cx 1K wx1s cxTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet1of576Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet2of576This Page Intentionally Left BlankBlack Athena Writes Backmx1K xK xscKbs 1c s cx1csMartin BernalEdited by David Chioni MooreDuke University Press Durham & LondonTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet3of576 bux uKvxs1\ xssAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of Americaon acid-free paper Designed by C. H. WestmorelandTypeset in Quadraatby Tseng Information Systems, Inc.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the lastprinted page of this book.Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet4of576For Cyrus Gordon and Michael Astour,who have led the way.Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet5of576ContentsPreface ixlranscriptions and Phonetics xiiiVaps and Charts xviiIntroduction iI Fgvptologvi. Can We Be Fair? A Ieplv to Iohn Baines zjz. Greece Is Not Nubia: A Ieplv to David OConnor aaII Classicsj. Who Is Qualied to Write Greek Historv?A Ieplv to Iawrence A. lritle jja. How Did the Fgvptian Wav of Death Ieach Greece?A Ieplv to Fmilv \ermeule 6j. Iust Smoke and Virrors? A Ieplv to Fdith Hall ooIII Iinguistics6. Ausnahmslosigkeit ber Alles:A Ieplv to Iav H. Iasano and Alan Nussbaum ioTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet6of576IV Historiographv. Accuracv andjor Coherence?A Ieplv to Iobert Norton, Iobert Palter, and Iosine Blok i6j8. Passion and Politics: A Ieplv to Guv Iogers io8o. lhe British Utilitarians, Imperialism, and the Fall ofthe Ancient Vodel zioV Scienceio. Was lhere a Greek Scientic Viracle? A Ieplv to Iobert Palter zaoii. Animadversions on the Origins of Western Science z6oVI Iecent Broadening Scholarshipiz. Greek Art Without Fgvpt, Hamlet Without the Prince:A Ieview of Sarah Vorriss Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art z8oij. One or Several Ievolutions? A Ieview of Walter BurkertsThe Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Inuence on Greek Culture inthe Early Archaic Age jo8ia. lheres a Vountain in the Wav: A Ieview of Vartin Wests lhe FastFace of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth ji8Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet7of576viii Contents. Phoenician Politics and Egyptian Justice in Ancient Greece VII A Popularizing Eort. All Not Quiet on the Wellesley Front:A Review of Not Out of Africa Conclusion Notes Glossary Bibliography Index Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet8of576PrefaceThis book and its forthcoming companion volume, Debating Black Athena,have had a long gestation. They were conceived in August in a diner inQuebec City after a panel on Black Athena at the tenth conference of the Inter-national Federation of Societies of Classical Studies at Laval University.We panelistsValentin Mudimbe, David Chioni Moore, Denise McCoskey,and Iate and relaxed. In the course of the conversation, I expressed myfrustration that Mary Lefkowitz and Guy Rogers were not allowing me torespond in their forthcoming edited volume Black Athena Revisited (BAR).What is more, they had refused to include the replies I had already pub-lished to many of the pieces to be contained in their volume.I mentioned that I should like to bring out a collection of my scatteredreplies in a single book and I wondered whether any publisher would beinterested in such a project. Mudimbe and Moore both said that the editorsat Duke University Press might like the idea. They thought, however, thata book that moved away from the minutiae of Classics to discuss broaderissues around Black Athena would be more interesting to them and to thePress. We agreed thenthat it should be possible to combine the two projects.Valentin, David, and Denise put the idea to Reynolds Smithat Duke Press.Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet9of576x PrefaceHe was interested and asked to see what I had. I mailed him the very roughmanuscript and he sent it on to readers. They gave it a mixed reception.Although they found Lefkowitz and Rogerss behavior disgraceful, the earlyreaders were bored by the manuscripts many repetitions and were irritatedby what they saw as its one-sidedness. I attempted to rectify the latterwith the kind aid of Geneva Cobb Moore, Professor of English at the Uni-versity of WisconsinWhitewaterby asking the authors of BAR to con-tribute to our book. However, any chance of success in this endeavor wasblocked by a circular from Lefkowitz informing all contributors that theywere exclusively committed to the University of North Carolina Press.After many months, a nal letter of strong support tipped the balanceand Duke University Press agreed to publish Black Athena Writes Back. Never-theless, Reynolds Smith, the editor at Duke who took on the project, de-cided that I needed a coeditor. The obvious choices were either DeniseMcCoskey or David Chioni Moore, and the latter, despite an extraordinarilyheavy workload of his own, very generously agreed not only to edit mypieces but to work with me in soliciting other contributions.By the spring of , we realized that because we had followed the twotracks of detailed response and broad-ranging discussion, we had far toomuch material to include in a single volume. Reynolds Smith agreed thatwe could have two books, one for each aspect of the project. Thus, this vol-ume contains my replies, and Debating Black Athena is made up of essays froma wide range of distinguished scholars from many dierent disciplines.In acknowledging the many women and men who have helped and en-couraged me in this project, I should, once again, like to thank all those Ihave listed in the prefaces to the rst two volumes of Black Athena. I shallrestrict myself here to those with whom I have continued to work over thepast ve years. First, I must thank my editor, David Chioni Moore, for theenormous eort he has put into these books and for the superb mixture ofpatience and bluntness with which he has tackled me and my disorganizedmanuscript. I alsowant to express my deepgratitude to Mary Jo Powell, whowhen asked, at a late stage, to copyedit agreed immediately and has donea superb job, as has the copyeditor at the press. Thanks too to Judy Schule-witz, who was of enormous help in checking and correcting the bibliog-raphy. Finally, there is Reynolds Smith, our extremely able editor at DukePress, who has helped, guided, and encouraged us at every step.I should like to thank those without whom the intellectual and schol-arly construction of this book would have been impossible: Nikos Axarlis,Gregory Blue, Stanley Burstein, Eric Cline, Molly Myerowitz Levine, Valen-Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet10of576Preface xitin Mudimbe, David Owen, and Gary Rendsburg. I must also thank thefollowing for their great help and patient understanding: Anouar AbdelMalek, Lynne Abel, Fred Ahl, George Bass, Jacques Berlinerblau, RogerBlench, John Boardman, Walter Burkert, Paul Cartledge, Chen Yiyi, GenevaCobb-Moore, Paddy Culligan, Peter Daniels, Robert Drews, EmmanuelEze, Dan Flory, David Held, James Hoch, Ephraim Isaac, Susan James,Shomarka Keita, Isaac Kramnick, Peter Kuniholm, Saul Levin, David Levy,Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Beatrice Lumpkin, Fouad Makki, Denise McCoskey,Uday Mehta, Henry Mendell, Toni Morrison, John Pairman Brown, JohnPappademos, Jacke Phillips, Jamil Ragep, Andrew Rammage, Nancy Ram-mage, Lori Reppetti, Stephen Scully, Barry Strauss, Wim van Binsbergen,Frans van Coetsem, Vance Watrous, Gayle Warhaft, and Linda Waugh.The past seven years have been extremely strenuous emotionally but theyhave also been happy and satisfying. One reason for this is that I have hadthe support of the friends and colleagues listed above. Even more impor-tant, however, has been the great warmth and joy of our family life. This hasbeen created by my sons Paul, Adam, and Patrick, my daughter Sophie, herhusband Mark, my wonderful grandchildren, Charlotte and Ben, and myson William, his partner Vanessa, and their baby Kate. Finally, there is myamazing mother, Margaret, and all the time my wife, Leslie, who has givenme both the intellectual stimulus and the emotional support necessary forcarrying on the project.Parts of chapters , , , , and appeared in slightly dierent versionsin the following journals, respectively: Bookpress, ; Arethusa, The Johns Hopkins University Press; History of Science, WellcomeTrust; Arethusa, The Johns Hopkins University Press; and Arion, Boston University Press.Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet11of576Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet12of576This Page Intentionally Left BlankTranscriptions and PhoneticsEgyptianThe orthography used inEgyptianwords is the standard one used by Anglo-American Egyptologists, the only exception being that the sign tradition-ally transcribed as k is written q in this volume.Whatever the exact sound of the in Old and Middle Egyptian ( ...), it was used where Semitic names contained r, l, or even n. Thisconsonantal value was retained until the beginning of the New Kingdom.In Late Egyptian (spoken, ...), it appears to have become analeph and later, like the Southern English r, it merely modied adjacentvowels. The Egyptian corresponded to the Semitic aleph and yd. Alephis found in many languages and in nearly all Afroasiatic ones. It is a glottalstop before vowels, as in the Cockney bol and bu (bottle and butter).The Egyptian ayin, which occurs in most Semitic languages, is a voiced orspoken aleph. The Egyptian form seems to have been associated with theback vowels o and u.In early Egyptian, the sign w, written as a quail chick, may have origi-nally had purely consonantal value. In Late Egyptian, the stage of the Egyp-Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet13of576xiv Transcriptions and Phoneticstian spoken language that had most impact on Greek, it seems to havebeen frequently pronounced as a vowel, either o or u. The Egyptian signtranscribed as r was more usually rendered as l in Semitic and Greek. Inlater Egyptian, as with the , it weakened to become a mere modier ofvowels.The Egyptian and Semitic was pronounced as an emphatic h. It appearsthat the sign conventionally transcribed in Egyptian as was originally avoiced g. In Middle and Late Egyptian, it was devoiced to become some-thing approximating the Scottish ch in loch. The sign transcribed ashwas pronounced as y. In Middle and Late Egyptian, it was frequently con-fused with . is used to transcribe a sign that originally sounded some-thing like . It later was pronounced as sh or skh.As mentioned above, q represents an emphatic k.The lettert was probably originally pronounced as ty. Even in MiddleEgyptian it was already being confused with t. Similarly,d was frequentlyalternated with d. In Late Egyptian, voiced and unvoiced stops tended tomerge. Thus, there was confusion amongt, t,d, and d.c\1K KmsEgyptian divine names are vocalized according to the most common Greektranscriptions, for example, Amon for Imn and Isis for St.Royal