Black and White Classics?
Margaret Jervis looks at Professor Martin Bernal's controversial work on Greek prehistory.
Passions are mounting in the sedate groves of classical academe over Professor Martin Bernal's controversial anti-racist re-mapping of Greek prehistory. Black Athena, touches a political nerve not readily soothed. Accusations and counter-accusations of scholarly impropriety seem set to run and run, especially with the re-issue in paperback of volume one (first published in 1987).
Taking classical scholarship by storm Black Athena rocks the underpinnings of ancient Greece as the cradle of European civilisation by postulating cultural roots in Egypt and the Levant. Roots, Bernal believes, which have been systematically overlooked by two centuries of racially prejudiced investigation.
Taking classical scholarship by storm Black Athena rocks the underpinnings of ancient Greece as the cradle of European civilisation by postulating cultural roots in Egypt and the Levant. Roots, Bernal believes, which have been systematically overlooked by two centuries of racially prejudiced investigation.
'The Greeks themselves said of their past that their cities had been colonised by Egyptians and Pheonicians', says Bernal. 'What I am saying is that we should take Greek reports much more seriously, though not uncritically, and that we should treat the work of classicists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries much more critically.'
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