Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volu

Editorial review from Barnes and Noble

ISBN: 0813536553
Format: Hardcover, 704pp
Pub. Date: August 2006
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
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ABOUT THE BOOK
* From the Publisher
ABOUT THE BOOK
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume
III: The Linguistic Evidence
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Could Greek philosophy be rooted in Egyptian thought? Is it possible
that the Pythagorean theory was conceived on the shores of the Nile
and the Euphrates rather than in ancient Greece? Could it be that
Western civilization was born on the so-called Dark Continent? For
almost two centuries, Western scholars have given little credence to
the possibility of such scenarios.

In Black Athena, an audacious three-volume series that strikes at the
heart of today's most heated culture wars, Martin Bernal challenges
Eurocentric attitudes by calling into question two of the
longest-established explanations for the origins of classical
civilization. The Aryan Model, which is current today, claims that
Greek culture arose as the result of the conquest from the north by
Indo-European speakers, or "Aryans," of the native "pre-Hellenes." The
Ancient Model, which was maintained in Classical Greece, held that the
native population of Greece had initially been civilized by Egyptian
and Phoenician colonists and that additional Near Eastern culture had
been introduced to Greece by Greeks studying in Egypt and Southwest
Asia. Moving beyond these prevailing models, Bernal proposes a Revised
Ancient Model, which suggests that classical civilization in fact had
deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures.

This long-awaited third and final volume of the series is concerned
with the linguistic evidence that contradicts the Aryan Model of
ancient Greece. Bernal shows how nearly 40 percent of the Greek
vocabulary has been plausibly derived from two Afroasiatic
languages—Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic. He also reveals how these
derivations are not limited to matters of trade, but extended to the
sophisticatedlanguage of politics, religion, and philosophy. This
evidence, according to Bernal, confirms the fact that in Greece an
Indo-European people was culturally dominated by speakers of Ancient
Egyptian and West Semitic.

Provocative, passionate, and colossal in scope, this volume caps a
thoughtful rewriting of history that has been stirring academic and
political controversy since the publication of the first volume.