The Classicist Response to Black Athena (Writing to Denise Eileen McCoskey)

[I wrote this mail in response to Denise Eileen McCoskey's article 'Black Athena, White Power', which was published in Eidolon in November 2018. The subtitle for the article is: 'Are We Paying the Price for Classics' Response to Bernal?']

On Sat, Dec 8, 2018 at 8:40 AM Thomas Yaeger wrote:

Dear Prof. McCoskey, 

Many thanks for writing the article 'Black Athena, White Power', published in Eidolon. It articulates a number of my own thoughts over the last thirty years, about classics and post-enlightenment eurocentric perceptions of ancient civilization. Black Athena made a huge impact on me on first publication, and the book was largely responsible for me moving to London to study in 1989. In London I had the option of studying ancient near-eastern languages and history, as well as Greece and Rome. 

In the end, the controversy over Black Athena made me interested in the mechanics of what makes scholarly arguments acceptable, and unacceptable. That's down to education, preconceptions, and the contemporary cultural context in which the arguments are made. It is no wonder that it can take so long to shift a body of ideas which is long past its prime. 

You wrote: 

...most classicists did not want to take up the difficult and often messy questions that were being posed. They preferred to insist that the Greeks should not, could not be questioned at all,.... In doing so, they reinforced a powerful yet solipsistic image of the ancient Greeks and also classicists themselves as exceptional, self-created and self-sufficient...

This has resulted in the discipline of classics essentially trading in forms of fiction since the middle of the eighteenth century. There is also (as I quickly discovered) a cavalier disregard for evidence which does not support these fictions (there is a lot more of that evidence than is imagined). But the difficulty that classics finds itself in is partly the product of a general will to shape the past in terms of what suits a modern and distinctly western cultural perspective. That also needs to be addressed. This 'general will' involves not only arguing for the supremacy of the Greeks, but the twisting of the history of ideas to support this notion. As a consequence, classics is one of the gatekeepers for two preposterous notions - the Greeks being a wholly autocthonous and self-sufficient cultural entity, and that no-one before them engaged with philosophical abstraction, or had the intellectual capacity to do so. 

My engagement with Black Athena largely revolves around its implications for the general history of ideas, since the linguistic evidence, particularly that published in the third volume, suggests strongly that the Egyptians were as comfortable with abstract thought as the Greeks, and there are plenty of plausible Egyptian loan words connected with abstract concepts in the Greek vocabulary. But the Egyptians were not the only external influence on the development of Greece, and may not have been the most important cultural influence between the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.  Ancient Assyria seems to have played a significant role in the early intellectual and political development of Greece, particularly around 700 BCE. 

Much relevant detail is now known about the Assyrian connection. But not to classicists, who usually know little about Mesopotamia. This is not entirely their fault, since one of the most important papers on the subject was published in the proceedings of an ANE conference, and was not written for classicists in any case. I also wrote a paper on the cultural influence of Assyria on Greece at around the same time (2004), using mainly Greek sources (so far only available on my blog, and published only recently). It has been looked at hundreds of times, but has attracted no comments at all, despite the potential implications of the argument for our understanding of the beginnings of Greek philosophy. 

You might want to take a look at these two papers, since they both undermine the notion that Greek civilization was self-made. They also, from the point of view of classics scholars, come from an unexpected angle, and put new information into any discussion about the early development of Greece. 

1. Parpola, S., 2003b Assyria's Expansion in the 8th and 7th Centuries BCE and Its Long-Term Repercussions in the West, - in W. G. Dever and S. Gitin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel and their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palestine. Proceedings of the Centennial Symposium, W.F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research and the American Schools of Oriental Research, Jerusalem, May 29-May 31, 2000 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 99-111  

2. Yaeger, T., "Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire" https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2018/10/greece-and-cultural-impact-of-assyrian.html (published October 11, 2018). [Parpola has read this article]. 

My general thesis on abstract thought in the ancient world is: The Sacred History of Being, which was published in November 2015 (The Anshar Press,  ISBN: 9781311760678). It discusses not only the Greek and pre-Greek notions of Being, but also the various obstacles which medieval and modern scholarship has erected which make it very difficult to understand the early history of ideas. https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/p/the-sacred-history-of-being-as-its.html

Thanks again for writing such an excellent article. 