names generally follow A. H. Gardiners () version of theGreek names for well-known pharaohs, for instance, Ramesses.CopticMost of the letters in the Coptic alphabet come from Greek and the sametranscriptions are used. Six other letters derived from Demotic are tran-scribed as follows: j f h cTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet14of576Transcriptions and Phonetics xvSemiticThe Semitic consonants are transcribed relatively conventionally. Severalof the complications have been mentioned above in connection with Egyp-tian. Apart from these, one encounters the following.In Canaanite, the sound merged with . Transcriptions here sometimesreect an etymological rather than the later . is an emphatic t. TheArabic letter th usually transcribed as th is written here as ty. The sameis true of the dhl, which is written here as dy. The letter found in Ugariticthat corresponds to the Arabic ghain is transcribed as g.The West Semitic tsade was almost certainly pronounced ts and the let-ter sinoriginally seems to have beena lateral fricative similar to theWelshll.In transcriptions of Hebrew from the rst millennium... the letter shinis rendered . Elsewhere, it is transcribed simply as s because I questionthe antiquity and range of the pronunciation .Neither the dagesh nor begadkephat are indicated in the transcription. Thisis for reasons of simplicity as well as because of doubts about their rangeand occurrence in antiquity.VocalizationThe Masoretic vocalization of the Bible, completed in the ninth and tenthcenturies .. but reecting much older pronunciation, is transcribed asfollows:Name of sign Plain with x y with c w with h hPata 1 M ba Qame 2 M b x1 M b h 2 M bhreq 3 M bi x3 M b r 5 M b x5 M b h5 M bhSegl 6 M be x6 M b h6 M behlem M b M b hM bhQib 7 M bu CM b The reduced vowels are rendered:4 M be i a 9 i e 9 i o.Accentuation and cantillation are not normally marked.Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet15of576xvi Transcriptions and PhoneticsGreekThe transcription of the consonants is orthodox; is transcribed as y; thelong vowels and are written as and , and where it is signicant thelong is rendered as ; accentuation is not normally marked. It is impossible to be consistent in transliterating these, because certainnames are so well known that they have to be given in their Latin formsThucydides or Platoas opposed to the Greek Thoukydids or Platn. Onthe other hand, it would be absurd to make Latin forms for little-knownpeople or places. Thus, the commoner names are given in their Latin formsand the rest simply transliterated from Greek. I have tried wherever pos-sible to follow Peter Levis translation of Pausanias, where the balance isto my taste well struck. This, however, means that many long vowels arenot marked in the transcription of names.Chapter In chapter some extra transcriptions are used. These are the InternationalPhonetic Alphabet and the Pingyin system for Chinese characters. Also inthis chapter, Greek accents are usually marked.Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet16of576AfroasiaticChadic Berber Egyptian Beja Semitic EastCushiticSouthCushiticCentralCushiticChart 1.OmoticMaps and ChartsTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet17of576Chart 2. Indo-Hittite Language FamilyAnglosaxon Frisian Norse GermanSerbianSouth SlavPolish WestSlav Czech RussianGermanicGothicRomance RomanceLatin Oscan, etc.IrishWelshBretonGreek PhrygianAlbanianArmenianTokharianLithuanianModernIndianPersian LatvianLuvianLydian LycianCarian Hittite Palaic LemnianEtruscanIndo-HittiteAnatolianIndo-EuropeanBalto-SlavBaltic SanskritIndo-AryanCelticItalicIndo-IranianIranianSlavTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet18of576Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet19of576Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet20of576Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet21of576Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet22of576Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet23of576Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet24of576lable i Fgvptian chronologiesDynasty Breasted Meyer CAH Helck Mellaart Bernal1st jaoo jj1j-1oo j1oo zojj jaoo jaooznd zooo z8o jzoo jzoojrd zo8o z8oj-1oo zjo z6jj zojo joooath zooo z8ao-1oo z61j zjo z8jo zozojth zjo z68o-1oo zaoa zajo zzj z8oo6th z6zj zjao-1oo zjaj zzoo zjo z6joth zaj z181 z1jj zj88 zao8th zaj zj88 zaooth zaaj zj6o-1oo z16o zaao1oth z1jo 11th z16o z16o z1jj z1ja zz8 z1ao1zth zooo zoooj1oo 1oo1 1oo1 z1jj 1oo1jth 188 18 186 ? 1oa6 18o11ath 1jth 16a 16jj 1o1 1jo16th 168a 1th 18th 1j8o 1j8ojj 1j6 1jjz 1j6 1j61oth 1j1j 1jzo 1jzo 1jo6 1jzo 1jzozoth 1zoo 1zoo 1zoo 11o6j86 1zoo 1zooSources: Breasted (ioo6, i: aoaj), Vever (ioo, pp. 68, i8), Cambridge AncientHistory (charts at the end of vols I.zB, II.i, and II.z), Helck (ioi, chart, ioo,pp. ia6ia8), Vellaart (ioo, pp. o, io).Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet25of576Table Aegean chronologyCeramic Period CAH K & M Bet. Bernal Bernal FVI jooo? jjooFVII zjoo? joooFVIII zzoo zaooVVIA 1ooo zojoVVIB zooo 1ojoVVII 18oo 18zoVVIII 1oo 1jjo 1jo 1joIVIA 16oo 16jjo 16jo 16jIHI 1jjoIVIBjIHIIA 1joo 16oo1jj 161o 1jjo 16ooIVII 1ajo 1joo1aj 1jjo 1ajo 1jzoIHIIB 1ajo 1jjo 1jzoIHIIIA1 1aoo 1aoo 1aoIVIIIA 1j8o 1aoo 1aoIVIIIAzjIHIIIAz 1ajo1o 1a1oIVIIIBjIHIIIB 1zj 1jjjo 1j6j 1joIVIIICjIHIIIC 118o 1zoo 1z1oCAH = Cambridge Ancient History, d ed.K & M = Kemp and Merrillees ().Bet. = Betancourt ().Bernal = Black Athena, vol. .Bernal = Black Athena, vol. .Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet26of576IntroductionBlack Athena Writes Back is a direct response to another book, Black Athena Re-visited (BAR). That volume, which came out in , is a collection of essayswrittenby some distinguished scholars froma number of disciplines. Thesewriters, while conceding various merits to my work, are generally criticalof itsometimes violently so. Some of the contributors to BAR attack thegeneral project of Black Athena for purely scholarly reasons, others from amixture of scholarly and what I perceive to be right-wing political motives.The combination is powerful, and there is no doubt that a large numbernot merely of the experts but also of the cultivated lay public have been per-suaded by the arguments set out in the book. The chapters of this book,Black Athena Writes Back, and its companion volume, the forthcoming De-bating Black Athena, are attempts to challenge and debate the arguments inBAR both in detail and in general and, from our point of view, to right thebalance.BAR was largely made up of previously published reviews of the rst twovolumes of Black Athena. They have been contributed with very little alter-ation and with virtually no consideration to the replies to them I publishedat the time. Thus, about half of Black Athena Writes Back consists of revisedTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet27of576 Black Athena Writes Backversions of these replies. As some of the journals in which they rst ap-peared are quite obscure, I believe that it is helpful to those interested inthe debates around the Black Athena project to republish them in a singlevolume.The rest of Black Athena Writes Back is made up of essays of three types.The rst category consists of responses to a number of the critiques thatappeared for the rst time in BAR. The second category consists of threepreviously published articles on topics not directly covered in Black Athenabut included here because of their bearing on the general debate. The thirdcategory is made up of reviews of recent important books by championsof a new, more hybrid brand of Classical studies, who maintain against theprevious orthodoxy that Southwest Asia had a critical impact on importantaspects of Greek civilization.Outline of Black Athena:The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Cultures1cxccx\ Kb 1 xcc1 s wcBlack Athena is about the origins of Ancient Greece. This concern, then, isEurocentric to the extent that Ancient Greece has been the most impor-tant single contributor to later Western European culture, either directly,or through Rome, Byzantium, and Islam. In investigating Greek origins, Ihave found it useful to set up two schemes, which I have called the An-cient and Aryan models. By model I merely mean a reduced repre-sentation, and this naturally involves oversimplication and distortion ofsome of the varied complexities of reality. The same can be said, however,of words themselves; just as with words, models are necessary symbols fora coherent representation of reality.Most readers born before will have been educated in the Aryanmodel, which holds that ancient Greek culture developed as the result ofone or more invasions from the north by Indo-European speakers or Hel-lenes. These invaders are supposed to have conquered the native popula-tion, who are seen as having been sophisticated but soft. Their name havingbeen lost, late-nineteenth-century promoters of the Aryan model calledthem Pre-Hellenes. Although it is armed that the Pre-Hellenes werewhite or Caucasian and denitely not Semitic or African, very littleis known about them except for what can be reconstructed from supposedlinguistic traces of their culture in Greek language and proper names.Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet28of576Introduction Greek is an Indo-European language; its phonetic and grammaticalstructures conform with relative regularity to those of the other extant an-cient members of the large linguistic family that includes Sanskrit, Latin,and many other languages. Greek, however, is unusual in the very highpercentage of its vocabularymore than percentthat cannot be ex-plained in terms of other Indo-European languages.1This pattern can beexplained by the Aryan model, according to which most of the non-Indo-European words and names are attributed to the Pre-Hellenes. The seriousdiculties presented by this scheme are discussed in my response to Jasa-no and Nussbaum.2The Aryan model does not claim that Greek as a lan-guage was homogeneous, or that the Greeks were pure Indo-Europeansor Aryans. Instead, its proponents agree that there was linguistic mixingbut insist that both invaders and natives were Caucasian or European.In this way, the picture produced of Ancient Greece is dierent fromthatof the Aryan conquest of India, because the original pre-Aryan inhabitantsof the Indian subcontinent were dark. Thus, despite what nineteenth-century historians sawas noble attempts to preserve their race through thecaste system, the Aryans who conquered India suered racial degrada-tion. The origin of Greece, in contrast, was imagined as having been morelike the Germanic destruction of the Western Roman Empire, events thathistorians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries portrayed as Teu-tons infusing vigor into a Celtic and Roman European population. However,although the Germanic invasions were unquestionable historical eventsand there is also strong legendary and linguistic evidence to suggest thatthere were Aryan conquests in Northern Indiaevidence