Black Athena Ten Years After
towards a constructive re-assessment
the original leading article from TALANTA XXVIII-XXIX (1996-1997)
Wim van Binsbergen
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Black Athena Ten Years Aftertowards a constructive re-assessmentthe original leading article from TALANTA XXVIII-XXIX (1996-1997) Wim van Binsbergen |
This special issue of Talanta is based on the proceedings of the one-day conference ‘Black Athena: Africa’s contribution to global systems of knowledge’, held at the African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands, 28 June, 1996. That conference was conceived and initial preparations were made at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS). Late 1995 I persuaded Dr. Rijk van Dijk, the African Studies Centre conference organiser, that a Dutch conference on the debate initiated by Martin Bernal’s controversial two volumes of Black Athena would be timely considering the minimum extent to which Dutch scholarship had so far participated in the debate since its inception in the late 1980s.[2] The stakes of this debate include not only the rewriting of the history of the eastern Mediterranean in the third and second millennium BCE; and the Eurocentric denial — as from the eighteenth century CE — of intercontinental contributions to Western civilisation; but also the place of Africa in global cultural history, and today’s re-assessment of that place especially by ‘Afrocentric’[3] scholars — in majority Blacks holding appointments in the U.S.A. and in African universities.[4]
Operating from the national African Studies Centre, which is part of the Leiden University social science faculty, meant being aloof of the U.S.A. scene where the debate had concentrated. It also meant being separated, and by a considerable social, institutional and geographical distance, from scholars who at Leiden and elsewhere in the Netherlands pursue the disciplines which had so far dominated the Black Athena debate: classics, ancient history, archaeology, historical linguistics, Egyptology, the history of ideas and of science. From the beginning it was clear that crossing that distance would require such major efforts (also because such few Dutch responses to Black Athena as existed had been largely dismissive),[5] that the immediate result could only be eclectic and initiatory, at best.
If nonetheless the conference was a success and led to the present collection of papers, it was largely to the credit of others. Martin Bernal not only agreed to participate and did so with inspiring openness and charm, but also his three original contributions to the present volume[6] already lend it far greater relevance to the ongoing debate than I could have hoped for. Jan Best, the ancient historian, put his network, advice and enthusiasm at my disposal, besides contributing a stimulating paper of his own — examining Cretan seals from the early 2nd millennium BCE for signs of Egyptian influence.[7] The Egyptologist Arno Egberts’ chance attendance at the conference led to an improvised intervention (on the historical linguistics relevant to Bernal’s proposed derivation of the Greek name Athena from the Ancient Egyptian expression /Ht Nt, ‘House of the goddess Neith’ i.e. the western Delta town of Saïs); Egberts’ argument has now been worked into fully-fledged, well documented critical paper.[8] The historian (both ancient and modern) Josine Blok in her paper insisted on historiographic method and intimate knowledge of early 19th-century CE classical scholarship as devastatingly criticised by Bernal; in this way she raises crucial problems: the requirement of examining all available factual data before passing judgement (notably, a verdict of anti-Semitism and racism) on historical actors; the relative weight of external (socio-political) and internal (new data and methods) in the history of science; and finally academic and political integrity in the context of such sensitive topics as identity, ethnicity, and especially race.[9] Wim van Binsbergen, Africanist and theoretician of ethnic and intercultural relations, explored some of the implications of the Black Athena thesis both from a theoretical point of view[10] and on the basis of a historical and comparative empirical analysis of two major African formal systems.[11] The latter leads him to conclude that the Black Athena thesis strikingly illuminates Africa’s vital, initial contribution to global cultural history in Neolithic and (outside Africa) Bronze Age contexts, but fails to appreciate Africa’s cultural achievements as well as involution in the more recent millennia; this allows him to identify substantial tasks for further research and rethinking.
Two other contributors who helped to make the conference a success could most regrettably not be incorporated in the present collection for personal and technical reasons: the historian of ideas Robert Young, who looked at the appropriation of Egyptological material in the ‘scientific’ discourse of racism in the U.S.A. South of the mid-19th century CE; and the linguist and ancient historian Fred Woudhuizen, who in an oral presentation assessed Bernal’s Egyptocentric linguistic claims in the context of linguistic diversity and interaction in the eastern Mediterranean in the second millennium BCE.
Further indispensable contributions came from Rijk van Dijk who co-organised the conference with me. And from the African Studies Centre in general, which — not for the first time — trustfully endorsed my explorations beyond the standard topics of African Studies, and provided adequate financial, library and secretarial support without which the present volume would never have materialised. Fred Woudhuizen made it possible that the conference proceedings are now published as a special issue of Talanta, which is particularly fitting since this journal is a Netherlands-based international venue for ancient history and archaeology, specialising on the eastern Mediterranean. The editors of Talanta (Dr. Jan Stronk and Dr. Maarten de Weerd, with their colleagues Dr. Jan de Boer and Dr. Roald Docter, and as archaeological artist Mr Olaf E. Borgers) have ensured that this volume meets professional standards, and facilitated its production in every possible way.
Here they now appear in very heavily edited, revised and expanded form, augmented with new contributions not only from Arno Egberts but also from Wim van Binsbergen (triggered by Jan Best’s paper),[12] as well as two responses by Martin Bernal to the papers by Josine Blok and Arno Egberts. The collection Black Athena: Ten years After at least marks the fact that in the Netherlands the reception of the Black Athena problematic has progressed beyond the initial stage. It constitutes an invitation to our national colleagues to contribute further critical and constructive work along these lines. If Black Athena has managed to generate comprehensive and complex, passionate interdisciplinary international debate over the past ten years, scholarship in the Netherlands can only benefit from being drawn into that debate, even if at a late stage.
It is certainly not too late, for despite unmistakable hopes to the contrary on the part of the editors of the recent collection of critical essays Black Athena revisited,[13] the issue is still alive and kicking. With understandable delay, more volumes of Black Athena and a defiant answer[14] to the dismissive Black Athena revisited have been projected by Martin Bernal. What is more important is that enough material, debate and reflection has now been generated for us to try and sort out whatever lasting contribution Bernal may have made, sifting such support and acclaim as he has received (not only in the form of Afrocentrist appropriation of his work but also from some of the most distinguished scholars in the relevant fields), — from his obvious errors and one-sidedness which the mass of critical writing on this issue since 1987 has brought to light.
Such a task cannot be fully accomplished within the 200-odd pages of the present collection. Yet its title Black Athena: Ten Years After has a significance beyond the flavour of atavistic chivalry, continuous skirmishes and ambushes, and the hopes of ultimate glory, as in A. Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, with Martin Bernal cast in the obvious role of d’Artagnan. It brings out that ours is not merely another instalment to the debate.
