Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence

Praise for Black Athena

A monumental and pathbreaking work.

—Edward Said

"Black Athena is a powerfully written and brilliantly researched book that relentlessly unveils the historical and cultural African origins of Western civilization. Still a must-read for all those in search of truth."

—Ama Mazama, associate professor and director of the graduate programs of the, Department of African American Studies, Temple University

"Martin Bernal’s Black Athena is nothing short of a monumental achievement in scholarship that reoriented and transformed serious study of ancient civilizations. It remains a soaring accomplishment of classical erudition of the Afroasiatic foundation of Greek history."

—Molefi Kete Asante, author of The History of Africa; professor and chair, Department of African American Studies, Temple University

Colossal.… Bernal aims to revise current understanding of Ancient Middle Eastern history by taking seriously the ancient Greeks’ legends that portrayed much in their civilization as originating in the Middle East, especially Egypt.

—New York Times Book Review

[Martin Bernal] has forced scholars to reexamine the roots of Western civilization.

—Newsweek

Demands to be taken seriously.… Every page that Bernal writes is educating and enthralling. To agree with all his thesis may be a sign of naivety, but not to have spent time in his company is a sign of nothing at all.

—Times Literary Supplement

In a spectacular undertaking, Martin Bernal sets out to … restore the credibility of what he calls the Ancient Model of the beginnings of Greek civilizations.… Bernal makes an exotic interloper in Classical studies. He comes to them with two outstanding gifts: a remarkable flair for the sociology—perhaps one should say politics—of knowledge, and a formidable linguistic proficiency.… The story told by Bernal, with many fascinating twists and turns and quite a few entertaining digressions, is … a critical inquiry into a large part of the European imagination … a retrospect of ingenious and often sardonic erudition.

—Perry Anderson, The Guardian

A work which has much to offer the lay reader, and its multidisciplinary sweep is refreshing: it is an important contribution to historiography and the sociology of knowledge, written with elegance, wit, and self-awareness … a thrilling journey … his account is as gripping a tale of scholarly detection and discovery as one could hope to find.

—Margaret Drabble, The Observer

Bernal’s material is fascinating, his mind is sharp, and his analyses convince.

—Richard Jenkyns,

Times Higher Educational Supplement

A formidable work of intellectual history, one that demonstrates that the politics of knowledge is never far from national politics.

—Christian Science Monitor

An astonishing work, breathtakingly bold in conception and passionately written … salutary, exciting, and, in its historiographical aspects, convincing.

—G. W. Bowersock, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Bernal’s work and the stir it has occasioned have caused ancient historians and archaeologists to undertake a major reexamination of methods and motives.

—Robert L. Pounder, American Historical Review

His book should be welcome to both classicists and ancient historians, most of whom will, now at least, be inclined to agree with him.

—R. A. McNeal, Franklin and Marshall College

[Bernal’s] multifaceted assault on academic complacency is an important contribution to the development of a more open, historical, and culturally oriented post-processual archaeology.

—Current Anthropology

A breathtaking panoply of archaeological artifacts, texts, and myths.

—Toronto Star

Bernal’s enterprise—his attack on the Aryan model and his promotion of a new paradigm—will profoundly mark the next century’s perception of the origins of Greek civilization and the role of Ancient Egypt.

—Transition

Challenges the racism implicit in the recent ‘cultural literacy’ movement.

—Socialist Review

Martin Bernal has managed to make the subject of Ancient Greece both popular and controversial.

—Baltimore Sun

A serious work that deals in a serious way with many of the principal issues of Aegean history in the second millennium BC, and one can ask little more of any historical work.

—Classic Philology

OTHER VOLUMES BY MARTIN BERNAL

BLACK ATHENA

The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization

VOLUME I

The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985

BLACK ATHENA

The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization

VOLUME III

The Linguistic Evidence

Black Athena

Black Athena

The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization

VOLUME II

The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence

Martin Bernal

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY

Reprint edition 2020

978-1-9788-0427-2 (pbk.)

978-1-9788-0716-7 (cloth)

First published in the United States of America by

Rutgers University Press, 1991

First published in Great Britain by Free Association Books, 1991

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

(Revised for volume II)

Bernal, Martin

Black Athena.

Includes bibliographies and indexes.

Contents: v. 1. The fabrication of ancient Greece,

1785–1985—v. 2. The archaeological and documentary evidence.

1. Greece—Civilization—Egyptian influences.

2. Greece—Civilization—Phoenician influences.

3. Greece—Civilization—To 146 B.C.   I. Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization.   II. Title.

DF78.B398   1987   949.5   87-16408

ISBN 0-8135-1583-1

ISBN 0-8135-1584-X (pbk.)

Copyright © 1991 by Martin Bernal

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

To the memory of V. Gordon Childe as a champion of modified diffusionism

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

Transcription and Phonetics

Maps and Charts

Chronological Tables

Introduction

Intrinsic Reasons for Preferring the Revised Ancient Model to the Aryan One

Some Theoretical Considerations

A Summary of the Argument

1 Crete Before the Palaces, 7000–2100 BC

The ‘Diffusionist’ and ‘Isolationist’ Debate

Crete Before the 21st Century BC

Cretan Religion in the Early Bronze Age

Conclusion

2 Egypt’s Influence on Boiotia and the Peloponnese in the Third Millennium, I: The Cultic, Mythical and Legendary Evidence

