I came to this issue as a teacher of ancient philosophy, and a concern to understand the claims of afrocentrists, as well as Bernal, that the ancient Greek philosophers took some significant portion of their thought from the Egyptians, in particular the Egyptian priests. What I have read of these claims has not been, in my view, impressive. (The best that Bernal can offer, given that no Egyptian texts bear any resemblance to Greek philosophy, is that the popular religion of Egypt "must" have been a popularized expression of some more abstract wisdom-an argument from ignorance of the most tendentious sort.) Still Bernal is the most impressive of those who argue for a massive cultural influence on the Greeks by the Egyptians, both from the perspective of the breadth of fields he marshals (though hardly masters) in support of the position, and the massive size of his output. For many who are not specialists these two features alone might seem to suggest that Bernal is correct. Thus the great value of this volume, which includes evaluations by various true specialists in the fields that Bernal attempts to harness for his own purposes: classical studies, linguistics, archeology, Egyptology, and history (Bernal, by the way, is a trained political scientist).
What is revealed is the various ways in which Bernal gets things wrong. He trusts in the historicity of myth in a simple-minded way that no current student of mythology would. He is uncritical of the writings of ancient authors who to some degree appear to support his case. He is highly selective of the evidence. For example, his treatment of nineteenth century classical studies points to authors who appeared to have racial motivations while ignoring others, such as Grote, who clearly did not.
One, to my mind, particularly revealing article is offered by Jay Jasanoff and Alan Nussbaum, trained linguists, where Bernal's linguistic evidence is evaluated. This might be one of the more important articles simply because comparative linguistics is such a technical and seemingly arcane discipline to the uninitiated (such as me), that Bernal's seeming mastery of it in support of the claim that some 25% of Greek words had Egyptian origins might be thought to be a particularly impressive component of the overall argument. What Jasanoff and Nussbaum discover, however, is that Bernal ignores the long established standards of evidence in these fields in favor of a quite superficial "looks alike" method for finding the massive linguistic influence on the Greeks. The authors meticulously go through a wide selection of Bernal's etymologies and debunk them all.
Perhaps the most unfortunate part of the book is a section of three articles on the subject of race: "unfortunate" because Bernal and other afrocentrists have reintroduced a scientifically worthless but historically invidious concept into academic discussions in their claim that the Egyptians were "blacks" (Bernal is a bit more timid here than other afrocentrists, simply saying that certain Egyptians could "usefully be thought of" as blacks). The authors of all three articles insist on rejecting this introduction of race into the issue. To my mind one of the most interesting articles was written by a team of anthropologists headed by C. Loring Brace. Brace brings scientific techniques to bear on the question, particularly comparative anatomy. The discussion reveals two things: 1. that indeed the concept of race has no basis in scientific fact, and has been replaced by the notions of "klines" (variations of anatomy selected by environmental conditions) and "clusters" (variations due simply to the locality of a reproductive population), and 2. that evidence Brace and his team developed shows that the ancient Egyptians cannot be considered (even "usefully") as either "blacks" or "whites" in the modern senses of those terms.
The contributions to this volume are uniformly erudite, well-argued, and well-informed by the latest understandings in the various fields represented. And this is a much needed book. There has been a disturbing propensity in academe as of late to inject politics into research of various forms. This has had the general character of first defining a view that is understood as somehow politically or socially beneficial or expedient from some perspective or another, and then searching for any sort of evidence or argument, however fanciful it might be, to support the view. At times these efforts are coupled by the postmodernist view that all so-called "knowledge" is historically contextualized and a product of social interests, so that any view is acceptable so long as it is embedded in a set of the "correct" political and social motivations. Although it is true that all seekers of truths are to some extent a product of their times, this extreme view has the most unfortunate effects. In the case of Bernal and afrocentrists a couple of such effects pointed out by the authors of this volume are first that their views, quite ironically, validate once again the concept of race, a concept so long used as the basis of oppression in this country, and second rather than eschewing eurocentrism it in fact reinvigorates it by the suggestion that the only way that the achievements of any culture can attain legitimate value and be worthy of study is if they can be shown to have influenced European culture. Given the tenuous threads of argument in afrocentrist writings that attempt to connect subSaharan African culture to the Greeks, threads that I believe are bound to snap if they haven't already, the consequent devaluation of African culture is the inevitable implication.
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Paul Marks
A fine collection of essays.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 29, 2014
