|
| Black Athena Revisited | 
| Author: Mary R. Lefkowitz
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Category: Book
List Price: $32.50
Buy New: $14.75
You Save: $17.75 (55%)
New (15) from $14.75
Avg. Customer Rating:  42 reviews
Sales Rank: 722547
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 544
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 0807845558
Dewey Decimal Number: 938
EAN: 9780807845554
ASIN: 0807845558
Publication Date: April 29, 1996
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: very minor shelf wear/ clean tight
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Was Western civilization founded by ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians?
Can the ancient Egyptians usefully be called black?
Did the ancient Greeks borrow religion, science, and philosophy from the Egyptians and Phoenicians?
Have scholars ignored the Afroasiatic roots of Western civilization as a result of racism and anti-Semitism?In this collection of twenty essays, leading scholars in a broad range of disciplines confront the claims made by Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. In that work, Bernal proposed a radical reinterpretation of the roots of classical civilization, contending that ancient Greek culture derived from Egypt and Phoenicia and that European scholars have been biased against the notion of Egyptian and Phoenician influence on Western civilization. The contributors to this volume argue that Bernal's claims are exaggerated and in many cases unjustified. Topics covered include race and physical anthropology; the question of an Egyptian invasion of Greece; the origins of Greek language, philosophy, and science; and racism and anti-Semitism in classical scholarship. In the conclusion to the volume, the editors propose an entirely new scholarly framework for understanding the relationship between the cultures of the ancient Near East and Greece and the origins of Western civilization.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 37 more reviews...
 You can't deny the truth September 4, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Why do whites want to separate Egypt from Africa so bad. Egypt is in Africa and the ancient Egyptians were African just as the Greeks and Romans are Europeans. It is a fact. I feel sorry for those of you who deny the truth. Although you perpetuate a legacy of falsified European history, I am satisfied because, "the truth is like lightening with its errand done." Centuries from now (or even sooner) historians will give Africa the credit that it is due. You can't erase facts or the past.
 Both sides are equally ignorant July 18, 2007
3 out of 11 found this review helpful
Greek civilization was much influenced by Egyptian civilization, this cannot be doubted, especially if one refers to ancient texts. What is absurd about both accounts and the militants forging their views, is the notion that Egyptian civilization was black or that African=Black. In fact, the label African was first used to refer to Phoenicians, and would never have been used to refer to the Black sub-saharan peoples that were known as Zanj, Sudanese or Aethiopian. When black contributors claim that Egypt is in "Africa" and that Egyptians were "African" they forget that they were not part of that "Africa" and that they weren't known as "Africans", that is, until the desecration of the word, it's misuse and abuse. As it stands today, the term is a misnomer. It is sad and scary how blacks are attempting to pillage alien cultures (Egyptian for instance) out of an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge their own for what it is. It is equally sad that certain "scholars" are trying to downplay Egyptian contribution and indeed, supremacy, in the ancient world. The world is changing , and I'm afraid for the worse.
 A most necessary read May 30, 2007
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
I came to this issue as a teacher of ancient philosophy, and a concern to understand the claims of afrocentrists, as well as Bernal, that the ancient Greek philosophers took some significant portion of their thought from the Egyptians, in particular the Egyptian priests. What I have read of these claims has not been, in my view, impressive. (The best that Bernal can offer, given that no Egyptian texts bear any resemblance to Greek philosophy, is that the popular religion of Egypt "must" have been a popularized expression of some more abstract wisdom-an argument from ignorance of the most tendentious sort.) Still Bernal is the most impressive of those who argue for a massive cultural influence on the Greeks by the Egyptians, both from the perspective of the breadth of fields he marshals (though hardly masters) in support of the position, and the massive size of his output. For many who are not specialists these two features alone might seem to suggest that Bernal is correct. Thus the great value of this volume, which includes evaluations by various true specialists in the fields that Bernal attempts to harness for his own purposes: classical studies, linguistics, archeology, Egyptology, and history (Bernal, by the way, is a trained political scientist).
What is revealed is the various ways in which Bernal gets things wrong. He trusts in the historicity of myth in a simple-minded way that no current student of mythology would. He is uncritical of the writings of ancient authors who to some degree appear to support his case. He is highly selective of the evidence. For example, his treatment of nineteenth century classical studies points to authors who appeared to have racial motivations while ignoring others, such as Grote, who clearly did not.
