Queen playing Senmut, Tomb of Nefertari, West Thebes, 1298-1235 BC(http://www.tulane.edu/lester/images/Ancient.World/Egypt/A78.gif)
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Queen playing Senmut, Tomb of Nefertari, West Thebes, 1298-1235 BC
(http://www.tulane.edu/lester/images/Ancient.World/Egypt/A78.gif)
To: athena@info.harpercollins.com
From: Information@harpercollins.com
Subject: Bernal 5/3/96
Date: Fri, 3 May 1996 09:51:48 -0400
Reply to Mary Lefkowitz's Response to my Review of Not Out of Africa.
Mary Lefkowitz portrays BAR as purely scholarly and a deliberately
"representative sample of responses." I cannot accept that. On her side,
there is no doubt that the majority of the reviews of Black Athena by
Classicists and Ancient Historians have been hostile, some vehemently so,
and it is altogether appropriate that some or many of these should be
included in any collection. Other reviewers, however, while leveling
specific criticisms, have taken my work very seriously. Interestingly the
latter group includes the only specialists in Egyptian-Aegean relations. to
have reviewed Black Athena John Ray and Stanley Burstein. Neither appears
in BAR Eric Cline, the leading US expert on Egyptian Aegean relations in
the Bronze Age, was invited to contribute. However, as he takes a similar
position to Ray and Burstein, the editors decided that there was "not
enough room" for his piece. Similarly, there have been two articles on the
linguistic aspects of my work by scholars competent in West Semitic and
Ancient Egyptian. However, M.L. preferred to commission a new piece by
two Indo-Europeanists with no knowledge of Ancient Egyptian and very little
understanding of language contact.
The suggestion of bias is strengthened the failure to inform me of
the compilation of the book and when I was told about it, not by the
editors but by an uncomfortable contributor, ML refused to allow me to
reply or to republish my responses to the reviews they were reprinting. She
now claims that the reason why she:
did not include in the book a response from B.(was) because we
do not consider ourselves as being in dialogue with B. alone. but
rather as participants in an on going debate with many other scholars
concerned about the evidence for the
interconnections among cultures in the ancient world.
This is ludicrous. The title of the book is Black Athena Revisited. Most
of its essays are based on reviews of Black Athena and 12 of the 20 have
"Bernal" or Black Athena or both in their titles. The promotional material
put out by the publisher begins:
In this collection of twenty essays, leading scholars in a broad
range of disciplines confront the claims made by Martin BernalS
The contributors to this volume argue that Bernal's claims are
exaggerated and in many cases unjustified.S
It is in fact a massive, sustained and, at times, passionate ad hominem
attack. I can have no objections to that as BA itself contains attacks on
many of the disciplines in which these scholars work. What I object to is
the editors' claim that their book is detached and objective.
Many other scholars have seen enough substance in my work to
believe that debate would be more useful than denunciation. Thus, the
organisers of the annual conferences of the American Philological Society;
the American Research Center in Egypt; the American Anthropological
Association and the American Historical Association as well as the editors
of Arethusa; The Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology; Isis and The
Journal of Women's History all requested my participation in discussions
on my work. As liberals they believed that dialogue or argument should be
the aim of scholarship. M.L.'s uniquely intolerant behaviour in this
regard, is one of the reasons that made me believe that M.L.'s strongly
conservative politics were pertinent to the discussion of NOA.
The second reason for raising the question of her political views
and activities was her claim that while she had biases, she was unlike the
Afrocentrists and me, in that she did not have a political agenda(NOA
p.161). In fact, the title Not Out of Africa itself reveals a clearly
political agenda and the book's contents fully live up to its direct
brutality. Glen Bowersock in the New York Times called NOA a "impassioned
polemicS through which rage boils," and George Will described it
approvingly as "using a howitzer to slay a hamster." M.L.'s aim is not
to enter a constructive dialogue with Afrocentrists as the philosophers
Anthony Preus and Christos Evangeliou have done and the Department of Near
Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins plans to do. Her purpose is to blast
Afrocentrism out of the water, an approach that seems to me to be
thoroughly political.
