Mary R.Lefkowitz & Guy MacLean Rogers (Eds.). _Black Athena
Revisited_.  University of North Carolina Press, 1996, xxi
+522 pp. Tables, appendix, notes, bibliography and index.
$55.00 (hardcover). $18.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Roland Oliver, University of London (Emeritus)
for H-Africa <Suzanne Miers Oliver,103227.2705@compuserve.com>

Earlier this year, in _Not out of Africa_, Mary Lefkowitz
fired some crisp broadsides along the wilder shores of
Afrocentrist fantasy inhabited by such past and present
writers as E.W.Blyden, Marcus Garvey, Cheik Anta Diop and
George G.M.Jones. In _ Black Africa Revisited _ she now
joins with eighteen collaborators in testing some of the
hypotheses concerning `the Afro-asiatic Roots of Classical
Civilisation' proposed by Martin Bernal in the first two
volumes of _Black Athena_, published in 1987 and 1991.
Essentially, it is a book about the Aegean world during the
second millennium B.C. This is the period for which Bernal
postulates two colonisations of Greece by Egyptians, each
sufficiently powerful and longlasting to set their mark
indelibly on Greek language and literacy, art and
architecture, religion and science.

The contributing `revisitors' are all specialists in one or
other of the relevant disciplines of Classics and
Egyptology, Archaeology and Ancient History, Linguistics and
the History of Science.  They have not approached their task
in the spirit of dyed-in-the-wool defenders of their several
professional traditions, but rather as seekers after truth,
prepared to take seriously the suggestions of an obviously
very gifted outsider whose own academic specialisation
happens to have been in the Government and Politics of
China. For all of them the question of whether the Ancient
Egyptians could, in Bernal's words, "usefully be called
Black" is really an irrelevance.

Bernal does not deal with any country to the south of Egypt,
and, as he apparently confessed to a colloquium of the
American Philological Association in 1989, his preferred
title for the book would have been "African Athena". It was
his publisher who insisted that the lady would sell even
better if she was Black. The substantive question of the
present inquiry, therefore, is in what measure the
civilisation of classical Greece owed its rise to knowledge
and skills implanted there by conquerors from Egypt,
assisted by their fellow Afro-Asiatics from the
Semitic-speaking Levant.

   It is the three Egyptologist--John Baines of Oxford,
David O'Connor of Pennsylvania and Frank Yurco of
Chicago--who make the most telling group of witnesses. All
three go out of their way to salute Bernal for helping to
correct an imbalance in the manner in which classicists have
commonly been content to treat the origins of Greek
civilisation as if it was a completely autonomous growth
which occurred within the sphere of a single
Indo-European-speaking community. All agree that Greek
civilisation needs to be seen much more clearly in the
context of the eastern Mediterranean basin as a whole. That
said, all three are quite sure that Bernal's hypothesis of
two periods of Egyptian conquest and colonisation of the
Greek mainland and islands goes far beyond the evidence.

They consider that during the first of these periods,
corresponding with the 12th Egyptian Dynasty, the northward
influence of Egypt was probably confined to the Sinai
peninsula and the Palestinian coast, with Byblos acting the
part of a client state at its northern extremity. They see
this expansion as primarily commercial, supported perhaps by
the occasional punitive expedition - a scenario comparable
to the southward expansion of Egypt into Nubia at the same
period. By the time of Egypt's next great surge of
prosperity and power under the 18th Dynasty at the end of
the second millennium, the economic situation in the eastern
Mediterranean had already developed to the point at which
Greek maritime traders were regularly visiting Egypt and
even settling in the ports of the Nile Delta. The commercial
contact no doubt led to cultural borrowings and the exchange
of ideas, but there is still no direct, contemporary
evidence of Egyptian conquest or colonisation in the Aegean
which can in any way compare with that from Nubia at the
same period, where Egyptian towns and temples were being
built, and where cemeteries bear witness to acculturation to
Egyptian norms in material culture and religious beliefs.

     The classicist and linguistic contributors to the
volume are noticably less tolerant of Bernal's lack of
professional rigour in handling his evidence. Sarah Morris
of UCLA and Jay Jasanoff and Alan Nussbaum of Cornell all
round on him for his uncritical acceptance of Herodotus'
oral interrogations of Egyptian clerics of the fifth century
BC as a valid source for events of the previous millennium
in preference to the contemporary written texts. Several
contributors complain that his `look-alike' etymologies
supposedly linking Greek with Egyptian and Semitic lack any
scientific basis. It is clear, they say, for any trained
historical linguist that his evidence for massive Egyptian
and Semitic borrowing in Greek is a "mirage".

Frank Snowden of Howard accuses him of ignoring copious
iconographic and written evidence in his easy acceptance of
African, Egyptian and Black as equivalent terms. Robert
Palter of Trinity College Connecticut argues that the
Egyptians never invented a mathematical astronomy comparable
with that of the Babylonians, who were surpassed in their
turn by the Greeks. John Coleman of Cornell sums up the
issue of Greek borrowing by granting that Greek civilisation
was influenced from abroad and made use of previous advances
in mathematics and science, but adding that this in no wise
amounts to saying that it had Afro-Asiatic roots. "Bernal
cites no instance of cultural borrowing significant enough
to be considered basic to Aegean civilisation". Emily
Vermeule of Harvard, who claims with obvious sincerity to be
his friend, and to having felt attracted by the apparently
even-handed and refreshing historiographical surveys of the
first volume of _Black Athena_, finds the second volume "a
whirling confusion of half-digested reading, bold linguistic
supposition and preconceived dogma".

     As Lefkowitz's co-editor, Guy MacLean Rogers, remarks
in his concluding chapter, the fact is that, despite its
title, "_Black Athena_ is not about ancient Africa at all".
Otherwise, its author would surely have paid some attention
to the relationship between ancient Egypt and the rest of
the African continent, where theories of civilisation
through conquest have mostly gone the way of Charles Gabriel
Seligman and the `Hamitic myth'. It is now apparent that,
with the single exception of Kush, which shared the same
uniquely favoured river valley, there was no part of
tropical Africa where cultural changes can be attributed to
Egyptian conquest and settlement. Most of Africa had to
cope, and, given time, did cope, with environments much more
difficult and hostile than that of the Nile valley, to
produce a huge variety of interlocking civilisations.

African history is well able to stand on its own feet,
without the spurious prop of a mythical conquest of Greece
by Ancient Egypt. As John Baines puts it, "Egypt offered a
dominant model of a large-scale society that confronted the
outside world in relative isolation...It was a more
homogeneous society than others, and many of its ideas did
not travel well". Historians of Africa, no less than others,
may be glad that _Black Athena_ has been so soberly and
usefully _Revisited_.

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