One, to my mind, particularly revealing article is offered by Jay Jasanoff and Alan Nussbaum, trained linguists, where Bernal's linguistic evidence is evaluated. This might be one of the more important articles simply because comparative linguistics is such a technical and seemingly arcane discipline to the uninitiated (such as me), that Bernal's seeming mastery of it in support of the claim that some 25% of Greek words had Egyptian origins might be thought to be a particularly impressive component of the overall argument. What Jasanoff and Nussbaum discover, however, is that Bernal ignores the long established standards of evidence in these fields in favor of a quite superficial "looks alike" method for finding the massive linguistic influence on the Greeks. The authors meticulously go through a wide selection of Bernal's etymologies and debunk them all.
Perhaps the most unfortunate part of the book is a section of three articles on the subject of race: "unfortunate" because Bernal and other afrocentrists have reintroduced a scientifically worthless but historically invidious concept into academic discussions in their claim that the Egyptians were "blacks" (Bernal is a bit more timid here than other afrocentrists, simply saying that certain Egyptians could "usefully be thought of" as blacks). The authors of all three articles insist on rejecting this introduction of race into the issue. To my mind one of the most interesting articles was written by a team of anthropologists headed by C. Loring Brace. Brace brings scientific techniques to bear on the question, particularly comparative anatomy. The discussion reveals two things: 1. that indeed the concept of race has no basis in scientific fact, and has been replaced by the notions of "klines" (variations of anatomy selected by environmental conditions) and "clusters" (variations due simply to the locality of a reproductive population), and 2. that evidence Brace and his team developed shows that the ancient Egyptians cannot be considered (even "usefully") as either "blacks" or "whites" in the modern senses of those terms.
The contributions to this volume are uniformly erudite, well-argued, and well-informed by the latest understandings in the various fields represented. And this is a much needed book. There has been a disturbing propensity in academe as of late to inject politics into research of various forms. This has had the general character of first defining a view that is understood as somehow politically or socially beneficial or expedient from some perspective or another, and then searching for any sort of evidence or argument, however fanciful it might be, to support the view. At times these efforts are coupled by the postmodernist view that all so-called "knowledge" is historically contextualized and a product of social interests, so that any view is acceptable so long as it is embedded in a set of the "correct" political and social motivations. Although it is true that all seekers of truths are to some extent a product of their times, this extreme view has the most unfortunate effects. In the case of Bernal and afrocentrists a couple of such effects pointed out by the authors of this volume are first that their views, quite ironically, validate once again the concept of race, a concept so long used as the basis of oppression in this country, and second rather than eschewing eurocentrism it in fact reinvigorates it by the suggestion that the only way that the achievements of any culture can attain legitimate value and be worthy of study is if they can be shown to have influenced European culture. Given the tenuous threads of argument in afrocentrist writings that attempt to connect subSaharan African culture to the Greeks, threads that I believe are bound to snap if they haven't already, the consequent devaluation of African culture is the inevitable implication.
what is it about Black Athena Vol. 1 & 2 that has scared soo many? May 28, 2007
3 out of 18 found this review helpful
Funny how 19th. C. Historical rethoric is not questioned. Think about it?
Most 19th. C historians where of Germanic and otherwise Aryan stock, slavery was still in full boogie business. The great Egyptian pyramids had been re discovered. How could a generation of slave owners make peace with the fact that the humans theybought and sold were African as were the very people who had founded the Egyptian dynasties? They could not.
Martin Bernal is a Jewish scholar who after over twenty five years of teaching Chinese history has a mid life crisis, "I do not understand my own people, the semitics." With that he launches into digging of the truth behind 19th c. scholarly writings. Dr. Bernal discoveres that not only were the semitics white washed(see his paper on Hannibal and the Cartheginians), so where the Egyptians, in a grand quest to PR the destruction of these two races, why? To support the outright contempt the Aryan Euros had against the Jews and the blacks, why? To maintain the status quo as the unquestioned authority of racial origins of civilization, which was believed to be white.
As a matter of fact, the oldest university in the world originates out of Africa, want to know from where email me or research it yourself.
So with these essays that support the 19th C. process of suppression I am one who urges you to read Martin Bernal's careful, and unbiased study of how these historical changes all came about--
Truth has power, but truth is only as powerful as those who wish to drink from the source.