Semelē and Alkmēnē

Athena and Athens in Boiotia: The Cults of Athena Itōnia and Athena Alalkomena

Nēit, the Controller of Water

The Battles between Nēit and Seth, Athena and Poseidon

Poseidon/Seth

Nēit/Athena and Nephthys/Erinys

Herakles

Conclusion

3 Egypt’s Influence on Boiotia and the Peloponnese in the Third Millennium, II: The Archaeological Evidence

Spartan Archaeology: The Tomb of Alkmēnē

The Tomb of Amphion and Zēthos

The Draining of the Kopais

Granaries

Irrigation and Settlement in the Argolid

Drainage and Irrigation in Arkadia

Parallels between Boiotian and Arkadian Place Names

Social and Political Structures in Early Helladic Greece

Other Archaeological Traces of Old Kingdom Egypt in the Aegean

The End of Early Bronze Age ‘High’ Civilization

Conclusion

4 The Old Palace Period in Crete and the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, 2100–1730 BC

Early Minoan III—the Prepalatial Period

Lead and Spirals

The Cretan Palaces

Cretan Writing Systems

Cultic Symbols in Early Palatial Crete

Possible Anatolian Origins of the Bull Cult

Thunder and Sex: Min, Pan and Bwäzä

Min and Minos

The Case Against Egyptian Influence

Mont and Rhadamanthys

The Survival of the Bull Cult—Cretan Conservatism

Conclusion

5 Sesōstris, I: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence for the Greek Accounts of His Conquest

The Discovery of the Mit Rahina Inscription

The Significance of the Inscription as Evidence for an Egyptian Empire in Asia During the Middle Kingdom

Senwosre and Sesōstris

The Real and the Fantastic in the Sesōstris Stories

Middle Kingdom Egypt’s Military Capability

The Background

Archaeological Evidence for the Campaigns

Was Sesōstris the Destroyer?

Sesōstris in Thrace and Scythia?

Sesōstris in Colchis?

The Evidence for Sesōstris’ ‘Conquests’ from the Mit Rahina Inscription

Conclusion

6 Sesōstris, II: The Cultic, Mythical and Legendary Evidence

The Egyptian Tradition

The Traditions of the Levant and Anatolia

Thrace and Scythia

Colchis: An Egyptian Colony?

Mesopotamia and Iran

The Greek Legends of Memnōn and his Conquests of Anatolia

The Case for an Egyptian Conquest of Troy c. 1900 BC

Sesōstris/Senwosre and Amenemḥ’s Conquests: A Summary of the Evidence

7 The Thera Eruption: From the Aegean to China

The Controversy over Dating

The Eruption Re-dated

The Implications of the Re-dating

Thera and Kalliste

Volcanic Allusions in the Exodus Story

Membliaros and the Pall of Darkness

The Myth of Atlantis

The Hekla Eruption in Iceland

China: The Historiographical Impact

The Worldwide Impact of the Thera Eruption

Conclusion

8 The Hyksos

The Chronology of the 13th Dynasty: Chaos in Egypt

The Chronology of the 15th Dynasty: The Beginnings of Hyksos Rule

The Hyksos Capital at Tell el Daba‹a

The 400-year Stela and the Temple of Seth

A Chronological Summary

Who Were the Hyksos?

Different Views on the Origin and the Arrival of the Hyksos

The Hyksos as a Multinational Corporation

Horses and Chariots: Hurrians and Aryans

Hurrians and Hyksos

Hyksos Material Culture

The Hyksos and the Biblical Captivity or Sojourn in Egypt

Conclusion

9 Crete, Thera and the Birth of Mycenaean culture in the 18th and 17th Centuries BC: A Hyksos Invasion?

The Cretan New Palaces

The Weapons of Crete in MMIII

The Flying Gallop, the Sphinx and the Griffin

Was There a Hyksos Invasion of Crete c. 1730 BC?

The Hyksos in Thera?

The Origins of Mycenaean Civilization

The Aryanist Model of Invasion

Between Aryan and Ancient: Frank Stubbings

Conclusion: A Revision of the Ancient Model

10 Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Levantine Contacts with the Aegean: The Documentary Evidence

Egyptian Place Names Referring to the Aegean

The Etymology of Danaan

Documentary Evidence for Egyptian Relations with the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age

Accuracy and Hybridism in Egyptian Inscriptions and Tomb Paintings

Why Did Cretan Princes bring Tribute to Egypt?

Dating the Mycenaean Domination of Crete

Cretan and Mycenaean Missions to Egypt

The Statue Base of Amenōphis III

Contacts between Egypt and the Aegean in the Late 18th and 19th Dynasties

A Summary of the Evidence from Egyptian Documents and Paintings

Mesopotamian and Ugaritic Documents

Aegean Documents

Conclusion

11 Egyptian and Levantine Contacts with the Aegean, 1550–1250 BC: The Archaeological Evidence

Late Mycenaean Greece

The Relative Isolation of the Aegean 1550–1470 BC

Egyptian Expansion from c. 1520 to 1420

Pelops and the Achaians: Evidence from Anatolia

Pelops ‘The Crown Prince’?

The Achaians and the Danaans

Archaeological Traces of the Achaians

Mycenaeans and Hittites

Ugarit and Cyprus

Mycenaean Expansion and the Conquests of Tuthmōsis III

The Merchants of the Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age?

The Kaş Shipwreck: The Sailors

The Egyptian Thebes and Mycenae, 1420–1370 BC

The Foundation Deposit Plaques

The Vocabulary of Trade

The Decline of Egyptian Influence on the Aegean 1370–1220 BC

Phi and Psi Figurines and Smiting Gods

Canaanite Jars

Ivory

Conclusion

12 The Heroic End to the Heroic Age: The fall of Thebes, Troy and Mycenae 1250–1150 BC

Cylinder Seals

The Boiotian Thebes and the Phoenicians’ Arrival

Ancient Chronographies

Kadmos and the Alphabet

Kadmos and Danaos: Hyksos Rulers

Problems in the Writing of Linear B

The Treasure of the Kadmeion

The Kassite Connection

The Destruction of Thebes

A Brief Survey of Trojan History

The Date of the Trojan War

Thebes and Troy

The Collapse of Mycenaean Civilization

Conclusion

Conclusion

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Preface and Acknowledgements

The publication of Volume I of Black Athena transformed my life. Before then, I was working in isolation or, to be accurate, with a few close friends and colleagues, with whom I had many fruitful discussions and correspondences. Nevertheless, my ideas were essentially figments of my imagination, remaining in my head as private possessions. With the appearance of the book they took on a social substance. I was both delighted and disconcerted to hear other people discuss and dispute them; they have become public property over which I have little control or even influence. This is, of course, quite proper, because the ways in which ideas are received are much more important than their author’s original and often convoluted intentions.

