The recent death of Martin Bernal (9 June 2013) renders it all the more appropriate to reassess his work. Edited by anthropologist Wim Van Binsbergen of Holland, this volume includes a dozen chapters including several by Bernal written in response to various authors. The volume takes a fresh look at the work of Martin Bernal in a calmer spirit than the earlier frenzy of ardent supporters and fierce antagonists that first received the volumes of Black Athena (1987, 1991, and 2006). All of the highly credentialed authors, except Bernal, are of Dutch origin, which does limit the perspectives offered on Bernal's sometimes contentious work.
The preface summarizes the organization, goal, and origin of the edited work for a rich one-day conference that reappeared in the journal TA∧ANTA and for this consolidated reprint. It is also here that Van Binsbergen credits Bernal's creative and heuristic role in stimulating empirical and ideological debates about his work interpreting the relationships between classical Greco-Roman civilization with the earlier and longer lasting Nile valley civilizations.
Binsbergen notes that Bernal was roundly criticized as a dilettante, especially by classics scholars. This is not surprising since he took them to task in particular; it is true that they were generally unfamiliar with Egyptology and especially unfamiliar with ancient Africa. Summarizing his dense and penetrating chapter, Binsbergen believes that Bernal set an important but overly large task in trying to create a new alternative paradigm to Eurocentrism. Bernal responded in a lengthy manner that addresses the many distortions and misrepresentations of his works as well as offers an extensive review of his evidence for the racial and linguistic aspects of his arguments.
Jan Best continues the dialogue through a detailed case study of toponyms of Bronze Age Mallia in Crete to test Bernal's thesis; while he does conclude that Eurocentric Hellenists should be rejected, he cautions that simply replacing this with another ‘centrism’ offers its own dangers. Binsbergen responds in great detail, regarding the origins and interactions of the earliest Cretan Script. Bernal had insisted that he never said Athena was ‘black’ or that Greek is wholly borrowed from Egyptian – these claims by his detractors were ‘straw men’. Chapter Four, also by Binsbergen, looks at models of the interaction between Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic writing systems, a topic that long preceded Bernal. Binsbergen agrees with Bernal that such relations were multiplex and multidirectional and can include Egyptian sources. Like me, Arno Egbert in a chapter on Neith and Athena, ‘Consonants in Collision’, argues that Bernal does not convincingly make this case. An exchange between Josine Blok and Bernal proves unproductive, however chapters on ‘Rethinking Africa's Contribution to Global Cultural History’ and on ‘Afrocentrism’, closer to my own specialty of ancient Nubia, offer useful contributions to this richly important topic.
Chapter Eleven by Fred Woudhuizen on Bee Signs in Cretan Hieroglyphs, concludes that the signs might have been borrowed from earlier Egyptian but they did not carry the same value. He states (p. 290) that the ‘bity’ bee sign in Egypt represented the king of Lower Egypt, when, in fact, the ‘nesu’ reed represents Lower Egypt and ‘bity’ is Upper Egypt. It is also incorrect to define bity as ‘beekeeper’; it only means ‘bee’ that is associated with Upper Egypt where the annual transportation of bees on barges started. In fact, ‘bt’ is derived from the word for ‘worker’ or ‘slave’ that lingers on in modern Semitic languages. The focus on bees continues with Binsbergen's concluding Chapter Twelve that has rich and extensive footnotes on this subject. The volume is provocative and productive; space only allows me here to conclude that Bernal was an ‘incessant visionary’ steering a useful course away from Eurocentric hegemony despite many details that invite further debate.