for a similar con-quest is completely lacking in the case of Greece.The Ancient model, which is very dierent, was referred to by the play-wrights Aeschylus and Euripides, the historians Herodotus and Diodo-rus Siculus, the orator Isocrates, the guidebook writer Pausanias, and themythographers Apollodorus, Palaiphatos, and Konn. It was omitted byone or two writers in contexts where they might have mentioned it, butwas denied only by Plutarch in what is generally seen as an outburst ofspleen against Herodotus. In other writings, Plutarch admitted Greecesdeep cultural debts to Egypt; he took it as axiomatic, for instance, thatGreek religion came from Egypt.According to the Ancient model, Greece had once been inhabited byprimitive tribes, Pelasgians and others. Certain regions, notably Boiotiaand the Eastern Peloponnese, had then been settled by Egyptians and Phoe-nicians who had built cities and civilized the natives. The Phoenicians, forTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet29of576a Black Athena Writes Backinstance, had introduced the alphabet, and the Fgvptians had taught thePelasgians such things as irrigation, the names of the gods, and how toworship them.3lhis Ancient model was not doubted until the end of the eighteenth cen-turv, and it was not seriouslv challenged until the i8zos. Onlv then didNorthern Furopean scholars begin to denv the ancient colonizations andplav down Fgvptian and Phoenician cultural inuences on Greece. lhesehistoriographical developments cannot be linked to the availabilitv of anvnew evidence. lhe great discoveries of the nineteenth centurvthe rstarchaeologv of Bronze Age Greece bv Heinrich Schliemann and the de-cipherment of cuneiformtook place manv decades after the change ofmodels. Iean-Franois Champollion had begun to decipher hieroglvphicsin the i8zos, but the scholars who overthrew the Ancient model drew littlefrom his work. Ieadings of Fgvptian texts were not generallv accepted bvclassicists until the i8jos. lhe reasons for the overthrow of the Ancientmodel are to be found not in internal developments within the disciplines,but in the intellectual milieu of the time.lhe vears from i8ij to i8jo were outstanding throughout Furope forpolitical reaction and religious revival. Both of these movements were op-posed to the Fnlightenment and the French Ievolution that was seen asits ospring. lhus, the reaction against Ancient Fgvpt during these vearsshould be seen in the light of the Fgvpts centralitv to the beliefs of theFreemasonssee for example the Vasonic trappings of Vozarts MagicFlute. lhe Fnlightenment in general and the Freemasons in particular wereseen bv reactionaries to have been at the heart of the French Ievolutionand specicallv to have been behind its anti-Christian religion of reason.In the long run, however, the Ancient model was destroved not becauseof anv threat to Christianitv from the Freemasons but because of the pre-dominance, in the nineteenth centurv, of the linked concepts of progress,romanticism, and racism. For the progressives, Ancient Fgvpt lost groundto Ancient Greece because the former was older and, hence, at an earlierstage of evolution. Fgvpts stable centralized government did not appeal tothe romantic love of small communities with turbulent histories. At rst,the racism of the Fnlightenment did not aect the reputation of the Fgvp-tians because thev were granted honorarv Furopeanstatus. After the ioos,however, both radicals and romantics began to view Fgvpt as increasinglvAfrican.4In the new period of svstematic racism, the eighteenth-centurv imageof the Greeks changed progressivelv from that of intermediaries who hadTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet30of576Introduction transmitted some part of the civilization and wisdom of the East to theWest into that of the very creators of civilization. At the beginning of theeighteenth century, the Ancient Greeks were admired because of Homerand the later poets. In the middle of that century, cultivated Europeans,led by the connoisseur Johann Winkelmann, began to see Greek art as thehighest ever achieved. Finally, in the s, historians of philosophy cameto agree that there had been no philosophy before the Greeks. This appar-ent triple achievementof epic poetry characteristic of the childhood ofa race, art associated with owering youth, and wisdom that came withits maturitygave the Ancient Greeks a superhuman status as the modelsof balanced and integrated humanity.This feeling was particularly strong in Germany. There, during the eigh-teenth century, intellectuals sought to preserve their cultural identity fromFrench Zivilisation. The French threat was backed not only by the powerand brilliance of contemporary Paris and Versailles but also by the RomanCatholic Church and Rome itself. In response, German thinkers turned tocreating a sophisticated German language purged of Latinisms and to de-veloping the romantic concept of an ineable German Kultur seen as local,deep, and hidden as opposed to the supercial glitter of Zivilisation.5German resistance to the supposed Rome-Paris axis also took the formof Neo-Hellenism. In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther had challengedthe Latin Vulgate Bible with both the Greek New Testament and his Ger-man translation of the Bible, thereby undercutting the Roman monopolyof Western Christianity in two ways. In the political and cultural crises ofthe eighteenth century, enlightened German intellectuals like ChristophMartin Wieland and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe became passionatelyinterested in pagan Greece. Many in their generation concluded that Ger-many, despite the eorts of Frederick the Great, could never be politicallyunited or militarily powerful as a NewRome. Nevertheless, with its manysquabbling small states but high level of education and culture, it couldbecome a New Hellas.German Neo-Hellenismbecame particularly passionate after , whenthe French Revolution compounded the menace to Protestant NorthernGermany, adding revolutionary ideas to its earlier Catholicism. In ,during the trial of Louis XVI, the brilliant young aristocrat and polymathWilhelmvon Humboldt sketched out a plan for a neweducation that wouldreintegrate men and women spiritually torn apart and alienated by moder-nity. This reintegration would be accomplished with the help of study ofwhat Humboldt sawas the most perfectly integrated people of the past: theTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet31of576 Black Athena Writes BackAncient Greeks. In , the Prussian government, in panic after its mili-tary humiliation by Napoleon at Jena, appointed a reform cabinet. Hum-boldt was included and put in charge of national education. In this way, hewas able to implement many of his earlier ideas, as well as establish thehumanistic education of the Gymnasium and the university Seminar focusedon Altertumswissenschaft, the study/science of Antiquity and of the Greeksin particular.6Humboldt seems to have intended his scheme to reach the whole popula-tion. Not surprisingly, this did not happen. Nevertheless, the new Germaneducational system, as it was instituted, had clear meritocratic tendenciesand was thus a threat to the aristocracy, many of whom opposed the newideas.7Similarly, its English oshoot, Classics, was seen as a middle waybetween reaction and revolution. From the beginning, however, the chiefpurpose of the Germans and English who advocated a humanistic educa-tion focused on Ancient Greece was not to attack the ruling class but toforestall or avoid revolution. Indeed, despite some trouble from the radi-cals associated with the Philhellenic movement in support of the GreekWarof Independence, humanistic education has very eectively maintained thestatus quo.The outbreak of the Greek War of Independence against the Turks in provided the only liberal outlet in an age of reaction. Academic andstudent circles thrilled to a passionate Philhellenism, intensied by the cultof the dead Philhellenic poets Byron and Shelley. The Greek revolt was seenby Philhellenes and much of the wider Northern European public as anapocalyptic struggle between freedom and tyranny, progress and reaction,youth and age, and, in particular, old corrupt Asia and Africa against youngpure Europe. In this atmosphere, it is remarkable that the Ancient modelsurvived as long as it did, but it was a tough nut to crack. Connop Thirl-wall, the rst writerin either English or Germanof a history of Greecein the new mode, wrote of the Ancient model in the s: It requiredno little boldness to venture even to throwout a doubt as to the truth of anopinion sanctioned by such authority and by the prescription of such a longand undisputed possession of the public mind, and perhaps it might neverhave been questioned, if the inferences drawn from it had not provoked ajealous enquiry into the grounds on which it rests.8What were these inferences? It is impossible to be certain, but it islikely that they were formed by the ideas of two inuential writers, Con-stantine Chassebeuf de Volney and Charles Franois Dupuis. Since thes and s, these two had promoted the notions, already present inTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet32of576Introduction Antiquity, that the Ancient Egyptians had gained their higher civilizationfrom the Upper Nile and that they themselves had been black. Abolition-ists quickly picked up this idea to argue the immorality of enslaving thepeople who had given Europe civilization. The intellectual appeal of thisposition intensied the opposite desire among romantics and others whosaw Europe and Europeans as the epitome of youth and progress. Thus,they sawa need to discredit the reputation of the Egyptians as the foundersof Greek and, hence, European civilization.The leading man who showed no little boldness in challenging the An-cient model was one of the rst products of Humboldts new educationalsystem, Karl Otfried Mller. Claiming a base in science that his prede-cessors had lacked, Mller maintained that Classical reports of early Egyp-tian and Phoenician settlement and civilizing were the result of connivanceamong later Egyptian, Phoenician, and Greek priesthoods and were, there-fore, untrustworthy. Furthermore, he argued, because none of the legendsthat made up the Ancient model could be proven, they should not be be-lieved. Mllers approach pulled o two sleights of hand. First, it requiredproof in an area where the best that can be hoped for is competitive plau-sibility. Second, Mller placed the onus of proof on those who accepted themassive ancient testimony rather than on those who challenged it. The un-spoken basis for the modern scholars seems to have been the newaxiomthat Europe was, and had always been, categorically separate from and su-perior to Asia and Africa. Thus, proof was required to justify something asunnatural as the Ancient model.9The rapid general acceptance of Mllers discrediting of Egyptian colo-nization shows how well attuned his idea was to its times. Mllers de-nial of Phoenician inuence on