper names Telphousa, Methone, Laris(s)a, Rhadamanthus, Thebai and Kopais as "lacking semantic rigor" and "phonetic consistency" (p. 191); the latter is the result of Bernal's "scheme of things," which allows phonetic "multi- ple reflexes" to "virtually every ... consonant in the Egyptian and Semitic alphabets" (p. 191).49 In the view of J & N, Bernal's etymologies for Greek names reduce linguistic science to "a parlor game that anyone can play with the help of a few good dictionaries" (p. 192). Moreover, while all of Bernal's etymologies are "essentially frivolous" because of his disregard for semantic and phonological constraints, some can also be shown to run contrary to established Greek sound laws (Thebai, lardanos) or "obvious morphological facts" (Kopais, Lakedaimon, Mykenai). This section of the discussion closes with J & N's derivation of Athena from Semitic Satan, a reductio ad absurdum of Bernal's derivation of the Greek Athena from Egyptian Ht Nt (pp. 192-94).

In the case of Bernal's etymologies for "ordinary words," J & N are equally unconvinced: "What his suggestions lack in semantic inventiveness they make up for in their complete disregard for established sound laws and patterns of word formation" (p. 195). As "no way unexceptional or atypical" (p. 200) examples, they substantiate their rejection of Bernal's Semitic or Egyptian etymologies for the Greek words harma, doulos, ker, basileus, kudos, bomos, eteos, Karuatides, ophis, xenos/xeinos, tima/time, xiphos, khilioi, neos.50 Their conclusion: Bernal is a crank whose "claim to have uncovered 'hundreds' of viable Greek-Egyptian and Greek Semitic etymologies is simply false" (p. 201). Whatever Semitic and Egyptian borrowings exist in Greek are "relatively few in number and-with some con- spicuous exceptions on the Semitic side-late in date" and-to add insult to injury-"most. . . have already been found" (p. 201).

49. For example, J & N object that Bernal supposes Egyptian b to have yielded Greek b in Thebai, p in Kopa-is, and ph in Telphousa and Kephisos, or Egyptian 3 to give Gk r(h), 1, or to disappear, usually leav- ing a vowel in its place (p. 191). Rendsburg, "An Etymological Response," earlier had examined several of the inconsistencies in phonetic correspondences that so exercise J & N (such as Old and Middle Egyptian 3=Semitic r or 1, or Semitic b=Greek b or p, Egyptian b=Greek b or ph, Semitic k=Greek g, k, ch) and defended most with the argument that they are in the main "internally consistent" and "when they are incon- sistent they can often be explained by inner Egypto-Semitic developments" (79). He also argues that borrowing that takes place at different times and via different channels can show a variety of phonetic equivalences (79; cf. 69-71). As an example of shifting phonetic equivalences, Rendsburg offers the En- glish analogies of father (early, a native English form derived from PIE via the Germanic),pater (later, via Latin), and padre (latest, borrowed from Spanish) (69-70). Later in their essay J & N characterize this defense as "an excuse . . .for the confusion . . . another wild card" that Bernal has yet to substantiate by demonstrating a consistent pattern for the variations in the Greek treatment of Egyptian sounds that are themselves supposed to have varied over time (p. 200). In his response to J & N (forthcoming) Bernal maintains that "the phonetic precision generally achieved by historical linguists within language families is inappropriate when dealing with language contacts, except when the time, place, and mode of borrowing can be documented in detail."

50. Cf. the reservations of Rendsburg ("An Etymological Response") regarding Bernal's etymologies for harma, basileus, deilos, and Rendsburg's discussions of ophis, bomos, kudos, xiphos, Karuatides (Karyat), naio/neos.




All this makes for riveting reading. More important, J & N make their case so authoritatively that by the close of the article the reader is left with only two alternative conclusions, neither flattering to Bernal. Either the man is an ignoramus who never bothered to acquaint himself with linguistic principles before suggesting his etymologies; or Bernal is a charlatan, not above deliberately foisting spurious etymologies on an ignorant readership in order to support his reconstruction of history. J & N present the options in Tacitean style: "We cannot tell whether Bernal is unaware of these facts or whether-to adopt one of his favorite locutions-he simply finds it 'useful' to ignore them" (p. 182).

