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(music)

(male narrator)Four years ago, a book was published

that laid bare the very rootsof Western civilization.

It argued that the cradle of Europe,Ancient Greece,

had origins in Africa and the East,

and that the West should recognize what itowes to Black and Eastern cultures.

This spring a second volumeis being published.

The book is Black Athena.

(music: instrumental with vocals but no words)

(overlapping voices of tour guides

in various languages)

... tragedies and comedies of thefifth century were presented to the ...

... des Gaules, les hommes et les femmes ...

... whereas the Ionic columns that theyerected are more elegant with the scrolls ...

... the best place for photographers,and the best view of the city,

is where the flag is.Do you see the flag? ...

Let's say we came here because I was

interested in looking at this wonderful,let's say, Acropolis.

I think it's part of everybody'shistory in some way.

Well, it's the basis of all democracy,isn't it? It started here.

It all comes back to roots,and that's where it is.

And I think it's much larger thanI expected it to be.

But this is the root of civilization.

(narrator)



The Parthenon, symbol of Classical Greece,

is being rebuilt. As the architectsand masons repair the broken stones,

their aim is to preserve the imagethat we have of it now:

bleached white and standing alone,

not brightly painted and enclosed byother buildings as it was originally.

But are we interested in having an accuratepicture of this ancient civilization,

or have we reconstructed its pastto fit our present?

(music)

I hope to give you some idea why the great

age of Athens is considered to be one of

the most brilliant moments in human history,

and why Athens has been described as

the most civilized societythat has ever existed.

You will see how the Greeks, and above all

the Athenians, not only ...(voice fades out, replaced by music)

You will see, in short, how the civilization

of Athens 24 centuries ago

laid the foundations on whichWestern civilization is built today.

Good evening and welcome to For the People.

Mention the civilization of Ancient Greece

and most of us automatically think of

science, philosophy and mathematics.

But is this image of Greecetrue to her real history?

And more importantly, how is the imageof the Ancient Greeks

as the creators of science and philosophy



being used to bolster and perpetuate racism?

We'll explore these and many other questions

with Dr. Martin Gardiner Bernal,author of Black Athena.

(narrator)In 1987, with the publication of

Black Athena, Professor Martin Bernal

challenged the academic establishment.

(TV host)OK, let's take a call from South Carolina.

For the People, you're on the air.

(female caller)Good afternoon. My question is the following.

(narrator)Bernal claims that during the last 200 years,

scholars rewrote the history books,

denying that Ancient Greece had rootsin Africa and Asia.

The myth they created of a pure white,

unsullied dawn of Western Civilization

was a result of both anti-Semitism and racism,

and he argues it still influences the

perception the West has of itself today.

I think that if people take Black Athena

seriously, uh, then they do have to look at

European early history in a different way.

Because always implicit, and sometimes

explicit in our view of history, is that

democracy and science and philosophy are

exclusively European possessions, and that

although people from other continentscan learn them,

through Europe and European culture,

they are essentially at home only in Europe.



(quiet talking)

(narrator)For Martin Bernal, attempting to knock

Greece from the white pedestalof Western civilization

is a huge undertaking. He started volume one

of Black Athena 12 years ago, and has had

to face the big guns of the academic profession.

(male voice)Bernal has fallen into exactly the same trap

as many of the 19th-century writers did.

What happened in the fifth century happenedin Greece, and in Greece only.

(female voice)He can't prove it either way. How can we tell?

(male voice)He's attacking a target

that we no longer need to worry about.

(different male voice)He doesn't know the evidence, and

therefore he supposes that there isn'ta great deal of evidence there.

(different male voice)

And I for one do not think

that he has provided anywhere near theamount of evidence needed to prove his case.

I don't know to what extent scholars today

are still motivated by these, you know,

objectionable attitudes of anti-Semitism,

racism, whatever it might be.I should think very few are.

That they have been in the past, to some

degree, no doubt, but on the whole these

are not the scholars who've been influential

in our understanding of the way things

actually work. I don't think it's played



a part at all, frankly.

Of course there are many Classicists who

object to what I'm saying,and some quite emotionally.

A friend of mine tried to persuade

a friend of his to buy a copy of the book

in Heffers, the main bookshop here,

and as he was talking about the book,

the shop assistant said, "Would you mind

speaking up? I hear so many people

muttering as they look at that book."

So clearly there is opposition.On the other hand,

there's been very little hostilecriticism in print.

(narrator)In 1989, the leading American Classicists'

organization held a Presidential panel

at their annual conferenceto debate Black Athena.

Articles followed from leading academics.

Much to Bernal's surprise, they gave

a serious and enthusiastic responseto his project.

The idea to hold a forum was put forwardby Molly Levine.

Bernal's prediction for this book was that

it would be ignored bythe Classics establishment,

and as a Classicist, I couldn't bear tobelieve that we were like that.

If somebody had a good idea, or even a bad

idea, I figured we were capable of discussing it.

And partly it was to test my own profession.

I wanted to see what we were really like,



and if we were as bad as Bernalmade us out to be.