Best regards, 

Thomas Yaeger

[Reply received Feb 02, 2019].

Orientalism and the Post-Enlightenment Agenda (Writing to Katherine Blouin)

[In 2018 I had some brief conversation with Dr. Katherine Blouin via Twitter. Which prompted the following email]. 

 I thought I should tell you about my work, since I am part of the largely disorganised cohort working for a radical change in our understanding of the role of ancient Greece in the development of western civilization.

My initial background is in classics and philosophy. At UCL I also studied Mesopotamia (languages and culture). This study was across three departments - UCL ancient history (text corpus, with Amelie Kuhrt), UCL department of Hebrew (Sumerian, with Mark Geller), and SOAS for Akkadian language (mainly with Andrew George). As a result I left college with a view of the relationship between Greece and Mesopotamia which was quite different from what I was led to believe while I was there.

 I graduated in 1992. I've been writing on the relationship between Mesopotamia and Greece since then. I arrived late to Said's work, since I was initially in thrall to Martin Bernal's thesis in Black Athena (though I did attend Said's series of lectures at UCL in the fall of 1993).

My main interest is in the history of philosophy. The conventional history of philosophy is pretty much a fabrication, The evidence doesn't support what is said about it, and it isn't actually that difficult to detect the fraud. Which led me to consider why the fraud was easily accepted. The answer turned out to be, as Bernal suggested, the post-Enlightenment agenda. The Enlightenment sought to understand everything in terms of common sense explanations, and not much in ancient philosophy conformed to common sense ideas.

So I've been researching and writing, off and on since 1993, about the origins of philosophy, Greek philosophical writing, and the cultural history of the west.

I was also interested in the role of anthropology in our understanding of past modes of thought. In 1993 I wrote a study of Frazer's essay on Plato, in which he argued that the idea of 'Being' was a barren notion, and nothing useful could be said of it. That is not what they thought in antiquity. So his later work was essentially a reframing of the past with one of its most important concepts entirely written out (formally published in 2016).

Hence I wrote The Sacred History of Being, which was finally published in November 2015. The point of this book was to show two things (amongst others): that the concept of Being was of immense importance before Plato, and that modern arguments about the nature of the Divine did not at all resemble ancient arguments, and so we could not easily understand what the ancients were talking about.

So we have a real problem. I've published a couple of volumes since The Sacred History of Being, which largely serve to illuminate how the ancients understood both physical reality and the Divine. Without a grasp of their radically different way of understanding, much of the ancient world is just unintelligible (oracles, omens, sacrifice, extispicy, etc).

These extra volumes serve as the basis for understanding that most ancient divine cult was transcendentalist in nature. Meaning that religious thought already embraced ideas and abstractions which surface in the writings of Plato and others. In Mesopotamia, in Israel, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, etc.

Which brings me to where I am now. I showed in The Sacred History of Being that the Assyrians and Babylonians were capable of abstract thought, and conceived of the Divine as a pure abstraction. They understood the basis of dialectical thought (collection and division) which the Greeks are credited with. They embraced the idea of excellence as the Greeks did, and the concept informed the education of their kings. They understood morality to emerge from the logic of excellence, as the Greeks did. They also conducted public debates on the relative merits of this or that good thing, as the Greeks also did.

 I intend next year to publish a concluding volume in the series which provides the evidence for these Assyrian and Babylonian parallels.

 After that, the jig will be up for the classicists. But I have no expectation that they will take notice of what has happened.

 One of the [key] things they have taken on board from their subject is the pursuit of excellence. They pursue this through what they understand as the rigourousness of the study of their source materials. The context of these materials, and the rest of the world, have relatively no importance for them. So why should they change their views?

Thomas Yaeger, October 18, 2018. [Reply received]

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. 

***

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.

