In the first volume of “Black Athena,” which carried the forbidding double subtitle “The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece - 1785-1985,” Mr. The precursors of Greek, and thus European, culture were seen instead as white Indo-European invaders from the north. His thesis was this: For centuries, European historians of classical Greece had hewed closely to the origin story suggested by Plato, Herodotus and Aeschylus, whose writings acknowledged the Greek debt to Egyptian and Semitic (or Phoenician) forebears.īut in the 19th century, he asserted, with the rise of new strains of racism and anti-Semitism along with nationalism and colonialism in Europe, historians expunged Egyptians and Phoenicians from the story. He said only that the debt Greek culture owed to Africa and the Middle East had been lost to history. He did not claim that Greek culture had its prime origins in Africa, as some news media reports described his thesis. Bernal, a British-born and Cambridge-educated polymath who taught Chinese political history at Cornell from 1972 until 2001, spent a fair amount of time on those panels explaining what his work did not mean to imply. Bernal a hero among Afrocentrists, a pariah among conservative scholars and the star witness at dozens of sometimes raucous academic panel discussions about how to teach the foundational ideas of Western culture.
The first volume, published in 1987 - the same year as “The Closing of the American Mind,” Allan Bloom’s attack on efforts to diversify the academic canon - made Mr. “Black Athena” opened a new front in the warfare over cultural diversity already raging on American campuses in the 1980s and ’90s. The cause was complications of myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disorder, said his wife, Leslie Miller-Bernal. Martin Bernal, whose three-volume work “Black Athena” ignited an academic debate by arguing that the African and Semitic lineage of Western civilization had been scrubbed from the record of ancient Greece by 18th- and 19th-century historians steeped in the racism of their times, died on June 9 in Cambridge, England.
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