Thanks to Robert Young and all at Free Association Books, Black Athena got off to a remarkably successful start. I had expected a low key and generally hostile response, but within days of its publication in March 1987, the book had received a double-page feature in the Guardian. Soon after that, came the start of a string of reviews, which were either friendly or mixed. For the first two years, there were none of the outright denunciations or frontal attacks on my competence to write such a work that I had expected. The mixed reviews usually accepted the historiographical portion of my work, but suspended judgement on the archaeological aspects and expressed scepticism about my linguistic claims.

These reviews attracted the interest of a number of American university presses and some who had previously rejected the manuscript now wanted to reopen the issue. Once again, however, the professional reviewers turned the project down, although in much friendlier and more respectful terms than before. Kenneth Arnold, the director of Rutgers University Press, decided—with the enthusiastic backing of Leslie Mitchner, the humanities editor—to use his right to publish three books a year without going through the normal professional reviewing process in order to accept Black Athena unconditionally. This bypassing of the usual channels in both England and the US answers the criticism made by at least one reviewer that the appearance of my book itself disproves my claim that the normal operation of university presses restricts the range of ideas that can be published. Anyhow, I now have two editors, Robert Young and Kenneth Arnold, to thank for sticking out their necks by publishing my books. Free Association Books did, however, receive generous financial backing from the Hull Fund which lends publishers money to help with the publication of books written by members of Cornell faculty.

There were interesting similarities and differences in the reception of the book in Britain and in the United States. The most striking difference was political. In Britain, the reaction fell into very neat categories. There was one hostile review in the Trotskyist Socialist Worker—I do not know whether this reflected merely the views of the individual critic or the Eurocentrism of Trotskyism as a whole. In general, however, the left and liberals liked the book, but from the Independent rightwards it was ignored.

The pattern was more complicated in the US. From the start, Black Athena was welcomed by the left, but, interestingly, it received scrupulously fair treatment in a feature in Insight Magazine, a journal whose editors see it ‘as a right-wing version of Time’! The gap in US response was from the liberal establishment; although Black Athena has become increasingly newsworthy, it has not been reviewed or discussed in Time or Newsweek and for a long time it was completely ignored by the New York Times.

The similarities between the British and American responses, however, outweigh the differences. In both countries there was an immediate and positive response from the Black and other non-European communities. Intellectuals from these communities have reviewed the book favourably and have actively promoted its sale and given me many chances to express my ideas at meetings and in interviews with the media.

There has also been a remarkable degree of interest by visual artists and designers and many of the most perceptive reviews of Black Athena have been published in journals concerned with the arts. I think this comes in part from the general radicalism and refusal to accept orthodoxies among those concerned with the arts, but even more because Black Athena provided a historical framework which explained the close relationships between Egyptian and Greek art they had long sensed.

Even more to my surprise, I found that in both countries there was a significant number of ancient historians and classicists who were sympathetic to my views and had in fact begun to articulate similar ones. Although delightful, this discovery revealed a major flaw in my sociology of knowledge. Despite my friendship with the distinguished classicist Fred Ahl, who has given me an immense amount of help and encouragement for many years, I had retained a hopelessly oversimplified image of classics as a monolithic discipline. Taking classics as a single adversary, I believed that it could be overcome only by outflanking it, that is, by convincing the cultivated lay public, especially scholars in other disciplines. I was wrong in both respects. In fact, classicists know better than anyone what the Greeks and Romans wrote about their distant past and that, whatever the truth of the matter, I was thinking along the same lines as the people they were studying. Furthermore, there had already been unpublished rumblings of resistance to the Aryan Model and its positivist historiography, of which I was unaware. For these and other reasons, a significant number of classicists have been more ready to accept my arguments than the lay public, who knew little or nothing about the field.

The most startling example of this openness among professionals came from Molly Myerewitz Levine, a classicist who has taught at Bar Ilan University in Israel and now teaches at Howard, one of the leading black universities in the United States. She read Black Athena and was sensitive to her students’ interest in it. Although she generally liked the book, she felt unsure of the extent she could trust or use it for teaching. Therefore, she organized a panel to discuss it, which she proposed to the American Philological Society for a meeting at their annual conference.

When she asked me whether I would be willing to attend such a session, I agreed readily, though I was convinced that the proposal would never be accepted or, if, by some extraordinary chance it were, it would be marginalized by being put in a back room at an obscure hour. I was completely wrong. In the event, the session was named as the ‘Presidential Panel’ and was held in a ballroom at prime time.

I found the criticisms and the meeting as a whole fascinating, but the thing that impressed me most was the patience of the audience sitting for three straight hours in a hot room. I have no idea whether anyone was converted to my ideas. On the other hand, there was no doubt that there was intense interest in the issues being discussed. This was also reflected by the fact that three professional journals asked to publish the proceedings and they have now appeared in a special issue of Arethusa, the liveliest classical journal.¹

After the meeting had been announced but before it took place, I happened to meet the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. His reaction was that the meeting was being held far too soon and that disciplines did not usually respond so quickly to fundamental challenges. My first response was to say that we were all living in a ‘post-Kuhnian age’ in which the possibility of fundamental or ‘paradigmatic’ shifts was now seen in all disciplines. My second answer, at another level, was to point out that the classicists might dismember me to their satisfaction. Kuhn’s reply to this was that what actually happened at the meeting ‘was totally uninteresting’. What was important was the legitimacy given by the holding of the meeting.

There is no doubt that he was right. Since January 1989 when the meeting was held, while the ideas that I put forward are far from being accepted by classicists as ‘the orthodoxy’, they are now widely considered to be a respectable variant of it. This is not to say that there is no opposition; there has always been, but up until the summer of 1989 it was almost entirely sotto voce. The passionate depths of this hostility can be seen from the response of one Indo-European linguist who compares my work—in private conversation—to that of the ‘revisionists’ who deny that the Holocaust ever took place. The comparison is fascinating on at least two counts. Firstly, as an emotional response to my case for setting the Aryan Model and the Holocaust in the same general movement and, secondly, as an example of the way in which the members of a discipline can believe that their reconstructions of distant linguistic relationships have the same veracity as a massive and massively attested historical event that took place within living memory. This, however, like attacks on my competence, is the subject of dinner-party conversations and not of public utterances or published articles.

