Around Black Athena (1990), Seminar Two (Tim Cornell)

This is an extract from my notes made at the second seminar in the series ('Representations of Carthage'), held on the 25th January 1990 in the Institute of Archaeology at UCL. There is a full set of notes for the entire seminar series, except for the first, which I missed because I didn't catch sight of the poster in time (no web in those days). The volume (Around Black Athena: the Origins of Graeco-Roman Culture) is under pressure from other work in progress, but it will eventually arrive. TY.

***

[Introductory preamble: Last week set up the central themes of this conference and on Martin Bernal’s book. Bernal has set the agenda. Now we explore different directions, and try to explain the pressures on our understanding, and on historiography].

Tim Cornell began by saying that he was not speaking as an expert on Carthage. After reading Bernal’s book he wondered if there was a hidden truth in it. Perhaps there was an unconscious and systematic attempt to overlook Carthaginian culture. It is definitely a neglected area. Within the format of the study of the ancient world, there are few general books on Carthage.

Cornell mentioned the names of a few authors (Warmington, Picard), who use a standard sort of treatment of their subject. Like books on the Etruscans, there is a standard menu – an outline of the format: date, colonizations and contacts, wars in Sicily with the Greeks. And then the Punic Wars, and the final destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE. This format indicates that Carthage is of interest insofar as the Carthaginians had dealings with the Graeco-Roman world. I.e., Carthaginian culture is somebody else’s problem. Carthage is an earlier foundation than the Greek colonies. Timaeus argued that Carthage and Rome were founded in the same year (i.e., the Dido story). Punic war seen as war against the Carthaginians.  Modern scholars identify with the Romans. A product of the sources being from outside, and hostile. Is there a hidden programme here? Archaeology, especially since the end of WW2, has done little to redress the balance. Especially concerning the Punic Wars. Stresses an impoverished culture. Often the evidence is interpreted in the light of literary sources.

The Carthage we have is a stereotype. Aristotle is an ancient exception – in his Politics he admired their constitution, but the account of this is lost. Polybius also regarded it well, though he was critical of it. We know that there were pro-Carthaginian accounts also written in antiquity. Now lost. Plautus wrote on the subject of Carthage, shortly after the Hannibalic War, but it presents the Carthaginians in a most unsympathetic way. In general they got a hostile press, and this is also true of modern works. Stereotypes in modern works include (1) racism and antisemitism, and (2) orientalism (as discussed by Said).

For (1) the ancient prejudices involve the stereotype of the Carthaginians as intelligent, but in a mean and self-serving way. Expressed in terms of cunning and trickery. They were notorious to the Romans for treachery. For ( 2), they were dependent on trade, and are shown as greedy and corrupt by Polybius, who contrasted the Romans and the Carthaginians, and attributes a leaning to bribery and corruption to the latter.

They were also depicted as capable of great courage in certain circumstances, but essentially unwarlike, which was seen as a weakness. They failed to press their advantage. (Diodorus). They were interested in commerce rather than war. Cicero said that this destroyed their will to fight. This was illustrated by their use of mercenaries. Note the contrast between Hannibal and the opposition and lack of support from the government at home. The Romans thought of him as a worthy enemy (this view is presented more by modern writers than in antiquity).

Some writers suggest that the Carthaginians were not actually Phoenician. This racism was not in the ancients for they treated subject peoples harshly (Spaniards). [Bk10.36]. Polybius says harsh on subject people in North Africa – they doubled city taxes, and took half the crop [Whitaker – Carthaginians land imperialism late 4^th century]. No tribute from Sicily until quite late. 

Carthage was not interested in imperialism abroad in the 6^th and 5^th centuries, but they were interested in alliances (Etruria, and Rome). Protection for trade. Warfare in Sicily was perhaps originated by the Phoenicians and was prosecuted together (hence mercenaries). They did not use coinage till late. Not specifically Carthaginian. Hence perhaps a failure to follow up this advantage. Only in the third century did they carve out provinces, coinage, tax and mercenaries – the harshness of the Carthaginians noted in Polybius is to this period and circumstances, and is not seen as a racial characteristic.

They were servile to those who were stronger (college porter obsequiousness and arrogance). Plutarch said they were ”a hard and gloomy people”, etc. Cruelty was a frequent charge -  punishments included crucifixion (the torture of Regulus, etc). Their cruelty was demonstrated by their regular holocausts of children and the killing of prisoners in a sacrificial manner. There is a brutal account in Diodorus of indiscriminate killing – severed heads on javelins, etc.

