Among other things, technical scholarship is a matter of sources: without a grasp of the status quaestionis, all the ingenuity in the world amounts to little, as demonstrated by B.'s conclusion to Black Athena.

The first series of chapters (1–7) ventures a theoretical defence of his most contentious claim, viz. whatever Greek word that lacks a crystal-clear Indo-European etymology shall a priori evince a borrowing from either Egyptian or West Semitic. B. believes himself to have proven that the non-Indo-European elements in the Hellenic language cannot be remnants of a proto-Greek or ‘Aegean’ substratum, and that Proto-Indo-European possesses little independence per se. The latter contention has been fashionable in some quarters (G. Semerano, F. Vinci); here it rests on an arbitrary downgrading of Tocharian and the separation of the Anatolian branch of PIE (P.W. Brosman, ‘Evidence in Support of Proto-Indo-Hittite’, Folia Linguistica Historica 23 [2002], 1–21; contra A. Kloekhorst, Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon [2008], pp. 7–11). B.'s faith in his ability to pinpoint sound shifts in (P)IE matching, or stemming from, Afroasiatic and in the rightness of multilateral lexical comparisons à la Greenberg over the standard comparative method, looks misplaced; for he has not checked his facts and stands at the mercy of sources notorious for their quirks and errors (Gamkrelidze–Ivanov for PIE / PIH, Orel–Stolbova for Afroasiatic, Bomhard–Kerns for Nostratic). His own proneness to blunders further compromises his construct. Let Sumerian examples suffice: gigir (actually ^ĝišgigir) is not ‘wheel, circle’ (p. 98) but ‘(war) chariot’; the absurd ‘*Nu[d] (= gud, gu)’ (p. 99) misreports Gamkrelize–Ivanov, who, on I, pp. 491 and 773, print ŋud, = ĝud; guskin does not mean ‘gold’ (= kù.sig ₁₇), pace p. 100, but, as GUŠKIN / GU.UŠ.KIN, is one of the ideographic values for that metal in Akkadian; kal mistranslated ‘hold, keep, retain’ (p. 105) is ‘to be / make (something) dear, precious’, cf. kal-kal, ‘most precious’, kal-la-mu, ‘precious sweet’, kal-la-gu ₁₀, ‘my dearest one’.

The other half of the book (Chapters 7–22) focusses on those Afroasiatic lexical loans B. uncovers in the gaps left by Frisk and Chantraine and in the failure of Indo-European linguistics to account satisfactorily for many Hellenic words. He emphasises the latter out of ignorance: on p. 421 it is suggested that οἷος might originate in the Egyptian verb of relatable value wo|; however, the PIE derivations οἷος < *oi-wo < *h ₁oi-_o-s and εἷς < *ἕνς < *sén-s < *sém-s (J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams [edd.], Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture [1997], pp. 398–9; V. Blažek, Numerals. Comparative-etymological Analyses of Numeral Systems and their Implications [1999], pp. 145–6) must be maintained (G.-J. Pinault, ‘Retour sur le numéral “un” en tokharien’, Indogermanische Forschungen 111 [2006], 88–93). His explanations of etymological cruces in Greek stumble on the unreliability of the Semitic isoglosses adduced, due to the avoidance of state-of-the-art tools (Akkadian, Aramaic, Canaanite, Phoenician and Ugaritic words are un-sourced, Egyptian ones sloppily provenanced; Hebrew comes from Gesenius or Klein's elementary lexicon; the only Phoenician grammar used dates back to 1939, despite P.C. Schmitz, ‘Phoenician-Punic Grammar and Lexicography in the New Millenium’, JAOS 124 [2004], 533–47), and on B.'s dilettante handling of linguistics. As he applies no method but ad hoc reasoning based on contingency (see M.R. Lefkowitz, History Lesson. A Race Odyssey [2008], pp. 133–4, 181–3 n. 16), those chapters eschew rigour. Roots, reconstructed or not, are consistently confused with attested bases verbal or nominal; a Greek word attracts several etyma (Θῆβαι stems ‘from a confusion of two Egyptian roots, tbi and dbt “box, chest” and Db #t “coffin, shrine”’ [p. 504], Ἀθῆνα from Ḥt-ntr Nt or Ḥt-ntr nt Nt through an *Ἀθᾱναΐα that needs no asterisk) or, conversely, an Egyptian lexeme would have been dressed under a plurality of Hellenic garbs (it cannot be granted that both γλαυκός and Γοργώ derive from g #g #, ‘to dazzle, amaze’ [pp. 578–9], itself a mistake for g #g #w, ‘to stare, be astonished’: Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, V, p. 157; R. Hannig, Ägyptisches Wörterbuch, I [2003], p. 1364, II.2 [2006], p. 2589); and one grows weary at the fundamental debates swept under the rug, such as the position of Ugaritic among the Northwest Semitic languages (I.K.H. Halayqa, A Comparative Lexicon of Ugaritic and Canaanite [2008], pp. 9–16) and the IE or non-IE stamp of Pre-Greek (M. Finkelberg, Greeks and Pre-Greeks. Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition [2005], pp. 49–54, versus R. Beekes, Glotta 83 [2008], 13–17, especially 13–14).