The third and most important reason for my listing some of M.L.'s
conservative associations is that I am convinced that scholarship is
socially embedded--that is not to say that it is socially determined. Good
scholars should try to transcend their social and economic environments.
However, even the best are unable to be completely successful, and the
social and personal backgrounds of historians are a factor in their
historiography that should be taken into account by readers when they
assess it. It was for this reason that in the prefaces and introductions
to BA I tried to alert readers to my prejudices by explaining-- as best I
could-- my personal circumstances and indicating my left wing political
position. M.L. does not hide her conservative associations and activities
but she tries to detach them from her scholarship and academic behaviour by
claiming a position of neutrality and objectivity, which as stated above,
does not convince Glen Bowersock or George Will.
Now I should like to consider her responses to my criticisms of
NOA. Firstly there is her disclaimer that "it was not intended as a
critique of BA." This is disingenuous to say the least. The first sentence
of NOA states that she was led to its subject by reviewing BA." Criticisms
of details of my work are interspersed with those of Afrocentrist writers.
Furthermore, NOA has appeared simultaneously with BAR and the two books
have already been--and undoubtedly will be--reviewed together.
However, my criticism of NOA does not arise from its association
with my work. It has many faults in its own right, some of which I raised
in my review and others I shall refer to here. Despite some obfuscations,
M.L. concedes most of the slips that I pointed out in NOA In normal
circumstances, I would have written to her privately about such things, but
in this case I thought it was a matter of public concern. This was because
she had used their factual errors and what she sees as their failure to
respect "warranted facts" to dismiss the Afrocentrists.
She still contests two of the trivial issues I raised. The first of
these is on the technical problem of the prepositions apo and ek . She
expresses surprise that I should respect classical scholars on this. Here
I should make my position clear, while I have considerable doubts about
some of their historical interpretations and their previous reluctance to
see substantial influences from South West Asia and Egypt, I have always
admired their ability to understand the subtleties of Greek grammar and
syntax. Therefore when all except one of the translators of Herodotos
interpret ap' Aigyptou as "from Egypt," I am inclined to accept their
judgment. Despite M.L's plausible claim that ek is "usually" used to
express place, when in conjunction with ginesthai, my inclination to
follow the majority is strengthened by the fact that Herodotos Book II, in
which ap' Aigyptou is used specifically to refer to the parents of
Herakles, is devoted to Egypt. The legendary Aigyptos, who is in any
event, merely the eponymous hero of Egypt is only mentioned once.
On the issue of my derivation of the name Athena from the Egyptian
Ht Nt, she claims that her reference to the article she commissioned for
BAR on language deals with the other arguments I made for the claim. It
does not. Its authors are the "trained linguists," she portrays as
supplementing her admitted lack of knowledge of language contact. For my
doubts that their training in the intricacies of the "genetic"
relationships of Indo-European languages is relevant issues of linguistic
borrowing, see above.
I see the substantial issue as that of the attitude of the Founding
Fathers to Ancient Greece, what she wrote about this was: "Since the
founding of this country,(the USA) ancient Greece has been intimately
connected with the ideals of democracy." (p.6) she argues that my case
against this claim is vitiated by my failure to continue my quotation to
include the words in her next sentence that: "much of the credit belongs to
the Romans." However, Carl Richard in the source she cited, did not merely
say that the Greeks deserved less credit than the Romans but that in the
eyes of the Founding Fathers they deserved no credit at all. "
M.L. complains that she did not say that the Afrocentrists were the
enemies of freedom. I never said that she had, I referred to her
"implication." My bases for this claim were firstly the statement itself,
secondly, in order to explain why she should have so misrepresented the
text she had in front of her, and thirdly because this thread found in many
of her articles. In one of these her conclusion begins:
Afrocentrist historians appear to have discarded this
important rationalist tradition. Instead they appeal to emotions
and deny opportunity for debateS
In an interview in the Greek Journal To Vima in which she described the
compilation of BAR, she was still more apocalyptic (and in view of her
behaviour over BAR, showed an astounding lack of self awareness):
(Interviewer) Were there many students who rejected your
views?