Greece, however, was not taken up soeasily. During most of the nineteenthcentury, then, the predominant imageof the origins of Greece was one that I call the Broad Aryan model.This model denied the Greek traditions concerning the Egyptians, but ac-cepted those about the Phoenicians. Indeed, the best-known colonizationof Greece from Egyptthat of Danaos in Argoswas now attributed tothe Phoenicians, for whom, indeed, a new boom arose in England. Mensuch as Prime Minister William Gladstone, who wrote extensively on EarlyGreece, clearly felt a sympathy for Phoenicians, who were typed as an up-right manufacturing and trading people who spread civilization, sold cloth,and did a little slaving on the side. With this reputation it is not surprisingthat French and somewhat later German scholars also linked the Phoeni-cians with the English nation of shopkeepers, which therefore causedTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet33of5768 Black Athena Writes Backa dierent result: thev disliked the ancient people. lhe French term andimage of perde Albion arose from the Ioman stereotvpe of the perde Poeneor Punica des, the bad faith of Phoenician Carthage. Nevertheless, thePhoenicians were then, as thev had been at least since the Ienaissance,chiev associated with Iews, with whom, in fact, thev shared the commonlanguage of Canaanite and manv religious and other customs. It is there-fore signicant that the peak of the Phoenicians reputation in nineteenth-centurv historiographv coincided with vears of relative tolerance for Iews:between the dwindling of the traditional Christian religious hatred of Iewsand the development of racial anti-Semitism at the end of the centurv.In some wavs, it is useful to see late-nineteenth-centurv racial anti-Semitismas a luxurv that Gentile Furopeans and their American cousinscould aord onlv when the rest of the world was utterlv crushed. One majorfactor behind the rise of Western anti-Semitism in the i88os and i8ooswas the massive migration of Fast Furopean Iews into Western Furopeand America. But another was the extraordinarv arrogance associated withthe triumphs of imperialism. It was during these decades that belief inthe Phoenicians formative role in the creation of Greek civilization plum-meted. Concomitantlv, this period saw not onlv the Drevfus aair but alsothe publication of inuential scholarlv articles denving that there had everbeen anv signicant extra-Furopean inuence on the formation of Greece.lhe Broad Arvan model survived, however, until the decade iozjiojj,when Western scholarship rmlv put the Semites, both Iews and Phoe-nicians, in their place: outside Furope. In contrast to the earlier period,the lessening of Furopean self-condence after the First World War nowserved to increase anti-Semitism. Furthermore, in ioi, anti-Semitismwasdriven to fever pitch bv the perceived and actual importance of Iews in theIussian Ievolution and world communism.10Although I maintain that the externalist forces described above pro-vided the chief impetus for the shift of models, and the only one for thedestruction of the Ancient model, an important internalist impulse alsolav behind the creation of the Arvan model in the i8jos and i8aos. lhisimpulse came from the working out of the Indo-Furopean language familvand the plausible belief that at some time a single Proto-Indo-Furopeanlanguage was spoken somewhere to the north of the Black Sea. lhus, asGreek was an Indo-Furopean language, it must, at some stage, have beenintroduced from the north. Using this argument, advocates were able topostulate an Arvan invasiondespite the absence of anv archaeologicalevidence or ancient authoritvand thus satisfv externalist demands. lheTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet34of576Introduction ideological forces behind the shift are shown by the increasing insistenceof the proponents of the Aryan model that the northern and southern in-uences were mutually exclusive. I am convinced that this insistence camefrom the romantic desire for purity and the association of such purity withthe north. No other reason can explain the inability to form the plausiblehypothesis that Greece had been substantially inuenced from both di-rections. This dual inuenceand not a sole inuence from the south andeastis what I propose in my Revised Ancient model.The situation has changed sharply since , partly because of themoral revulsion at the consequences of anti-Semitism seen in the Holo-caust. Sadly, I believe that the simultaneous rise of the Third World andof Israel as a bastion of the First World or Western Civilization has hadan even greater impact on European and Euro-American academic opinion.Concretely, Israels military triumphs have removed the stereotype, com-monat the beginning of this century, that Semites, or at least Phoeniciansand Jews (as it was never possible to include Arabs), were racially deter-mined to be passive merchants and were, therefore, biologically incapableof the military actions attributed to them in Greek legends.The events of the s and s led toward the readmission of Jewsas Europeans. Among Jews in both the United States and Europe, the in-creased self-condence has been largely reected in Zionism and religiousrevival. At the same time, a very much smaller group has tried to restore thereputation of the Phoenicians. Thus, since the s an attempt to bringback the Broad Aryan model for the origins of Greece has been reemerg-ing. Resistance from the extreme Aryanists seems to result largely frominertia and respect for authority, which are naturally very high in such tra-ditional disciplines as Classics and historical linguistics. Nevertheless, thedefenders of the Extreme Aryan model have been weakened both by thechanging intellectual climate and by increasing archaeological evidence ofEgyptian and Levantine inuence in the Aegean during the Late Bronzeand Early Iron Ages. The Broad Aryanists are now gaining ground and willalmost certainly succeed within the next ve years. For instance, the edi-tors of BAR now appear to accept the Broad Aryan model, although theystill prefer Mesopotamian East Semites and the Northern Levant to theWest Semites of the Southern Levant. The restoration of the Egyptianaspect of the Ancient model, in a revised form, will take somewhat longer;the principal debate is now beginning to be between the Broad Aryan andthe Revised Ancient models.At this stage, I should like to reiterate my respect for the achievements ofTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet35of576 Black Athena Writes Backthe early-nineteenth-century Indo-European linguists and my convictionthat, despite the presence of many foreign aspects and elements, Greek isfundamentally an Indo-European language. Equally, I do not believe thatthe legends of such heroic invaders as Danaos and Kadmos should be takenliterally as referring to specic individuals. They should be seen, rather, as ageneral indication of Aegean settlements by Phoenicians and peoples fromEgypt, or perhaps merely as markers of substantial cultural inuences onGreece from the southeast. In sum, I do not argue for a complete restora-tion of the Ancient model but for a synthesis, incorporating the linguisticadvances of the nineteenth century and adjusting some traditional dates inthe light of archaeological evidence fromthe twentieth. Nevertheless, I be-lieve that the newscheme or Revised Ancient model is closer to the Ancientthan to the Aryan model.Even if one accepts the argument put forward in the historiographical sec-tion of my work, that the Aryan model was conceived in what we shouldnowconsider to be the sin and error of racialism and anti-Semitism, themodel is not invalidated by this argument alone. Many fruitful theories,such as Darwinism, have been developed for what would later seem, onfactual or moral grounds, to have been dubious reasons. There is no doubt,however, that the Ancient model was discarded not because of any inher-ent defects but because it did not t the nineteenth-century worldview. TheAryan model had the advantage that it made Greek history conformtowhatits proponents saw as the universal historical principle of perpetually un-equal races.This external surplus explanatory value, to use the termof the philoso-pher of science Imre Lakatos, allowed the Aryan model to supersede theAncient model.11Today, we should not abandon the Aryan model merelybecause we dislike the ideology behind its establishment. Nevertheless, weshould remove such underpinnings and, as far as it is possible to do so,assess it simply in terms of its utility in explaining the data.From the beginning of the Black Athena project, I saw competition be-tween the Aryan and Revised Ancient models not in terms of certainty butin terms of competitive plausibility, to be judged in the light of evidencefromcontemporary documents of the Late Bronze Age ( ...),archaeology, language, toponyms, divine and mythological names, reli-gious ritual, and historical analogy or typology. In some cases, such as thedocuments and archaeology, the evidence merely tends toward the RevisedTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet36of576Introduction Ancient model. In the others, cult and language for instance, the evidencesupports it strongly.To some extent, competition of this kind can be measured by prediction:the ease with which new evidence can be tted into one or other of the twomodels. In general, however, there are serious problems with prediction.In the years after the publication of the rst volume of Black Athena (BA I)I came to realize the navet and logical impossibility of the idea that onecould stand above or beyond the models and be given a Gods-eye view.All I now claim is that the world of the Revised Ancient model is morestimulating and exciting to inhabit than that of the Aryan model. That isto say, the Revised Ancient model generates more testable hypotheses; itenables one to check parallels among the civilizations around the EasternMediterranean and, when these parallels are found, it provides more inter-esting and intellectually provocative answers.If on these or any other grounds one prefers the Revised Ancient model,the image of Ancient Greece must be reassessed. We should turn from theimage of a civilization springing, like the conventional image of Athenafrom the head of Zeus, white, virgin, and fully formed, to an image of anew civilization growing up at the intersection of Europe and the MiddleEast as a thoroughly mixed and eclectic culture. The greatness and extraor-dinary brilliance of Greek civilization in Antiquity, and the central role itplayed in the formation of all later European cultures, was not the resultof isolation and cultural purity but of frequent contact and stimulus fromthe many surrounding peoples with the already heterogeneous natives ofthe Aegean.The Reception of Black AthenaI have told my version of the publication and early reception of Black Athenamany times and I see no reason to repeat it here.12The only facts that needrepeating are that, to my amazement and delight, and completely