He was a Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. Was a British scholar of modern Chinese political history. Members of minority groups often complained that the academic cannon contained too many “dead, white, males.” Calling Athena “black” was a way to turn the tables on the academic establishment.Martin Gardiner Bernal ( / b ər ˈ n ɑː l/ 10 March 1937 – 9 June 2013 ) The 1980s and 90s was a time when various “culture wars” were fought at American universities in particular.
In fact, the Black Athena debate may say more about us than it does about the ancients. And the choice of Greece was, at least in part, a consequence of the fact that the French – Germany’s enemies in a series of wars – often retraced their own history to the Romans. It was only in the nineteenth-century that German scholars in particular started thinking of Greece as the origin of their own society. Greek and non-Greek societies were not as distinct as we often believe. For one thing, the people we think of as Greeks were seafarers who interacted closely with everyone else around the eastern Mediterranean. More generally, it might be a mistake to think of “Greece” as a discrete civilization which easily can be distinguished from the societies that surrounded it.
The ancient Greeks themselves readily admitted as much. However, there is no disputing the fact that Greece borrowed heavily from its neighbors, from Egypt in particular.
For that reason, the Black Athena thesis has often been rejected. His interpretation was controversial since ancient Greece often has been identified as the origin of everything we think of as “European.” If it turns out that the Greeks had borrowed most, or much, of their culture from Africa and the Middle East, Europeans would no longer be who they think they are.īernal himself was a scholar of contemporary China, not Greece, and it was easy for specialists to point to mistakes in his analysis. Bernal’s thesis was that much of Greek culture had been imported from Greece’s African and Asian neighbors, especially from the Phoenicians and Pharaonic Egypt. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization is the name of a book, in three volumes, by the historian Martin Bernal, which gave rise to a major controversy when it first appeared in 1987.
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