In continuation of our editorial, “Western whites stole knowledge from Black Africa,” (DV Dec. 16, 91), we are reproducing the following book review that appeared in the Economic and Political Weekly, Bombay, Aug. 5, 1989 (pages 1768/69) which goes to prove the truth behind our edit – EDITOR.
SUSANTHA GOONATILKE
Black Athena: The Affroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, by Martin Bernal, Vol 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985; Free Association Books, London, 1987.
After the rise of black slavery and racism, European thinkers were concerned to keep black Africans as far as possible from European civilisation. Martin Bernal (1987) in Black Athena, The Affroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation. The track science has followed – from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Greece, from Islamic Spain to Renaissance Italy, thence to the Low Countries and France, and then to Scotland and England of the Industrial Revolution – is the same that of commerce and industry.
J.D. Bernal (1956) in Science in History.
Martin and J D Bernal, son and ather have in their respective books Belt with intellectual history from a social perspective. Yet, more than generation separates their approaches’. J.D. Bernal was inspired in the 1930s by the Soviet writer Boris Hessen. Bernal senior then developed a largely eurocentric social history of science. Although is book was published in 1956, it was conceived before World War II and was largely written within the road 19th century perspective orientalism” (in the phrase of Edward Said).
In Black Athena, the son implicitly questions the centrality given by the ather to classical Greece. The Ather’s generation – and the everal generations before him – allowed unconsciously a Eurocentric view in describing the intellectual history of the world. Black Athena is essentially about how in 19th century Europe, the primacy of the Greek experience for later European civilisation and, through the latter, the dominant strands of contemporary “world civilisation” was socially constructed.
The book concerns itself primarily with the glossing over in the 19th century of the Greek’s own acknowledgements of their debt to other civilisations. This glossing over occurred when social imperatives operating in Europe and associated with 19th century imperialism and racism demanded a special place for Athens. Bernal’s tightly argued, nearly 600-page first volume, is part of a three-volume work of reassessing this false history and of reconstructing a truer one.
Bernal desribes how the Greeks themselves acknowledged their strong debt to Egypt, an acknowledgement which Bernal calls the “Ancient Model”. The Ancient Model was ascribed to by many Greeks, among them being Herodotus, the father figure in Greek history. This Ancient Model was superseded only in the 19th with the rise of European racism.
Because of racial and imperialist considerations, the Ancient Model had to be overthrown and replaced by something more acceptable. For “18th and 19th century romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood, to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonising Africans and Semites”.
A new model was now sub-stituted which emphasised the European and Aryan roots of Greek civilisation over Egyptian and Semitic roots. A broad form of this “Aryan Model” denied even basic, well documented facts such as that of the Egyptian settlements in Greece. A narrower, more extreme form of the Aryan Model even denied any Phoenician influence.
In this first volume Martin Bernal details how the views on ancient Greece were socially fabricated from 1785 to 1985 to deny the Ancient Model. And, in a forthcoming Volume II, he proposes a revised Ancient Model, where Egyptian and Phoenician influences are again emphasised.
Although 19th century ‘Source Critics’ took the position that the Ancient Model was concocted only in the 18th century, Martin Bernal shows that this claim itself was a social construct. No one had in fact questioned the Ancient Model before the 18th century historian William Mitford.
Bernal records how aspects of the Egyptian heritage of Europe was transmitted through the centuries without a break. This thread can be traced from the times of the ancient Greeks through the Roman period, the Renaisance and the Rosicrusians of the 17th century to the Free Masons of the 18th century.
With emergence of the paradigm of progress in the 18th century, a number of Christian apologists now promoted the Greeks at the expense of the Egyptians. This trend combined itself with two other dominant themes of the time, namely racism and romanticism. With the onset of slavery and the emergence of colonial empires, dark skinned, African people as originators of Greek civilisation were now considered incompatible with creativity and civilisation.
The fall of Egypt from intellectual grace was also accompanied by the rise of India in European eyes through the discovery of a connecting link between Sanskrit and European languages. For a short time India rose in prominence through a romantic ‘Aryan’ linguistic connection.
By the first quarter of the 19th century, the Ancient Model had fallen from grace. By then it was “scientifically proved” that philosophy and civilisation had indeed originated in Greece. This was very convenient for the psychological well-being of the ruling class in Europe. “After the rise of black slavery and racism, European thinkers were concerned to keep black Africans as far as possible from European civilisation”. Gradually with the rise of anti- Semitism, a sustained attack was also made on the Phoenician contribution and by the 1930s the anti-Phoenician position had also been “scientifically proved”.
After World War II the old geo- political order began to change. The Eurocentric order was being dismantled geographically through decolonisation and this had intellectual repercussions. The resultant post-World War II rethinking gave rise to attempts at revisionism of the handed truths. These efforts were partly under way by the 1950s and the 1960s. Bernal describes how with the help of Israeli scholars and under a new environment, the anti-Semitic elements in the given histories were now being closely re-examined and history was being restructured.
At the same time we should note that other countries in the ex- colonial lands were also re- examining their own histories. Bernal’s book is therefore a constituent and important part of these efforts at dismantling the old Intellectual order and restructuring a new one.
Bernal has constructed his case drawing carefully from a wide variety of sources. Yet the Aryan Model he demolishes has been hitherto supported by a well entrenched intellectual stratum. Around this model has been implicitly created a total intellectual history and a large number of publications, as well as a host of influential academic positions. This was an implicit establishment which even for Martin Bernal’s own father, functioned as the factual bedrock from which to view scientific history. This book is therefore bound to ruffle several feathers in this entrenched academia.
Yet it comes at a time forty years after decolonisation when Eurocentric histories are being freshly re-examined. It is time when winds of intellectual change are blowing from the new historical research on North Africa, West Asia, South Asia and East Asia. This research is questioning the facts on which the largely European trajectory for science and knowledge had been built. Martin therefore writes amidst a major reorienting process, at a time when a new brand of scholars from the Afro-Asian lands are rewriting their intellectual history and forging new intellectual visions.
To the latter Martin Bernal’s book is both a partial liberation as well as a partial prison. It is a liberation in the sense that it dismantles a racialist and imperialist vision which had been constructed on very little evidence. It is a prison because Martin Bernal still holds implicitlly to a broad Eurocentric vision. Although Black
Athena re- examines the relationship of Egypt to Greece, Bernal does so to still within a broad and implicit view of the primacy of European civilisation.
Therefore whilst recognising Bernal’s book as a liberating act of ‘deorientalisation’, one should also recognise the limits of this liberation. True liberation of a colonially derived intellectual history can only come when efforts such as Black Athena are also supplemented by similar exercises on other regional civilisations. The raw material for such an examination amply exists in unexamined manuscript and undug archaeological sites. Already several Afro-Asian writers have laid the ground-work for such rethinking. In the coming decades, we are bound to see an intensification of this re-examination of laying to rest the holy ghosts of colonial intellectual history. When this true history is eventually written, Martin Bernal’s painstaking efforts will stand as an important contribution to the liberation of the human spirit. (Economic and Political Weekly Aug. 5 1989)