There is of course that element too, vide the exhaustive and, in my opinion, definitive critical essays by Blok and Egberts on two central issues of the Black Athena argument which hitherto have met with relatively little specialist treatment: Greek-Egyptian etymologies, and the methods and politics of Bernal’s historiography of nineteenth-century classical studies.[15] Martin Bernal’s response to Josine Blok is courteous and receptive. His admittance of having grossly misinterpreted, in Black Athena I, the limited material he had read on the pioneer classicist K.O. Müller is scholarly and sincere. Yet one can hardly believe that he (cf. p. 22X below) ‘had’ truly Blok’s kind of devastating criticism ‘in mind’ when, at the end of Black Athena I, he expressed the hope that the book would ‘open up new areas of research by women and men with far better qualifications than myself’; much as one regrets that he does not address what are clearly Blok’s main points, on integrity, identity, race, and the role of internal and external factors in the history of science. If Martin Bernal’s response to Egberts’ paper is short, dismissive, and (in its long digression on Soviet linguistics, and his promise to write his memoirs at the age of 80 as his only concession) rather flippant, it is partly because in his own original paper for the collection Black Athena: Ten years After,[16] he has covered much of the same etymological ground in considerable detail — notwithstanding his highly significant claim (to which I return below) that in the case of proper names and between languages from different families, the established sound laws of historical linguistics do not work anyway. In the same paper, he looks back at the Black Athena discussion over the past ten years, denounces Black Athena revisited in strong terms, engages in an enlightening discussion of some common misrepresentations of his work and views, and for the first time explicitly seeks to situate Africa linguistically and phenotypically (but hardly culturally) within the Black Athena context. Also for the first time he presents a more systematic treatment of the historical and interactive linguistics on which his views on the ‘Afroasiatic[17] roots of classical civilization’ are based. Jan Best argues for an Egyptianising reading of the Cretan seals, thus offering a specific example of how the Black Athena thesis could be fruitfully deployed in specific research contexts; meanwhile he calls attention to Syrio-Palestinian and Anatolian, in addition to Egyptian influences.[18] Wim van Binsbergen,[19] in a contribution specifically written in response to Best’s analysis, argues the complexities of the intercontinental cultural interaction which produced the earliest Cretan script; he stresses the argument of transformative localisation as a necessary complement of the argument of diffusion. His claim is that after two successive transformative localisations at focal points along the Levantine coast (Byblos and northern Syria) any original Egyptian contribution would have been greatly eroded and conventionalised before it ever contributed to Cretan hieroglyphic. Like so many other participants in the Black Athena debate,[20] both contributing authors concur with Martin Bernal’s stress on intercontinental exchanges in the eastern Mediterranean in the second and third millennium BCE, but they express concern about the — by and large probably unintended — suggestion of unidirectional Egyptocentrism in some of his work.
However, the present collection is also an attempt to go beyond a mere listing of pros and cons. It seeks to help define in what ways, on what grounds, and under which stringent methodological and epistemological conditions, Martin Bernal’s crusade deserves to have a lasting impact on our perception of the ancient eastern Mediterranean; on our perception of the intercontinental antecedents of the European civilisation which is one of the principal contributors to the global cultural domain whose emergence we are witnessing today; and on our perception of Africa.
Apart from the African dimension, which is new to the debate, this is as in previous special issues of scholarly journals devoted to the Black Athena debate,[21] yet reveals almost the opposite aim from Black Athena revisited. I am very pleased that, contrary to that much more voluminous, comprehensive and prestigious book from which Martin Bernal was deliberately excluded and which was intended to render all further discussion of Black Athena a waste of time, he is the principal contributor to the present collection. In a way which does credit to that remarkable scholar, it will be clear to the careful reader that this state of affairs has enhanced, not diminished, the volume’s potential for criticism — but of a constructive kind.
So far I have taken a basic knowledge of the Black Athena debate for granted, but for many readers some further introduction may be needed.
British-born Martin Bernal (1937- ) is a Cambridge (U.K.)-trained Sinologist. His specialisation on the intellectual history of Chinese/ Western exchanges around 1900 CE,[22] in combination with his — at the time — rather more topical articles on Vietnam in the New York Review of Books, earned him, in 1972, a professorship in the Department of Government at Cornell University, Ithaca (N.Y., U.S.A.). There he was soon to widen the geographical and historical scope of his research, as indicated by the fact that already in 1984 he was to combine this appointment with one as adjunct professor of Near Eastern Studies at the same university. Clearly, in mid-career he had turned[23] to a set of questions which were rather remote from his original academic field. At the same time they are crucial to the North Atlantic intellectual tradition since the eighteenth century CE, and to the way in which this tradition has hegemonically claimed for itself a place as the allegedly unique centre, the original historical source, of the increasingly global production of knowledge in the world today. Is — as in the dominant Eurocentric view — modern global civilisation the product of an intellectual adventure that started, as from scratch, with the ancient Greeks — the unique result of the latter’s unprecedented and history-less achievements? Or is the view of the Greek (read European) genius as the sole and oldest source of civilisation, merely a racialist myth. If the latter, its double aim has been to underpin delusions of European cultural superiority in the Age of European Expansion (especially the nineteenth century CE), and to free the history of European civilisation from any indebtedness to the (undoubtedly much older) civilisations of the region of Old World agricultural revolution, extending from the once fertile Sahara and from Ethiopia, through Egypt, Palestine and Phoenicia, to Syria, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Iran — thus encompassing the narrower Fertile Crescent — and the Indus Valley. Here Minoan, subsequently Mycenaean Crete occupies a pivotal position as either ‘the first European civilisation in the Eastern Mediterranean’; or as an ‘Afroasiatic’-speaking island outpost of more ancient West Asian and Egyptian cultures; or as both at the same time. The most likely view would stress — foreboding the equally dissimulated dependence of medieval European civilisation on Arab and Hebrew sources — a vital ‘Afroasiatic’ contribution to the very origins of a civilisation (sc. the Greek, subsequently European, now North Atlantic one) which has bred the most vicious anti-Semitism, both anti-Jew and anti-Arab/ Islam, in the course of the twentieth century.
Bernal’s monumental Black Athena, projected as a tetralogy of which so far the first two volumes have been published, addresses these issues along two main lines of argument. The first volume, besides presenting an extremely ambitious but provisional and deliberately unsubstantiated outline of the promised findings of the project as a whole, is mainly a fascinating exercise in the history and sociology of European academic knowledge. It traces the historical awareness, among European cultural producers, of ancient Europe’s intellectual indebtedness to Africa and Asia, as well as the subsequent repression of such awareness with the invention of the ancient Greek miracle since the 18th century CE. The second line of argument presents the converging historical, archaeological, linguistic and mythological evidence for this indebtedness, which is then symbolised by Bernal’s re-reading (taking Herodotus seriously)[24] of Athena, apparently the most ostentatiously Hellenic of ancient Greek deities, as a peripheral Greek emulation of the goddess Neith of Saïs — as Black Athena.
Reception of the two volumes of Black Athena so far has been chequered. Classicists, who read the work not so much as a painstaking critique of North Atlantic Eurocentric intellectual culture as a whole but as a denunciation of their discipline by an unqualified outsider, have often been viciously dismissive; far less so — especially before the publication of Volume II — specialists in archaeology, the cultures and languages of the Ancient Near East, and comparative religion. Virtually every critic has been impressed with the extent and depth of Bernal’s scholarship — he shows himself a dilettante in the best possible tradition of the homo universalis. At the same time, much of his argument is based on the allegedly substantial[25] traces of lexical and syntactic material from Afroasiatic (including Ancient Egyptian, and West-Semitic) languages in classical Greek; while there is no doubt that he has the required command of the main languages in this connexion (Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek), the question here is whether his insight in theoretical, historical and comparative linguistics is adequate.
Meanwhile in the Netherlands the echoes of the ongoing Black Athena debate has been, as said above, scarcely audible.[26]
Where Bernal’s central thesis was picked up most enthusiastically, immediately to be turned into an article of faith, was in the circles of African American intellectuals. Here the great present-day significance of Black Athena was rightly recognised: not so much as a purely academic correction of remote, ancient history, but as a revolutionary contribution to the global politics of knowledge in our own age and time. The liberating potential of Bernal’s thesis has been that it has accorded intellectuals from outside the politically and materially dominant North Atlantic, White tradition an independent, even senior, historical birth-right to full admission and participation under the global intellectual sun. Egypt is claimed to have civilised Greece, and from there it is only one step to the vision that Africa, the South, Black people, have civilised Europe, the North, White people; the ultimate answer to the imperialist (including cultural-imperialist) claims of the ‘white man’s burden’. Such a view clearly ties in with a host of current Afrocentrist publications making similar claims or with the Egyptocentric idioms among present-day African intellectuals in, e.g., Nigeria, Senegal and Zaire. But coming from a White upper-class academician who is socially and somatically an outsider to Black issues, the impact is truly enormous. Here Black Athena is built into the ongoing construction of a militant Black identity, offering as an option — not contemptuous rejection, nor parallel self-glorification as in the context of Senghor’s and Césaire’s négritude, in the face of the dominant, White, North Atlantic model, but — the explosion of that model. And this leads on to its replacement by a model of intercontinental intellectual indebtedness, in which Europe is affirmed to have been, until as recently as the first millennium BCE, a receptive periphery of the civilisations of the region of Old World agricultural revolution; classical Greek civilisation, whatever its achievements, no longer can be taken to have been original and autonomous, but was building on this intercultural indebtedness.