contra-dicting my sociology of knowledge, I found that a small number of expertswere sympathetic to my project, and that an even larger fraction disagreedwith most of my ideas but felt that the issues were important and believedthat they should be debated. Scholars with these views made Black Athena thetopic of the Presidential Panel of the annual meeting of the AmericanPhilological Association, the largest body of classicists in the world. ThisTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet37of576 Black Athena Writes Backdiscussion was followed by invitations to panels at the annual meetingsof other relevant disciplines; archaeometry, anthropology, Egyptology, andhistory. I found myself ooded with invitations to speak and debate at vari-ous universities and colleges around the country.Another result of the APA Presidential Panel was that it convinced thosewho opposed my books that Black Athena would not evaporate from its ownabsurdity and would have to be confronted. This academic reaction co-incided, and cooperated, with a much bigger political one. One of the sideeects of the collapse of European communismin was that it openedan opportunity, particularly in the United States, for more attention to bepaid to the so-called culture wars. Debates around Black Athena played animportant role in these, and political objections to my work were added tothe academic ones.These dierent bases for opposing my work are reected in BAR.Whereas its two editors object to Black Athena on both academic and politi-cal grounds, most of the contributors, many of whom see themselves asliberals if not socialists, object solely because of what they see as my bad orinadequate scholarship. Interestingly, however, a close reading of hostilereviews reveals that several of the reviewers, while objecting to my meth-ods, accept many of my historiographic and archaeological conclusions, orat least agree that they may well be right.13This concession seriously undermines opposition to the theme of BlackAthena. If archaeologists concede that relations around the Eastern Mediter-ranean in the Bronze Age had been far closer than previously supposed, andintellectual historians agree that the prevailing racism and anti-Semitismheavily inuenced the work of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuryscholars, then the grounds for denying massive and fundamental Egyp-tian and West Semitic inuences on Greek religion and language becomeextremely precarious.At the meeting of the American Philological Association, I outlineda four-stage process through which I sawdisciplines reacting to potentiallyfruitful radical new ideas: such ideas are ignored, dismissed, attacked, andthen absorbed. The reception of volume of Black Athena (BA II) when it waspublished in marked a shift from ignore to dismiss. Where therst volume had received no attention fromthe U.S. mainstreamand right-wing press, the second was given long reviews in the New York Times BookReview, the NewYork Reviewof Books, the Washington Post, and many other jour-nals. Most, though by no means all, were hostile.14I can nd two plausibleTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet38of576Introduction explanations for the change. First, Black Athena was seen to have grown tooimportant as a cult book and as a legitimizer of Afrocentrismto be ignored.It had to be confronted. Second, whereas at that stage the classicists andancient historians had felt unable to deny my arguments on historiography,they sensed that the historical and archaeological arguments presented involume were more vulnerable.Black Athena RevisitedBy far the most important single reaction to Black Athena has been the publi-cation of BAR. The title is brilliant, indicating as it does a calm objectivity.It is, however, misleading, as most of the reviews were written soon afterthe publication of BA I or BA II, and are not the products of long and maturethought. The books objectivity is also compromised by the fact that hos-tility to my work was the main criterion in selecting the reviews. In disci-plines where there were no suciently hostile reviews, newones were com-missioned. For instance, the editors of BAR did not select the two reviewsthat had already been published on my linguistic claims; these reviews werewritten by scholars who knew all three of the relevant languages: AncientEgyptian, West Semitic, and Greek.15Instead, they commissioned a newchapter by two Indo-Europeanists with no knowledge of Ancient Egyptianand little interest in, or understanding of, language contact.16Similarly,new reviews were included on historiography, presumably to remedy thefact that earlier reviewers had tended to agree with that aspect of my work.Initially, in , I was not informed of the preparation of BAR. After ithad been in preparation for some months, an uncomfortable contributortold me about it. My rst reaction was one of dismay at having to writeanother article of response. Nevertheless, I dutifully emailed the senior edi-tor Mary Lefkowitz, and asked when I could see the articles so that I couldprepare my reply. She emailed back that the editors had decided not to in-clude any response from me because, as she wrote, most of the articleshave appeared already and you have published replies to them. When Iinquired whether my responses were to be included, Lefkowitz said no,adding that three authors had insisted that they would not contribute theirarticles if I were allowed to respond.My rst reaction was bewilderment. I had never heard of a scholarly vol-ume devoted to the works of a living author not containing her or his re-Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet39of576 Black Athena Writes Backsponse if she or he wished to write one. Within a few days, however, mydisconcertionwas compensated by a sense of the double honor Mary Lefko-witz and her colleague Guy Rogers were bestowing on me. I was atteredboth because they felt it worthwhile to compile a book on my work andbecause their refusal to include my responses suggested that they believedmy arguments were too compelling or persuasive to be included. As EmilyVermeule, one of the contributors, quoted Miltons Paradise Lost in referenceto me:But all was false and hollow, though his tongueDroppd manna, and could make the worst appearThe better reason, to perplex and dashMaturest counsels.17xcsscx xcw1zs xc KbK1xcbuc1cK 1c sttck tfnrnt krvisifroHaving summarized the Black Athena debates and my position in them andbefore outlining the contents of the present volume, I shall turn to an as-sessment of Mary Lefkowitzs preface and introduction to BAR. As most ofthe issues she raises are treated with more precision by other contributorsto the volume, I respond to them in the body of this book. Here, therefore,I restrict myself to just a fewof the points she brings out more clearly thanher collaborators.Lefkowitz gives BAR two openingsa preface and an introductionandboth provide excellent pregurations of the book as a whole. She begins thepreface with a quotation from a letter written in by the Catholic poetand Hellenist Gerard Manley Hopkins to a professor of Greek at Oxford.Hopkins suggested that the Greek legends about Egyptian colonizationsof Crete etc should be taken seriously, and proposed an etymology forAphrodite from an Egyptian form, *Nefrat-isi (BAR, p. ix).Making this story the most prominent in BAR suggests that the editorswould like it to be treated as a microcosm of the entire debate. In this way,the story serves a number of important purposes for Lefkowitz. First, Hop-kinss suggestion demonstrates that my ideas are not original. Second, thereference to the poet shows that Lefkowitz is not a narrow specialist buta scholar of broad culture. Third, it implies that scholars on the peripheryof a discipline (Hopkins was professor of Greek at Dublin), however re-Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet40of576Introduction spected they are in other elds, should not tell those at the center (Oxford)what to do. Fourth and fth, the story shows how ridiculous it is to believeGreek traditions, and how easy it is to concoct etymologies.The rst suggestion is undoubtedly true. I have never claimed that myideas are original, merely that I am reviving some neglected older viewsand bringing together some scattered contemporary ones. The second sug-gestion can stand on its own, but I believe that the last three points arethoroughly misleading. To begin with the third implication of the story ofHopkinss letter, I am convinced that all disciplines can prot from occa-sional marginal intervention. The study of Ancient Greece, in particular,has gained enormously from participants or even interlopers far furtherfrom the center of the discipline than Gerard Manley Hopkins: the bankerGeorge Grote, the tycoon Heinrich Schliemann, and the architect MichaelVentris, to name three.On the fourth point, mistrusting Greek traditions, I believe that given thepaucity of other information, Greek traditions should be used as a sourceof evidence about prehistory but used cautiously and in conjunction withmaterial from other disciplines: archaeology, linguistics, studies of cult,and more. Finally, on the fth point, concocting or fabricating etymologiesis not an easy task. To be convincing, etymologies must have semantic con-gruence and followcertain regularities in their phonetic correspondences.It is simply not true to say, as Jasano and Nussbaumdo in their chapter ofBAR, that I maintain that in this area anything goes. Thus, Lefkowitzsclaim (p. xi) that my etymology of Athens is intrinsically no more persua-sive than Hopkinss Egyptian derivation of Aphrodite is merely reductioad absurdum. Jasanoand Nussbaums attempt to discredit the etymologyof Athena and Athens fromthe Egyptian t Ntfor which I give abundantdetailed evidenceheads a paragraph on it with the words: This is notthe place for a lengthy rebuttal of Bernals case (p. ). I wonder wherethe correct place would be?Lefkowitzs second beginningthat is, the introduction to BARis withan exaggeration. She heads the rst section of the introduction Are An-cient Historians Racist? She writes: Bernal himself ask[s] us to acknowl-edge that we have been racists and liars, the perpetrators of a vast intellec-tual and cultural cover-up, or at the very least the suppressors of an Africanpast that, until our students and our colleagues began to mention it, we hadourselves known nothing about. Had our teachers deceived us, and theirteachers deceived them? (p. ).In the main clause before or at the very least, Lefkowitz attempts toTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet41of576 Black Athena Writes Backlink two incompatible ideas, one of which is totally false and the other ofwhich is partly so. In the rst case, I have never accused contemporary clas-sicists of being racists and liars. As I have stated many times, I believethat modern classicists and historians of Antiquity are no more racist thanother academics. Furthermore, modern classicists could not possibly lieabout something of which they were unaware. For