It is precisely because J & N attack so strongly and specifically that the absence of a defense from Bernal laid out in similarly cogent fashion is particularly to be regretted. How else are we to decide whether J & N are shadow boxing or whether their essay is indeed the coup de grace adminis- tered by two "competent historian(s) of the Greek language" (p. 178)? Is Bernal's linguistic evidence for massive Egyptian and Semitic borrowing in Greek indeed "a mirage" as J & N assert (p. 178) or is the "mirage" itself a distortion effected by the tunnel vision of the Indo-Europeanists? Al- though incontrovertibly directed against Bernal, the essay of J & N ultimately needs to be read against W. Burkert whom no one-including Lefkowitz (p. ix)-has yet marginalized as crank or "amateur":

Greek linguistics has been the domain of Indo-Europeanists for nearly two centuries; yet its success threatens to distort reality. In all the standard lexicons, to give the etymology of a Greek word means per definitionem to give an Indo-European etymology. Even the remotest references-say, to Armenian or Lithuanian-are faithfully recorded; possible borrowings from the Semitic, however, are judged uninteresting and either discarded or mentioned only in passing, without adequate documentation. It is well known that a large part of the Greek vocabulary lacks any adequate Indo-European etymology; but it has become a fashion to prefer connections with a putative Aegean substratum or with Anatolian parallels, which involves dealing with largely unknown spheres, instead of pursuing connections to the well-known Semitic languages.51

Could the "mirage" ultimately be the assumption that linguists can and do operate on a different, more purely "scientific" order of scholarship than other humanists? Despite their obvious outrage, J & N lay claim to "scientific" detachment, rigor, control, and predictability that enable confident pronouncements of right and wrong (p. 178):52

As linguists, we have no professional interest in the politically charged issues.... We have no deeply held convictions.... We have nothing in principle against the Revised Ancient Model.... We reject it not because it challenges our cultural convictions but because it seems, on the basis of the facts that we control, to be wrong.

Against this absolutism, Burkert observes:

It is true that dilettantes eager to make new discoveries have been guilty of carelessness and rash speculation in this field, while the negative statements of critics enjoy the ad- vantage of seeming caution and strict methodology: Linguists can keep to well-established

51. Burkert, Orientalizing Revolution, 34. Burkert's remarks come in the context of his discussion of Semitic loan words into Archaic Greek.

52. Cf. p. 183: an etymology that is wrong is likened to the flat earth theory.




laws of phonetic evolution within a closed system, whereas borrowings are mostly in- ferred from similarities of sounds that may be fortuitous. But it is precisely methodology which is the problem. Greek language, at any rate the literary Greek that we know, absolutely rejects the use of unadapted foreign words; they are accepted only in perfectly assimilated form as to phonetics and inflexion. Thus there can be no method to discover borrowed words: They imitate and go into hiding, adapting themselves to the roots and suffixes of native Greek. In general, loan words can be established definitively only on the basis of detailed documentation from both sides The word hammock, derived from some American Indian language, has become Hangematte, hanging mat, in German, which looks perfectly indigenous-until with a second or third look one may realize that there is not, in fact, a mat which is hanging. Popular etymology plays its role in metamorphosis; no rules of phonetic evolution can be established. Even the correspondence of meaning is seldom perfect; partial misunderstandings take place all the time. Thus the situation as far as the eighth century B.C. is concerned appears to be hopeless: Greek documentation is sparse, limited almost exclusively to the highly spe- cialized sphere of Greek epic diction. The neighboring languages, Aramaic and Phoeni- cian, are known mainly through casual inscriptions; the rest of the documentation is lost. For a conscientious judge, acquittal by lack of evidence will be the result again and again-and yet the outcome of minimalism, arrived at in this fashion, must be absolutely false, as a general consideration of probabilities will show. The underworld of loan-words is still there, camouflaged but influential.53

Burkert's remarks recall the parable of the man who, having lost his watch in a dark alley, is seen searching under a street light. When asked why he isn't looking in the place where he lost it, he answers "that's not where the light is." Nineteenth-century philology cast our brightest linguistic light on the Indo-European family of languages to which the Greek language be- longs. But does this mean that we should scrupulously comb the pavement under J & N's sharp lamplight in a search for unknown Greek etymologies that is a priori restricted to a putative IE origin? Or should we look also in the dark alley of the ancient Mediterranean where the Greek language evolved into the Greek of our extant texts? I know J & N's answer; I know Burkert's answer; it would have been interesting and informative to have learned from Black Athena Revisited what Bernal has to say.

In addition to the exclusion of direct or indirect responses by Bernal, Black Athena Revisited is further flawed by the failure to include (or com- mission) any articles that are supportive of Black Athena or that independently pursue Bernal's line of inquiry, although even many of Black Athena Revisited's hostile contributors find much to agree with in Bernal's work.54 Black Athena Revisited is also marred by gratuitous attempts to marginal-

53. Burkert, Orientalizing Revolution, 35-36. Bernal's own position is in fact less "permissive" than Burkert's; cf. his review of Burkert inArion, 3d ser., 4.2 (1996): 137-47.