A Brief History of the Rise and Fall of One Dimensional Whiteness January 15, 2007
11 out of 17 found this review helpful
"In pursuing a PhD on Minoan archaeology, it became necessary to spend several years in Greece. Many of the scholars I encountered there were not only ignorant of the contributions of the Near East to the development of Greek civilization, they were uninterested." Dr. L. Hitchcock, Institute of Archaeology, UCLA
Classics and Education:
Education was once conceived almost exclusively as the cultivation of values and tastes that distinguished the learned from the lay, the culturally enlightened from the functionally literate. Today, however, we inhabit a flat world transformed both by expanding scientific horizons and by the agendas of new social and intellectual movements, from the critique of unfettered capitalism and the "universal" codes of the West to debates over endemic problems of class, sexism, racism, pollution, and homophobia.
Over the last twenty years, scholars influenced by these developments have clashed, as cultural historian Andrew Ross has observed, "with a reactionary consensus of left and right, each unswervingly loyal to their respective narratives of decline: charges of post-sixties fragmentation and academification from unreconstructed voices on the left, and warnings of doom and moral degeneracy from the Cassandras of the right."
Lefkowitz & Pseudohistory:
Pseudo history is purported history which often denies that there is such a thing as historical truth, clinging to the extreme skeptical notion that only what is absolutely certain can be called 'true' and nothing is absolutely certain, so nothing is true. Pseudo history includes Afro centrism, holocaust revisionism and the catastrophism, to them should be added Helleno-mania, centered in one-dimensional Whiteness. "Ancient Myths of Cultural Dependency," actually concerns a much broader topic: the way historians such as Herodotus, Diodorus, Strabo, Eudoxus and Aristobulus 'fabricated a myth' that the Greeks owed their culture to the Ancient Egyptians. Professor Lefkowitz, became involved in the debunking of Afrocentrism by discrediting Herodotus et al, and seemed upset, passionately shaken of her disregard as a scholarly authority, claiming her opponents and their supporters undermined her value, while they neglect to follow the conventional means of scholarly evidence. On a TV clip of Lefkowitz debating Afrocentrists, the moderator asks her, "And how many times have you been to Africa, Dr. Lefkowitz?" Replying that she has never been to Africa, the moderator commented conclusively, "I thought so."
Title change to Black Athena!
Black Athena: the pragmatic title of Bernal's best seller, suggests that the Greek goddess Athena, the central symbol of classical Greek civilization, had a tinted origin outside White Europe, in Black Africa. The question is not without consequences for philosophers of principal stake in the Black Athena debate, a claim concerning the non-European origins of the main philosophical tradition of Europe, if late antiquity Alexandria was excluded from the search of glorified ancestors. By one account, it was the publisher, in fact, who proposed the polarizing title, a proposal about which Professor Bernal was reported not to have been at all enthusiastic, probably realizing just how provocative such a title would be in the forefront of a work already full with more than enough of conflicting issues.
'Black Athena' & `White Egypt':
Ancient Egypt, although 'accidentally' situated on the NE edge of the African continent, was thought essentially by Egyptologists and Orientalists, led by JH Breasted, as a non-African civilization whose major achievements in the fields of religion, social, political and military organization, architecture and other crafts, the sciences etc., were largely original and whose historical engagement and its cultural interaction, and indebtedness lay, if any, with (South) West Asia rather than with sub-Saharan Africa. 'Black Athena' is a slogan just as false to history as is `White Egypt.' Egyptian wisdom was a only a part of the most enduring civilization to our day, is existentially moral and social, different, and immutable with individual speculative Greek philosophy, nevertheless, Platonism was amended and upgraded by late antiquity Egyptian Copts, as the second century infamous Plutinus, fouder of Neoplatonism, a thinker from upper Egypt, who taught in Rome. While Aristotalian science was garbled by another seventh century Coptic genius, John Philoponoi.