Questions and Answers

The Sacred History of Being addresses many questions. Some of these have been puzzles over the centuries. What follows is a list of fifty of these questions (some of which are framed as proposals for discussion), all of which are given some kind of answer in the course of the text. Other questions are discussed, including the strange description of the Great Year in relation to the life of man, in the famous conversation between Solon and Croesus, recounted by Herodotus.

There isn't much about my use of methodology in the course of SHB. It would have been a tedious way of starting the book, and instead I chose to write about the development of my understanding of certain problematic questions during my formative years, and some of my reading, as a way to introduce the main subjects I wanted to deal with. But there is a methodology present. The text is the result of the application of a Husserlian approach to the study of ancient history. This approach has been refined over the years, and is capable of producing rich results, as I think SHB shows. I intend to write more about this methodology at some other time.

Here is the list.

1. Is Plato writing literary fiction when he talks about the Forms? 

2. The history of philosophy is old, and was understood in the 2nd millennium B.C.E.

3. Are there philosophical ideas in Homer?

4. How did scholars schooled in philosophy not notice philosophical procedures in texts from the Ancient Near East in the 2nd millennium B.C.E.?

5. What was Homer joining together? Literature and poetry in the Late Bronze Age.

6. The undiscovered philosophical underpinnings of the liturgy of the New Year Festival in Babylon (Enuma Elish).

7. How is it that statues of the gods are themselves divine in the ancient world?

8. How can you make gods, and why?

9. The significance of the Undefined Dyad in ancient thought.

10. When is polytheism actually polytheism, and when is it monotheism?

11. Why is the Ontological Argument such a disaster for our understanding of ancient philosophy concerning the gods?

12. Why was philosophy demoted from its original status by German scholarship?

13. Can the nature of Reality be accommodated by an Aristotelian logical model?

14. How and why did Egypt lose its reputation for philosophy?

15. What is the meaning and purpose of the Assyrian Sacred Tree?

16. When scholars blink: Not seeing what there is to be seen.

17. What aspect of philosophy did Pythagoras learn at Babylon?

18. How the kings of ancient Assyria could be gods.

19. Philosophical analysis before Plato.

20. The most secret and sacred of rituals: the setting up of gods in Heaven.

21. How old is Jewish mysticism, and what is its origin?

22. What aspects of the Divine have existence on Earth?

23. Why is the home of the Mesopotamian god Ea at the bottom of the sea?

24. Why Assyrian kings on campaign wished to touch the ‘Upper and Lower Seas.’

25. Why ancient cultic life is not best understood as religion.

26. Is the origin of the world always with us?

27. What did the European Enlightenment leave behind?

28. How man was instructed by the first sages in the art and science of civilization, and what the story means.

29. How much fiction is there in our rational understanding of the past?

30. The myth of Progress, and the power of Abstraction.

31. What theory of reality is present and cultivated from the 2nd millennium B.C.E., and can be found in the Nag Hammadi codices?

32. Why the Assyrian Court valued scholarship and excellence.

33. What is the True light of the gods?

34. How old is Abstract Thought?

35. Ancient Cult practice and the pursuit of Knowledge.

36. The necessity of knowing the mind of God, and how it is known.

37.  What is the Doctrine of Wholes and Totalities?

38.  Is Reality One or Many?

39. How 'God' is different from the gods.  

40.  What is the nature of Reality?

41. The properties and attributes of the Divine.

42.  What is the complexion of the Dead?

43. Why are rivers divine in Mesopotamia?

44.  What is the significance of Ocean?

45. Can holiness be conferred and taken away?

46. Why does Marduk carry a woven basket?

47. The meaning of the Mesopotamian interest in lists.

48. What is the Paradox of Knowledge?

49. What is the Sweet Song of Swans?

50. What is esoteric knowledge?


Thomas Yaeger, 22 September 2015

Language and Abstraction in Egypt and Greece

[This document is a brief summary and analysis of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena Vol 3 (2006) from August 2013. This was prepared for an interested third party. Slightly edited.]

Bernal had to choose an approach for this study of the linguistic evidence for the contact between cultures around the Mediterranean – either proceed from the certain to the less certain, and move toward the speculative, or use a chronological approach. He chose the chronological approach, which means he is using the family tree analogy quite a lot (though with some subtlety), and there are several diagrams showing hypothetical relationships and patterns of influence, not all of them reflecting his views. Both Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European relationship trees appear in different versions.

