Martin Gardiner Bernal (1937–2013)

The book produced something of an eclat in some circles. However much they might sympathize with the result, no reputable scholar was comfortable with the crazy, non-scholarship of people like Leonard Jeffries, of "sun people"/"ice people" fame. So it was cheering to believe that a real scholar--Bernal has no actual training in ancient history, archaelogy or linguistics, but was a prominent academic and not an idiot--was taking up the case for the African origin of Greek civilization. (The show more "Asiatic-" part tends to get lost in the identity politics game.)

Volume 1 has a rather lengthy and polemical demonstration that the study of ancient history has too often been shot through with racist assumptions. Although 19c German historiography isn't my forte, I gather this part has good grounding. Apart from that, volume one is a sort of striptease for Bernal's actual thesis, the "afro-asiatic roots of Greek civiliation," heavy on the tease and light on the strip.

Volume 2 presents the actual argument, and even Bernal's supporters had to concede the effort fell far short of the promise. Freeing himself from 19th-century racism, Bernal's method doesn't rise above 19th-century techniques. His archaeology is unsystemmatic and speculative. His linguistics is not recognized as such by real linguists, although it seems like linguistics to others (real linguistics is more than a game of playing with sounds to make words come from other words).

By the time the third volume came out, I, at least, stopped caring what he had to say. Perhaps he redeemed the argument in volume three. I doubt it. show less

Bernal's "Black Athena," though at times loopy, beautifully exposes how cultural prejudice could for centuries blind ancient historians to what they were actually reading in the sources.

Persuasive, elegantly written, and not refuted yet by its critics. Speaks volumes about modern greek residual racism that Bernal's trilogy has not found a publisher in Greece, while its "refutation" by Levkowitz was immediately translated

Difficult to evaluate. Not quite what I had been led to believe as far as black African influence and much about the influence of anti-Semitic ideas on Classical studies.