The vices are seized on by modern detractors, who add others which are modern. There is some basis in the sources, but the tone of the passages is misleading – antisemitism and vulgar orientalism. The sources show no disgust at the physical appearance of the Carthaginians among the ancients.  Other modern notions arise from modern passages with no source warrants. It is a feature of orientalism that orientals are specifically given to religious fanaticism – Hindus, Etruscans, etc. It is taken as a sign of the eastern character {See Warmington). However there is no evidence in the sources for an especial religiosity among the Carthaginians (quantification of religiosity is meaningless anyway). There is a christianizing evaluation of oriental religiosity in some of the sources. Observers (Philo of Byblos, Tertullian) had their own axe to grind. Cult practice is prominent in surviving sources, but there may be a bias in the survivals.

***

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].

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.

Post-Enlightenment Plato, and That Which Cannot Move

The Plato we have we look at differently from the way he was understood in antiquity. For most of the middle ages all that was available to scholars was the first part of the Timaeus. So it is not the case that a way of understanding Plato has been handed down to us, except via the neoplatonists. But the neoplatonist understanding of Plato is deprecated as a way of understanding his work, with the consequence that modern scholars approach Plato virtually naked, with a very modern set of intellectual baggage. This can be a problem.

I wrote in SHB that:

In parallel with the changing scholarly assessment of Egyptian civilisation in the eighteenth century, Greek philosophy itself was undergoing a re-evaluation. This was essentially the first since the renaissance, when Plato was generally understood to be writing about theological matters, rather than purely philosophical questions. Now Plato needed to be co-opted into the life of reason.

Karl Friedrich Herman (1804 1855) wrote what von Wilemovitz-Moellendorff regarded as an important 'Life of Plato.' This life was 'the first to understand the development of Plato's thought.'

Well there you have problem number one: the idea of a development in Plato. So, what Plato was writing about had nothing to do with a background in cultic life, and therefore he could be approached as a writer on all fours with modern philosophers. Modern philosophers, principally after the foundation of the University of Gottingen, do research, and what they do is a secular activity.

Martin Bernal wrote that:

Gottingen can well be considered the embryo of all later, modern, diversified and professional universities. It was established in 1734 by George II, King of England and Elector of Hanover, was well endowed, and as a new foundation was able to escape many of the medieval religious and scholastic constraints that persisted in other universities. With its British connections it was a conduit for Scottish Romanticism as well as for the philosophical and political ideas of Locke and Hume.

Bernal writes about one of the founders of the University of Gottingen, Kristophe August Heumann. He says that: “As a pioneer of the new professionalism Heumann established a scholarly journal, Acta Philosophorum, in the first issue of which, in 1715, he argued that although the Egyptians were cultivated in many studies they were not ‘philosophical’.

This claim – which his contemporaries Montesquieu and Bruckner… did not dare to make – was both striking and daring in the light of the strong ancient association between philosophia and Egypt." Bernal mentions that 'three of the earliest four references to philosophia are associated with Egypt'. Isokrates specifically associated philosophy with Egypt (Bousiris, 28).

Bernal points out that modern scholars have difficulty in accepting this ancient association, and mentions one author, who, writing in 1961, consistently translated 'philosophia' as the civilisation of Egypt' (Black Athena p 216) .

Further, he writes that: “Heumann’s categorical distinction between Egyptian ‘arts and studies’ and the Greek ‘philosophy’ is rather difficult to comprehend, as his definition of the latter was ‘the
research and study of useful truths based on reason.’ Nevertheless its very imprecision made, and makes, the claim that the Greeks were the first ‘philosophers’ almost impossible to refute."

It is in fact not so difficult to comprehend, when Heumann's view is considered in its cultural context. At the time this distinction was made, Newton's mechanical philosophy and mathematics were in the ascendant. A reaction had long since set in across Europe against magic, alchemy, astrology, and other pseudo-sciences of the time. Leibniz, Newton's rival in mathematics, had, toward the end of the seventeenth century begun to distance himself from both people he knew in these fields, and from the kind of language they used to describe and understand ideas and phenomena. He became modern. 1

Egypt, being undoubtedly a place of magic and other unreasonable practices, experienced collateral damage. It could no longer be seen by proponents of reason as a place of philosophy, since philosophy was to be understood as the exercise of human reason, and not something which could co-exist with magic, prophecy, divination, etc. Irrespective of the fact that magic and the other unreasonable practices co-existed with philosophy in Greece.

So there has been a very strong effort by scholars, particularly since the enlightenment, to break with earlier understandings of both the basis of Greek philosophy, and its relationship to other cultures in the ancient world. In the interest of establishing the life of reason.