Given the phenomenal expansion of Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptological studies in the course of the twentieth century, we should not have needed Bernal to broadcast this insight in the first place. Ex oriente lux, ‘light comes from the east’, not only sums up the daily subjective experience of sunrise anywhere on earth, but has also been the slogan of an increasing number of students of the Ancient Near East since the beginning of the twentieth century.[27] The message however was scarcely welcome when it was first formulated, and imaginative Semitist scholars like Gordon and Astour found themselves under siege when they published their significant contributions in the 1960s. Black Athena has done a lot to drive this insight home and to popularise it, making it available to circles thirsting for it while building and rebuilding their own identity. Meanwhile Bernal himself does not claim excessive originality:
‘...it should be clear to any reader that my books are based on modern scholarship. The ideas and information I use, do not always come from the champions of conventional wisdom, but very few of the historical hypotheses put forward in Black Athena are original. The series’ originality comes from bringing together and making central, information that has previously been scattered and peripheral’.[28]
‘Der Kulturmorphologie wird also vor der Frage gestellt, ob die Räume jenseits der ägyptisch-babylonischen Kultur völkerkundliches Material zu bieten vermögen, das zum Verständnis der Entfaltung der ägyptischen und babylonischen Kultur raum-, zeit- und sinngemäß Entscheidenes beitragen kann.’ (Leo Frobenius, 1931)[29]
Although Egypt is a part of North East Africa, Black Athena displays a double blind spot where Africa is concerned. An obvious implication of Bernal’s thesis would be to explore the roots of Egyptian civilisation in its turn. Towards ancient Egyptian origins, people from elsewhere on the African continent, e.g. the Upper Nile valley and the once fertile central Sahara, made the principal contributions. What did the interior of Africa thus contribute to Egypt, and via Egypt, to classical Greek, European, North Atlantic, global, civilisation? Bernal has remained largely silent on this point. Also one might expect the argument on Afroasiatic languages to be traced further inland into the African continent. These steps Bernal obviously could not yet take.[30] He can hardly be blamed for this, not only in view of the enormity of this additional task and of the scope of his actual accomplishments, but also because Africanists have so far, with few exceptions,[31] ignored him. They have refrained from exploring the implications of Bernal’s view for the historical, political and intellectual images of Africa which Africanists professionally produce today, and which — perhaps more important — circulate incessantly in the hands of non-Africanists, in the media, public debate, and identity construction by both Whites and Blacks in the context of both local and global issues. The reasons for the Africanists’ non-response are manifold and largely respectable:
• African pre-colonial history, a rapidly growing field in the 1960s and early 1970s, has gone out of fashion as an academic topic, and so have, more in general, — at least, until the recent emergence of the globalisation perspective — grand schemes claiming extensive interactions and continuities across vast expanses of time and space.
• Linguistic skill among Africanists has dwindled to the extent that they are prepared, perhaps even eager, to accept without further proof some linguists’ dismissive verdict on Black Athena’s linguistics.
• Egyptocentric claims were conspicuous in African Studies in the first half of the twentieth century.[32] Besides these ‘Egyptianising’ scholarly studies by established Africanist anthropologists and archaeologists, present-day Africanists are particularly concerned not to revive the cruder forms of Egyptocentric diffusionism as in the works by Elliot Smith and Perry (the first Manchester School in anthropology, before Max Gluckman founded his), who saw Egypt as the only global civilising force, whose seafarers presumably carried their sun cult throughout the Old World and beyond.[33] Another spectre to be left locked up in the cupboard is that of the civilising Egyptians (or Phoenicians, for that matter), invoked as the originators of any lasting physical sign of civilisation in sub-Saharan Africa, especially the Great Zimbabwe complex in the country of that name.[34] More recently, Egyptocentrism has been so vocally reiterated in Cheikh Anta Diop’s work and his Afrocentric followers in Africa and the U.S.A.,[35] that excessive care is taken among many Africanists today not to become entangled in that sort of issue.
• Quick to recognise the ideological element in the Africas as propounded by others, Africanists — most of which are North Atlantic Whites — are, with notable exceptions,[36] rather less accustomed to consider, self-consciously, the political and identity implications of the images of Africa they themselves produce.
To put it mildly, one cannot rule out the possibility that, as a fruit of a similar inspiration to which Bernal attributes the emergence of the myth of the Greek genius, African Studies too[37] have a built-in Eurocentrism that prevents it from seriously considering such a totally reversed view of intellectual world history as Bernal is offering. Here lies a tremendous critical task for African and African American scholars today. In an earlier generation we have seen how African scholars like Okot p’Bitek and Archie Mafeje have sought to explode the Eurocentric implications of the then current work in the anthropology of African religion and ethnicity.[38] In the study of Asian societies and history, the critical reflection on the models imposed by North Atlantic scholarship has developed into a major industry, ever since the publication of Said’s Orientalism.[39]But where are the Black scholars to do the same for Africa? The names of Appiah, Mbembe, Mudimbe, could be cited here;[40] but their most obvious intellectual peers, the exponents of ‘African philosophy’ today, seem more concerned with re-dreaming rural Africa along dated anthropological lines, than waking up to the realities of cultural imperialism and repressive tolerance in intercontinental academia. It is here that the anti-Eurocentrism of the Black Athena project could play a most valuable role (especially Volume I; Bernal’s study on the Phoenician and Egyptian contributions to Greek notions of democracy and law;[41] and his responses on the history of science and on Afrocentrism, now to be collected in Black Athena writes back; while his splendid contribution to the early history of the alphabet[42] provides an inspiring model for the complex, multicentred intercontinental interactions at work in and around the eastern Mediterranean in the formative millennia of classical Greek civilisation.
Will Bernal’s thesis on the European history of ideas concerning Egypt, and his stress on the role of Egypt in the context of actual cultural exchanges in the eastern Mediterranean in the third and second millennium BCE, stand up to the methodological and factual tests of the various disciplines concerned? Before turning to the Black Athena debate I propose to deal, in the following two sections, with two issues which help to bring that debate in proper perspective: the ideological component in cultural history; and Martin Bernal’s position vis-à-vis the sociology of knowledge.
Black Athena’s exposure of Eurocentrism is based on his work concerning the ancient cultural and religious history in the eastern Mediterranean, and concerning the perception of the Ancient Near East in the European intellectual tradition since Antiquity (more in particular the history of ideas and sociology of knowledge of North Atlantic classical studies since Romanticism).
At one level of analysis Bernal restates and popularises, with synthetic scholarship, what many archaeologists, Assyriologists, Egyptologists, Semitists including Arabists, students of the history of science and the history of ideas, students of the history of magic, divination and astrology, students of Hermetic and Gnostic texts, of comparative religion and mythology, have begun to realise in the course of the twentieth century on the basis of increasingly overwhelming and comprehensive evidence. The roots of North Atlantic civilisation, including what used to be portrayed as the classical Greek genius — allegedly incomparable and without historical antecedents — have long been shown to lie to a considerable extent outside Europe, in north-eastern Africa (Egypt) as well as in the rest of the Ancient Near East: Ancient Mesopotamia, Iran, Syria, Anatolia, Palestine, Crete, the Indus civilisation with which Mesopotamia had such extensive contacts. Of course this insight adds a most ironic commentary to North Atlantic cultural hegemony as enforced by military and economic dominance in the Late Modern era: it reduces Western European civilisation to upstart status.
