The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith
1980s. Since then, Bernal’s views have so often been promoted or opposed that I shall not attempt to outline the entire debate here. However, the essays collected by Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers in Black Athena Revisited (1996) are an obvious point of reference. For my purposes, the pertinent part of Bernal’s thesis is that Greek civilisation is not only fundamentally and generally Egyptian and Semitic-Phoenician in origin and character, but specifically the product of a series of Egyptian invasions and settlements of the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean, starting in the Middle Kingdom (ca 2040–1700 BCE), coming to a peak under the Hyksos rulers of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Dynasties (ca 1640–1530 BCE), and consolidated by the New Kingdom pharaohs of the early Eighteenth Dynasty (ca 1550–1300 BCE). In support of these claims, Bernal marshals a mass of archaeological, mythological, literary and linguistic evidence. Two linguists who have examined Bernal’s philological evidence, Jay H. Jasanoff and Alan Nusbaum, have no hesitation in rejecting it out of hand as ‘a farrago of hypotheses’ (1996, 178), as revealing a ‘thoroughgoing contempt for phonetic consistency’ (200), and as ‘simply false’ (201). Much the same may be said of Bernal’s arguments more pertinent to the topic at hand.
Bernal makes much – as do his Afrocentrist acolytes – of Herodotus’ account (2: 102–110) of the military campaigns of an early Twelfth Dynasty pharaoh, ‘Sesostris’, in the Red Sea area, Asia Minor and as far as the Black Sea, where the Colchians who ‘are black-skinned and have woolly hair’ (2: 104) are purported to be the (black) Egyptian descendants of the armies of Sesostris. However, not only does Herodotus himself immediately dismiss this evidence of a ‘Negroid’ affinity as inconclusive (‘which certainly amounts to but little, since several other nations are so too’ – 2: 104), but more importantly, the identity and achievements of his ‘Sesostris’ are well known to be spurious. Herodotus’ Dynastic chronology is wholly inaccurate (he takes Dynastic history to cover ‘eleven thousand, three hundred and forty years’ – 2: 142 – and he places the Old Kingdom and the building of the pyramids after the New – 2: 124–136), while his creation of a legendary ‘Sesostris’ reflects no more than the near-fabulous status of Middle Kingdom rulers that obtained among his priestly informants more than a millennium later. ‘Sesostris’ seems to be Herodotus’ (or his priestly informers’) confused composite of the Middle Kingdom rulers Senwosret I (ca 1971–1926 BCE) and III (ca 1878–1841 BCE), and the much later Ramesses II, who usurped hundreds of his predecessors’ statues, thus encouraging recent scholarly confusion (Franke, 1995, 744; Schulz and Seidel, 1998, 135–7; Van Dijk, 2000, 299). As William Murnane puts it, ‘there is now a broad consensus against assuming that any Middle-Kingdom pharaoh governed even the most loosely organized empire in Asia’ (1995a, 700). Yet so politically attractive is the evidence Bernal offers for his thesis of a massive Egyptian settlement of the Aegean, and thus for broad claims about the ‘African’ origins of Mediterranean civilisation, that Afrocentrists have embraced his thesis wholesale to produce what Mary Lefkowitz calls ‘a fable for our time, an ingeniously documented work of historical fiction, engineered to help address one of society’s greatest problems [i.e., racism]’ (2001, 14).
Still, it is important to assess carefully what Bernal does say and what he does not. Firstly, his focus is primarily on the ‘Afro-Asiatic’ origins of Greek civilisation, not on the African roots of Egyptian culture, even though he does seem to subsume such an origin throughout. He claims that ‘Egyptian civilization was fundamentally African’ and that some ‘of the most powerful Egyptian dynasties which were based in Upper Egypt – the 1st, 11th, 12th and 18th – were made up of pharaohs whom one can usefully call black’ (242), but the very looseness of that last statement suggests that Bernal has little interest in, evidence for, or intention to develop the implications of such a claim. In a later attempt to confront his critics, Black Athena Writes Back (2001), Bernal reiterates his primary interest in the Hyksos and Semitic-Phoenician impact on Egypt, and admits that his reference to pharaohs ‘whom one can usefully call black’ had primarily had ‘a political purpose’ (209). Nevertheless, as the evidence of pharaonic sculpture surveyed earlier suggests, it is hard not to agree that some pharaohs may indeed have been ‘black’ in the sense of having Nubian or ‘Negroid’ features.