Hence SHB is, as a work of scholarship, as near anathema as it is possible to imagine, since one of its principal aims is to break up the post-enlightenment consensus about what philosophy is, where it came from, and its cultural context, by showing its roots in a ‘cultus deorum’ - among those who speculated on the nature of Divinity, the Creation, and the nature of Reality itself. In short, among those who sought to answer the question, ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’

I will now turn to the kind of argument Plato used in addressing the nature of reality itself. Some of the most interesting passages are well known, but apparently impenetrable to the modern mind. They come from three dialogues in particular – the Timaeus, the Sophist, and the Republic. Other important information is scattered through other dialogues, but it is possible to understand Plato’s thought on the basis of these three dialogues alone (though reading the Theatetus as well is recommended).

I’m now going to quote from the chapter in SHB on Plato’s theory of Being:

The Timaeus contains a famous passage which discusses the manner in which the forms are conjoined with body:

...it is not possible that two things alone should be conjoined without a third; for there must needs be some intermediary bond to connect the two. And the fairest of bonds is that which most perfectly unites into one both itself and the things which it binds together; and to effect this in the fairest manner is the natural property of proportion. 2

The context of this passage is an attempt to explain water and air as intermediary between fire and earth, but what Plato is giving us is more general: a theory of participation which has been the root of the western tradition in art and architecture ever since:

For whenever the middle term of any three numbers, cubic or square, is such that as the first term is to it, so is it to the last term - and again, conversely, as the last term is to the middle, so is the middle to the first.

- then the middle term becomes in turn the first and the last, while the first and last become in turn middle terms, and the necessary consequence will be that all the terms are interchangeable, and being interchangeable they all form a unity. 3

Why is it a necessary consequence that all the terms are interchangeable? Each of the terms bears a relation to the others, a proportionate similitude, and each can become first, middle and last terms in an extended sequence, but they are not the same as each other. They are conjoined with one another, but in sequence. They bear likeness to each other in the proper sequential order but not otherwise. It depends on the arrangement. Given the proper arrangement, one may pass through the sequence and establish degrees of similitude between all the different terms. But they are still not the same. They participate in each other, but their proportionate similitude is not identity, and that is essentially what Plato is claiming here.

I think that there is no doubt that this is what Plato means, and it is up to us to explain it. Clearly it underpins the description of the activity of the philosopher in the Republic, where it is said that the process of argument:

...treats assumptions not as principles, but as assumptions in the true sense, that is, as starting points and steps in the ascent to something which involves no assumption and is the first principle of everything; when it has grasped that principle it can again descend, by keeping to the consequences that follow from it, to a conclusion. The whole procedure involves nothing in the sensible world but moves solely through forms to forms, and finishes with forms. 4

What Plato is arguing is that, by systematic dialectical enquiry, we can rise from the realms of likelihood and opinion, where we encounter only similitudes, to the realm in which certain knowledge is possible. This is to be achieved by passing through the similitudes, on account of their similitude, to their ultimate origin, the Form of the Good.

End of the section from SHB. When Plato speaks of ‘something which involves no assumption and is the first principle of everything’, he is speaking of the root of creation, as well as an intellectual apprehension of Reality itself. Plato sees a parallel between the acquisition of knowledge of what lies behind the world of appearance, and the inverse process by which that world of appearance is created, though he speaks only of an intellectual descent: ‘when it (the mind) has grasped that principle it can again descend, by keeping to the consequences that follow from it, to a conclusion. The whole procedure involves nothing in the sensible world but moves solely through forms to forms, and finishes with forms.’

Another section from SHB, which explores the attempt to define what Reality itself is in the Sophist:

… the ideas, formerly aloof from the world of sensibles and incapable of interaction turn out to be entities capable of participation in each other. And thus, like objects apprehended by opinion, are compounded both of Being and Not-being.

At 244c the Eleatic stranger asks whether the Real is "the same thing as that to which you give the name one? Are you applying two names to the same thing...?" And continues: "it is surely absurd for him Parmenides to admit the existence of two names, when he has laid down that there is no more than one thing..." Thus in attempting to define the One Parmenides cannot state it at all "without recognising three real things." 5

At 244d the Stranger questions the notion of the reality as wholeness: is "whole" other than the one real thing or identical with it? For

... if it is a whole - as indeed Parmenides says 6 "Every way like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, evenly balanced from the midst in every direction; for there must not be something more nor something less here than there" - If the Real is like that, it has a middle and extremities, and consequently it must have parts, must it not? 7

The Stranger observes that if a thing is divided into parts it may have the property of unity in terms of an aggregate of its parts, "being a sum or whole". However, "the thing which has these properties cannot be just Unity itself... Unity in the true sense and rightly defined must be altogether without parts." 8

Thus, how are we to define the Real - is it one and whole? The property of unity is not unity itself, and alternatively, if the Real is not a whole by virtue of having this property of unity, while at the same time Wholeness itself is real, it follows that the Real falls short of itself... and further... all things will be more than one since Reality on the one side and Wholeness on the other have now each a distinct nature. 9

