According to Robert Knox, all men are in practice racist, in that "…all men believe in the element of race". Although the significance of race may be denied theoretically, Knox reminds us that "…theory and practice seldom coincide: profession is not conduct; fair words do not always imply straightforward actions" (Knox, The Races of Men, 1850).

Around no other issue, Knox avers, is there so much hypocrisy and double-think as that of race. No other subject engenders so many "wild, visionary and pitiable" notions.

The sagacity of these trenchant judgements is amply confirmed by a recent debate about the role of ethnicity in history, to which Black Athena Revisited is an important further contribution. This collection of essays by leading scholars covers a wide range of disciplines: ancient history, anthropology, classical studies, Egyptology, linguistics and the history of science. Some but not all of the essays were specifically written for the compilation. Their subject matter is complex at times. Yet the content always remains accessible to the general reader.

Black Athena Revisited, as the title suggests, is a response (and a crushing one) to Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation (first volume 1987; second, 1991).

In Black Athena, Bernal debunks what he regards as the myth of the intellectual superiority of the ancient Greeks (to which Galton, for one, subscribed). This myth was sustained by racism, he maintains, specifically the theory of the predominantly northern/Aryan origin of Hellenic Civilisation, as expounded by 19th century historians of ancient Greece such as Dr Ernst Curtius (also by Gobineau and his epigones).

A unique role was attributed to the ancient Greeks by 19th century historians and classicists. They lauded their attributes, depicting them as the fountainhead of European culture. This reverential attitude is pejoratively dubbed "Hellenomania" by Bernal. He instead favours the view held by ancient chroniclers, notably Herodotus, (and enshrined in Hellenic legends, such as the coming to Greece of Danaus, from Egypt) that the Greeks "…had been colonised by Egyptians and Phoenicians and had taken most of their culture from these colonies…". Such use of myth to authenticate historical events (most notably, the putative Hyksos invasion of Greece) is only one of Bernal’s controversial methods to which some scholars have objected (see the essays by E. Hall and J. E. Coleman, in B.A.R.).

Bernal is an exponent, then, of Marcus Garvey’s doctrine that "…Greece and Rome have robbed Egypt of her arts and letters, and taken all the credit to themselves". In a recent statement, Bernal acknowledges that his emphasis on the "African" nature of Egyptian civilisation is intended "to counter the cultural debilitation to peoples of African descent brought about by implicit assumptions or explicit statements that there has never been a great "African" culture which has contributed to world civilisation as a whole and that "Blacks" have always been servile".

Here (if nowhere else), Bernal is on firm ground in my opinion (although two B.A.R. essayists, G. M. Rogers and R. Palter, dispute the centrality of European racism). Scholarly perceptions of the ancient world were not formed in a vacuum. And there is abundant evidence that in the 18th and 19th centuries, an ever broadening swathe of European thinkers (including numerous distinguished natural scientists) disputed the Negro’s human status, let alone capacity for civilisation.

Thus, Edward Long, in The History of Jamaica (1774), spoke of the "extremely potent reasons" for thinking that blacks and whites belonged to different species. He challenged the notion that there are universal human characteristics transcending racial differences on the grounds that the Negro is devoid of "moral sensations".

In their widely read Types of Mankind (1854), likewise, J. C. Nott and G. R. Gliddon, opined that not a single civilisation had adorned the Negro’s "gloomy past". Anatomist Robert Knox, in similar vein, described the history of the black races as "a blank", while Professor Paul Broca was deeply impressed by the evidence from both Long and Nott as to the sterility of cross-breeds such as Mulattos, which seemed to contradict the common origin of all racial groups. For Broca (the founder of the Anthropological Society of Paris) it was self-evident that a "…group with black skin, woolly hair and a prognathous face has never been able to raise itself spontaneously to civilisation".

In The Negro’s Place in Nature, an address delivered to the London Anthropological Society in 1864, Dr James Hunt speculated that the premature closing of the fontanelle may explain the intellectual inferiority of the Negro. Samuel George Morton (the Corresponding Secretary of the American Academy of Sciences, no less), proceeding from the premise that the average brain of the Negro occupies only eighty five cubic inches (compared to the ninety for the average Caucasian specimen), thought it inconceivable that such a gifted people as the ancient Egyptians could have been Negroes. Morton was convinced they were a mixture of Negro, Caucasian, Semitic and other elements. Had not Gobineau shown that only offshoots of the Indo-European family have ever initiated civilisation by mixing their noble blood with that of less creative stocks?

These characteristic expressions of opinion, randomly taken from a copious anthropological literature, testify to the ascendancy of "scientific racism" in the 18th and 19th centuries. As Dinesh D’Souza has argued in The End of Racism, the "science" of race represented an eminently rational explanation of an apparent asymmetry in mankind’s capacity for progress. It would have been remarkable had classical scholars not been influenced by its findings.