Since the summer of 1989 some resistance has come out into the open and there have been a number of fierce public attacks on the book, provoked partly by the meeting at the American Philological Association and partly by the uses being made of the book by American Blacks, both of which made it clear that the ideas in Black Athena were not simply going to fade away into decent obscurity.

Two journals of the far right, the New Criterion and the National Review, have launched an attack on my politics. In the first, the reviewer, who had clearly read and thought about Black Athena, admitted that it might contain some interesting arguments. However, he maintained that these were vitiated by the essential evil of the project. He saw this as inspired by the Marxism of my father—a crystalographer and historian of science, who was a well-known Communist. Although the reviewer somewhat contradicted his case by his accurate perception that Marxism was perfectly compatible with the Aryan Model and that there have been many distinguished Marxist classicists working within it.

I think there is something in his argument, in that I have been heavily influenced by my father. However, this has been more by the general features of his thought, his broadness of historical vision and sympathy for the underdog, than by the specifics of his Marxism.

The attack in the National Review was far less interesting and informed. It initially claimed such absurd irrelevancies as that I was black and that Herodotos had written that the Greeks were blond. But a letter published soon after from an ex-student of mine accused me of being a ‘pasty-faced’ English Maoist. Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised that my letter in response to this was printed in full.

Conservative classicists, whose academic attitudes have no necessary correlation with political conservatism, have taken the tack I had initially expected. They often say or at least imply that I am an incompetent ‘crackpot’. This charge, which might well have been shattering to the book’s academic reputation in 1987 or 1988, has come far too late.

This is because, if we are to use institutional or social criteria to judge who is or is not a ‘crank’ or ‘crackpot’—as I think we must, if we are to avoid complete subjectivity—I can no longer qualify for the epithets. It stretches the meanings of the terms ‘cranky’ or ‘cracked’ to breaking-point if they are applied to ideas that have had special sessions devoted to them in the annual conferences of the leading American professional organizations of the two most relevant disciplines, classics and Egyptology, and their author has been asked to address an international congress of archaeometry. There have also been two special numbers of professional journals on Black Athena.

My other mistaken prediction was that the cultivated lay public in Britain and America would rally to my cause. This is because, by and large, they know nothing about Black Athena. As I mentioned above, readers of the Independent, The Times, the Sunday Times and the Times Literary Supplement have seen no mention of it. In the US there has been no review of the book in the New York Times. This omission is so important and interesting that it is worth considering in some detail, It is difficult for me to reconstruct the whole story. However, as I understand it, when Black Athena first came to the book review committee in 1988, it was refused peremptorily. Later that year, Henry Louis (Skip) Gates, the most influential Black academic in the United States, asked me to compile a dossier of reviews and news items, which he kindly forwarded to the paper with his strong endorsement. Nothing happened. At the end of the year a Black correspondent on the New York Times, seeing me on the New York television talk show ‘Like It Is’, checked back for his paper’s review of Black Athena and, not finding it, asked me to send a copy for review. Nothing happened, even though, when someone from Rutgers University Press asked about it, she was assured that it was just about to come out. In the autumn of 1989, after the publication of the Arethusa special issue on the APA meeting, Rutgers tried again. This time the New York Times agreed to plan a feature article on the book and the response to it. This seemed to me the best thing to do as it would not oblige a reviewer to take a stand on the book one way or the other. I was interviewed at some length and a photographer was sent up to take pictures of me in my academic habitat. At this point, I was telephoned by another Times correspondent, who was working on a feature on Black claims that Egypt was Black. She too interviewed me for over an hour and her article appeared. As Black Athena is only peripherally concerned with this issue, it rightly did not feature largely in the piece, but the tone was hostile and dismissive, clearly aimed at discouraging readers from looking at the book. After that there has been no trace of the feature article.

What are the forces blocking any discussion of the ideas behind the book in this crucial newspaper? I suspect that it was following sequence: initially the work was thought to be absurd; then, when it was believed to be worth refuting, there was difficulty in finding experts who were willing or able to do this. As time went on, it became increasingly embarrassing to admit the slowness of their response. Finally a new factor entered, the fear that, even if they were able to do an effective hatchet job on Black Athena, there would be a barrage of angry letters from my Black supporters. Underlying this sequence, I suspect that there is a fundamental discomfort with the ideas that a respectable academic discipline could have racist roots and that racism has permeated liberal thought as well as that of obvious bigots.

The lack of a review in the New York Times means that Black Athena has not reached the liberal, cultivated white public in America that is so dependent on the Times. Information about the book has been spreading by word of mouth from its two centres, academia and the Black community. This means that its sales pattern in the US has been very unusual. Instead of rising to a peak and falling off, sales have risen steadily for over two years.

It is now simply too late to crush the ideas I have been proposing. They have become an established academic discourse. As Nixon’s henchman John Haldemann put it so well after the Watergate revelations, ‘you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube’. Black Athena has also reinforced many long-standing beliefs in the American Black community. Some of my classicist friends have asked me whether I am not disturbed by the uses made of Black Athena by Black racists. My answer to this is that I am disturbed because I hate racism of any kind. I would prefer to be in my position than theirs, however, as I am infinitely less concerned by black racism than I am by white racism, and white racists, directly or indirectly, make constant use of orthodox views of the classical world and the Aryan Model. In any event, regardless of the politics of the situation, the reason why I am devoting the second half of my life to this project is not simply as an attack on white racism but because I believe the Revised Ancient Model to be a less inaccurate representation of the history with which it is concerned and I know that untangling its ramifications is fascinating.

I should like to thank again everyone I acknowledged in the preface to Volume II. This includes the Government Department at Cornell, which has not merely tolerated my irregular activities but has encouraged and rewarded them. Once again, I should like to express my especial gratitude to Frederick Ahl, Gregory Blue, Saul Levin and David Owen, to whose number I should like to add Eric Cline, Susan Hollis, Edward Meltzer, Gary Rendsburg, Anthony Snodgrass and James Weinstein, all of whom have provided me with much important information and have shown enormous patience in answering my importunate questions.

