Black Athena

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Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (German: Black Athene. The Afro-Asian roots of Greek antiquity ) is a three-volume work by Martin Bernal from 1987, 1991 and 2006. In Black Athena, he puts forward the controversial hypothesis that the culture of ancient Greece derives from the cultures of the Phoenicians and Egyptians . This would mean that the origin of western civilization would lie in the Middle East and North Africa and not, as previously assumed, in Europe.

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Martin Bernal's (1937-2013) actual subject was not classical antiquity, as he was professor of Sinology at Cambridge University and at Cornell University until he retired in 2001. His research focus was on the development of the Chinese language. In the case of Black Athena , he tries to demonstrate cultural influences on the linguistic level, while rejecting archaeological evidence and historical reports to a certain extent.

According to Bernal, there are two main theories about the origin of Greek civilization: the "Aryan model" and the "Phoenician model". According to the Aryan model, Greece was settled from the northwest, so the immigrants came from central Europe. Bernal divides this model into two versions, the "strong" and the "weak" version. The strong version says that Greece was unpopulated before the Aryans immigrated, the weak version assumes that there was an indigenous population.

Bernal rejects the Aryan model because of a lack of evidence. He quotes Greek historians to prove that the contemporaries of Socrates , Plato, and Aristotle believed that the Phoenicians colonized Greece. Building on this, he hypothesizes that the immigrants from the north met a Phoenician colony with which they mingled. In addition, he tries to prove that the Egyptians and Phoenicians were mainly of African and not Mediterranean origin.

Research context

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The Aryans here mean the early Indo-Europeans . The term "Arya-" is only used as a self-designation in the Indo-Iranian area; further use is based on no longer accepted etymological interpretations and is therefore now avoided by experts. The opinion that the origins of the Indo-Europeans are to be found in Central Europe is also out of date; today they are believed to be further east. About Greek ethnogenesis : Nowadays the most common assumption is that there was an indigenous population on the Balkan Peninsula and that traces of pre-Indo-European substrate languages persist in ancient Greece. The Minoan culture is nowadays mostly considered to be pre-Indo-European, the early Cycladic and early Helladic cultures as well as Cyprus before the Late Bronze Age are also mostly viewed as pre-Indo-European. The prevailing opinion is that the Greeks, as a result of the mixing of an indigenous population with Indo-European immigrants (whose language gradually developed into Greek under the influence of the indigenous substrate languages), probably emerged in the course of the 2nd millennium BC, and only then Phoenician influences took effect.

expenditure

English
Part 1:
  • Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Rutgers University Press (1987) ISBN 0-8135-1277-8 )
  • Black Athena. Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 Vol 1 (Paperback) Vintage; New Ed edition (21 Nov 1991) ISBN 978-0099887805
  • Black Athena. Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 Vol 1 (Paperback) Free Association Books (29 Nov 2004) ISBN 978-0946960569
Volume 2:
  • Black Athena. Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence Vol 2 (Paperback) Publisher: Free Association Books (1 Jan 1991) ISBN 978-1853430541
  • Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Vol 2 (Hardcover) Rutgers University Press (Jul 1991) ISBN 978-0813515847
Volume 3:
  • Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence Vol 3 (Hardcover) Rutgers University Press (25 Nov 2006) ISBN 978-0813536552
  • Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence Free Association Books (1 Feb 2006) ISBN 978-1853437991
German
  • Translation by Joachim Rehork : Black Athene. The Afro-Asian roots of ancient Greece. How classical Greece was "invented" . Verlag List, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-471-77170-0

literature

  • Mary Lefkowitz : Not out of Africa. How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History . First Edition: Basic Books, New York 1996. 2, Revised Edition: Basic Books, New York 1997. ISBN 046509838X
  • Mary Lefkowitz, Guy MacLean Rogers (Eds.): Black Athena Revisited . The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1996. ISBN 0807845558
  • David Chioni Moore (Eds.), Martin Bernal: Black Athena Writes Back. Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics . Duke University Press, Durham 2001. ISBN 978-0822327066 .
  • Thomas A. Schmitz : Ex Africa Lux? Black Athena and the Debate about Afrocentrism in the US. In: Göttingen Forum for Classical Studies 2, 1999, 17–76, online (PDF)
  • Wim van Binsbergen (Ed.): Black Athena Comes of Age . Berlin 2011.

Web links