instance, in the s,the brilliant scholars Cyrus Gordon and Michael Astour were driven beyondthe pale of academic respectability. This was because conventional schol-ars then saw the intimate links between Semitic and Hellenic cultures thatthe two proposed as impossible within the framework of the Classics thatthat they had inherited. This reaction, in turn, was in many ways the resultof the fact that several of the disciplines most inuential founders wereracist and anti-Semitic and that such prejudices had aected their scholarlyapproach.18Nevertheless, I have never suggested that either the creatorsor the defenders of this orthodoxy were insincere or lying. They clearlybelieved in the ideological basis of their work. How could they have doneotherwise?Beyond these matters of contention, Mary Lefkowitzs introduction ismarred by its sole focus on the specter of Africa and her consequent omis-sion of the words Southwest Asian and Semitic in describing my work.In fact, Black Athena is substantially concerned with Levantine inuences onthe formation of Ancient Greece, and the role of anti-Semitismin their ne-glect. The Afrocentrist scholar Tony Martin, though problematic in otherrespects, is far closer to the mark when he writes: If any of Bernals Afro-centric followers had slowed down a bit in their speed reading of BlackAthena, they would have noticed that he was as much or more concernedwith a Semitic origin for Greek civilization as for [sic] African inuenceover Greece.19Martin sees what Lefkowitz does not want to see: that Iam interested in both Southwest Asian and African inuences on AncientGreece, in addition, of course, to Greeces indigenous sources of culture.sttck tfnrnt Kb xccK1xsmAt dierent times and in dierent places, Lefkowitz has expressed dier-ent views of my genuinely complex relationship to Afrocentrists. In BARshe scrupulously makes a distinction. At other times, as in a questionnairesent out on her behalf to search out (and destroy?) Afrocentric inuencein American schools, it is argued that my work can be fairly listed withTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet42of576Introduction Afrocentric literature.20This issue is discussed again in the chapter con-cerned with her popular book Not Out of Africa. At this stage, I merely wantto point out that in BA I I made it clear that I disagreed with extreme Afro-centrists. Instead, I aligned myself on historical issues with more moderatehistorians, including George Washington Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois, JohnHope Franklin, and Ali Mazrui, whom the more hardline Jacob Carruthersdismisses as Negro Intellectuals.21Carrutherss view of my position isconrmed in his chapter in our forthcoming companion volume, DebatingBlack Athena.Lefkowitz also overlooks the point that seeing Egypt as an importantsource of Greek higher culture is not necessarily an Afrocentric position.Such a position can also be taken by assimilationists looking for a com-mon origin of African and European culture. Indeed, in what I might de-scribe as a mirror image, her position is more compatible than mine withthe extreme Afrocentrists. Both parties desire to keep Europe and Greececarefully separated from Egypt and Africa. The cases of intercontinentalhybridity on which I focus are far more threatening to the view that Greeceborrowed nothing of signicance from Egypt than are Afrocentric notionsof fundamental continental dierence and separation. ?To return to the four-stage scheme of ignore, dismiss, attack, and absorbmentioned above, BAR is on the cusp of the last two stages. The attack onBlack Athena can be seen in the publishers promotional material, which be-gins: In this collection of twenty essays, leading scholars in a broad rangeof disciplines confront the claims made by Martin Bernal. The contribu-tors to this volume argue that Bernals claims are exaggerated and in manycases unjustied. Absorption appears in the blurb on the books back,which states that, in their conclusion, Lefkowitz and Rogers propose anentirely new scholarly framework for understanding the relationship be-tween the cultures of the ancient Near East and Greece and the origins ofWestern civilization. The only positive suggestion I can nd in their bookis that one should avoid concentration on Egypt and Phoenicia and insteadstudy relations with the northern Levant, Anatolia, and, ultimately, Baby-lonia, which was much more inuential culturally than Egypt generally inthe Near East. Furthermore there were more geographical routes availableby which that Babylonian inuence could travel (p. ). Apart from theTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet43of576 Black Athena Writes Backgeographical argument that Egypt and the Levant were physically closer toGreeceand far more accessible to itthan Mesopotamia, I disagree withthis proposal for many reasons, including, not least, that both the archaeo-logical evidence and the Greek texts indicate that Egypt and Phoenicia pro-vided much the most important outside inuences on Greek culture.22Nevertheless, the shift partway to the perspective of Black Athena madeby Lefkowitz and Rogers is signicant. Even self-proclaimed championsof the traditional disciplines now accept that Greece did not create itselfand that one must look at its civilization in a much broader geographicaland cultural context. As the classicist and recent president of the Ameri-can Philological Association David Konstan put it in his review of Not Outof Africa and BAR: In spite of a certain superciality or tendentiousness inBernals history of philology, in which he ignores a good many scholarswho have frankly acknowledged Greeces debt to its neighbours, Classicistsas a whole (including those represented in Black Athena Revisited) have wel-comed Bernals forceful critique of the professions implicit prejudices andits already palpable eect on the way the Classics are taught and studied.23We are now at the stage of absorption.The Structure of Black Athena Writes BackBlack Athena Writes Back is entirely my own work. Not all of the reviews thatwere reprinted in BAR receive responses here. Notably, I have excluded mymany previously published replies to John Coleman because virtually allof the points he makes have been raised by other reviewers.24In revisingmy initial replies, I have tried to avoid excessive repetition. I use the wordexcessive because some repetition has been inevitable: dierent criticshave leveled closely overlapping charges against Black Athena and I have re-sponded to them in similar if not identical ways.I also do not reply to some of the chapters of BAR that have not previ-ously been published as reviews. We decided that it would be better to leavethe response to Loring Bracess technical article to a professional physicalanthropologist, Shomarka Keita; his extensive reply is included in DebatingBlack Athena. As my only substantial disagreements withFrankYurcos chap-ter are specialized ones on chronology, we decided not to include a replyto his piece in either book. Katherine Bards popular piece does not men-tion me and, therefore, does not require a direct response. I regret that Ihave not replied to professors Liverani and Jenkyns, from whose splendidTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet44of576Introduction book The Victorians and Ancient Greece I have learned a lot. However, my felloweditor David Moore and I felt it necessary to focus on the more substantialcritics, notably Robert Palter, Jay Jasano, and Alan Nussbaum.25Palter isimportant as he is a powerful and interesting adversary both on questionsof ancient science and on modern historiography. Jasano and Nussbaumrequire special attention not because of the quality of their linguistic argu-ments but because so many of the other contributors to BAR have reliedon them.At this point, I should note that Jasano and Nussbaums contributionto BAR is anomalous in that they dislike my proposed etymologies fromSemitic as much as, if not more than, they do those from Egyptian. Inthis reaction, as in other ways, they show their rm allegiance to the late-nineteenth-century tradition of the Neogrammarians, which I discuss inmy reply. To put it in the terms set out in Black Athena, the editors and mostof the contributors to BAR now work within a Broad Aryan model thatdenies Egyptian inuences on Greece but accepts Semitic ones, though,within Southwest Asia, they prefer Mesopotamia to the Levant. By contrast,Jasano and Nussbaum continue to work within the Extreme Aryan modelthat denies suggestions of any Afroasiatic inuences. This discrepancy pro-duces an interesting anomaly in BAR as a whole. The editors Lefkowitz andRogers, as well as other writers, now proclaim their open-mindedness tooutside inuences on Greece. By embracing Jasano and Nussbaum, how-ever, they are forced to deny the obvious corollary that the close interactionin all other realms would lead to substantial linguistic borrowings.As mentioned at the outset of this introduction, in addition to the re-sponses to chapters in BAR we have included other articles relevant to thedebate. Two of these are reviews of books written by contributors to BAR,Mary Lefkowitz and Sarah Morris. In the latter case, we thought it betterto respond to her splendid book Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art ratherthan to her less substantial chapter in BAR. We also include two reviewsof books by Walter Burkert and Martin West, who since their student dayshave been in contact with the Cologne school dominated by ReinholdMerkelbach. For some decades, this school has emphasized the importanceof Southwest Asian inuences on Greek religion.Burkert and West have been what one might call licensed deviants, li-censed because their profound scholarship has never been questioned;until recently, however, their conclusions have been considered eccentric.Now, in the face of threats from outside, they are being hailed as pioneersof the direction that Classics as a discipline would have taken without allTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet45of576 Black Athena Writes Backthe brouhaha around Black Athena. I have the deepest admiration for Burkertand West and for Morris, who makes arguments similar to theirs, both fortheir courage in the face of the entrenched discipline and for their scholar-ship, which possesses depths that I could never possibly plumb. I disagreewith them, however, on two important grounds. First, they focus largelyon the Greek Dark Ages and Archaic Period, ...; they tendnot to look further back into the Bronze Age, when I amconvinced much ofthe cultural borrowing took place. Second, they strikingly neglect Egyptiancultural inuences, which I, like the Greeks of the Classical and HellenisticPeriods ( ...), am convinced played if anything an even greaterrole in the formation of Greek civilization than did Southwest Asia.The two areas of neglect are connected. Although Egypt played the largerrole in the formation of Greek civilization in the Bronze Age and againin the late seventh and sixth centuries ..., Southwest Asia in generaland Phoenicia in particular had a greater impact on the Aegean from theeleventh to the early seventh centuries. For this reason we have also in-cluded an original article, Phoenician Politics and Egyptian Justice in An-cient Greece. In this I tried to set out my views on the dierent types ofcultural inuence Egypt and the Levant exerted on the Aegean and the dif-ferent periods in which one or other regional inuence was predominant.At this point, we should turn to the book itself and to the rst part onEgyptology.Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet46of576IEgyptologyScm c m\ cx1cs, notably the editors of BAR, desire to portray mywork as exclusively focused on Egypt and Africa. These editors should haveincluded an equivalent section on Syro-Palestine.1Nevertheless, it is truethat I do see Egypt as central to the formation of Ancient Greece. Further-more, much of my argument is based on Egyptian sources and I have spenta great deal of time and eort looking for evidence of Egyptian culture andlanguage in Greece and Greek.Though critical, the tone of the Egyptologists whose articles have beenincluded in BAR is considerably more civil than that of the scholars fromother disciplines. Much of this can be explained in purely personal terms.However, there are also structural reasons for this civility in that the ideascontained in Black Athena are less threatening to Egyptology than they are toClassics, Aegean archaeology, or the historiography of the ancient world.Before the fth century .c.., Egypt had a far greater impact on Greecethan vice versa. Thus, recognition of signicantly closer relations betweenthe two civilizations has a major impact on our understanding of AncientGreece but a relatively minor one on the reconstruction of Ancient Egypt.Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet47of576 Part IOne reason I am particularly glad to be able to have calm debates withEgyptologists is because Egyptology was the rst academic discipline withwhich I came into contact. My grandfather Alan Gardiner was not only anEgyptologist but he was a pioneer of Egyptology as a professional disci-pline. Having worked for many years in Berlin and in close contact withAmericancolleagues, he introduced Germanic rigor and positivisminto thepreviously amateurish Egyptology of France, England, and Wales. He usedthe Teutonic title Dr. when it was considered somehow foreign and vul-gar at Oxford and Cambridge. He also made a clear demarcation betweensound scholarship and unsound speculation. I experienced this personallywhen I was a child: he rmly warned me oreading cranks like MargaretMurray and old-fashioned scholars like Wallis Budge.I now know that as a linguist, my grandfather had a bold and creativemind. However, as a child and a young man, I sawhimas the model profes-sional scholar, as opposed to my brilliant, wide-ranging, and controversialfather, J. D. Bernal.2Knowing that I could not compete with my father, Ifound that my grandfathers professionalism had a considerable appeal tome as a strenuous but attainable goal. The fact that I never reached thisin any discipline does not prevent me from feeling a fond familiarity withEgyptology and Egyptologists.BAR contains three chapters by Egyptologists. I have replied to only twoof them. The third, by Frank Yurco, contains some interesting challengesto the chronology I propose, but the bulk of the other issues he raisesare covered in the chapters by John Baines and David OConnor. More im-portant, Yurco and I are largely in accord on the Africanity of Egypt. Thewriter Richard Poe, in his massive and fascinating work Black Spark, WhiteFire, which includes discussion of the struggles around Black Athena, ndsit interesting that Yurco and I, with completely dierent backgrounds anddiametrically opposed views on the VietnamWar, should be in such agree-ment about Egypt.3Although we all agree that the issues are important and that there aresignicant dierences between the two sides, as I have stated above, thereis a civilized tone to the Egyptological debate. Baines, OConnor, and I are,of course, united in our aection for if not love of Ancient Egypt. Further-more, most Egyptologists acknowledge that the furor around Black Athenahas increased general interest in their discipline. After years of decline, anumber of newposts in Egyptology were created in the s. Despite thisgrowth, however, Egyptologists are terried at nonprofessional interven-Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet48of576Part I tions in their eld, which has always been a fragile discipline set in a seaof cranks. Many Egyptologists clearly put me in that category. As I wentinto the panel on my work at the annual conference of the American Re-search Center in Egypt (), I overheard someone say: Now for somecomic relief ! Others, like the contributors to BAR, take my work moreseriously. They believe, however, that I have acted irresponsibly by encour-aging cranks in general and Afrocentric cranks in particular.Readers interested in the physical anthropology of the Ancient Egyp-tians will not nd it in Black Athena Writes Back. For this they should turnto Shomarka Keitas substantial reply to the physical anthropologist Lor-ing Braces essay on the subject in BAR, which is included in Debating BlackAthena. Althoughthere is no discussionof bones and genes by the Egyptolo-gists in BAR, these authors are unhappy at my use of the adjective black.Unlike some critics, Baines and OConnor have read my work carefullyenough to realize that I have never suggested that the Ancient Egyptianpopulation as a whole looked like stereotypical West Africans. Neverthe-less, they nd my statement that some dynasties and pharaohs can use-fully be described as black to be distasteful. They argue that such cate-gories make no sense biologically and were meaningless to the AncientEgyptians themselves and, further, that my raising the issue exacerbatesthe tense situation between whites and blacks today.As I have said and written a number of times, I should have preferredthe title African Athena. On the other hand, I stand by my references tocertain rulers as usefully described as black. Race is certainly not auseful biological category, and until the Assyrian and Persian invasionsin the rst millennium ..., it was not an issue for the Ancient Egyp-tians. However, it is a crucially important social classication for Europeansand North Americans today. Furthermore, Black Athena did not introducethe subject to Egyptology: it was always there. In later chapters of thisbook there are discussions of the nineteenth-century Abolitionists, whofor their own political reasons insisted on the black pigmentation and Ne-groid features of the Ancient Egyptians.4By contrast, most Egyptologistsformed before accepted the view held generally in the societies inwhich they lived that Negroes were categorically incapable of civiliza-tion. Thus, the extent to which the Ancient Egyptians were civilized wasseen as the measure of their whiteness. This belief has weakened sincethe s, but it has not disappeared. It was for this reason that I haveinsisted that Ancient Egypt was both civilized and African and, further,Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet49of576 Part Ithat its population included some men and women of what we now thinkof as Central African appearance in politically and culturally importantpositions.After this brief preamble, I should like to set out my individual replies,starting with that to the chapter by Professor Baines.Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet50of576 Can We Be Fair? x\ 1c cK KsJohn Baines is not only professor of Egyptology at Oxford, more recentlyworking at Harvard, but he had previously written two substantial essayson Black Athena II. The rst of these appeared in the New York Times andthe second was originally scheduled for a volume proposed as a publica-tion for the American Research Center in Egypt on the basis of a sessionon Black Athena at the centers annual meeting in Berkeley in April .1The volume, however, was scrapped at a late stage, and the editor, AntonioLoprieno, oered the papers responding to my workthough not my re-plies, which he also possessedto Mary Lefkowitz and Guy Rogers forBAR. They accepted those by Baines and OConnor.2Bainess chapter in BAR is closely based on his second review. In hisnotes to the chapter, he scrupulously apologizes for reviewing the samebook twice but justies it by treating aspects of my work that he did notdiscuss in the earlier review. I must confess that I nd this piece far morethoughtful and thought-provoking than the one in the New York Times. I amTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet51of576z6 Part Iparticularlv impressed bv the close attention to mv work that this reviewshows. I shall respond to what I believe to be his main challenges in theorder in which he raises them.Bainess IntroductionIn his introduction, Baines suggests that rather than attributing the apo-theosis or idealization of the Ancient Greeks at the beginning of the nine-teenthcenturv to racism, one should attribute it to other factors. Ingeneral,as he puts it, the emergence of Greece as an ideal was part of the incipi-ent secularization of the Fnlightenment and of Iomanticism (p. z8). Inpoint of fact, I do not claim that racism was the sole factor in the down-plaving of Fgvpt and the elevation of Greece in the earlv nineteenth cen-turv. I onlv maintain that it was one of manv causes. I do, however, seeracism as a signicant initial factor and one that remained important untilioaj. Furthermore, as I have stated in manv places elsewhere, I believethat another of the initial factors was the revival of Christianitv after i8ij,which is preciselv the opposite of the secularization that Baines proposes.Furthermore, I do not accept the idea that manv thinkers of the Fnlight-enment idealized Greece. Indeed, several of them preferred Fgvpt.3Ioveof Greece was verv largelv a romantic preserve. For some Iomantics, likeShellev, this passion was linked to atheism, but for most eighteenth- andearlv-nineteenth-centurv Philhellenes, love of pagan Greece was paradoxi-callv associated with passions for Furope as the Christian continent. Withthe general secularization from the end of the i8jos, Philhellenism be-came more detached fromreligion. Fven after that period, Christian beliefsand a love of pagan Greece were quite compatible, as, for instance, in theFnglish public schools (BA I: jzo).What I did underestimate was the appeal of a Greece of citv states overthe Ioman and Fgvptian empires to the progressive Northern Furopeanbourgeoisie, this appeal is epitomized bv the work of George Grote.4How-ever, here too one cannot dismiss the eect of romanticism and revivedChristianitv on the new historiographv, not to mention the increasinglvpervasive and svstematic racism, which was particularlv strong among theNorthern Furopean bourgeoisie.Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet52of576Reply to Baines The Argument of Black Athena, Volume Immediately after his introduction, Baines sets out what he sees as the mainpoints of BA II. Simplication is, of course, inevitable, but I nd his re-statement of some of my arguments too bald. For instance, I do not claimthat Egyptian temples were dedicated at Mycenae, I only refer to pos-sible foundations (BA II: ). Turning to another issue, he states,In contrast with general practice, Bernal introduces authors with theirethnicity and often a sort of academic genealogy, and he frequently mobi-lizes these factors . . . in explaining, approving, or dismissing what theysay. This quirk . . . (p. ). In point of fact, it is quite normal for histo-riographers to refer to a scholars country of origin. John Baines himselfis no exception. Take, for example, the three instances of this practice ona single page of his and Jaromir Mleks admirable Atlas of Ancient Egypt.5Presumably, these identications are not merely mnemonic devices but aremeant to convey something about the scholar concerned. It is also rela-tively common to refer to scholars academic backgrounds. Indeed, mostdisciplines, including Egyptology, have biographical dictionaries in whichnationality, academic formation, and the links among scholars are rightlyemphasized.6Where I go beyond the convention of Egyptology and Classics (thoughnot that of other elds) is in stating publicly that I see the writing of historyand other forms of scholarship as an intricate dialectic between the sub-jective predispositions of the scholar and the conguration of the object ofstudy. Therefore, I believe one should attempt to take both into account.Naturally, I accept that my own situation and motives should also be scruti-nized, and I have attempted to help in this analysis by making my consciouspreferences clear. For example, I expressed my unhappiness at my conclu-sion that speakers of Hurrian and possibly even Indo-Aryan were presentamong the Hyksos when they conquered Egypt.Methods and TheoriesBaines shares the widespread uncertainty as to whether I believe contem-porary classicists to be racist. I had thought that I had made my positionclear on this point. For instance, in BA I, I wrote, Muhly was undoubt-Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet53of576 Part Iedly right . . . to point out that the majority of modern Classicists do notshare the racism and anti-Semitism endemic among their teachers andtheir teachers teachers (p. ).Baines raises the issue of the strategy, used by both conservatives andinnovators, of legitimation through real or imagined ancestors. I certainlyaccept that some myths of origins are complete ctions (p. ). I wouldagree, for instance, that it is unlikely that the Trojan prince Brutus sailedto South Devon and landed at Totnes, especially as the event was recordedby Georey of Monmouth more than two thousand years after the allegedarrival. Other such myths, however, may contain genuine historical infor-mation. In the Eastern Mediterranean, given the relatively short distancesinvolved together with the archaeological and, I would argue, linguistic evi-dence of contact, the stories of Hyksos settlements in Greece would seemplausible.Many scholars today maintain that attempting to distinguish fact fromction in myth is both futile and uninteresting.7They are concerned withthe structure and contemporary function of myths. I do not challenge thesignicance of suchconcerns, but they are not mine. Giventhe unreliabilityand patchiness of other sources of information on the Bronze Age Aegean,I believe that one should use those elements of myths and legends withplausible historicity as aids in setting up working hypotheses to be testedin other ways. Obviously, I am not the rst to do this. In the Cambridge An-cient History, for instance, Frank Stubbings uses precisely such a conjunc-tion of tradition and archaeological evidence to set out his interpretationof the early Shaft Graves and the beginnings of the Mycenaean Period asthe results of Hyksos conquests and settlements.8On the issue of blackness, Baines nds my attempts to establish thepaternity or maternity of specic individuals distasteful, especially as thisissue was of no concern to the Ancient Egyptians themselves. As I havewritten before, I am sympathetic to this view, especially because I too donot believe in the biological utility of the concept of race.9As a socialphenomenon, however, race is of overriding importance to anyone livingat the turn of the twenty-rst century. In particular, blacks are constantlybeing told explicitly or implicitly that they have never created a civiliza-tion and that, therefore, unless they accept European culture, they neverwill partake in civilization. Although I agree with Baines that PharaonicEgypt was only one of a number of African civilizations, given the toutedand real hegemony of European and Western civilization today, the role ofEgypt in the formation of Ancient Greece gives Ancient Egypt a special sig-Tseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet54of576Reply to Baines nicance. This fact is one reason why many American and British blacksare so eager to claim identication with Ancient Egypt. I believe that theyare right to be indignant at the double standards applied to themand to theAncient Egyptians. In the United States and Western Europe, one drop ofblack blood is enough to label someone a black. However, when AncientEgypt is viewed, no one is considered black unless he or she conformsto the European stereotype of a West African. Very few Ancient Egyptianswould have been labeled white in nineteenth- or twentieth-century Brit-ain or America.I should have preferred this series of works to have been called Afri-can Athena because for Europeans and Euro-Americans, the word blackconjures up a stereotype that is not appropriate for Egyptians. This, how-ever, does not make themany less African.10Hence, I accept that the titleBlack Athena is in some ways misleading. I do not, however, concede thesame for my claim that the rulers of the Eleventh Dynasty were black.The famous cult statue of Mentuhotpe II of that dynasty could have beenpainted black for many reasons. It could well have been to represent Osirisand the color of immortality, but that possibility does not rule out otherfactors. Before the rulers of the Eleventh Dynasty became pharaohs, thefamily had ruled the Theban nome or district in the south of Upper Egypt.As nomarchs or local rulers, the family had close relations with Nubia, andit is interesting to note that some of Mentuhotpes wives are also repre-sented as having black skin.11Thus, one cannot assume that the blacknessof the pharaohs miniature statue was purely the result of religious sym-bolism.Bainess main question, however, is why I should have stressed theblackness of these pharaohs. I did it to counterbalance early-twentieth-century Egyptologists emphasis on the image of Ancient Egyptians andtheir rulers as real or imagined northerners or whites, and the continuinginuence this image has in popular representations of Egyptians.12Take,for example, the straight-nosed sphinx at Las Vegas. At another level, thereare the illustrations of the childrens book Gods and Pharaohs from EgyptianMythology by David OConnor (not the Egyptologist of that name) with textby the Egyptologist Geraldine Harris, which consistently portray Egyptiansas made-up Europeans.13Indeed, its striking cover and frontispiece is ofa pharaoh with blue eyes and the features of the evangelist Billy Graham!The cover of the sophisticated board game Civilization, which was clearlydeveloped in close consultation with archaeologists, features pyramids, apalm-fringed river with a felucca, the Acropolis, and Vesuvius. The centerTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet55of576 Part Iis dominated by the face of a bearded Greek Zeus/philosopher. Behind himto one side is a blond, blue-eyed Roman, and on the other side a gray-eyed,auburn-haired Cleopatra gure who makes Elizabeth Taylor look Mediter-ranean! In such a cultural environment, I believe it is useful to emphasizethat the Ancient Egyptians were African.Baines points out that my earlier work on China shows that I am ex-tremely interested in some non-European civilizations for their own sakeand not simply for their contributions to the development of Westerncivilization.14In general, I do not see why concern with the Egyptian andPhoenician roles in the emergence and owering of Ancient Greece shouldbe seen as diminishing respect for other African cultures. My books are notworld histories; they are treatments of one particular historical theme. Iconcede that my choice of this theme is Eurocentric. Given the hegemonicposition of European culture in the world today, I am convinced that thischoice is a particularly important one.Baines writes that I have little to prove and that few will deny thatthe Aegean was part of a wider cultural and economic Eastern Mediterra-nean region. I completely agree that recent archaeological discoveries aremaking denial of this position increasingly untenable. However, the iso-lationism of archaeologists and historians of the Ancient Aegean is deep-rooted and remarkably impervious to contrary evidence. The disgracefultreatment of the work of Gordon, Astour, and Bass on Semitic inuenceson the Aegean did not end in the s.15Nevertheless, since the mid-s a movement, in which Black Athena has played a role, has opened upthe possibility of substantial contacts around the Eastern Mediterraneanduring the Bronze Age. The one area where the old isolationist faith per-sists is that of language. If few now deny that Egypt and the Levant hadclose relations with the Aegean, the obdurate refusal to consider the possibilityof substantial linguistic borrowing from Egyptian and West Semitic intoGreek, seen clearly in the BAR chapter by Jasanoand Nussbaum, becomesincreasingly anomalous.I agree with Baines (p. ) that the special relationship between Byblosand Egypt indicates that Egyptian relations with other parts of Syro-Palestine were not equally close. I would maintain, however, that part ofthe dierence lies in the length and continuity of the Byblian connection,whereas that between Egypt and other Canaanite cities was more episodic.When discussing the New Kingdom, we might dier on the semantic eldof the word colonial, but I would nd it appropriate for the situationTseng 2001.7.5 15:14 6353 Bernal/BLACKATHENAWRITESBACK / sheet56of576Reply to Baines presupposed in the Amarna Letters as well as from evidence produced by ex-cavations in Gaza, Aphek, Beth Shan, and elsewhere. Intense contact isalso indicated linguistically by the Egyptian inuence on Canaanite andvice versa.16Although the situation in the Levant during the Middle Kingdom isless clear-cut, Baines states that most scholars now see more Egyptianinuence there in this period than would have been envisaged a gen-eration ago (p. ). Naturally, I welcome this retreat from minimalism,but Baines is quite right to suppose that I nd even the new cautiousapproach inadequate. It seems to me not only that Giveons and