Martin G. Bernal

From Philosopedia

Bernal, Martin G(ardner) (1937— )

Bernal, a professor emeritus of government and a Chinese scholar at Cornell, is the British author of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987), a work that in 1996 has been refuted by numbers of scholars.

Bernal is interested in that which is not European or Greek, what usually is called “pre-Hellenic.” Unlike other scholars, he finds the Greek culture represents “a mix of the native Balkan-Indo-European-speaking population with Egyptian and western Semitic populations. The linguistic and cultural mix was extraordinarily productive in cultural terms.” Further, he finds that 80% of the non-European words in Greek are in fact Egyptian or Semitic. He believes,

• Humanism is rooted in the late-Egyptian religious concept that human beings can become "god." The belief that humanity has divinity within itself is essentially Egyptian or African, and was transmitted to modern Europe through the hermetic texts. . . . Though you could say that the atheist tradition can only be traced back to Greek and Latin thinkers, humanism, in the centrality of the "person," is a very Egyptian idea.

The earliest example of monotheism, he writes in an interview with Norm R. Allen Jr.,

• is that of Akhenaton, the Egyptian pharaoh of the 14th century B.C.E. And the earliest trace of monotheism in Judaism is really from the 8th century B.C.E. . . . I very much doubt that we can go as far as Freud did in his book Moses and Monotheism, and say that Moses took monotheism from Akhenaton’s reforms in Egypt, but there seems to be no doubt that Egyptian religion had both polytheistic and monotheistic trends, and that Judaism borrowed from it.

As for their differences,

• One thing that is characteristic of Egyptian religion and not Judaism is the emphasis on knowledge. In Judeo-Christian thought the emphasis is on faith. And the idea of knowledge- which again is humanistic in that human beings attempt to understand and manipulate spiritual and other systems- is very different from the position of subjugation of the worshiper who accepts with blind faith whatever happens. Also, organizationally, monasticism started in Egypt with a church hierarchy, rituals like the shaving of priests’ heads and things like that. Egypt provided the model of Western religion and religious institutions and structures.

Bernal, cautioning both Eurocentric and Afrocentric scholars, posits the need to be disinterested and unprejudiced when writing history. Refuting Bernal’s theories, Mary R. Lefkowitz has written Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1996). Also, she and Guy MacLean Rogers have edited Black Athena Revisited (1996), a thorough attack by nineteen scholars from Rome and Oxford as well as from Howard University and Harvard. For example, although Bernal insists that the ancient Egyptians were not only African but explicitly black, scholars from Howard University, Boston University, and the University of Michigan state that they were Mediterranean peoples, neither Sub-Saharan blacks, Nubians, nor Caucasian whites, that their craniofacial morphology has nothing whatsoever in common with Sub-Saharan Africans’, and that attempts to force the Egyptians into a “black” or “white” category have no biological justification.

“Substituting fiction for fact is,” according to Howard University’s Frank M. Snowden, “is a disservice to blacks.” Meanwhile, whereas some molecular biologists have concluded that all family trees lead back to a single African woman, who lived some 200,000 years ago, Dr. Alan Templeton, a geneticist at Washington University in St. Louis, believes otherwise. He as well as Pennsylvania State University’s Mark Stoneking and the University of Michigan’s Milford Wolpoff say it is possible that the evolution to modern humans occurred roughly simultaneously in many places. In short, according to The New York Times (19 May 1992), scholars continue to debate whether or not there was “an African Eve.”

(For a negative view of Bernal’s view, see the entry for Afrocentrism. Also, see “Anxieties of Influence” by Jasper Griffin in The New York Review of Books, 20 June 1996)

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