The Real cannot come to be if wholeness does not exist, for "whenever a thing comes into being, at that moment it has come to be as a whole; accordingly, if you do not reckon unity or wholeness amongst real things, you have no right to speak of either Being or coming into being as having any existence." 10 The Eleatic stranger (probably representing Plato himself) concludes by observing that "countless other difficulties, each involved in measureless perplexity, will arise, if you say that the Real is either two things or only one." 11

In the Timaeus the fully knowable is defined as the eternal and the unchanging, i.e., that which fully "is". However the discussion at Sophist 248-249d seems to jettison this definition. The Eleatic stranger observes that the Idealists (the "Friends of Forms," 248a) distinguish between "Becoming" and "Real being": the definition of the former involving the sensible world, and the latter communing via the soul through reflection. And whereas Real being is defined as unchanging, Becoming is subject to change (the word used is koinonein: "to be in touch with". The same word is used of our communion or participation with both change and the changeless).

The Eleatic stranger recalls an earlier proposition that the "sufficient mark of real things is the presence in a thing of the power of being acted upon or of acting in relation to however insignificant a thing." 12 The Friends of Forms do not accept this argument and reply that: "a power of acting and being acted upon belongs to Becoming, but neither of these powers is compatible with Real being." 13

Thus apparently is distinguished the material world subject to causal relations from the world of Forms and those objects which participate in them, clearly by acausal means; the division would seem to be absolute.

The Friends of Forms acknowledge that the soul knows, and that Real being is known, it is agreed; and then the stranger asks if it is agreed that

knowing or being known is an action, or is it experiencing an effect, or both? Or is one of them experiencing an effect, the other an action? Or does neither of them come under either of these heads at all? 14

It can of course be neither action or effect, as the text makes clear, 15 if the Friends of Forms are to avoid contradicting their earlier remarks, for: if knowing is to be acting upon something, it
follows that what is known must be acted on by it; and so, on this showing, Reality when it is being known by the act of knowledge must, in so far as it is known, be changed owing to being so acted upon; and that, we say, cannot happen to the changeless. 16

Cornford's translation of the remainder of 248e is unsatisfactory, since it obscures one of the most interesting allusions in Plato. It may be translated thus:

Before God - that we might be easily persuaded that truly motion, life, soul and wisdom are not completely real - neither life itself nor thought, but revered and sacred, it has no mind, if it put on existence unmoved. 17

The allusion, semnon kai hagion, is, as Campbell noted in his edition of the Sophist, to the statues of the gods. This phrase might be written off as of no great moment, but I think it unwise to do so. Reality has been spoken of as revered and sacred, using a phrase of specific application to the images of the gods. We catch here (I think) a glimpse of the true scope of this argument and its consequences: it concerns the logic underpinning the patterns of understanding among the Greeks. 18

End of this section of SHB. The absurdity of the argument concerning the gods (that they cannot move) in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (discussed elsewhere) is now perfectly clear. What is being discussed in the Sophist is the nature of a Reality which completely transcends the world of appearance, and so can be considered to be the root from which the physical creation emerged. This reality is the telos; the Ur-Reality. Its nature, properties and attributes have been established by logical argument. The result however is paradoxical. It must remain one to be itself (elsewhere Plato ‘conjectures’ that the world of appearance is a copy of the Ur-Reality. That too cannot be the case, without compromising the nature of the Ur-Reality). It cannot move because it is the undifferentiated all. But without movement there is no mind. Without movement there is no life.

Yet there is thought and life. So at the least, the created world enshrines a paradox.






1 This phenomenon is discussed in Leibniz, Mysticism and Religion, ed. by Allison P. Coudert, et al, Kluwer, 1998.
2 Tim 31b-c
3 Tim 31c-32a
4 Rep. 511b-c
5 Cornford, F.M. Plato's Theory of Knowledge, p221.
6 Frag. 8.43
7 244d-e
8 245a
9 245c
10 245d
11 245e
12 Soph.248c.
13 Soph. 248c
14 248d
15 There is a minor textual problem concerning the identity of the speaker at this point in the dialogue which does not affect the sense of the argument - see L. Campbell, Sophistes, p128
16 248e.
17 Soph. 248e-249a. Lewis Campbell comments, in addition to noting the allusion to the statues of the gods, that there is a striking passage in the Laws (967 a-e) ‘where it is said that the deepest study of astronomy, instead of encouraging the notion of a blind necessity, leads directly to the supposition of a celestial mind or minds.’ Sophistes and Politicus, Oxford, 1867, p129. Reprinted by the Arno Press, New York, 1973.
18 We are not generally accustomed to imagine that belief is something for which sound arguments can be supplied, though christian religious history provides numerous examples of the use of philosophy to support the foundation of these.

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.