M.L. Enough . But if there are 50 or 500 today, tomorrow there
will be 50,000 and up to millions, brainwashedSS and something
more basic concerning teaching, if we do not push our children to
reflect, to love dialogue to discover, but we prevent them from
opening their ears to opposing ideas-- as the Afrocentrists do--
what sort of democratic citizens shall we send out into society?
I think we can agree that both sides (and I myself) have made
factual errors, some of them serious but this in itself should not be used
to dismiss them. We should now look at the substance of the arguments. ML
does not take up the issue of the recent trends of scholarship linking them
to Egyptian tradition and the increasing likelihood that there were
Egyptian prototypes for the Hermetic Texts, written in Greek.
On central issue of NOA, the mysteries, M.L. accuses me of an
argumentum ex silentio, when I make the self evident statement that
"mysteries are by their nature mysterious." The two main issues are 1)
whether Egyptians of the pharaonic period had a mystery system of
initiation of the living and 2) if they had, whether or not this had a
significant impact on the Greek mysteries. On the first, the probabilities
are clearly in favour of the proposition.
ML makes the extraordinary claim that: "Since initiation
ceremonies are found all over the world, general similarities between them
cannot be used to prove any direct connection between them." However,
Egypt is not anywhere in the world, it is close to Greece and conventional
wisdom in the ancient world held that the Greek initiations derived from
Egypt. Furthermore although they talk in very different terms, most
Egyptologists now believe--with the Afrocentrists-- that there were
mysterious initiations in Ancient Egypt.
The Egyptologist Jan Assman begins the conclusion of his essay on
the subject:
No one doubts that the initiation rites of the Isis Mysteries as
Apuleius describes them, are deeply rooted in the elaborated
rituals and conceptions of Egyptian funerary religion. The same
holds true for other initiation rituals. Seen from this aspect, a
relationship between death and initiation is not disputed. S Let
us attempt to formulate our results into a hypothesis: the
funerary rites take the form of an "initiation into the mysteries
of the underworld" (Hornung). because they reflect the
corresponding rites and conceptions of cultic rituals in "this"
world, of which, for obvious reasons, we know next to nothing.
Similar views are held by many if not most Egyptologists.
M.L. concedes that there were "elements of Egyptian funerary
religion in Greco-Roman religion." Her sticking point is the denial of
Egyptian influences on the early Greek mysteries and especially those at
Eleusis.
I do not claim--and nor did the ancients-- that Greek funerary
rites were identical to those of Egypt. There is no doubt that the Greeks
were less concerned than the Egyptians with the preservation of the body.
Nevertheless, Emily Vermeule devotes 11 pages of her bookAspects of Death
in Early Greek Art and Poetry to detailed comparisons between, and the
apparent derivation from Egypt of Greek funerary rites and images dating
back to Mycenaean period. Thus there would seem to have been Egyptian
influence in the relevant cultural zone before or during the period in
which the mysteries were established.
G, Mylonas to whom M.L. refers, does not confront the arguments
made by Foucart for an Egyptian origin of the cult. He merely relies on
what he sees as Charles Picard's demolition of them. In fact, as I pointed
out , Picard had accepted Egyptian influences on the mysteries "well
before" the 8th century.
M.L. is in the minority, when she denies that there were
mysterious initiations of the living in Ancient Egypt and there is support
among 20th century scholars for the Afrocentrists' claim that the Greek
mysteries were heavily influenced by Egyptian ones. Thus, while there is
no doubt that Afrocentrist writers have made many serious exaggerations and
mistakes, M.L. and I make them too. What is more, their basic claim that
Greece received much of its culture from Egypt is far less absurd than
M.L's attempt to deny it.
Martin Bernal
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