Another group of women and men, who have encouraged me enormously and have aided the project as whole over the past three years, to whom I should like to express my deep gratitude, are Anouar Abdel Malik, Meg Alexiou, Tariq Ali, Ahmed Ben Bella, Geoffrey Chester, Eleni Cubitt, Basil Davidson, Margaret Drabble, Grégoire Dunant, Skip Gates, Angela Gilliam, Richard Gott, Shomarka Keita, Molly Myerewitz Levine, Listervelt Middleton, Jonathan Miller, John Najemi, Gil Noble, John Peradotto, Jamil Ragep, John Ray, Nancy Ramage, Edward Said, Robert Stieglitz, Michael Vickers, Raymond Westbrook and Jack Winkler.

I should also like to thank a number of other people who have been especially helpful in the writing of this volume. These include Michael Baillie, George Bass, Patricia Bikai, John Coleman, D. O. Edzard, Lucy Goodison, Peter Huber, Bernard Knapp, Peter Kuniholm, A. Lambropoulou, Connie Lambrou-Phillipson, Ernest McClain, Sarah Morris, Scott Noegel, Kevin Pang, Andrew Ramage, Barry Strauss, Cornelius Vermeule, Emily Vermeule and Anita Yannai.

I want to thank Bob Young, Ann Scott and all those who were working at Free Association Books during the winter of 1986/1987 for their extraordinary efforts and the splendid and attractive volume they produced. This time, I should like to thank the women and men working there now. I am especially grateful to my editor Selina O’Grady for the tireless work she has put into rescuing my disorganized text as well as to Dr. Leofranc Holford-Strevens and Adaya Henis, the proofreader, and Jane Dieckmann, the indexer, all of whom have saved me from some of what remain a multitude of errors. Naturally, I want to take full responsibility for the many mistakes of fact and interpretation that remain.

As well as thanking my publishers in England, I should also like to express my gratitude to those in America, particularly Leslie Mitchner, Marilyn Campbell and Ken Arnold, who have consistently given me encouragement, support and good advice. I am also very grateful to Jenny Jardine for the splendid maps she has drawn on the basis of my very rough sketches and even vaguer directions.

As before, 1 cannot imagine having completed this volume without the love and support of my family, my wife Leslie and my children Sophie, William, Paul, Adam and Patrick, my son in-law Mark and my mother Margaret. They have kept and will always keep me in touch with a reality, without which all scholarly achievement is meaningless.

Transcription and Phonetics

Egyptian

used to represent the ‘vulture or double ›aleph’, which is often printed as two commas on top of each other.

is the first sign of the alphabetical order used by Egyptologists, and I shall continue with other letters with obscure or difficult sound values.

corresponds to both the Semitic ›aleph and yōd. ›Aleph is found in many languages, and nearly all Afroasiatic ones. It is a glottal stop before vowels, as in the Cockney ‘bo›le’ or ‘bu›e’ (‘bottle’ and ‘butter’).

The Egyptian ‹ayin, which also occurs in most Semitic languages, is a voiced or spoken ›aleph. The Egyptian form seems to have been associated with the ‘back’ vowels o and u.

In early Egyptian the sign w, written as a quail chick, may have had purely consonantal value. In Late Egyptian, the form of the language which had the most impact on Greek, it seems to have been frequently pronounced as a vowel, either o or u.

The Egyptian sign written as r was more usually transcribed as l in Semitic and Greek. In later Egyptian it seems, as with the з, to have weakened into becoming merely a modifier of vowels.

The Egyptian and Semitic letters Romanized as ḥ appear to have been pronounced as an emphatic h.

The Egyptian and Semitic | represents a sound similar to the ch in ‘loch’. In later times it became thoroughly confused with the letter š.

The Egyptian letter ẖ appears to have represented the sound |y. It too became confused with š.

The letter written here as s was transcribed as either s or z.

š was pronounced as sh or skh. In later times it became very confused with | and ẖ.

ḳ represents an emphatic k. Inconsistently, I have followed the common practice of Semitists and have employed q to represent the same sound in Semitic.

The letter t was probably originally pronounced as ty. However, even in Middle Egyptian it was being confused with t.

Similarly, the ḏ was frequently alternated with d.

Egyptian names

Egyptian divine names are vocalized according to the commonest Greek transcription—for example, Amon for ›lmn.

Royal names generally follow Gardiner’s (1961) version of the Greek names for well-known pharaohs, for instance, Ramessēs.

Coptic

Most of the letters in the Coptic alphabet come from Greek and the same transcriptions are used. Six extra letters derived from Demotic are transcribed as follows:

Semitic

The Semitic consonants are transcribed relatively conventionally. Several of the complications have been mentioned above in connection with Egyptian. Apart from these, one encounters the following:

In Canaanite the sound | merged with ḥ. Transcriptions here sometimes reflect the etymological | rather than the later ḥ. ṭ is an emphatic t.

The Arabic sound usually transcribed as th is written here as ty. The same is true of the dh/d y.

The letter found in Ugaritic which corresponds to the Arabic ghain is transcribed ǵ.

The Semitic emphatic k is written q, rather than ḳ as in Egyptian. The Semitic letter tsade, almost certainly pronounced ts, is written ṣ. In Hebrew from the 1st millennium BC the letter shin is written as š. Elsewhere, however, it is transcribed simply as s, not as š, because I question the antiquity and the range of the latter pronunciation (Bernal, 1988). This, however, causes confusion with Samekh, which is also transcribed as s. Sin is transcribed as ś.

Neither dagesh nor begadkephat is indicated in the transcription. This is for reasons of simplicity as well as doubts about their range and occurrence in Antiquity.

Vocalization

The Masoretic vocalization of the Bible, completed in the 9th and 10th centuries AD but reflecting much older pronunciation, is transcribed as follows:

The reduced vowels are rendered:

Accentuation and cantillation are not normally marked.

Greek

The transcription of the consonants is orthodox.

ν is transcribed as y.

The long vowels η and ω are written as ē and ō, and where it is significant the long α is rendered ā.

Accentuation is not normally marked.

