Cultural Continuity in the Ancient World, and Bernal's 'Black Athena'

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

This text, in its original manuscript form, was the second chapter (original title: 'The Construction of the Intellectual world of Antiquity') of the book The Shrine in the Sea. It dates from June 2004. It did not make it through to the text which was published in 2015 with the new title: The Sacred History of Being. I’ve re-edited and updated the text (May 2018). The text also contains a link to an analysis of the final volume of Black Athena, which takes a linguistic look at possible cultural connections between east and west. 

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We have already come to terms with the idea that the world of ancient Greece, as it has been presented to us, is to a large extent the product of nearly two hundred years of industrious activity by scholars, and that the evidence for ancient Greece is not particularly well served by this construct.

In particular, philosophy in ancient Greece has been made into a wholly secular phenomenon, with no history in the religious life of the Greeks. The evidence does not bear this out: Harold Cherniss demolished the idea that Plato’s Academy was a teaching and research establishment along the lines of the modern university back in the 1930s, and there are a number of clues which suggest that philosophy has a strong connection with the religious life of Greece. 

Further, the ‘history’ of philosophy created by Aristotle in his Metaphysics is an entity which conforms in format to a number of his other works, in that he begins from ‘common opinion’ and leads his audience in the direction of  ‘true opinion’.  It may have been ‘common opinion’ in Athens that the presocratics and the sophists were pioneers of philosophy, but that is opinion, and not history. We have other materials to work with. This book puts Greek, Egyptian and Near Eastern materials together within a new hypothetical model of the intellectual model of antiquity.

It is a serious matter to claim that generations of scholars have not understood important aspects of the subject of their study, and that their methods of interpretation have been riven with systematic fault. This work has much to say about the modern intellectual world, since that is a major part of the problem in our understanding of the past, as well as the ancient mental world itself. In part, this is because the work is an attempt to develop a pattern of discourse suitable for the understanding of antiquity in the modern world. To achieve this, it is necessary to put our relationship with our past into a proper context. Otherwise it is impossible to understand either of these worlds. The enlightenment view of an ancient ‘urdummheit’ underpinning cultural production is here shifted out of place, so that it becomes an intermittent phenomenon in human cultural history rather than a certain continuum, and now capable of casting light on our own times.

The enlightenment agenda (and its products) has been subject to severe criticism since 1987, beginning with Martin Bernal. The community of ancient historians and classical scholars generally reacted with good grace to his pioneering and imperfectly researched analysis of two centuries of classical scholarship: Black Athena: the Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985. This was partly because some of the community was already uncomfortable with the history of their subject, and unhappy with the assumptions of cultural superiority (not just of the Greeks over the barbarians) which seemed to be implicit in the way classics operated as a subject.

The community of classicists and historians is one which is very dependent on peer approval and the ‘soundness’ of scholarship – of importance in any subject where – either through limited availability of evidence, or through the existence of discontinuities of evidence and interpretation – it is possible for an individual to wander off into territory of no value or credibility to the peer group. 

As a community therefore, the classicists and historians were happier for a scholar to provide the criticism from the outside. If the criticism was sound, its conclusions might be absorbed without the necessity of a reorganisation of the hierarchy of the subject (though this would remain a risk). If incorrect, it could be dismissed as an amateur effort. And even better, the analysis focussed on the now obvious faults in the study of classics and ancient history – the eurocentric racism, and the strange methodology which could promote the judgement and interpretative genius of the scholar above evidence itself. These were things which the classicists and historians would not defend at the time of the publication of Bernal’s book (1987) as they might have done as late as 1945.

On balance therefore, it could have been so much worse. Bernal’s attack was aimed at features of classical studies already overdue for serious overhaul, and several of his charges fell on receptive ground. Its agenda is essentially one which would have been familiar in a sociology department In the late 1960s. It was not written then because no-one within the subject was particularly interested in rocking their academic boat, and it took another twenty years for an interested and able outsider to come along and deliver what appeared to be the coup de grace to a number of the subject’s sacred cows.

Another feature of the Bernal analysis which would have been pleasing to the classicists and historians was that it did not succeed in moving very much around. Though it was concerned with this.  The lasting impression of his study is that the principal problem is the attitude of the classicists to their subject, rather the problem being a combination of attitude and what they had done – wilfully - to the accuracy of our understanding of the ancient world as a whole, through the evaluation and interpretation of evidence.

An exception to this was Bernal’s attempt to establish contact between Egypt and Greece in the 2^nd millennium B.C.E, based largely on a reified reading of Greek myths. In this he seems to have been following the lead of the poet Robert Graves, who read all sorts of myths in terms of charter documents and poetic accounts of actual political events. Additionally, Bernal suggested that a significant part of the Greek vocabulary could be shown to be related to the vocabulary of the ancient Egyptians.

Both of these attempts received serious and generally well-tempered criticism, even if the arguments have not been taken on board. What he was trying to do was to take ancient Greece out of its exalted orbit above all other civilizations, and root it in what he assumed to have been a cultural continuum around the Mediterranean sea from at least the mid-2^nd century B.C.E up until the classical period of Greece in the 5^th and 4^th centuries B.C.E. Bernal pointed to the evidence within the texts of the 1^st millennium which suggested cultural continuities with ancient Egypt – all dismissed by the classicists in favour of evidence in texts which could be interpreted as suggesting the opposite.

Bernal’s attempts to establish cultural continuity with the civilizations around the Mediterranean were hampered (the volume looking more closely at the linguistic affinities of Egypt and Greece did not appear until 2006) by the fact that myths are not simply encodings of historical and political change, and that the exchange of words between linguistic groups is, by itself, weak evidence for cultural continuity, though it can indicate significant  cultural connection.  He was correct to guess at the existence of the cultural continuity, I think, but ill-equipped to establish such a thing.

To do this requires moving things around – particularly the relationship of Greek philosophy to its patterns of religious belief and cult practice; and the relationship of Greek patterns of religious belief and cult practice to parallel ideas and activities in the Near East and Egypt. Currently, for classicists at least, the relationship between philosophy and Greek life and religious belief remains numinously and safely vague, despite two centuries of formal research activity in Europe. And the relationship between a philosophical theology and religious belief in the ancient Near East and in Egypt is presumed not to exist at all. This was a taller order than Bernal or anyone in his position could manage.