By Martin Bernal
Might Greek philosophy be rooted in Egyptian notion? Is it attainable that the Pythagorean conception was once conceived at the beaches of the Nile and the Euphrates instead of in historic Greece? may or not it's that a lot of Western civilization was once shaped at the “Dark Continent”? for nearly centuries, Western students have given little credence to the potential for such eventualities. In Black Athena, an audacious three-volume sequence that moves on the middle of today's such a lot heated tradition wars, Martin Bernal demanding situations Eurocentric attitudes by means of calling into query of the longest-established causes for the origins of classical civilization. to take advantage of his phrases, the Aryan version, that's present at the present time, claims that Greek tradition arose because the results of the conquest from the north by way of Indo-European audio system, or “Aryans,” of the local “pre-Hellenes.” the traditional version, which used to be maintained in Classical Greece, held that the local inhabitants of Greece had first and foremost been civilized through Egyptian and Phoenician colonists and that extra close to japanese tradition have been brought to Greece by way of Greeks learning in Egypt and Southwest Asia. relocating past those triumphing versions, Bernal proposes a Revised historic version, which means that classical civilization in truth had deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. This long-awaited 3rd and ultimate quantity of the sequence is worried with the linguistic facts that contradicts the Aryan version of old Greece. Bernal indicates how approximately forty percentage of the Greek vocabulary has been plausibly derived from Afroasiatic languages—Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic. He additionally finds how those derivations are usually not restricted to issues of alternate, yet prolonged to the subtle language of politics, faith, and philosophy. This proof, in keeping with Bernal, vastly strengthens the speculation that during Greece an Indo-European–speaking inhabitants was once culturally ruled by means of old Egyptian and West Semitic audio system Provocative, passionate, and great in scope, this quantity caps a considerate rewriting of historical past that has been stirring educational and political controversy because the e-book of the 1st quantity.
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Extra resources for Black Athena: The Linguistic Evidence
Example text
The ideological reasons for this latter requirement as it affected the East Mediterranean were considered at length in Volume 1 of Black Athena. Essentially, they were to preserve a pure, and purely European, image of Ancient Greece. During the past three decades the historiography of the ancient East Mediterranean has shifted significantly. 4 Others include the Mesopotamian and Syrian seals found at the Greek Thebes; the astoundingly rich and cosmopolitan fourteenth-century shipwreck found off the South Turkish coast near Kas∫‘; the paintings with Egypto-Minoan motifs found at Tel Ed Daba’a, INTRODUCTION 3 the capital of the Hyksos, who were Syrian rulers of lower Egypt in the seventeenth century BCE.
The first of these chapters, on phonology, is largely negative, in that the phonological alterations that took place between INTRODUCTION 17 PIE and the earliest Greek can largely be explained as internal developments, without recourse to Afroasiatic influences. Furthermore, where similar changes, such as that from initial s- to initial h- or the breakdown of labiovelars, took place in both Greek and nearby Afroasiatic languages the Greek shift seems to have been earlier. On the other hand, Afroasiatic clearly influenced the distribution of phonemes in Greek through lexical loans.
Other linguists have found even larger super-families, such as Niger-Congo stretching from Senegal to Swaziland. Casting their nets even more widely, they have discerned a Nilo-Saharan family scattered across northern Africa with very few common features indeed. Since the late nineteenth century, attempts to establish genetic links between Indo-European and other language families have appeared sporadically. Their nonacceptance by mainstream Indo-Europeanists is overdetermined. At an ideological level any such connections would infringe on Indo-European purity and at a methodological one the attempts require imprecisions not tolerable to men and women working within the tight elegance of a single language family.