Even if Europe’s great cultural indebtedness to the Ancient Near East (Southwest Asia and Northeast Africa) is no longer the rather carefully constructed secret it was a hundred years ago, given the hostile reception this insight received right up to the 1980s (and perhaps even still, as far as language and the classics are concerned) Bernal can only be admired for the courage and persistence with which he emphasised and popularised this crucial insight. Although his analytical attention is focused on the third and second instead of the first millennium BCE, he is simply right in reminding us of the consistent first millennium record that claims extensive spells of travelling and studying in Egypt, Mesopotamia, perhaps even India, for such major Greek intellectuals as Plato, Pythagoras, Plutarch, and many others. Recent research[43] is beginning to explore the Greek intellectual indebtedness to the very Achaemenid civilisation whose proud military confrontation, at Marathon and Salamis, virtually — and largely through the impact of Herodotus’ long-winded interpretation of the Persian wars in his History — marks the beginning of European geopolitical consciousness as an ideological self-definition against ‘the East’.
Spengler boldly states in his Untergang des Abendlandes,[44] one of the earliest and most uncompromising attempts, among European scholars, to escape from Eurocentrism:
‘Europe as a concept ought to be struck from the record of history’.
His great admirer, Toynbee,[45] although in his later years more optimistic than Spengler as to mankind’s chances of working out some sort of intercultural compromise, knew the civilisation of the West to be only one among a score of others, waxing and waning at the tide of time.
‘L’Occident est un accident’,
the French Marxist thinker Garaudy[46] reminds us half a century later, in a plea for a dialogue of civilisations. Recently, intercultural philosophy has emerged (around the work of such authors as Kimmerle and Mall)[47] in order to explore the theoretical foundations for a post-racial and post-hegemonic cultural exchange at a global scale. Meanwhile, a more pragmatic axiom of cultural relativism has been the main stock-in-trade of cultural anthropologists ever since the 1940s; it has guided individual field-workers through long periods of humble accommodation to local cultural conditions very different from their own, and on a more abstract level has battled for a theory of cultural equality, emphasis on culture in planned development interventions, etc. Much like all other civilisations, the West has developed an ideology of chauvinist ethnocentrism, and in recent centuries it has had the military, ideological, technological and economic means of practising this ethnocentrism aggressively in almost every corner of the world; unlike many other civilisations, however, the West has also produced intellectual movements — I mean: the science, technology, art, international law, philosophy, of the twentieth century CE — that in theory critique and surpass Western ethnocentrism, and that in practice observe a universalism that hopefully forebodes the emergence of a global world culture in which individual cultural traditions may meet and partly merge. Many would agree that there (besides hunger, disease, infringement of human rights, war and environmental destruction) lies one of the most crucial problems of the future of mankind.
In my opinion this universalism owes a specific original debt to the creativity of classical Greek culture.
The problematic of cultural creativity in a context of diffusion is far from lost on Martin Bernal,[48] whose self-identification as a ‘modified diffusionist’ precisely seeks to capture the difference between the obsolete model of mechanical transmission and wholesale adoption of unaltered cultural elements from distant provenance, and the far more attractive model that insists on a local, creative transformation of the diffused material once it has arrived at the destination area:
‘In the early part of this century, scholars like Eduard Meyer, Oscar Montelius, Sir John Myres and Gordon Childe[49] maintained the two principles of modified diffusion and ex oriente lux. In the first case, they rejected the beliefs of the extreme diffusionists, who maintained that ‘master races’ simply transposed their superior civilizations to other places and less developed peoples. They argued instead, that unless there was a rapid genocide, diffusion was a complicated process of interaction between the outside influences and the indigenous culture and that this process itself produced something qualitatively new.’[50]
Here we encounter, once again and not for the last time in this volume,[51] the argument of transformative localisation as a necessary complement of the argument of diffusion. Despite his occasional Egyptocentric lapses into a view of diffusion as automatic and one-way, Bernal often shows that he is aware of the tensions between diffusion and transformative localisation:
‘While I am convinced that the vast majority of Greek mythological themes came from Egypt or Phoenicia, it is equally clear that their selection and treatment was characteristically Greek, and to that extent they did reflect Greek society.’[52]
Even the most implacable critics of Martin Bernal (and I shall discuss them at length below) can rest assured: despite their indignant allegations to the contrary, there is no indication that he tries to reduce Greek culture to the flotsam of intercontinental diffusion.
As far as the development of critical, universalist thought is concerning, admittance of the innovative creativity of the destination area simply means that the Greeks, like we all, did attempt to stand on the shoulders of their unmistakable predecessors in the Ancient Near East. Admittedly, part of the production systems, the language, the gods and shrines, the myths, the magic and astrology, the alphabet, the mathematics, the nautical and trading skills, of the ancient Greeks were scarcely their own invention but had clearly identifiable antecedents among their longer established cultural neighbours. However, citing such eminent authorities as Cassirer, Cornford, Snell and Frankfort c.s.,[53] Peter Gay in his masterly reassessment of the Enlightenment (which was among other things a rekindling of the ideals of classical civilisation) points out that this indebtedness to the Ancient Near East does not seem to apply for ‘sustained critical thinking’, in other words philosophy as a deliberately distinct realm of human symbolic production.[54] This particularly includes syllogistic logic, which could be argued to be one basis of universalism.[55] The point made by the Egyptological archaeologist Trigger appears to be well taken as far as Egypt-Greece cultural exchanges are concerned:[56]
‘That the ancient Egyptians, like the peoples of other early civilizations, did not distinguish as we do between the natural, supernatural, and social realms renders improbable Martin Bernal’s (...) efforts to trace the origins of classical Greek religion and philosophy back to Egyptian sources.’
In his (generally very positive) review of Black Athena I & II, Trigger makes a similar point:
‘...Bernal, along with a growing number of anthropologists, expresses opposition to an evolutionary view of human history. He traces the origins of Greek religion and philosophy to Egyptian sources. It is probable that some schools of Greek philosophy were influenced by Egyptian ideas much as modern Western philosophy is by Hindu and Buddhist thought. Yet it is impossible to find in the surviving corpus of ancient Egyptian writings evidence of the divergent basis postulates, scepticism, materialism, and human-centeredness that characterize post-Ionian Greek philosophy.[57]
The evidence from the Ancient Near East, however, has also been read to support the opposite view, and polemics concerning the Afroasiatic roots of Greek philosophy and science have gained prominence in the Black Athena debate.[58]
Much further research needs to be undertaken before this question can transcend the phase of excited, identity-boosting claims and counterclaims, and develop into a valuable branch of historical intercultural philosophy. Meanwhile Bernal’s caveat should be born in mind: Dodds’ famous study of the Greeks and the irrational, as well as more recent work by von Staden,[59] have called our attention to the massive irrational dimensions of ancient Greek civilisation.