Indeed, much of what Bernal has to say about Egypt in Africa is unexceptionable and well established. His proposals that ‘Egyptian civilization is clearly based on the rich pre-Dynastic cultures of Upper Egypt and Nubia, whose African origin is uncontested’ (15), or, from Black Athena Writes Back, that ‘it is useful to see Ancient Egypt as an African civilization’ (376), have been uncontested since the publication of Michael A. Hoffman’s Egypt before the Pharaohs (1980), and we shall return to these. He also acknowledges, again in line with standard views, that ancient Egypt’s ‘African’ profile was always a perplexing one: ‘at least for the last 7 000 years, the population of Egypt has contained African, South-West Asian, and Mediterranean types’; and even though ‘the further south, or up the Nile, one goes, the blacker and more Negroid the population becomes’ (242), Egypt’s political determinants were never merely African: ‘the unification and establishment of Dynastic Egypt, around 3250 BCE, was in some way triggered by developments to the East’ (15).
Such cautions on Bernal’s part are not, however, the stuff upon which to found and nurture Afrocentrist Egyptology, and they have been ignored by both proponents and opponents of Bernal’s views. Yet a much bigger problem for the Afrocentrist paradigm lies at the very core of Bernal’s thesis. Though Mary R. Lefkowitz has quite rightly complained that Bernal ‘has contributed to the provision of an apparently respectable underpinning for Afrocentric fantasies’ (1996, 20), she does not expose the profound irony of this ‘underpinning’. For the truth is that Bernal’s thesis has been recruited by Afrocentric polemicists with little regard for the actual counter-African thrust of his theory. Simply put, while Bernal does posit a first wave of ‘pure’ Egyptian expansion into the Aegean during the Middle Kingdom under the Twelfth Dynasty pharaohs (ca 1990–1780 BCE) whom he regards as ‘black’ (18), his main focus is on a putative Hyksos-inspired Egyptian conquest and cultural colonisation of the Eastern Mediterranean of two centuries later; in other words, on an intervention which, if it took place at all, was not ‘African’ but Phoenician-Semitic. ‘I am convinced that the Hyksos played a major role in introducing West Semitic and Egyptian civilization to the Aegean,’ he reiterates in Black Athena Writes Back (48). Africa plays little part in this, except perhaps in providing the troops who did the fighting.
Bernal’s thesis of large-scale Hyksos conquests in the eastern Mediterranean remains controversial (see several contributions to Lefkowitz and Rogers, 1996), but its details need not concern us further. What must, however, is the extraordinary slippage that has occurred between Bernal’s focus on the activities of Egypt’s Phoenician Hyksos conquerors and the advocacy of those who wish to invoke these suppositions as argument for the fundamentally African origins of eastern Mediterranean – and hence classical Greek – culture.
Far from confirming any originating African core to Egyptian, let alone eastern Mediterranean civilisation, Black Athena is a sophisticated resurrection of a hoary Near-Eastern diffusionist hypothesis whereby major Egyptian achievements have always had their origin elsewhere – usually, as in this case, east of the Delta. Two thousand years ago, Josephus claimed, ‘[Abraham] introduced [the Egyptians] to arithmetic and transmitted to them the laws of astronomy. For before the coming of Abraham the Egyptians were ignorant of these sciences, which thus traveled from the Chaldeans into Egypt, whence they passed to the Greeks’ (66 AD/1989, 1. 2: 168). Variations of such surmises of origins have lurked in Western thinking ever since.
Perhaps for these reasons, an emeritus professor of Oriental Studies, James Muhly, referred to Black Athena as ‘a cruel hoax … foisted on black people in America’ (1991, 22), while the leading African-American classicist, Frank Snowden, lamented that ‘Black people have suffered enough lies’ (cited by Muhly). An otherwise feisty promoter of African-American studies, John H. McWhorter, warned that ‘Black America is currently embarked on a tragic detour’ (2000, xv) of an ‘Afrocentric History’ that is ‘a fragile assemblage of misreadings of classical texts to construct a scenario under which Ancient Egypt was a “black” civilization raped by the ancient Greeks’ (54).
This