Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985

Martin Bernal

ISBN 10: 1978804261 / ISBN 13: 9781978804265

Published by Rutgers University Press, 2020

About this Item

2019. Reprint. Paperback. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9781978804265

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1978804261
• ISBN 13: 9781978804265
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.”

About the Author

MARTIN BERNAL (1937-2013) was a British scholar of modern Chinese political history and a Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His celebrated Black Athena trilogy is a controversial series which argues that Ancient Greek civilization and language are Eastern and Egyptian in origin.