Black Athena

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.

Preface and Acknowledgements       
Transcription and Phonetics  
Maps and Charts        
Chronological Table  
Introduction   
Background   
Proposed historical outline    
Black Athena, Volume I: a summary of the argument                      
Greece European or Levantine? The Egyptian and West Semitic
Components of Greek Civilization / a summary of Volume 2                      
Solving the Riddle of the Sphinx and Other Studies in Egypto-Greek
Mythology / a summary of Volume
1          The Ancient Model in Antiquity       
Pelasgians       
Ionians
Colonization
The colonizations in Greek tragedy  
Herodotos      
Thucydides    
Isokrates and Plato     
Aristotle         
Theories of colonization and later borrowing in the Hellenistic world
Plutarch’s attack on Herodotos
The triumph of Egyptian religion
Alexander son of Ammon
2          Egyptian wisdom and Greek transmission
From the Dark Ages to the Renaissance        
The murder of Hypatia
The collapse of Egypto-Pagan religion
Christianity, stars and fish     
The relics of Egyptian religion: Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism
Hermeticism – Greek, Iranian, Chaldaean or Egyptian?       
Hermeticism and Neo-Platonism under early Christianity, Judaism and Islam
Hermeticism in Byzantium and Christian Western Europe  
Egypt in the Renaissance       
Copernicus and Hermeticism
Hermeticism and Egypt in the 16th century
3          The triumph of Egypt in the 17th and 18th centuries
Hermeticism in the 17th century       
Rosicrucianism: Ancient Egypt in Protestant countries        
Ancient Egypt in the 18th century     
The 18th century: China and the Physiocrats
The 18th century: England, Egypt and the Freemasons        
France, Egypt and ‘progress’: the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns  
Mythology as allegory for Egyptian science 
The Expedition to Egypt       
4          Hostilities to Egypt in the 18th century         
Christian reaction       
The ‘triangle’: Christianity and Greece against Egypt          
The alliance between Greece and Christianity          
‘Progress’ against Egypt
Europe as the ‘progressive’ continent
‘Progress’       
Racism           
Romanticism  
Ossian and Homer
Romantic Hellenism
Winckelmann and Neo-Hellenism in Germany
Göttingen
5          Romantic linguistics
The rise of India and the fall of Egypt, 1740–1880
The birth of Indo-European
The love affair with Sanskrit
Schlegelian Romantic linguistics
The Oriental Renaissance
The fall of China
Racism in the early 19th century
What colour were the Ancient Egyptians?
The national renaissance of modern Egypt
Dupuis, Jomard and Champollion
Egyptian monotheism or Egyptian polytheism
Popular perceptions of Ancient Egypt in the 19th and 20th centuries
Elliot Smith and ‘diffusionism’
Jomard and the Mystery of the Pyramids
6           Hellenomania, 1
The fall of the Ancient Model, 1790–1830   
Friedrich August Wolf and Wilhelm von Humboldt
Humboldt’s educational reforms       
The Philhellenes         
Dirty Greeks and the Dorians
Transitional figures, 1: Hegel and Marx        
Transitional figures, 2: Heeren
Transitional figures, 3: Barthold Niebuhr
Petit-Radel and the first attack on the Ancient Model
Karl Otfried Müller and the overthrow of the Ancient Model
7          Hellenomania, 2
Transmission of the new scholarship to England and the rise of the Aryan Model, 1830–60           
The German model and educational reform in England       
George Grote 
Aryans and Hellenes  
8          The rise and fall of the Phoenicians, 1830–85
Phoenicians and anti-Semitism          
What race were the Semites? 
The linguistic and geographical inferiorities of the Semites 
The Arnolds   
Phoenicians and English, 1: the English view           
Phoenicians and English, 2: the French view
Salammbô      
Moloch
The Phoenicians in Greece: 1820–80
Gobineau’s image of Greece 
Schliemann and the discovery of the ‘Mycenaeans’ 
Babylon
9          The final solution of the Phoenician problem, 1885–1945
The Greek Renaissance
Salomon Reinach
Julius Beloch
Victor Bérard
Akhenaton and the Egyptian Renaissance
Arthur Evans and the ‘Minoans’
The peak of anti-Semitism, 1920–39
20th-century Aryanism
Taming the alphabet: the final assault on the Phoenicians
10         The post-war situation
The return to the Broad Aryan Model, 1945–85       
The post-war situation
Developments in Classics, 1945–65  
The model of autochthonous origin   
East Mediterranean contacts  
Mythology     
Language       
Ugarit 
Scholarship and the rise of Israel       
Cyrus Gordon
Astour and Hellenosemitica
Astour’s successor? – J. C. Billigmeier
An attempt at compromise: Ruth Edwards
The return of the Iron Age Phoenicians
Naveh and the transmission of the alphabet
The return of the Egyptians?
The Revised Ancient Model
Conclusion
Appendix        Were the Philistines Greek?
Notes  
Glossary         
Bibliography
Index