54. To the relatively positive published evaluations by J. Ray and S. Burstein (see n. 13 above), add S. Burstein, "The Challenge of Black Athena: An Interim Assessment," AHB 8.1 (1994), 11-17 and "Greek Contact With Egypt and the Levant: Ca. 1600-500 BC. An Overview," The Ancient World 37.1 (1996): 20-28. A contribution by E. Cline whose research directly deals with Egypto-Greek contacts in the Bronze Age and who is sympathetic to Bernal's approach would have also improved Black Athena Revis- ited: see, e.g., "Amenhotep III and the Aegean: A Reassessment of Egypto-Aegean Relations in the 14th Century Bc," Orientalia, n.s., 56 (1987): 1-36, "An Unpublished Amenhotep Faience Plaque from Myce- nae," Journal of the American Oriental Society 110 (1990): 200-12, and "Contact and Trade or Coloniza- tion? Egypt and the Aegean in the 14th-l3th Centuries B.C.," Minos 25/26 (1990-91, pubh. 1993): 7-36.




ize Bemal through misrepresentations of Bernal's position,55 reductio ad absurdum arguments, and ad hominem attacks that invoke irrelevant antith- eses between spurious categories: "amateurism" vs. "professionalism"; sub- jectivity vs. objectivity; the one vs. the many; emotion vs. reason. The very first page of the preface implies that Bernal's scholarship ("another amateur attempt") should be seen in the light of similar lines of investigation pursued by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose interests in links between Egypt and Greece are attributed by his biographer to "some pent-up, poetic, assertive side of himself" (Lefkowitz, p. ix). Against "poet" Bernal is ranged the collective wisdom of the contributors-the professionals "we" or "us" (repeated circa fifteen times in pp. xi-xii) who are described as representing no particular school of scholarship, but rather are a cross section of every age, sex, and race, united only by their interest in Ber- nal's work and, as the reader will learn, by their conviction that he is in many (most?) respects wrong (p. xii). This preamble-reiterated at points throughout the book56-forms a ring composition closed in the conclud- ing essay by coeditor Rogers, who recalls the introductory comparison to the pent-up self of the poet Hopkins, now on the analyst's couch, when he characterizes Black Athena as expressing "the personal odyssey of Mar- tin Bernal" (p. 442). These ad hominem arguments with their false antithe- ses unfairly contextualize the reader's reception of the entire collection of essays. (Are the responses of the objective and rational "professionals" uniformly devoid of emotion? Can Bernal at this point be accurately characterized as an "amateur" in Bronze Age Aegean studies or nineteenth-century European historiography?)

Black Athena Revisited is useful for scholars and students because it collects many of the most trenchant criticisms of Bernal under one accessible and affordable cover. Black Athena Revisited is flawed because (in sharp contrast to Bernal's own declared ideological stance) it presents a book that is, in reality, slated to be "the knock out punch" for Bernal as apolitical or "pure" scholarship.57 Despite lip service to the contrary, the physical appearance of Black Athena Revisited easily belies any such claims. To leaf

55. Misrepresentation is particularly offensive in J & N's phraseology implying that Bernal has questioned the Indo-European status of the Greek language ("Greek, as Bernal admits, is an Indo-European language," p. 179, emphasis added).

56. Especially emphasized in Liverani's title "The Bathwater and the Baby" (pp. 421-27) drawn from Liverani's characterization of Bernal as an "outsider" who "does not have the necessary equipment (professional methodology)" to enable him to keep "the baby" (ninteenth-century historiographical methodolo- gies) at the same time as he throws out "the bathwater" (nineteenth-century historiographical biases). Liverani concludes: "In any case, the reconstruction of such a complicated set of historical problems is an enormously difficult task, even for professional historians; outsiders do not have the necessary equipment- in methodology, source control, interdisciplinary approach-to tackle it. We duly thank Martin Bernal for his useful insights about the biased appproaches of former (and present) classical scholars, but we have to go along on our own way without him. We will keep and we like (at least I like) his baby, but we must throw out all his dirty water" (p. 427, emphasis added).