Bernal is conscious that he is equating chronology and causation – he says: “I chose a chronological scheme for two reasons: the aesthetic appeal of the narrative through time and the close link between causality and time” – p10. He admits a defect of this approach on p11 and says that “here we face … the general contradiction between accuracy and coherence” in the use of the easy to understand tree model.

This book has a much bigger overall focus than the two previous volumes, and the first five chapters are actually about Afroasiatic and IndoEuropean and their diffusion (there is a section in Ch. 2 referencing Gordon Childe and Colin Renfrew). Chapter 5 is on Greek phonology, and looks at whether or not Greek is the result of a linguistic shift or of linguistic contact. Ch. 6 looks at morphological and syntactical developments. Chapter 7 looks at the vocabulary and the incidence of lexical borrowings, and the Greeks own attitude to this. Chapter 8 looks at phonetic development in Egyptian, West Semitic and Greek over 3 millennia BCE, as reflected in lexical borrowings. Ch. 9 looks at Greek borrowings from Egyptian prefixes, including the definite articles. The detail here is enormous, and will take a long time to work through. 

The book is now something like what I was expecting. Ch. 10 & 11 look at major Egyptian terms found in Greek – muthos, moira, etc., and Ch.12 looks at 16 minor roots. Ch. 13 is about Semitic sibilants, and borrowings of these from the Caananites. Ch. 14 looks at more Semitic loans in Greek. Ch. 15 is about some Egyptian and Semitic semantic clusters in Greek, focussing on words related to nature and agriculture, cooking and medicine.

From Ch. 15 onwards Bernal’s treatment is to cover both Semitic and Egyptian words in a systematic way, looking at semantic clusters. Ch.16 covers weapons, warfare and hunting, shipping. Ch. 17 covers Society, Politics, Law, and interestingly ‘abstraction’. Particularly since the next chapter is about religion. The section on abstraction begins with an extraordinary sentence, which expresses the exasperation created by the modern refusal to recognise the role of abstraction in cultures before Greece. He says:

“Abstraction is the inner sanctum of the Greek vocabulary. The continued use of these terms in ‘western’ philosophy have given these words, and ancient Greek culture as [a] whole, an important impetus to elevation to the superhuman, universal and eternal”.

He argues that the presence of so many words of Egyptian origin in this semantic area of the Greek vocabulary “indicates not conquest but the high status of Egyptian during the New Kingdom in the second half of the Second Millennium and again in the late seventh and sixth centuries BCE.” He then passes on to an analysis of Egyptian abstract concepts including the concept of completion, the limit (telos, also looked at in Ch. 10), the idea of boundary, and Sophia (from sb3, also discussed in Ch. 10), and the etymology for eskatos, meaning edge, end, and extreme, once applied in spatial terms, but later applied to time and morality. Which is very familiar territory, since it was the noticing of the technical use of the concept of completion in one of the hymns of Akhenaten that first started me on the pursuit of abstract technical concepts in cultures which preceded Greece. The fact that these concepts are all mentioned on the same page (422), even if their detailed discussion is elsewhere in the book, indicates that he has a clear grip on the fact that our way of understanding our intellectual history is upside down: abstractions are early, not late developments.

Chapter 18 onwards is the most important part of the book. Ch. 18 explores the terminology around structures, personnel, cult objects, rituals, sacrifices (this discussion is on the money), incense, flowers, scents, aura, and mysteries. Ch. 19 is focussed on Divine names in relation to gods, mythical creatures, and heroes. All of this is interesting and useful, but though he uses his sources critically, he hasn’t got a grip on ancient theology any more sound than they have (his background is in sociology). He also discusses mainly names which have problematic etymologies, rather than the ones which are reasonably probable. The discussion of the relationship between Zeus-Ammon and Amon-Re is interesting, but not well informed with an understanding of detail outside purely etymological speculation. He notes that both Zeus and Ammon were associated with rams, but is in no position to take that observation any further. He does suggest however that the name Zeus may be a public name for a god whose identity is otherwise hidden (we’ve seen that arrangement before!), which might explain the association between Zeus and Amon. He doesn’t explicitly draw the rather obvious conclusion that the visible and the invisible have been joined in these yokings.

