![]() Getting to Know Black AthenaAmar Farooqui By Martin Bernal Rutgers University Press, 1987, 1991, and 2006 respectively VOLUME XL NUMBER 1 January 2016 For several years I taught a history course
on ‘Social Formations and Cul-
tural Patterns of the Ancient and Medieval
World’ at Hans Raj College, University
of Delhi. This was a B.A. Honours ‘survey’
course (which is still part of the syllabus,
although in a modified form), intended
to give to students a general understanding of the early and premodern
history of humankind—including themes such as evolution,
transition to food production, the Sumerian civilization, ancient
Egypt, Graeco-Roman antiquity, and emergence of feudalism
in early medieval Europe. While teaching this course I became acquainted
with a work of brilliant scholarship, Martin Bernal’s Black
Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (Volume I, 1987).
The book was lent to me by the well-known lawyer and crusader for
secularism, Anil Nauriya, who was rather annoyed when I told him
that I had taken the liberty of getting some portions photocopied. It
was much later that I came to possess a personal copy of the book. I
have profited much from re-reading the work from time to time.
Surprisingly, in India this major academic intervention in historiography
has not received the kind of attention that it deserves, the
more so as it has much to tell us about the manner in which colonial
dominance has fundamentally re-shaped the understanding of the
ancient human past and the role which ideas of race have played in
this process. However, many of the conclusions of the book were too
radical to be directly incorporated into classroom teaching.
The book argues that ancient Greek civilization bore the strong
imprint of Egyptian civilization and of cultures of West Asia and the
Eastern Mediterranean (e.g., of the Canaanites/Phoenicians). This
was recognized by the ancient Greeks; and European historiographical
traditions continued to acknowledge these influences till the beginning
of the modern era. By the end of the eighteenth century an
‘Aryan Model’ had replaced this understanding, and the role of Egypt
and West Asia in the making of Europe began to be systematically
erased in the dominant historiography which just could not accept
the Egyptian or Phoenician ancestry of ancient Greece. Black Athena
is primarily a powerful critique of racist perceptions of the past. With
the ascendancy of colonial ideas about Aryan superiority, Egyptians
and Semites were downgraded. In the latter half of the nineteenth
century and the early twentieth century an ‘Extreme Aryan Model’
prevailed, reaching ... Table of Contents >> |