‘Mary Lefkowitz’s conviction that there is a categorical distinction between a rational Greece and an irrational Egypt only holds if you believe that reason only began with Aristotle’s formal binary logic[60] and Euclid’s axiomatic geometry, neither of which existed — as far as we know — in Ancient Egypt.’[61]
The development of philosophy was neither a Greek prerogative, nor a sufficient condition (although arguably a necessary one) for the development of modern science as a global concern. Schools of logic have developed not only in Greece but also in ancient India and China. The examples of medicine, alchemy and engineering, both in the Ancient Near Eastern/ Hellenic/ Hellenistic / Late Antiquity / Arabic / European tradition, and in China, make clear that science does not spring just from logic but also from the systematic practical, trial-and-error-based knowledge accumulated for centuries at the interface between artisanal and intellectual pursuits. A radical re-reading of the historical evidence (which inevitably has an ethnocentric bias) concerning the subtle ramifications of long-distance contacts across the Old World since the Neolithic, will help us understand the intercontinental contributions leading to the emergence of modern science, technology and philosophy in the West and subsequently on a global scale. One such a radical re-reading has been Joseph Needham’s Science and civilisation in China.[62] Although this most impressive project[63]scarcely features on the pages of Black Athena,[64] it greatly appealed to young Martin Bernal, in scope, in anti-Eurocentric orientation, and as an exercise in universal scholarship — and it may even have tilted the scales for him to read Sinology rather than African Studies or History of Science. Repeatedly, and to my mind convincingly,[65] Needham stresses the possible, likely, or certain contributions of China to European intellectual and technological achievements; Yellow Athena? Nor was the West Asian and North African contribution to modern world-wide science limited to some initial, pre-Greek formative period: Aristotelian logic, Aristotelianism, the subsequent Hellenistic philosophy including Stoicism and Neo-Plationism, and most of Hellenic and Hellenistic science (projects, incidentally, to which Egyptian and Levantine scholars made important contributions at the time) in general would never have been revived in the West in the early second millennium CE unless through the extensive mediation and elaboration of Arabic thinkers (Ibn Rushd and Ibn S¤ina, foremost), with Maimonides and other medieval Jewish scholars acting as intermediaries.
This brief and inconclusive discussion of the contested origins of Greek thought should not obscure the fact that in the field of scholarship there are limits to the extent to which origins truly matter, truly illuminate the past and the present. This is particularly clear from the vantage point of anthropology, which Frazer once defined as a science of origins,[66] but which since the structural-functional revolution affecting that young discipline in the 1930s and ’40s, (until quite recently) had lost all interest in origins, geographical distribution patterns, even in causes, instead largely limiting itself to a contemplation of synchronic interconnectivity of diverse socio-cultural phenomena within typically a narrow geographical horizon. And even a more properly historical approach to social and cultural phenomena and their changes would insist that origin and diffusion is not to be equated with subsequent transformative localisation, leading to performance in maturity.
Let me give one example. Islam at its earliest stage was largely a creative peripheral reformulation of, already mutually interrelated, Jewish, Samaritan, Gnostic and Christian strands of religious thought and practice; but it soon grew into a world religion in its own right, up to the point where current anti-Islamist prejudice in the North Atlantic region among nominal Christians is scarcely mitigated by the sense of shared historical roots.
The same reasoning applies to Bernal’s central show-piece, the Greek goddess Athena herself. Considering the wealth of iconographic and semantic detail which Bernal adduces (even regardless of the contentious /Ht Nt-Athena etymology itself, which receives ample discussion in this volume), it is quite conceivable that the link between the Greek goddess Athena, patron goddess of the major city of Greek civilisation in its heyday, and her Egyptian counterpart Neith, did go rather further than a mere superficial likeness cast in terms of the interpretatio graeca. Bernal urges us once again[67] to take the testimony of such ancient writers as Herodotus seriously, as evidence of the possibility that the Greek Athena merely represented the grateful adoption, into some Northern Mediterranean backwater, of splendid and time-honoured Egyptian cultural models — adoption as a result of colonisation and military campaigns, of Hyksos penetration, or of trade. The extensive arguments back and forth, in the Black Athena discussion, over the blackness of ‘Black’ Athena, the Africanness of blackness, the Africanness of Egyptians, the blackness or whiteness of Egyptians and Greeks, form its least inspiring and, frankly, rather embarrassing part, wholly determined as they are by the ideological and political connotations — so restricted and specific in time and space — of the concept ‘black’ in North American multicultural discourse of the 1980s and 1990s CE, four millennia after the point in time when the Egyptian/ Greek cultural exchanges in question are to have taken place. The important point is both to acknowledge the Egyptian, or in general Ancient Near Eastern, essential contributions to Greek classical civilisation (the argument of diffusion), and to recognise at the same time that Athena outgrew her presumable Egyptian origin, increasingly severing such Egyptian ties (in the form of actual cultic and social interaction with Egyptian) as she may once have had, integrating in the emergent local culture, and transforming in the process (the argument of subsequent localisation). She ended up as an important cultic focus and identity symbol of local cultural achievements which were, in the end, distinctively Greek. For an understanding of Greek Athena we need to know both her presumable Egyptian background and her local history in Greece.[68] Especially as the goddess of the mind, of mental processes, Athena at best characterises both the indebtedness of Greek and ultimately Western civilisation to the Ancient Near East, and, on that basis, the Greeks’ subsequent own achievements; as the patron of weaving and warfare she is particularly appropriate to preside over scholarly arguments (‘yarns’) claiming and contesting both intercultural dependence and subsequent emancipation from such dependence.
There is something thoroughly disconcerting in the emphasis on origins, as attends the debate on Black Athena and many other discourses on charters of identities confronting each other, not so much in the distant past (although that is where the actors project them), but in the world today. Origins are almost by definition too humble than that they are clearly perceptible to empirical research. At best the question of origin reduces a given socio-cultural phenomenon to the transformative combination of a number of earlier such phenomena, while the examination of the latter’s own origins is left for a later project. In this sense, the scholarly literature abounds with book titles on origins, and legitimately so. The quest for origins however implies that whoever undertakes it, is satisfied as to the preliminary question of the classification and the unit of study of his chosen subject; if different decisions are taken on these points, the quest will yield totally different results or will have to be called off altogether. A case in point is the quest for the origin of the Amazons: as long as these were classified as an ethnic group, all sort of likely candidates for identification were produced, especially in extreme south-eastern Europe; once it was realised that perhaps the most likely candidates for the Amazons are the females within, imaginarily threatening Greek males from inside the repressive confines of classical Greek society itself, the quest could be abandoned.[69] Another, even more pertinent example is that in terms of phenotype: much of the meta-scholarly excitement of the Black Athena debate is due to an anachronistic classification, smuggling in a late twentieth century CE folk classification in terms of Black and White, of race, into the analysis of cultural phenomena among ancient actors who employed very different classifications.[70] Implicit refusal to admit the essential role classification plays in defining origins, means that reification and the quest for origins often go hand in hand. Often then the ostentatious search for origins is not truly historical but merely programmatic, and theoretical primordial constructs (which because of their lack of empirical grounding are prone to ideological one-sidedness anyway) pose as historical ‘firsts’. This is one of the reasons why most anthropologists would no longer be enthusiastic about Frazer’s definition of their discipline.
With their ideological overtones and their invitation to conjecture, quests for origins are particularly cherished in the context of the identity formation of social groups, classes, racial groups, ethnic groups, nations. The exclusivist, racist variant of Afrocentrism is a good example of how the very language of identity (as in ethnic and religious attempts at self-definition) tends to succumb to the essentialistic suggestion that it is some primordially established, fixed quality or nature at the beginning of time, which determines present-day qualities and performance — instead of seeing the latter as being realised in a dialectical, contradictory, and largely unpredictable historical process: a process, not of remaining an essence, but of becoming — usually becoming more than one thing at the same time, fostering multiple identities while constantly switching from one identity to the other, and being conscious of the arbitrary nature of all socially upheld identity anyway.
Thus the pursuit of ‘origins’, however legitimate as an academic activity under certain conditions, ultimately even risks to be co-opted into the camp of Blut und Boden — not necessarily with Nazist overtones, but at least of a frame of mind brooding on tangible essences about which one does not argue lest one is forced to admit the historically constructed and optional nature, of an identity one hoped could pas for primordial, unalterable, God-given, uncompromising. It is ultimately the frame of mind in which people feel justified to kill over ideas.