Greek names

It is impossible to be consistent in transliterating these, because certain names are so well known that they have to be given in their Latin forms—Thucydides or Plato—as opposed to the Greek Thoukydidēs or Platōn. On the other hand, it would be absurd to make Latin forms for little-known people or places. Thus the commoner names are given in their Latin forms and the rest simply transliterated from Greek. I have tried wherever possible to follow Peter Levi’s translation of Pausanias, where the balance is to my taste well struck. This, however, means that many long vowels are not marked in the transcription of names.

Maps and Charts

Chronological Tables

Black Athena

Introduction

Volume I of this series was concerned with two views of the origins of Ancient Greece. In the first of these, which I called the Ancient Model, it was maintained that Greece had originally been inhabited by Pelasgian and other primitive tribes. These had been civilized by Egyptian and Phoenician settlers who had ruled many parts of the country during the ‘heroic age’. According to the second view, the Aryan Model, Greek civilization was the result of cultural mixture following a conquest from the north by Indo-European—speaking Greeks of the earlier ‘Pre-Hellenic’ peoples. In Volume I I tried to trace the processes by which the Ancient Model current in 5th-century Greece survived until the end of the 18th century and was overthrown in the early 19th century to be replaced by the Aryan Model in the 1840s.

The introduction to Volume I contained an outline of the project as a whole. In this I announced my belief that the Aryan Model should be superseded by what I call the Revised Ancient Model. This model accepts, on the one hand, that Egyptians and Phoenicians settled in and had a massive influence on Ancient Greece. On the other hand, it takes into account the undoubted fact that Greek is fundamentally an Indo-European language. It also makes various chronological adjustments suggested by recent archaeology. At the end of Volume I, I wrote that the

conception in sin, or even error [of the Aryan Model] does not necessarily invalidate it. Darwinism, which was created at very much the same time and for many of the same ‘disreputable’ motives, has remained a very useful heuristic scheme. One could perfectly well argue that Niebuhr, Müller, Curtius and the others were ‘sleepwalking’ in the sense in which Arthur Koestler used the term—to describe useful ‘scientific’ discoveries made for extraneous reasons and purposes which are not accepted in later times. All that I claim for this volume is that it has provided a case to be answered. That is, if the dubious origin of the Aryan Model does not make it false, it does call into question its inherent superiority over the Ancient Model.¹

In the many reviews of the first volume, there has been some scepticism about the utility or ‘truth’ of the Revised Ancient Model I propose. On the other hand, there has been a general acceptance of my historiographical scheme and of my contention that most of the men who established the Aryan Model were—to put it bluntly—racists and anti-Semites. There has also been a recognition that these attitudes could have affected their writing of history. I take this reception as a licence to continue my project.

The form of the continuation of the project has changed fundamentally. Many critics of the first volume wrote or hinted that I would have great difficulty in producing convincing work in the way I had set it out in the introduction. They were quite right. In the event, I have had to alter my project in three important respects. In the first place, where I had originally planned to cover the evidence from archaeology and Bronze Age documents in two chapters, I have now found it necessary to devote a whole volume to these two sources of information.

Secondly, my intention to keep the different kinds of evidence neatly apart has broken down completely as I have found it impossible to indicate the significance of one type without reference to others. For instance, I claim that the establishment of palaces in Crete in the 21st century BC was heavily influenced by the contemporary restoration of central power in Egypt at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom. I believe that this argument can be made convincingly only if one links it to the contemporary introduction of a bull cult to Crete and the latter’s Egyptian precedents and parallels. Similarly, in examining the significance of the Mit Rahina inscription, I have felt obliged to look quite extensively at Classical and Hellenistic sources and at the archaeological evidence. Thus, I abandoned the attempt to apply disciplinary rigour to the material in favour of ‘thick description’ involving many different types of information simultaneously.

This leads to the third and most important change to my original plan. I have given up the mask of impartiality between the two models. Given my commitment to the Revised Ancient Model, I had always known that this would be difficult. In the event, I have found it impossible. Now, instead of judging their competitive heuristic utility in a ‘neutral’ way, I shall try to show how much more completely and convincingly the Revised Ancient Model can describe and explain the development and nature of Ancient Greek civilization than can the Aryan Model.

Intrinsic Reasons for Preferring the Revised Ancient Model to the Aryan One

In a fascinating, though to my mind fundamentally misleading, article, published in 1972, the classicist R. A. McNeal argued that the ‘prehistoric’ Aegean could be approached in four ways: ‘(1) archaeological artifacts, (2) language, (3) skeletal material, if he wants to use it, and (4) Greek myth and legend.’² Apart from minor objections such as the fact that archaeologists today are extremely interested in buildings, settlement patterns and traces of agricultural and industrial activity, which are not restricted to artifacts, and that the fact that the extraordinarily ambiguous skeletal evidence can easily be subsumed under archaeology, the chief problem with this scheme is its omission of contemporary documents. The Aegean Bronze Age was not as ‘prehistoric’ as McNeal supposes. There are many references to the Aegean in Egyptian, Levantine and Mesopotamian texts and what is more, there are the tablets written in the Aegean syllabaries Linears A and B. Therefore, I think documentary information is of primary importance. It was for this reason that I had originally intended to begin this volume with a chapter on ‘Contemporary Documents’. However, because archaeology can reach back to the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age, from which there is virtually no documentary evidence on the Aegean, I have altered the scheme so that in this volume the documentary evidence on contacts between the Near East and the Aegean comes only in the tenth chapter.

McNeal argues forcefully against any attempts to synthesize evidence from his four categories of archaeology, language, physical anthropology and legend, claiming sensibly that one can never be certain of correlations between them and, less convincingly, that scholars should not poach in their neighbours’ fields because they cannot hope to understand the others’ professional mysteries. My objections to the last argument should be evident to readers of the first volume.

Furthermore, I cannot accept his requirement of certainty. I have based my case in this whole project on the principle of competitive plausibility rather than certainty, simply because the latter is impossible to achieve in these areas. Thus, I believe that the most one can do is to achieve plausibility and this is best done by combining evidence from all sources, even while aware of the dangers involved. In this volume, therefore, although I attempt to distinguish the different approaches, I am not distressed when I fail to keep them apart.