57. "Our criticisms are offered in spirit [sic] of scholarly endeavor, which must always be to get at the truth, no matter how painful our discoveries may be to any or all of us," Lefkowitz, p. xii. Cf. Internet response by Lefkowitz (94.4.19) to Bernal's BMCR Review (96.4.5) of her Not Out of Africa (1996) where Lefkowitz states that Black Athena Revisited is not "in a dialogue with Bernal alone ... [but] ... in an ongoing debate with many other scholars who are concerned about the evidence for the interconnections among cultures in the ancient world."




through Black Athena Revisited is to step through the looking glass into an anti-Bernal. The book's cover layout eerily recalls the covers of Bernal's two previously published volumes, reminding us that Bernal is not the only one liable to the charge of a little chicanery to "sell books." The front pages of the book also owe much to Bernal: four useful maps (pp. xv-xviii), "An- cient Egyptian Chronology" (pp. xix-xx, by Yurco), and "Chronology of the Early Greek World" (p. xxi).58 The last, the "Chronology of the Early Greek World" illustrates yet another misleading impression created in Black Athena Revisited: that the subject is nicely under the control of the "professionals." Although this table recalls Black Athena's "Chronological Table,"59 any resemblance stops with external appearance; in contrast to Bernal's chronology and despite the implications of its heading, this table lists only a few relatively noncontroversial Bronze Age dates, with no indication of dating divergences or problems. (Recall that Bernal's chronological tables in Black Athena 1 made divergences explicit.) By sidestepping all disputed dating issues (both by Bernal and others), Black Athena Revisited's chronology of the early Greek world presents a neat historical package that is misleading in a book of this type and so can serve as a paradigm for the way in which this book's efforts to marginalize Bernal at all costs ultimately short- change the reader. In this case the confidence of editor Lefkowitz should have yielded to the wise skepticism of author Lefkowitz: "To speak with complete confidence, without any tincture of doubt, about some of the great controversies is to betray a misunderstanding of what classicists do" (Black Athena Revisited, p. 5).

Thus, Black Athena Revisited creates a whole series of misleading im- pressions: that this book is not a direct attack on Bernal; that the professionals have things under control; that Bernal has been outflanked, outsmarted, outargued, and indeed silenced by the experts; that Bernal's work meant nothing: whatever he did right, classicists were doing all along, and every- thing else in his work is wrong.60 These overarching "conclusions" appear to be necessary in large measure due to an editorial policy which actually undermines the authority of the many seriously damaging criticisms raised by individual essayists.

It is not the issue of "fair play" in itself that particularly concerns me here; anyone is free to put together any book that he/she can get published, and the work under review is not the first and certainly not the worst example. As a reader/reviewer, I am concerned with the extent to which the editorial policy makes a better or worse, a more or less intellectually useful

58. Cf. Black Athena 1, "Maps and Charts," xxiv-xxxii, "Chronological Table," xxxi-xxxii; Black Athena 2, "Chronological Tables," xxviii-xxxiii, "Maps and Charts," 531-547.

59. Black Athena 1, xxxi-xxxii; cf. Black Athena 2, xxviii-xxxiii. 60. This "conclusion" is especially felt in Rogers' essay, pp. 428-43. Contrast the refreshing candor of

Bernal's longtime opponent J. Muhly: "There can be no doubt that much of the impetus for such scholarship [recent studies of contacts and influences between Greece and the Near East] has come from the challenge presented to Classical scholarship by Bernal's Black Athena volumes. As scholars we usually end up doing the right thing, but only after we are given a good push in the right direction" ("Afrocentric Educa- tion and the Study of Ancient History," in Achievements of Ancient Greece, 53 [see n. 21 abovel).




book. Furthermore, I think that the zeal to "educate" the reading public should not overwhelm a basic commitment to intellectual integrity; that, in fact, "education," is ultimately undermined by Black Athena Revisited's brand of intellectual protectionism.

Like Bernal's own Black Athena, Black Athena Revisited is situated firmly in what might be called the agonistic school of scholarship. This is the view of scholarship as a zero-sum game in which there can be only one winner. The aim of the game is to knock your opponent out cold. What hap- pens afterwards is irrelevant. The referee raises the victor's hand in triumph. The ignominious loser is carried out on a stretcher and forgotten. To this view can be contrasted the notion of scholarship as a dialectic in which the truth or something closer to it emerges from punches traded by the antago- nists. In the latter case, there are no clear winners or losers. The only winners are the spectators-the rest of us-whose understanding has been advanced by learning bits and pieces from either side as we watch the fight closely. Since I subscribe to the latter view of scholarship (and indeed early welcomed and still welcome Bernal's invitation to investigate the many interesting and important questions opened by his Black Athena 1), I find Black Athena Revisited a useful, but seriously flawed book.

MOLLY MYEROWITZ LEVINE

Howard University



The Marginalization of Martin Bernal

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