They didn’t dispute the achievements of the great black kingdoms of west Africa in governance, social organization and economic sophistication. But they dismissed them as a sideshow in human civilization. And even if Egypt was pretty great…well, Egypt was not really Africa, cartographers not-withstanding. “Just as Africans were taken out of Africa, so Egypt has been taken out of Africa,” says Barbara Wheeler, director of Africana Studies at Kean College in Union, N.J. But now the claims for Egypt, and Africa, have arrived front and center on the academic stage. Classies departments from Oxford to Harvard are embroiled in a red-hot debate over what role Egypt played in shaping the glory that was Greece. And that leads to an incendiary question: was Egypt “black”?
Perhaps it is mere coincidence that the scholar who has forced these questions onto the agenda has lighter skin and straighter hair than the west Africans who tried in vain to get the academy’s attention. Martin Bernal is a professor of government at Cornell University, a scholar of modern China Vietnam and Japan, a Briton whose father was the wartime adviser to Lord Mount batten. In the 1970s a midlife crisis sent him in search of his distant Jewish roots. His study of Hebrew and antiquity led him to Greece, and thence to Egypt. The result was the first of a projected four-volume series titled “Black Athena.”
Published in 1987 and winner of the 1990 American Book Award, the 575 page work explores why European scholars beginning in the 18th century excised Egypt and Canaan from the family tree of Western civilization. Bernal’s answer: the classicists were racists and anti-Semites. They could not stand the idea that their beloved Greece had been made “impure” by African and Semitic influence and so dismissed as mere myth the Greeks’ own accounts of how Egyptian and Canaanite technology, philosophy and political theory shaped Aegean civilization.
In place of this ancient model, which had stood for 3,000 years, the classicists offered what Bernal terms the “Aryan model.” This theory holds that Greek civilization began when (white) Indo-European speakers from the north swept down on the native (white) “pre-Hellenes” between the fourth and third millennium B.C. Most modern researchers say “there’s no real question” that 19th-century academics were racist and anti-Semitic, as classicist Gregory Crane of Harvard University puts it. But not all agree that such personal beliefs tainted their scholarship.
The just published Volume II of “Black Athena” moves beyond its predecessor’s ad hominem attacks to offer a bold alternative to the Aryan model. Marshaling mountains of evidence from linguistics, archeology and ancient documents, Bernal argues that between 2100 and 1100 B.C., when Greek culture was born, the people of the Aegean borrowed, adapted or had thrust upon them deities and language, technologies and architectures, notions of justice and polis. From where did they come? Egypt and the Phoenicians of Canaan, says Bernal. A sampling from his numbing barrage of evidence:
The Greeks wrote that their culture emerged (around 1500 B.C.) when Egyptians and Phoenicians civilized the Aegean natives. Herodotus wrote that “the names of nearly all the gods came to Greece from Egypt.” Greek legends relate that Egyptian and Phoenician conquerors ruled all or parts of Greece until the 14th or 15th century B.C.; historians wrote that such great lawgivers as Lykourgos studied in Egypt and brought back the legal and political basis for the West’s polities.
Bernal’s critics treat the ancient texts more suspiciously. Greeks may well have traced their civilization to Egypt (Sparta used Egyptian pyramids as one of its symbols), they say, but only to claim legitimacy through an older civilization, and not because it reflected historical truth.
Scores of Egyptian objects, from coins and jewels to sculpture and earthenware, litter the Aegean from Crete to the Greek mainland. Palaces suddenly appeared on Crete in around 2000 B.C.-the first time this architectural style graced any land other than Egyptat exactly the time when Crete abruptly switched from being a rural, farming state to an urban one like Egypt. Bernal says this sudden change could have occurred only through Egyptian colonization. Around 2750 B.C., the Greek city of Thebes built a pyramidlike structure resembling those on the Nile. Murals from buildings on Thera preserved in volcanic ash in 1628 B.C., show egyptian influence. They depict a stratified society, scenes of the Nile River and African plants drawn according to Egyptian artistic convention.