One of the ironies of Black Athena is that Martin Bernal, seeking to explode the Eurocentrist myth of origin (‘the Greek miracle’), was tempted to extend his analysis beyond a mere critique of classicist scholarship since the 18th century CE, and felt compelled to produce his own account of the origins of Greek/ European civilisation — with the obvious danger of producing merely another myth of origin. What enables him to construct for himself an analytical meta-plane from which to observe and interpret the historical actors that fill his historiography? How does he descend from that meta-plane in order to become himself a producer of historical knowledge, launching his ‘Revised Ancient Model’ stipulating massive Afroasiatic, or more specifically Egyptian, cultural and linguistic influence upon the genesis of classical Greek civilisation — in addition for allowance (hence ‘Revised’) for immigration of Indo-European speakers from the north? How does he avoid (or does he?) the methodological and ideological pitfalls into which he claims his historical actors have fallen? These are crucial questions in any assessment of Black Athena, and they lead us to consider, in the following sections, Bernal’s sociology of knowledge, the debate his books have generated, and his epistemology.
In order to contrast between rival theories and between their producers, Martin Bernal frequently deploys two conceptual tools forged in the 20th century CE: Kuhn’s notion of the succession of scientific paradigms;[71] and what Bernal insists on calling ‘the sociology of knowledge’ as if there were only one — in his case essentially Mannheim’s[72] perceptive elaboration of Marx’s awareness of the class determinants in the production of scientific and other knowledge.
Bernal uses these tools with enviable economy. ‘The’ sociology of knowledge is claimed to enable us to understand why scholars propounding wrong, obsolete or ethically undesirable (e.g. racialist) theories should do so, by revealing the interest groups to which these scholars belong in terms of class, gender, race, education, generation, academic discipline, academic establishment versus academic periphery, specific institutions and academic schools at rivalry with each other in the national and international scene, etc. The notion of the succession of paradigms, on the other hand, is invoked — reticently in Black Athena I, more confidently in Black Athena II — in order to highlight the revolutionary and irreversible nature of the breakthrough produced by the Black Athena thesis, as well as to justify that such a breakthrough could or should come from someone like Bernal, by professional training an outsider to the ancient history of the eastern Mediterranean. Below, when discussing the Black Athena debate, I shall come back to Bernal’s claims concerning paradigms.
The one-sidedness of Bernal’s position with regard to any sociology of knowledge becomes clear once we realise that, with all the personal detail concerning the circumstances of the author’s embarking on the Black Athena project,[73] the two Black Athena volumes are silent as to whatever systematic ‘sociology of knowledge’ their own author might find himself to be determined by — and what (in the face of the oppressive influence such a sociology of knowledge is claimed to have had on the authors he faults) he has done himself to transcend that determination.
Significantly, Martin Bernal presents his autobiographical details as ‘a study in the sociology of knowledge’ but he fails to raise them above the anecdotal level. Clearly he is under the impression that with the anecdotal account he gives of himself and his Werdegang, against the setting of the 1970s and ’80s in the introductions to both Black Athena I and II, he has given us all we need in this respect. However, a proper sociology of knowledge is of course more than a programme, and more than a scenario of good guys and bad guys. It should investigate the contradictions inherent in the production of academic knowledge under relevant social conditions. For contemporary knowledge production such conditions include: state patronage; organisational structures and institutional rivalry; personal career insecurity; a partly immaterial and in general disintegrating and declining reward structure in terms of income and social prestige; class aspirations; the problems of recruitment and socialisation involved in perpetuating an academic discipline which (contrary to an ethnic group, a class, a village etc.) is not demographically a self-reproducing unit; intra-generational and inter-generational control over resources and rewards; pressures towards conformity; yet scope for individual freedom, transgression, and innovation; the leverage offered by new ideologies and social movements from outside the discipline (e.g. feminism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism); and patterns of ‘dropping out’ through routinisation, absenteeism, career shifts etc. Bernal has a sharp intuition for such themes, and interesting material towards the sociology of knowledge of ancient history and related disciplines in the twentieth century CE is presented throughout Black Athena I, the preface to Black Athena II, and in his contributions to the present volume. Yet the sociological analysis itself remains to be written. Unfortunately, the more the Black Athena project has allowed the Sinologist Bernal to insert himself in the scholarly circles where ancient history is being produced, rapidly[74] shedding the outsidership that characterised his initial position in the late 1970s, the less likely he becomes as the future author of such an analysis.
Bernal is obviously unique as an intellectual producer. This is borne out by his successful expansion, after his initial training in Sinology and modern, intercontinental intellectual history, into a totally new set of disciplines in mid-career, and by the phenomenal if often conflictive response he gained as a result. Likewise, Bernal’s ancestry is rather more unique even than that of other social actors in that it contains several intellectual giants and was rather more than average conducive to marginality:
Martin Bernal grew up as the son of J.D. Bernal, a famous British crystallographer cum Marxist historian of science. His maternal grandfather was Sir Alan Gardiner, millionaire and the greatest British Egyptologist of his generation. Growing up in the Bohemian fringe of the British upper-class, his father’s Irish background, his maternal grandmother’s half-Jewish background, and his milieu’s general preoccupation with intellectual excellence left their traces in Martin Bernal’s biography. So did anthropology and Africa: before marrying J.D. Bernal, Margaret Gardiner had a relationship with the anthropologist Bernard Deacon, who however died during field-work in Melanesia; much later young Martin as a freshman lived for a year at the house of Meyer Fortes, the leading Africanist anthropologist of his generation. The family’s tea plantation in Malawi earned young Martin an extensive stay in Africa and introduction to an African language, Chi-Nyanja, in 1957. His father was a close friend of the biologist and historian of Chinese science Joseph Needham, and took his son to visit this universal scholar.[75]
Sociology, also sociology of knowledge, consists in the subsuming of individual actors under broader social categories, their dynamics and interactions. As such a sociology of knowledge of the individual Martin Bernal would be a contradiction in terms. Yet one might pursue a number of directions towards the sociological framing of Bernal as an academic actor. I can see a number of strands which I shall identify by italicised paragraph headings.
The upper-class symbolic veiling and subjective transcendence of exploitation. While material appropriation and exploitation (both domestic and in a North-South, colonial context) constituted the economic base for the British upper classes, the symbolic veiling and subjective transcendence of such material relations under a cloak of indirectness, expertise, respectability and sublimation has been a major incentive in the production of culture including scholarship. Of course, such a project can only work if its class nature and psychological strategy remains hidden from the consciousness of the actors involved. Its scope can only be understood on the basis of an assumption of these actors’ integrity as cultural, including intellectual, producers taking on extraordinary responsibility for the production of emphatically disinterested knowledge, on behalf not just of their own class but of society as a whole. Thus Black Athena I stresses how familiarity with the classics became the mainstay in the gentleman’s education — although its author himself, in the mid-20th century and only marginally upper-class, went to a progressive coeducational school. But in the same way, colonial expansion and its attending class interests become translated in the study of exotic languages and cultures, remote in place and/ or time — as throughout Bernal’s family and social circle. When directed not to dead civilisations but to living colonial subjects, such a study is likely to result in the appreciation of, and identification with, the people concerned; although initially ineffectual from a political and economic point of view, this may ultimately erode the premises of North-South domination — a development of which the production of anti-Eurocentric Black Athena is the final consequence.
