Black Athena (the Afroasiatic Roots Of Classical Civilization Volume I: The Fabrication Of Ancient Greece 1785-1985)

By (author) Bernal Martin
Short description/annotation:
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 influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed.
Description:
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’ c