Dr. Louise Hitchcock, of UCLA, Institute of Archaeology, wrote, "Bernal is certainly passionate, but I don't think his attempt is amateurish as much as it is biased...He has moved away from this theory in the Archaeology Magazine video 'Who was Cleopatra?' stating that it isn't necessary to believe in colonization to admit massive near eastern / Egyptian influence in the formation of Greece. I show this video to all my ancient art classes as an exercise in critical thinking, and an exercise in "how evidence can be distorted, created, (and) interpreted out of context.' ... No where is the naturalism of the Amarna period mentioned nor is it mentioned that Athenian democracy lasted a very brief period and was limited to male Athenian citizens. Nor is the 2000 year time difference mentioned."
Any future for Afrocentrism?
Inevitably, and in a rather belittling manner, "Herodotus is paraded in the all too familiar manner as the `Father of Lies', whereas more recent reassessment of the amazing extent of objective historical fact in Herodotus is ignored. Henry Frankfort, who was one of the greatest Egyptologists and Assyriologists of his generation, and whose books still rate as lasting standard works among the specialists, is denounced as `outdated'. Frobenius, one of the greatest Africanists of his generation (early twentieth century) who has been the main single intellectual influence upon Afrocentrism, is depicted as of negligible intellectual capabilities, of damaging influence even on European Africanism, hardly taken seriously by the specialists, and an art thief to boot. Sergi, a highly original physical anthropologist of the early twentieth century, is filed by Howe as merely `long-forgotten and academically discredited'," concludes W. van Binsbergen.
Where are the Orientalists?
Bernal's strategy in his preface is to acknowledge numerous authority figures who have helped him. These are just two examples of many of the problems in both books. If Lefkowitz et al. were held up to the same scrutiny that Bernal is, a number of distortions and biases can be uncovered there as well.
"It is a supreme irony that the only chapter on the Near East in Lefkowitz et al.'s 500+ page book is only 10 pages long and written by a classicist, Sarah Morris, and not a Near Eastern scholar. Lefkowitz, like Bernal, has her own rhetorical strategies for establishing her authority such as beginning her preface with the story of the professor of literature in 19th century Dublin who is untrained to interpret archaeological evidence, the implication by analogy being that Bernal is also a coffee table archaeologist too inexperienced to function within another discipline." adds Dr. Hitchcock
Academic Scandal, Contributors withdrew?
It is no wonder that investigations into external influences, whether passionate like Martin's, or serious and legitimate like those of a few bold Classicists who have dared to learn about Oriental cultures, resulting in their planned chapters were excluded from Lefkowitz & Rogers' *Black Athena Revisited*, after they were submitted, such incidents, are met with hesitancy or skepticism in some quarters.
As stated on owner-ane@ane-digest, two originally planned contributors to Lefkowitz volume withdrew when they heard that she denied Bernal the opportunity to respond in 'BA Revisited'. A contribution of Eric Cline (expert in Bronze Age relations between Egypt and the Aegean) was refused, with the argument there was no room, but Cline believes that resulted because his piece was favourable towards Bernal. Cline later published a damning review of 'BA Revisited' in Journal of Archaeology. Whether his paper was published elsewhere is not stated. Bernal does list over a dozen "general sympathetic" reviews of BA by specialists in several fields, as well as some hostile reviews of 'BA Revisited'.
"With that as the background noise of the uneducated masses in Greece (akin to the racist background noise in the US, which we like to think has been largely overcome but regularly finds expression, sometimes brutally, it is no wonder that investigations into external influences are met with hesitancy or skepticism in some quarters," concludes Peter Daniels
Is there a positive side?
Yes, affirms Christopher Robbins, "to my view,...Somewhere along the line the idea arose that the unprecedented Greek accomplishment was of a wholly endogenous provenance. This is an absurd idea when one thinks of a post-palatial-economies people emerging from a centuries-long dark age of villatic illiteracy into the archaic period.
Where was the raw material for the 6th c. and the classical going to come from is not largely from elsewhere? In fact this idea is an insult to one of the most fundamental aspects of what we may call the genius of the Greeks - or of the West ever since, for that matter.
After all, for the Greeks, for the West or for any manufacturing company in the world, it is not the raw materials (Advanced Egyptian civilization) that make a difference. Raw materials are available to anybody. The only difference is what is produced from those raw materials, whatever their source.
A basic common sense comment: Greek Classics, 700 BC lags two millennia beyond the Egyptian miracle, Pyramids built 2800 BC. Forget the petrified classics, What do you conclude?
|
|
|
Wildlife, nature and the Environment
Sponsored Links
Learn how to get your own Amazon Book shop | |