The critics respond that such influences more likely reflect trade and cultural ties, not Egyptian conquest. No ancient generals left behind papyrus with their battle plans.
Bernal is fluent in Greek, Hebrew, Coptic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Vietnamese; his grandfather wrote the definitive Egyptian grammar. He combines his own etymological analysis with secondary sources to argue that half of all Greek words are derived from Egyptian or Semitic. He traces scores of words to the Egyptian, including sword, wisdom, honor and king; the large number of Egyptian-derived words, says Bernal, argues for " massive and sustained Egyptian cultural influence" over a less developed population.
Because hardly any scholars share Bernal’s virtuosity of language, very few can judge his thesis, which turns on such arcana as whether the Greek “Athena” is truly derived from the Egyptian “Nt.” Those who can judge parts of it generally agree that Bernal’s etymologies are plausible but insist that this could be the result of trade and cultural contact. “Most scholars say there is no real evidence of conquest or colonization,” says historian James Mulhy of the University of Pennsylvania.
Who were these people, then, who left their mark on the childhood of Western civilization? For years many African scholars have argued that the answer is as plain as the Sphinx’s face: Egypt was a black civilization. By inference, say some Afrocentrists, Euclid, Homer, Socrates and Egyptian royals from Tut to Cleopatra were African blacks.
Egypt almost certainly originated in the black African societies of the upper Nile, in what is now Ethiopia. Fossil skulls from the start of Egypt’s Dynastic period (30th century B.C.) resemble people in northern Ethiopia today. Bernal is convinced that many pharaohs looked black. Among them: Menthotpe, who around 2100 B.C. reunited Egypt after 300 years of chaos, and Sesostris who 100 years later sent African regiments into the Levant, Turkey and perhaps southern Russia. There, Herodotus wrote, they settled on the eastern shore of the Black Sea.
But that does not mean that Egyptian civilization as a whole was black, as the term is understood today, Bernal says, and almost all scholars agree, that for 7,000 years Egypt has been populated by African, Asian and Mediterranean peoples. He notes that ancient carvings usually show Nefertiti with Caucasian features, and believes Cleopatra was Greek (her family traced its ancestry to Alexander’s invading generals). Says Bernal, “It was a thoroughly mixed population that got darker and more Negroid the further up the Nile you went… though few Egyptians could have bought a cup of coffee in America’s Deep South in 1954.” He allows that a more accurate title of his work would have been ‘African Athena."
Other scholars attack the notion that Egypt was black. Classicist Frank Snowden, now at Georgetown University, spent his career (he is 80) researching ancient notions of race. Arguably America’s greatest black classicist, he believes that when Herodotus, Aeschylus and Aristotle wrote of “black” Egyptians, they were referring only to their swarthier complexion. “Race as an intellectual construct didn’t exist” for the ancients, agrees historian Gary Reger of Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. (In this they were smarter scientists than most people today: the concept of race has no biological validity, and genetic analysis shows that some “blacks” share more of their genes with “whites” than either do with members of their own “race.”)
It was not too many years ago that anthropologists desperately sought to trace humankind’s origins to anyplace but Africa. That debate has been settled in favor of an east African genesis, a resolution that struck at the heart of European biological arrogance. Bernal readily acknowledges that “the political purpose of ‘Black Athena’ is, of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance.” He may not have done that yet, but he has clearly forced scholars to reexamine the roots of Western civilization.
The movement has its basic texts -Asante, Bernal and Diop-and its foes-Schlesinger and Ravitch.
AFROCENTRICITY, by Molefe Kete Asante, Africa World Press, 1988 BLACK ATHENA, Volumes 1 and 2 by Martin Bernal, Rutgers U. Press 1987-91 CIVILIZATION OR BARBARISM, by Cheikh Anta Diop, Lawrence Hill Books, 1991 THE AMERICAN READER, edited by Diane Ravitch, Harper Collins, 1990 THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Whittle Direct Books, 1991
