Winner of the 1990 American Book Award

What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the foundation of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed since the eighteenth century—chiefly for racist reasons.

The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers—Aryans—from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this “Aryan model.” They did not see their institutions as original, but as derived from the East and from Egypt in particular.

In an unprecedented tour de force, Bernal links a wide range of areas and disciplines—drama, poetry, myth, theological controversy, esoteric religion, philosophy, biography, language, historical narrative, and the emergence of “modern scholarship.”

Table of Contents:
Preface and Acknowledgements        Transcription and Phonetics   Maps and Charts         Chronological Table   Introduction    Background    Proposed historical outline     Black Athena, Volume I: a summary of the argument                       Greece European or Levantine? The Egyptian and West Semitic Components of Greek Civilization / a summary of Volume 2                       Solving the Riddle of the Sphinx and Other Studies in Egypto-Greek Mythology / a summary of Volume 1          The Ancient Model in Antiquity        Pelasgians        Ionians Colonization The colonizations in Greek tragedy   Herodotos       Thucydides     Isokrates and Plato      Aristotle          Theories of colonization and later borrowing in the Hellenistic world Plutarch’s attack on Herodotos The triumph of Egyptian religion Alexander son of Ammon 2          Egyptian wisdom and Greek transmission From the Dark Ages to the Renaissance         The murder of Hypatia The collapse of Egypto-Pagan religion Christianity, stars and fish      The relics of Egyptian religion: Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism Hermeticism – Greek, Iranian, Chaldaean or Egyptian?        Hermeticism and Neo-Platonism under early Christianity, Judaism and Islam Hermeticism in Byzantium and Christian Western Europe   Egypt in the Renaissance        Copernicus and Hermeticism Hermeticism and Egypt in the 16th century 3          The triumph of Egypt in the 17th and 18th centuries Hermeticism in the 17th century        Rosicrucianism: Ancient Egypt in Protestant countries         Ancient Egypt in the 18th century      The 18th century: China and the Physiocrats The 18th century: England, Egypt and the Freemasons         France, Egypt and ‘progress’: the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns   Mythology as allegory for Egyptian science  The Expedition to Egypt        4          Hostilities to Egypt in the 18th century          Christian reaction        The ‘triangle’: Christianity and Greece against Egypt           The alliance between Greece and Christianity           ‘Progress’ against Egypt Europe as the ‘progressive’ continent ‘Progress’        Racism            Romanticism   Ossian and Homer Romantic Hellenism Winckelmann and Neo-Hellenism in Germany Göttingen 5          Romantic linguistics The rise of India and the fall of Egypt, 1740–1880 The birth of Indo-European The love affair with Sanskrit Schlegelian Romantic linguistics The Oriental Renaissance The fall of China Racism in the early 19th century What colour were the Ancient Egyptians? The national renaissance of modern Egypt Dupuis, Jomard and Champollion Egyptian monotheism or Egyptian polytheism Popular perceptions of Ancient Egypt in the 19th and 20th centuries Elliot Smith and ‘diffusionism’ Jomard and the Mystery of the Pyramids 6           Hellenomania, 1 The fall of the Ancient Model, 1790–1830    Friedrich August Wolf and Wilhelm von Humboldt Humboldt’s educational reforms        The Philhellenes          Dirty Greeks and the Dorians Transitional figures, 1: Hegel and Marx         Transitional figures, 2: Heeren Transitional figures, 3: Barthold Niebuhr Petit-Radel and the first attack on the Ancient Model Karl Otfried Müller and the overthrow of the Ancient Model 7          Hellenomania, 2 Transmission of the new scholarship to England and the rise of the Aryan Model, 1830–60            The German model and educational reform in England        George Grote  Aryans and Hellenes   8          The rise and fall of the Phoenicians, 1830–85 Phoenicians and anti-Semitism           What race were the Semites?  The linguistic and geographical inferiorities of the Semites  The Arnolds    Phoenicians and English, 1: the English view            Phoenicians and English, 2: the French view Salammbô       Moloch The Phoenicians in Greece: 1820–80 Gobineau’s image of Greece  Schliemann and the discovery of the ‘Mycenaeans’  Babylon 9          The final solution of the Phoenician problem, 1885–1945 The Greek Renaissance Salomon Reinach Julius Beloch Victor Bérard Akhenaton and the Egyptian Renaissance Arthur Evans and the ‘Minoans’ The peak of anti-Semitism, 1920–39 20th-century Aryanism Taming the alphabet: the final assault on the Phoenicians 10         The post-war situation The return to the Broad Aryan Model, 1945–85        The post-war situation Developments in Classics, 1945–65   The model of autochthonous origin    East Mediterranean contacts   Mythology      Language        Ugarit  Scholarship and the rise of Israel        Cyrus Gordon Astour and Hellenosemitica Astour’s successor? – J. C. Billigmeier An attempt at compromise: Ruth Edwards The return of the Iron Age Phoenicians Naveh and the transmission of the alphabet The return of the Egyptians? The Revised Ancient Model Conclusion Appendix        Were the Philistines Greek? Notes   Glossary          Bibliography Index