Black Athena Comes of Age

What prompted Martin Bernal (Cornell University, USA) - specialising in modern Chinese intellectual history, to turn to the ancient history of the Eastern Mediterranean basin? Why did Bernal set out to rewrite two millennia of European intellectual history, exposing the eighteenth-century rise of Altertumswissenschaft as a critical phase in the collective, Eurocentric denial of what he calls the `Afroasiatic roots of European civilisation'? How could his multi-volume book Black Athena (1987, 1991) create havoc - in the form of a heated and protracted, international debate - in the fields of African Studies, ancient history, classical archaeology, Egyptology, comparative linguistics, the history of ideas, and human biology? How could Martin Bernal become a reluctant hero of African American intellectuals identifying as Afrocentrist? Why did this condemn him to the hatred of conservative American classicists and historians of ideas? Why was he tempted to overplay his hand? What errors did he commit in the fields of epistemology, historiography and historical linguistics? Why, yet, is Martin Bernal largely right - if often for the wrong reasons?
With the publication, in 1996, of the devastatingly critical Black Athena revisited (eds. Mary Lefkowitz & Guy MacLean Rogers) the impression was created that the Black Athena thesis had been conclusively refuted. However, the present collection has sought to restore the balance. Bernal himself has contributed three innovative and illuminating pieces to the collection, responding to critics, systematising his linguistic claims, and applying the Black Athena thesis to sub-Saharan Africa. By offering answers to the above questions, the collection has sought to take the international debate to the next, constructive phase. It shows that incisive and multifarious criticism of Bernal's position and methods is necessary and often justified. Yet at the turn of the 21st century, the formulation of a non-Eurocentric, multicentric model