Before examining the value of the Revised Ancient Model in the light of the different sources of evidence, I should like to consider its relative inherent plausibility in the face of the Aryan Model. The Ancient Model has the advantage of having existed nearer the period concerned. It could be argued that there is a gap of twelve hundred years between the 5th century, when the Ancient Model is first attested, and the 18th century BC, when I believe there to have been Near Eastern settlements in Greece, which is more than the time that separates us from Charlemagne, and also that this temporal divide between Mycenaean and Classical Greece is not qualitatively shorter than the thirty-five hundred years between us and the hypothetical settlements by Phoenicians and Egyptians.

There are several good reasons for denying this contention. Firstly, as Ruth Edwards has shown in her book Kadmos the Phoenician: A Study in Greek Legends and the Mycenaean Age, there is a mass of literary and artistic circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Ancient Model existed in Archaic (776–500 BC) and even Geometric times (950–776 BC). This shortens the historical gap by some centuries.³ Furthermore, evidence from Linear B tablets, reinforced by an increasing amount of information from archaeology, has confirmed that, in religion at least, there was considerable continuity from Mycenaean to Classical Greece.⁴

I have argued elsewhere that the West Semitic alphabet was introduced into the Aegean before 1400 BC and, in any event, recent epigraphical discoveries and interpretations make it extremely unlikely that the Greek alphabet was borrowed or adapted after the 11th century.⁵ Even if the introduction were as late as the 9th century, the survival of the Cypriot syllabary—until recently—without attestation for more than five centuries, and apparently that of Linear A in Eastern Crete for over a thousand years, makes it extremely unlikely that all knowledge of Linear B disappeared immediately with the collapse of Mycenaean palatial society in the 12th century.⁶ Thus, there is every reason to suppose that some documents survived from the Late Bronze into the Early Iron Age. On the other hand, while there is no doubt that there was considerable cultural regression between the 12th and the 8th centuries and that during this period much factual information was lost and much myth, legend and folktale accreted, nevertheless, it is certain that the Linear scripts and the alphabet overlapped in time, probably for several centuries. It is now impossible to maintain that the Greek Bronze and Iron Ages were separated from each other by impermeable centuries of illiteracy.

For instance, the second book of the Iliad contains an extensive descriptive list of Mycenaean cities, many of which appear to have disappeared by the time Homer wrote in the 9th century. Thus, it would seem very likely to have been based on Bronze Age written material. Furthermore, as well as possessing written and oral traditions, Classical and Hellenistic writers were able to visit some well-preserved Mycenaean ruins and we know that some sort of archaeology was carried out.⁷

On the other side of the Mediterranean, substantial records from the Bronze Age were available in the Classical period to Egyptian priests as well as to Phoenicians and Mesopotamians. In Hellenistic times some of these ancient texts were translated into Greek or summarized by priests and scholars like the Egyptian Manetho, the Phoenician Philo of Byblos and Berossos from Mesopotamia.⁸ These and other sources were available to Greek writers, Hekataios of Abdera, Menander of Ephesos and others. Well before this, in the 6th century, Pherekydes of Syros is supposed to have based his work on Egyptian and Chaldaean works.⁹

By contrast, Herodotos, Diodoros Sikeliotes and other ancient writers had garbled views of Egyptian history that were, in many respects, inferior to those of modern Egyptologists with their access to original sources.¹⁰ However, the discovery of the Mit Rahina inscription—describing previously unknown extensive expeditions and voyages to Syria and beyond in the 12th Dynasty—shows us that we should not let the undoubted triumphs of Egyptology lead us to overestimate the completeness of modern knowledge. In this case, it is striking to note that Herodotos, as well as other Greek writers, seem to have referred to these activities in their descriptions of the conquests of Sesostris (see chapters 5 and 6 below). Thus, it is quite possible that Greeks knew things about Egypt’s relations with the Aegean that are unknown to modern scholars.

On a more general level, it is important to note that Egyptologists rely on the Egyptian tradition transmitted by Manetho for many points and still use the traditional dynastic framework as he transmitted it. They also refer frequently to Herodotos, Plutarch and Diodoros whose direct contact gave them a ‘feel’ for ancient Egypt that can never be equalled by modern scholars.

The relative superiority of modern Egyptologists over the Classical and Hellenistic Greeks is not paralleled with the Levant. The tablets from Ugarit have provided a fascinating and detailed picture of a major Syrian port for over a century in the Late Bronze Age as well as important, if scrappy, evidence on West Semitic religion and myth. The cuneiform letters found at Amarna give us an idea of the political situation in coastal Syria and Palestine for some decades in the 14th century. However, in the Southern Levant the predominant writing material was papyrus and the Phoenician cities were particularly lavish in their use of it. As the Jewish politician and historian Josephus put it in the 1st century AD,

Of the care bestowed by the Egyptians and Babylonians on their chronicles from the remotest ages … among the nations in touch with the Greeks, it was the Phoenicians who made the largest use of writing both for the ordinary affairs of life and for the commemoration of public events; of this I think I need say nothing, as the facts are universally admitted.¹¹

Furthermore, despite the many destructions of Phoenician cities in the 1st millennium, some documents appear to have survived right up to Hellenistic and even Roman times. As Josephus wrote,

For many years past the people of Tyre have kept public records, compiled and very carefully preserved by the state, of the memorable events in their internal history and in their relations with foreign nations.… Many of the letters which they [Hiram and Solomon in the 10th century] exchanged are preserved to this day.¹²

None of these documents survived into modern times and the only substantial piece of Canaanite literature we possess today is the Old Testament. This has extraordinary historical value but it is largely concerned with Israel, an inland state with very little contact with the Mediterranean, let alone the Aegean. With so very few texts and an extremely ambiguous and scrappy archaeological record, modern scholars’ knowledge of the Levantine coast in the Late Bronze Age is minute in comparison to that of Classical and Hellenistic times.

In the Aegean itself, Linear B tablets have provided invaluable linguistic evidence and given important information on the Late Mycenaean palatial economy. They have also dropped some tantalizing hints on the religion of Late Bronze Age Greece. They do not contain, however, any mythological or historical texts.

