Volume 39, Number 6 · March 26, 1992
The World Turned Upside Down
By Emily Vermeule
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume II, The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence
by Martin Bernal
Rutgers University Press, 736 pp., $17.95 (paper)
Professor Martin Bernal's first volume of Black Athena, published in 1987, brought him instant fame as a defender of Semitic peoples and cultures against German Aryan-propagandists and other anti-Semites of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the same time Bernal became, as he apparently hoped, the chief intellectual antagonist of those who have over the centuries refused to acknowledge the contributions that black Africa has made to the development of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations and therefore to European civilization and to the Eurocentric education of Americans. Egypt, as a geographical mediator between Africa and the Mediterranean, was said by Bernal to be both black and Semitic.
Review, 4637 words
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