The burden of empire. Having built part of their security on territorial expansion and productive exploitation of the African and Asian continent in the course of the 19th century, in the next generations — with the redefinition and subsequent loss of empire, though not necessarily of the wealth it had afforded them — the British upper classes were forced to redefine their identity; after dumping the Malawian tea plantation that featured as a major asset in his maternal family’s wealth, Afrocentrist-inclined Black Athena is the final stage in such a process, also in Martin Bernal’s own perception.[76]
A sense of inter-generational continuity and obligation. Martin Bernal grew up among the giants of British intellectual life. He was early on socialised to the highest standards of intellectual prominence and heroism, of world-wide responsibility, of scholarship as a family obligation. The British upper classes shared this concern with academic professional circles with which, despite massive differences in wealth and birth, they entertained a Wahlverwantschaft, as expressed in close friendships and marriages — including presumably that of J.D. Bernal and M. Gardiner. The exalted family standards as regards scholarship were scarcely met by marginal Martin Bernal’s inconspicuous Cornell professorship, outside the world’s few great centres of Asian studies. This realisation may have been at least one ingredient in the mid-life crisis leading to Black Athena. The dedication of Volume I to the memory of J.D. Bernal, and that of Cadmean Letters to the memory of Alan Gardiner, would then appear to be a triumphant declaration: to the world, that Martin Bernal was coming into his own; and to the ancestors, that the son was discharging his obligation, even if this meant invading several disciplines totally new to him.[77]
The stimulating effect of the transatlantic brain drain. From a European academic vantage point, one of the striking features of the Black Athena debate is that it is unmistakably American, despite its British-born protagonist.[78] Although Martin Bernal continued to frequent Cambridge academic circles during the preparatory stages of Black Athena,[79] his first papers on his newly chosen theme were virtually all situated within a U.S.A. context,[80] — where he was working at Cornell, where the aftermath of the Vietnam war dominated intellectual life, and where Blacks, i.e. African Americans, were becoming increasingly vocal — insisting on a university curriculum that would represent them and their intercontinental antecedents truthfully or at least: positively. Racialism, African roots, Black curricula, were already becoming established concerns of institutional and academic politics in the U.S.A. when, in the 1970s, European countries, utterly unprepared, were only going through the first waves of immigration from Africa and the Africanised Americas. Subsequently, after the end of the Cold War, the U.S.A. Black population and their socio-cultural aspirations were pressed into service by the dominant right-wing white community in order to constitute one of their much needed enemies within, now that the major external enemy, communism, had dissolved. The fact that North American white classicists dominate the Black Athena debate suggests that a major, if implied, concern for them has been preservation of the purity of their imported European culture, referring to a distant homeland far to the east (!) across the Atlantic; their Ex oriente lux simply has different mythical and geopolitical parameters than for British-born Martin Bernal. It is in the North American context that he hit on the one ideological issue, race; that allowed him to make the transition from Sinologist to ancient historian of the eastern Mediterranean; to discharge, in the process, the accumulated obligations which his nationality, class and family history have structurally imposed upon him; and to turn his own marginality into a positive force by passionately and creatively fighting the ideological exclusion of Africa and Asia, and of their diasporic descendants in the West.
Even from the vantage point of an increasingly ‘multicultural’ (i.e. phenotypically diverse) continental Europe with mounting racial tensions, it is difficult to appreciate the way in which race — a concept so utterly compromised by modern history, and dismantled by modern science — is an issue in U.S.A. public culture today. Outside specialist circles, the sheer existence of Afrocentrism as an established ideological option has even scarcely registered with the continental European intellectual public — another reason why e.g. the Dutch response to Black Athena has been so slow to gain momentum.
And this does not even exhaust the extent to which the Black Athena debate reflects an American academic culture which, despite the obvious American academic hegemony in many fields, still has not become fully standard in Europe. Further features include the stress on corporate action, corporate responsibilities, explicit professionalisation, formal labelling practices through public debate and mass gatherings, on the part of academic disciplines and of academia at large — in other words the visual and group-wise, organisational articulation of the academic forum. This pattern is rather different from the cherished model of public aloofness and small-scale, informal intra-academic exchanges, which is more or less standard in many European countries. The fact that France is rather an exception to this pattern suggests that we are not just talking here of subcultural free variation on both sides of the Atlantic, but about the way in which a national culture’s sense of self-imposed mission, in other words a state’s hegemonic cultural aspirations (which are massive in the case of both the U.S.A. and France today) are reflected in academic production patterns. If the European academic producer often aims at sheltered production to be assessed among selected peers, the American (or in general, hegemonic) pattern instigates the role model of the academic producer as the belligerent hero who seeks, and finds, public exposure and recognition, and who in the process satisfies the collective demand for new, topical intellectual issues to be initiated, used up, and replaced.
While these Americanisms may have offended some of Martin Bernal’s British upper-class values, they must also have appealed to his family-instilled sense of social obligation as discharged through scholarly excellence and fame. He has utilised these characteristics of the American academic scene with the same capacity for absorption and mastery as is demonstrated in his polyglot language skills and his stunning display of erudition, which show him to be the scion of an intellectual dynasty he is.
The above goes a long way to explain the scope of the Black Athena debate and the peculiarly insistent stance of its protagonist. In addition there may be something of a band-wagon effect producing a ‘Black Athena industry’ (including the present collection...), but the vehemence of the debate reveals that, instead of opportunism, profound emotions and convictions are involved on all sides. Understandably so, considering the scope of Bernal’s project. The publication of Volume II in 1991 meant not only a further increase of the number of disciplines involved in the debate, but also a marked change of tone. As long as the Black Athena project remained (as in Volume I) essentially a review of the image of Egypt in European intellectual history, with — as was the author’s stated intention — mere truncated and only lightly referenced previews of the expected findings of the next volumes, the project was by and large welcomed for its solid foundation in scholarship, and critical sense of Eurocentric and racialist prejudices informing previous generations of classicists now long dead. Glen Bowersock, the leading American classicist, proved far from blind to the oddities even of Volume I, yet he could declare:
‘This is an astonishing work, breathtakingly bold in conception and passionately written. It is the first of three projected volumes that are designed to undermine nothing less than the whole consensus of classical scholarship, built up over two hundred years, on the origins of ancient Greek civilization. (...) Bernal shows conclusively that our present perception of the Greeks was artificially pieced together between the late eighteenth century and the present. (...) Bernal’s treatment of this theme is both excellent and important.’[81]
However, when Volume II was published four years later, it addressed the specifics of eastern Mediterranean ancient history — a topic constituting the life’s work of hundreds of living researchers. And it did so in a truly alarming fashion, less well written than Volume I, invoking yet more contentious Egyptian etymologies for ancient Greek proper names and lexical items, insisting on the cultic penetration not only of Neith but of specific minor Egyptian gods to the Aegean, relying on mythological material as if whatever kernels of historical fact this might contain could readily be identified, claiming physical Egyptian presence in the Aegean by reference to irrigation works, a monumental tumulus, and traditions of a Black pharaoh’s military campaign into South Eastern Europe and adjacent Asia, playing havoc with the established chronologies of the Ancient Near East, attributing the Mycenaean shaft graves to Levantine invaders identified as early Hyksos yet bringing Egyptian culture, and reiterating a sympathy for Afrocentrist ideas which meanwhile had become rather more vocal and politicised in the U.S.A. It was at this stage that many scholars parted company with Bernal and that genuine and justified scholarly critique was combined with right-wing political contestation against the unwelcome, anti-Eurocentric, intercultural and intercontinental message of the Black Athena project as a whole — a development formalised and meant to be finalised by the publication of Black Athena revisited in 1996 under the editorship of Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers.
Moreover, a peculiar feature of the debate has been that Martin Bernal has remained the single main producer in the Black Athena industry, not only with his two fat tomes and a modest number of independent articles, but particularly as the author of a large number of often quite lengthy responses,[82] which take up major and minor challenges of his stated views. Two more such responses were specifically written for the present volume,[83] and an entire volume of them is now underway as the answer to Black Athena revisited.