During the past century there has been more systematic digging in Greece than ever before and much significant evidence has been unearthed. Consecutive ceramic stratigraphies have been established for the Middle and Late Bronze Age. However, the absolute dating has been uncertain and for one of the periods with which we are most concerned, the border between the Middle and Late Bronze Age, has until recently been particularly obscure, and the synchronisms or dating parallels with the Middle East have been fiercely debated.¹³ There has also been a tendency to distrust carbon 14 and the other independent methods of dating where they do not fit preconceived chronologies; see, for example, the following statement made by the distinguished archaeologist Paul Åström:

I should like to emphasize that carbon 14 dates are useless for exact dating of the Aegean Bronze Age. This may be demonstrated by an example. The average corrected carbon 14 dates for a short-lived group of seven samples from the time of the destruction of Thera or a little earlier in 1688 ± 57 BC. The results are obviously quite ridiculous, as there is a general agreement on other grounds that the eruption occurred some time in the first half of the fifteenth century.¹⁴

In this case, so many other independent measures have confirmed the high dates that Åström considered ‘ridiculous’ and I shall show in chapter 7—many scholars are now beating a retreat.¹⁵ The point I am trying to make here is that the orthodoxy of the Aryan Model was established long before the new scientific techniques had been applied to Aegean archaeology and the reaction to their results has generally been to squeeze them into the model rather than to adjust or discard it. This aspect of the competition between the two models must thus be judged not on all the information available to their adherents after they were established but on the state of knowledge in the periods in which they were formed. In the case of the Aryan Model, this was the middle of the 19th century. For instance, at that time there was no archaeological knowledge of chronology whatsoever. This was not established until the 1880s when Flinders Petrie was able to date Minoan and Mycenaean pottery found in Egypt.¹⁶

Today, even if the pottery is beginning to be dated accurately and it is possible to discover where it was made, it will never be able to tell us the languages spoken by its makers and users, nor can it prove or rule out any invasion or population movement, unless this involved a complete cultural break, and these are fortunately very rare. Thus archaeology, on its own, cannot answer the questions in which we are interested: the type, extent and duration of Egyptian and Phoenician influences on the Aegean during the Bronze Age.

Much of the assessment of the Classical and Hellenistic Greeks’ knowledge of the Bronze Age depends on the extent of the cultural break after the 13th century BC. In Egypt, as the Egyptian priests were alleged to have told Solon in the first half of the 6th century, there was none.¹⁷ It is clear that, although there was some political instability and economic decline in Egypt for the next few centuries, there was virtually no disruption of cultural continuity or knowledge of the past. The invasions of the Near East by the Sea Peoples in the 13th and 12th centuries—described in the Appendix to Volume I—did cause a break on the Levantine coast, which appears to have led to the replacement of the predominantly monarchical, though thoroughly commercial, cities of the Bronze Age by cities of a new type, dominated by a temple not a palace, and the inauguration of what we may usefully call ‘Slave Society’.¹⁸ Despite these fundamental social changes, however, the cities revived decades not centuries after their destructions with strong continuities in their material culture. We even know from the 11th-century Egyptian traveller Wen Amon that, at least in the key city of Byblos, official records had been kept for over a century.¹⁹

In Anatolia, the disturbances destroyed the Hittite Empire forever but, as the Hittite specialist James Macqueen has written, ‘We cannot now postulate four hundred years of chaos and an almost complete return to nomadic life.’²⁰ Many of the Empire’s traditions survived well into the Iron Age. Greece was no exception, as I have argued above; the break was not as drastic as it has commonly been portrayed. All in all, while the break was catastrophic locally, in the East Mediterranean as a whole, the so-called Dark Ages did not make a clean break from the past.

‘Dark Ages’ have, in fact, been given a bad name by the quite exceptional cultural collapse between the 5th and 8th centuries AD. Although Byzantium survived this crisis, it had to be radically reformed to do so. Islam, while it too preserved some Egypto-Greek-Babylonian institutions, science and philosophy, did create a completely new beginning. In Western Europe, the Frankish Empire was nothing like the Roman one it claimed to succeed. All in all, the Bronze Age civilizations of the Middle East had been weakened by the Hellenistic and Roman conquests but they survived until the Gothic and Arab invasions and the triumphs of Christianity and Islam.²¹

The destruction of civilization accompanying the rise of monotheism included the loss of the great written languages of the early civilization: Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian. Hence the drastic cultural break between 500 AD and 800 AD makes the disturbances of the 12th century BC look trivial. Consequently, while the proponents of the Ancient Model lived when the traditions of the Bronze Age had faded, they were still in the ancient world. By contrast, the champions of the Aryan Model have lived many centuries after a true coupure.

In general, then, it is clear that, as well as having a ‘feel’ for the topic from their common culture, the writers working in the Ancient Model had more information about the Bronze Age than do supporters of the Aryan one. However, proponents of the Aryan Model base their claim to superiority less on the amount of information available to them than on the contention that they, unlike the ‘credulous’ Classical and Hellenistic writers, have a ‘critical approach’ and a scientific viewpoint which more than compensate for any lack of information.

The term Altertumswissenschaft, used in German for the new study, has a less restrictive sense than its English translation ‘science of antiquity’. Nevertheless, the sense of being ‘scientific’, even in the broad meaning of the word, indicates the feelings of excitement and confidence in the early 19th century which enabled scholars to disregard all their ‘baroque’ predecessors. To be precise, this claim to be ‘scientific’ was first made in the 1790s under the influence of Kantian terminology and before the technological breakthroughs of steam and electricity in the 1810s and 1820s. Nevertheless, just as railways, steamships and telegraphs surpassed all previous means of transport and communication, the philologists and ancient historians of the 19th century were convinced that their scientific and ‘critical’ historical approach or ‘method’ put them on a categorically higher plane than all their predecessors.

For the new scholars, the Ancient Model was a delusion. Just as ‘scientific’ historians had to discount all Greek references to centaurs, sirens and other mythical creatures that offended against the laws of natural history, the Ancients’ view of Greece as having been