Volume 36, Number 10 · June 15, 1989
Who Are These Coming to the Sacrifice?
By Jasper Griffin
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985
by Martin Bernal
Rutgers University Press, 575 pp., $15.00 (paper)
'We are all Greeks. Our literature, our religion, our arts all have their roots in Greece.' So, and much more in the same vein, wrote Shelley in 1821. At that stage of Romanticism, the statement was barely controversial. But where did the Greeks have their roots? The question has been asked and answered, over the centuries, in different ways and with great emotion. Martin Bernal, professor of government studies at Cornell and an expert on modern China, enters the lists as a challenging amateur, with the first installment of an elaborate three-volume work which aims to show that most of what was important in Greece came from Egypt, and much of the rest from the western Semites; and that professional scholars, influenced consciously or unconsciously by racism, have denied these facts and suppressed the publications of the few individuals who presumed to argue for them. 'It will be necessary not only to rethink the fundamental bases of 'Western Civilization' but also to recognize the penetration of racism and 'continental chauvinism' into all our historiography.' By 'continental chauvinism' he means assigning too much importance to Europe, and too little to other places, as the sources of historical change.
Review, 4064 words
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