The book is full of red herrings that betray its quality. Pace pp. 219–20, the putative Egyptian title ⁽*⁾P #sr was not transported into Peripheral Akkadian by the Hittite scribes of the Boğazköy letters qua Pašiyara before becoming qa-si-re-u in Linear B and βασιλεύς in Greek, since pa-ši-ia-ra KBo XXVIII 48 at 69 /608 + 301/u1, l. 24, is in all probability an anthroponym adapting the Egyptian P #-s(|)rw ~ Paser, some vizier (E. Edel, Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, Phil.-Hist. Klasse [1978], 122–3, Die ägyptisch-hethitische Korrespondenz aus Boghazköi in babylonischer und hethitischer Sprache [1994], I, p. 32 [text], II pp. 57–8 [commentary]; J.F. Quack, Die Lehren des Ani. Ein neuägyptischer Weisheitstext in seinem kulturellen Umfeld [1994], pp. 24–5). ‘The Egyptian nfr, which Gardiner reconstructed as *nu-fe(r), meant “youth” as well as “beauty”’ (p. 230) and would have given the Greeks νύμϕη, though nfr revolves around the notions of accomplishment / perfection, therefore: achievement, success, predicated of persons (e.g. nfr-|mn-m-H #t, ‘perfect one of Amenemhat’: J.P. Allen, BASOR 325 [2008], 30–1, 32) or objects (a stone in a temple: J. Baines, Visual and Written Culture in Ancient Egypt [2007], pp. 269–70). ‘In some senses ntr(w) is / are transcendent but more often they are immanent not only in the sun, moon and air but also in the earth and Nile’ (p. 248) is mere blustering concealing the fact that the etymology and exact value of ntr are beyond recovery (E. Hornung, Der Eine und die Vielen. Ägyptische Gottesvorstellungen [1971], pp. 20–35; the best that seems feasible, after D. Meeks, ‘Notion de “dieu” et structure du panthéon dans l'Egypte ancienne’, Revue de l'histoire des religions 205 [1988], 425–46, is to draw a line between ntr and not-ntr). On p. 308, B. ‘maintain[s] that the most likely source’ of the words of the στρατός family is ‘the Egyptian root sdr “to pass the night” and the noun sdryt “sleeping place.” In Late Egyptian sdrt meant “night camp, bivouac.” The possibility that the Egyptian sdrt was already developing some of the other meanings found in Greek is suggested by the Demotic verb and noun sdy “fight, warrior, hero.”’ Sdy means that (W. Vycichl, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue copte [1983], p. 278), but it is perverse to compare sdr, a verb which expresses the sleeping / spending the night as well the lying (down) / going to rest, thence: inactivity / laziness (Wörterbuch, IV, pp. 390–2, Belegstellen, IV, p. 61; R.O. Faulkner, A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian [1962], p. 259; Hannig, I, pp. 1276–7, II.2, pp. 2411–13; cf. G. Meurer, Die Feinde des Königs in den Pyramidentexten [2002], pp. 236–40). As for New and Late Egyptian sdrt, it might only provide the missing link B. needs if it possesses marked military overtones, but this substantive has no other values than that of ‘resting place, night quarter’ on a journey (Wörterbuch, IV, p. 392. 12; R.A. Caminos, Late Egyptian Miscellanies, II [1954], p. 409 at 10, 8–9). Yet, in W. van Binsbergen (ed.), Black Athena Comes of Age. Towards a Constructive Re-assessment (2011 = Black Athena: Ten Years After [1996]²), p. 90 n. 78, B. now refers to the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 24 (1938), 191 n. 6, for ‘night camp, bivouac’: now A.N. Dakin only wondered there whether the sdryt of the stele he published ‘was … a commemoration of a bivouac …’. Given that sdrt has nothing to do with war and that sdr is semantically too distant to be anything more than a phonetic look-alike to στρατός, only sdy, by an ad hoc development, would somehow square with στρατός. Thus the IE cognate sttá- (GEW, II, p. 806, III, p. 181; DELG, IV.1, pp. 1061–2; M. Mayrhofer, Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen, II [1996], p. 755 s.v. STAR) is in no way superseded.