The undoubted impact of Black Athena (which the publication of Black Athena Revisited amply confirms) becomes explicable by reference to an emerging Afrocentric historiography (as the B.A.R. contributions from Lefkowitz, Rogers and Snowden show). Enthusiastic support for Bernal has come from its partisans, well ensconced in the American university system, thanks, in no small measure, to the white liberal guilt complex.

Frank M. Snowden (in B.A.R.) documents the alarming general failure of many practitioners of Afrocentric theory, past and present, to observe even elementary norms of traditional scholarship. Bizarre and groundless claims have been made that the Carthaginians (a Semitic people) were "Negroid", and that Cleopatra (the last of the Greco-Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasty) was black. Those who question the truth of such revelations have been dismissed as "white supremacists".

Two particular elements in the critique of Black Athena call out for emphasis. Both are prominently featured in Black Athena Revisited. The first concerns Bernal himself, his qualifications, objectivity and scholarly methods. On the face of it, his claim to have revolutionised our understanding of the ancient world is hardly credible. He is a Professor of Government at Cornell and his specialism is Chinese studies. In other words, he is only an amateur (although admittedly a well read one) as regards the vast subject matter of Black Athena, which arguably requires a range of knowledge and skills beyond the capacity of any one individual. Just how seriously can one take a claim to expertise in such a wide range of subjects as archaeology, comparative religion, linguistics, mythology and the history of ideas, each of which requires a lifetime’s study ?

Contemporary Egyptologists and classicists have not taken kindly to Bernal’s claims that their 19th and 20th century predecessors (because of racial bigotry) colluded in the "fabrication of ancient Greece". Nor to his specious argument that he, because an outsider, has no preconceptions and can therefore see things which remain invisible to the specialist.

Robert Palter lays bare the egregious errors made by Bernal when describing the (alleged) shift from Egyptophilia to Egyptophobia in late 18th century thought, under the burgeoning influence of "scientific racism" (B.A.R.). Palter shows that there simply is no clear cut evidence of a unidirectional movement at this juncture away from acceptance of a major Egyptian and Phoenician contribution to Greek culture.

Unhappily, there are comparable errors in Bernal’s exegesis of 19th century European thought. Witness his interpretation of the ideas of Robert Knox, in volume one of Black Athena. Bernal accuses Knox of glorying "..in the opportunities for white men to commit genocide" (p.340). An apparently incriminating passage is cited from Knox’s The Races of Men, which reads thus: "What a field of extermination lies before the Saxon Celtic and Sarmatian races!". A few pages earlier, however, Knox exhibits a far more complex attitude to what he conceives of as the war between the races. Knox characterises the conquest of North and South America by white men as: "…the old tragedy again, the fair races of men against the dark races, the strong against the feeble…". Clearly, there is an important distinction between observing racial conflict and advocating it. But it is wasted on Bernal, who significantly fails to cite the latter passage.

The other key element in the critique of Black Athena concerns Bernal’s confusing contortions as to the ethnic identity of the ancient Egyptians. He acknowledges they were a mixture of African, south west European and Mediterranean racial "types" ("types", for some unfathomable reason, is acceptable to Bernal, unlike the term "races", which is deemed imprecise and subjective). And, since his "Revised Ancient Model" depends upon cultural borrowing/diffusion, he can hardly treat biology as the determinant of culture. What then can we make of Bernal’s view that Egypt belonged to "African civilisation"? Why is he so adamant that many of the most powerful dynasties based in Upper Egypt were "black"? But Bernal himself has provided the answers (and unintentionally admitted his own lack of objectivity). His intention is to "lessen European cultural arrogance" (sic).

To say that the ancient Egyptians were "black", however, only obscures the difference between what were Mediterranean stocks, with skin adapted to a desert environment, and the sub-Saharan blacks, as K. A. Bard points out. It also arbitrarily selects colour as the primary criterion of race, although by this token many inhabitants of southern India, who are black in colour, would have to be classified as Negro. Nor is there any evidence in recent studies that Egyptian skulls resembled contemporaneous West African samples.

The ancient Egyptians themselves did not share Bernal’s opinion that they were "African" or black. In Egyptian iconography, Egypt’s southern neighbours, such as the Nubians, are invariably depicted as quite different from Egyptians, as Negroes in fact. There is also the ample written testimony of Greek and Roman classical authors who unfailingly differentiated between Egyptians (in terms of colour, hair type, facial features etc.) and the Negro peoples whom these ancient chroniclers called "Ethiopians" (see Snowden, B.A.R.).

Molecular biologists from Brigham Young University have recently devised sophisticated techniques for obtaining DNA samples from ancient Egyptian burial grounds. Soon they will be able to provide hard information about the ethnic characteristics of the people interred there. Preliminary results are not encouraging for those who think that the universities of ancient Alexandria teemed with Negro professors.

The editors and essayists of Black Athena Revisited deserve high praise for defending the principles of rigorous scholarship (the notion that "some kind of objectivity is possible", to quote Mary Lefkowitz). They have shown that Afrocentric ancient history is the new Lysenkoism. And sent Martin Bernal to his account with all his imperfections on his head.

Leslie Jones