Bernal is good on Atum and Apophis (more clear evidence that the Egyptians were thinking in terms of abstract ideas about the creation of the world -p468), and less good on Ra/Re, who is hardly discussed. The discussion of the origin of the Greek Puthos, an epithet of Apollo and a name associated with Delphi, covers a number of possibilities more or less inconclusively.

Geographical features and place names are covered next (Ch20). The focus is on natural features, and city names. Ch 21 is all about Sparta. He talked about this in vol 1, but didn’t spend thirty-odd pages on the subject the first time around. He looks at an Egyptian etymology for the name Sparta, as he did before. The discussion here is extremely interesting – he looks at the possible connections between Sp3t and the capital of Lydia, which was called Sardis by the Greeks. The Persian name was Sparda or Saparta, and the Aramaic was Sprd. All of the discussion here is in terms of linguistic changes, but underneath the discussion seems to be the possibility that the Spartans came from somewhere else. Bernal speculates on the possible relationship connections between Anubis (‘Lord of sp3’, etc) and Sparta, and explores some Egyptian religious punning around sp3. He also covers some largely sterile discussion by other scholars of the origins of the names ‘Lakedaimon’ and ’Lakonia’.

Bernal quotes Plutarch, and reinforces the half-articulated theme of the joining of the visible and invisible worlds –

when Nephthys gave birth to Anubis, Isis treated the child as if it were her own; for Nephthys is that which is beneath the earth and invisible, Isis that which is above the earth and visible; and the circle which touches these, called the horizon, being common to both has received the name Anubis, and is represented in form like a dog; for a dog can see with his eyes both by night and by day alike.

The relationship between the Spartans and the Jews is discussed, on the basis of the well known references in Maccabees and in Josephus. The references suggest that the Spartans and the Jews are kinsmen. The supposed date of this claim is around 300 BCE. Two succeeding letters suggest that the Jews are ‘brothers’ of the Spartans. Bernal points to a discussion of the subject by Eduard Meyer, and his belief that the writings these items were drawn from were by Hekataios of Abdera. Hekataios said, on the subject of the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt, that:

The natives of the land surmised that unless they removed the foreigners their troubles would never be resolved. At once therefore, the aliens were driven from the country, and the most outstanding and active among them banded together and, as some say, were cast ashore in Greece and certain other regions. Their teachers were notable men, among them being Danaus and Cadmus. But the greater number were driven into what is now called Judea which is not far from Egypt and was at that time utterly uninhabited. The colony was headed by a man called Moses.

Lots of contentious stuff to discuss here! But Bernal argues that “from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period one finds substantial indications of Egyptian and West Semitic civilization in Sparta, one aspect of which is linguistic. This is altogether what one should expect of the southernmost state on the Greek mainland.”

Chapter 22 is about Athena and Athens, which Bernal has discussed before, but not at such length (pages 540-582).

The Conclusion begins with a quote by the historian J.M.Roberts (New History of the World, 2002, p86) –

The spectacular heritage of Egypt’s monuments and history counted not in centuries but in millennia stagger the critical sense and stifle criticism. Yet the creative quality of Egyptian civilization seems, in the end to miscarry… it is difficult not to sense an ultimate sterility, a nothingness, at the heart of this glittering tour de force…. Egypt’s military and economic power in the end made little permanent difference to the world. Her civilization was never successfully spread abroad…

Bernal’s response is that “The purpose of these volumes is to refute this widespread conventional view repeated by Roberts. I hope to have demonstrated that neither ancient Egypt nor the pagan Levant were dead ends. Both of them, through Greece and Rome and the civilizations of the monotheistic religions, have been central and crucial to western history. “

Bernal finishes his conclusion with a well-known passage by Charles Darwin, which reveals that he never really thought he would shift the paradigm in his lifetime:

Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume…, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine…. But I look with confidence to the future – to young and rising naturalists who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.