One thing which the editors of Black Athena revisited have certainly managed to bring about, is a state of alarm and embarrassment among all scholars and lay people seriously interested in pursuing the perspectives which Martin Bernal has sought to open in the Black Athena volumes. How could one honestly and publicly continue to derive inspiration from an author whose work has been characterised in the following terms by a well-informed critic like Robert Palter:
‘...those today who are seriously concerned with formulating a radical political critique of contemporary scholarship (...) might wish to think twice before associating themselves with the methods and claims of Bernal’s work; (...) for his lapses in the most rudimentary requirements of sound historical study — traditional, critical, any kind of historical study — should make one wary of his grandiose historiographical pronouncements. (...) In the absence of adequate controls on evidence and argument, the view of history presented in Black Athena is continually on the verge of collapsing into sheer ideology.’[84]
Sarah Morris praises the critical self-reflection Black Athena has brought about among classicists, but finds this too dearly paid for:
‘On the other hand, it has bolstered, in ways not anticipated by the author, an Afrocentrist agenda which returns many debates to ground zero and demolishes decades of scrupulous research by excellent scholars such as Frank Snowden. An ugly cauldron of racism, recrimination, and verbal abuse has boiled up in different departments and disciplines; it has become impossible for professional Egyptologists to address the truth without abuse, and Bernal’s arguments have only contributed to an avalanche of radical propaganda without basis in fact’.[85]
Mary Lefkowitz says she does not doubt Bernal’s good intentions yet finds him criminally guilty of what must be, especially in her eyes, the greatest crime: providing apparently serious, scholarly fuel to what otherwise might have remained the Afrocentrist straw fire:
‘To the extent that Bernal has contributed to the provision of an apparently respectable underpinning for Afrocentric fantasies, he must be held culpable, even if his intentions are honorable and his motives are sincere.’[86]
Yet all this cannot be the entire story, and it is probably only a one-sided version of whatever story. How else to account, for instance, for the praise which the prominent Egyptologist and archaeologist B.G. Trigger piles on Black Athena? He sees Martin Bernal’s project certainly not as a mere exercise in consciousness-raising meant for Blacks in search of identity,[87] but as a serious contribution to the history of archaeology — one of his own specialisms[88] — and as a stimulating pointer at the possibilities of innovation in that discipline, which he considers to be bogged down by processual scientism.[89]
Yet even Trigger stresses Bernal’s methodological inadequacies, rejects his contentious chronology particularly with regard to the Hyksos, and criticises the way in which he tends to take ancient myth as a statement of fact. And given the large numbers of both Egyptian and Greek myths, he argues, it is easy for any scholar to take his pick and claim historical connections between selections from both sets. Moreover, as an Egyptologist Trigger appears unconvinced by Bernal’s argument in favour of the possibility of extensive Asian and European campaigns by Senwosret I or III.
The Black Athena debate can be seen to operate at two levels:
• that of the political agenda of the editors of Black Athena revisited, which revolves on the grossly irresponsible denial[90] of the multicultural, intercontinental and multicentred origins, both of classical Greek civilisation, and ultimately of Western European and modern global civilisation; character defamation is among their lines of attack.[91]
• and that of the majority of contributors, who — whatever their political convictions — are merely doing their jobs as scholars, justifiably defining and defending, not so much the political and economic resources, but the methodological and theoretical principles, of their respective disciplines.
The factual, chronological and methodological chords struck by Trigger as a thoroughly sympathetic reviewer reverberate, with dissonants and fortissimi, throughout Black Athena revisited and the other venues of the Black Athena debate. Many complain of the defects and even of the absence of methodology in Bernal’s writings.[92] Many are appalled by what they consider to be Bernal’s confusion of culture, ethnicity and race.[93] They suspect him of a nineteenth-century, lapidary belief in physical displacements of people through migration and conquest as prime explanatory factors in cultural change. They blame him for an unsystematic and linguistically incompetent handling of etymologies. While Bernal positively prides himself (to the extent of claiming to have authored a Kuhnian paradigm shift) in championing modes of interpretation which were far more favoured in the beginning of the twentieth century than towards its end, many critics do not so much find fault with his specific points but simply — and clearly for disciplinary, internal, rather than political and external reasons — refuse to recognise his approach as legitimate, up-to-date ancient history.[94] As John Baines has pointed out,[95] the notion of paradigms may be scarcely applicable in the field of ancient history:
‘Despite the extended applications of Kuhn’s term that have appeared since the publication of his book [Kuhn’s, i.e. The structure of scientific revolutions, o.c.], ancient Near Eastern studies are not a ‘science’ or a discipline in the Kuhnian sense. Rather, they are the sum of a range of methods and approaches applied to a great variety of materials from a particular geographical region and period; even definitions of the area and period are open to revision. So far as the ancient Near East relates to ‘paradigms’, these are, for example, theories of social complexity and change, or in other cases theories of literary form and discourse. This point is where Bernal’s aims depart farthest from those of many specialists in ancient Near Eastern studies.’
Specialists in eighteenth and nineteenth century CE intellectual history have little difficulty showing that some of Bernal’s allegedly racist villains were in fact heroes of intercultural learning and tolerance.[96] His Afrocentrist-inspired views of Ancient Egyptian science have been severely attacked by Palter.[97] Several find his treatment of what he alleges to be the undercurrent of Egyptian knowledge in European culture since Late Antiquity incompetent.[98] Many critics question whether Bernal’s stated intention of trying to understand Greek civilisation is sincere: all they can see is an obsession with provenance, with intercontinental cultural displacement, and with late 20th century CE identity politics, but certainly no coherent and empathic appreciation of the inner structure, the moral and aesthetic orientations, religious experience and life world of the Ancient Egyptians, Levantines and Greeks.[99]
These are very serious points, although not necessarily destructive for the Black Athena thesis as a whole. An examination of Bernal’s epistemology may help put them in perspective.
Trigger’s impression that Bernal points to the way ahead rather than to outdated methods of the past, is evidently not shared by most other critics. Thus Manning,[100] who contemptuously calls Trigger a ‘pseudo-realist’ (p. 264), in a full-length exploration of the epistemological context of Black Athena, states:
‘Black Athena is in many ways set within the pre-processual, empirical, culture-historical framework of traditional archaeology (...), and forms a radical critique of several of the trends in the subsequent (...) ‘new’ or ‘processual’ modes of archaeology. This is both a requirement for the book’s approach (with its concern for ‘origins’) and ironic, as the object-typology-culture-identity approach leads (via its study of specific peoples) inexorably to non-holistic, extreme and often racist or race-centred interpretations.’
For Manning the central dilemma of Black Athena revolves on the issue of realism:
‘If these relativist-orientated, or post-processual, modes of thought became dominant in the discipline, then the debate over Black Athena is not about facts or evidence at all, but should only be a critique of the ideology in which its author is enmeshed along with everyone else. In these paradigms, the value of Black Athena would be political and social; it would probably be seen as another worthwhile attack on the imperialist, late capitalist, male chauvinist, and racist forces against which the Good continue the unending struggle...’.[101]
Although tongue in cheek, Manning does apparently not intend to be dismissive of Black Athena, but merely to define the specific epistemological settings within which Bernal’s project can or cannot make sense. Manning’s escape clause lies in what we can call the relativity of relativism:
‘The acceptance of a realist mode of thought within a wider acceptance of a relativist, or socially constructed, framework both allows for Black Athena, and for a satisfactory discussion of it. Uncritical positivism, or relativism, does not’.[102]
As an assessment of the epistemological options this conclusion is adequate but it scarcely offers a solution; for as Manning has stated at the outset of his argument, against the background of recent advances in the critique of objective knowledge by such philosophers as Rorty and Bernstein,[103]
‘the historian creates [original emphasis] the past, and what Bernal considers to be the objective reality is his [original emphasis] reality (largely set within a paradigm of race)...’[104]
But even though he has only led us to realise that the problem behind Black Athena is an insurmountable epistemological contradiction, Manning is correct in claiming that realism is one of the underlying assumptions of Bernal’s project and of his political stance. E.g., speaking on Said Bernal declares that he is aware of the parallels between his and Said’s work, however:
‘his work is literary and allusive, mine historical and pedestrian. More importantly, I do not accept his view that Orientalism — or for that matter ancient history — are almost entirely self referential.’[105]
In other words, for Bernal, there is a past reality i.e. a real past out there, which we can at least partially capture even if we are largely determined by set paradigms and the sociology of knowledge (while for Said, orientalism’s ‘conception in sin’ — European expansion and racialism — could never produce valid knowledge of Asian and Islamic cultures and their history).