I've picked up on a couple of subsidiary themes in the book, because I think they are more important than they may seem. Bernal's position has shifted since the first volume of Black Athena. He isn't always looking at things from the point of view of a sociologist in this book, but has a more anthropological interest in both the interaction of ancient cultural groups, and the suppression of the role of Egypt and other ancient cultures on the development of Greece. What I mean by this is that whereas sociologists are, by and large, interested in the mechanics of social organisation, and understanding these mechanics within various models, anthropologists have more interest in the detail of the mechanics, including those aspects which they regard as dependent on the local cultural context, which are (or are deemed to be) irrational, or are regarded as pathological. I think he has moved in the course of putting this book together to a position where the suppression of the evidence for cultural interchange, and the suppression of the existence of a capacity to think in complex and sophisticated abstractions in the ancient world, is not something which can be understood purely in sociological terms, but needs to be understood in terms of a framework which can deal with the irrational and the pathological in human culture.

In other words, something else is going on with the suppression of the past, which is beyond understanding as the product of racism and an orientalist view of the world. This is where he seemed to start, but the reality is more complicated, and he has shifted position along with the progress of the project. He has been writing all along about a phenomenon which involves a high degree of irrationality, and which may be best understood as pathological.

He mentions the fact that both dirt and the holy were often joined together in the ancient mind through the concept of taboo, and revulsion was often the response to both. The response to the dirty isn't problematic, but revulsion for the holy is complicated. The holy or the divine can be defined as something which is beyond human reach and understanding, and that it is therefore not acceptable or even possible for the purely human to reach or understand things which are holy. This can be true even if the whole thrust of a civilization holding this view is toward the achievement of the holy, and the understanding of what is divine. In the case of Egypt in particular there can be no doubt that the pursuit of the divine by the Egyptians is absolutely unmistakeable to us. We know plenty about some aspects of their religion and religious organization, but very little in comparison about their society and its organisation, and how the two might have fitted together.

Bernal remains a sociologist in that he hasn't made the leap to understanding the relationship of some of the abstract terminology he discusses to the gods and understanding of the divine, which is why he collects the terms together at the close of the section looking at Society, Politics, and Law. In essence what we have done, in order to make study of the past possible, is to make its real nature, even if we have no understanding of it, taboo. We understand it in terms of models which have very little to do with available information from the past, and we shoehorn entire civilizations into interpretative frameworks which suit our purposes. And that is what we (as a culture) want. The past is better as a fiction. We are mortally afraid of the 'glittering tour de force', and the possibility that Egyptian culture enshrined something which was not wholly irrational, and was not an example of a pathology lasting for millennia. We made Greece into an acceptable antecedent culture for an ancestor, even though it is clearly in the same cultural orbit as Egypt and the Near East, and have stripped out from it (as far as possible) all those aspects of the ancient world which we find  unacceptable, strange and unfathomable. The rest we simply fail to notice.

Notes on the text are gathered together between pages 587 and 694. There is a glossary between pages 695 and 711.There is a useful list of Greek Words and Names with Proposed Afroasiatic Etymologies between pages 713 and 729. A section of letter correspondences follows between pages 731 and 739. A bibliography occupies pages 741 to 795. There is an index between pages 797 and 807.

One final point: Bernal does not refer much to interpretations found in the Lexicon of Liddell and Scott, though it is mentioned in the Bibliography. The referenced edition is the 9th, which is the one revised by H. Stuart Jones and R. McKenzie in the early years of the 20th century. He doesn’t mention at all the 8th edition, which contains speculations about Semitic etymologies (and others) for Greek words. He may have omitted reference to it since there is a fair amount of twaddle in that edition. I know of at least one other Greek lexicon, dating from around 1840 which gives good Semitic parallels, but without the etymological speculation. He hasn’t referenced that either.

Marks out of 10 for this book? 10/10 for Bernal being able to do so much useful work in this area with very little in the way of assistance from specialists. And for sticking it out to the end. It’s an awesome achievement. It’s also extremely readable, even when the going gets tough.

22 Aug 2013.