(narrator)Bernal teaches here at Cornell Universityin New York State.

He's not a Classics professor, butteaches Near Eastern studies,

and has taught Chinese politics.

For Black Athena, he has studied archeology,

Egyptology, modern history and linguistics,

as well as Classics. He's supportedby his own department.

But how have other colleagues at Cornellreacted to his work?

I part company with Martin Bernal on the

issue of white racism is bad, black racism

is tolerable, because after all, blacks

have suffered so much from white racism,

and historically, whites have not suffered

any proportion of the way blacks have.

Racism in any form is counterproductive,um, it's also disgusting.

And, uh, I think that it's all --

I say counterproductive because it's

counterproductive forthe black students themselves,

as what they should be getting is

an accurate and clear picture of the past.

They should correct the distortions

in history,

but without creating a whole newdistorted model,

because in the end, if their own picture

of their own past is built on distortions

and lies, it does them no good.



It will crumble apart at the first opposition.

(male voice)So I'm sayin' we've got to begin to deal

with the reality, and we can't expect the

Bernals to do it. They've done their job,

by taking us to a certain level.We have to go beyond it.

(different voice)I mean, the search for roots and origins

is essentially an affirmation of identity.

Ethnic identity, religious identity,

historical identity, national identity ...

And that is almost always a construction.

There is no such thing as a pure Greek,

or a pure Egyptian, or a pure anything.

Everything is hopelessly mixed up together,

and I don't see why they couldn't remainmixed up together.

It seems to me that's thereality of the world of the '90s.

(music)

(female voice)Should we be actually concerned about who

the Greeks were by blood, or should we be

asking about how they constructed their

own past? I actually think to even ask

the question, "Who were the Greeks really?

Were they black? Were they Jewish?",

is to fall into a racist trap. What we've

got to do is abandon them altogether,

these myths of ethnicity,myths of ethnic origin,

and we have to abandon both the mythof the Aryan origin



and the myth which he's trying toreplace the Aryan model with,

of the Egyptian Semitic origins

of the Greeks, and ask whytheir ideology works how it does,

what are these myths actually saying?

(narrator)Whether or not his work is welcometo all Classicists,

Bernal intends to continue with his project.

The second volume of Black Athenais due out in the spring,

and there are two more to follow.

He firmly believesthe Aryan model will crumble,

but he has many academics yet to be

convinced with his evidence.

(male voice)Lots of very interesting new ideas and

approaches in Classical Studiesabout the place now.

Some are motivated partly politically,

partly by other current interests

in racism, feminism, whatever it might be.

They all make their contribution.

They're all -- most of them, at any rate --

a good deal less hot-headed than they might

have been a generation or so ago. And, um,

they all help, but if we say to ourselves,

"Yes, of course we realize that each

generation takes its own view of the past,

or each faction in each generation will

take its own view," the honest scholar

ought to be able to make some sort of



allowance for that, and one hopes that

the common view which emerges will take

allowance for that, and one can recognize,

as one does, that is a feminist work,

that is an anti-racist work, this is

a structuralist work, this is a Marxist work,

and so forth, and make due allowance,

and that the single-minded who write these

sort of things are making their points,

no doubt, but they're not making such a

major contribution to our properunderstanding as they may imagine.

Well, I think that the accusation has often

been leveled at me, and I'm sure it's beenthought by many other people,

that if I accuse other scholars ofbeing influenced by their times,

and by their social backgrounds,

I myself must be equallyinfluenced by them.

And I think that there's some truthin this accusation,

but my defense against it would be

that my version is closer to thetraditional notion,

held for the last 1800 years-- or more, the last 2000 years --

and I think that the Aryan model is moreof an aberration than mine.

(music)

(audio cuts in suddenly)(narrator)

-- only for having preserved partof this lost wisdom.

During the Enlightenment, the Freemasons,



who included the aristocracy, artists and

philosophers, used Egyptian rituals andsigns in their ceremonies.

The one dollar bill still retains the

Masonic symbol of the eye in the pyramid.

In 1798, Napoleon commanded a huge

scientific and cultural assessment of Egypt,

and tried to claim its past for France.

But with the start of Egyptology, and the

deciphering of the hieroglyphs in 1820,

the ancient civilization of Egyptfell from grace.

The decipherment of hieroglyphs was like

discovering a new planet, and finding that

the planet didn't behave like planetsthat you were used to.

So suddenly we could read hieroglyphs,

and what we expected to find was somethinglike Greek philosophy,

or we expected to findthe secrets of the universe,

laid out in very plain language.It didn't happen like that.

The preoccupations of the Egyptians are notthe ones that we would like them to have.

So there was a reaction, very strongly,particularly in the English-speaking world.

The Egyptians were not intellectuals.They were not philosophers.

A well-known novelist has described themas "merely craftsmen, not artists."

That idea dies rather hard, because evenwhen we could read the hieroglyphs,

we didn't understand the preoccupationsbehind them.

We're beginning to, but it's taken a long time.



So there was a strong reaction,particularly in England,

that the Egyptians were mystic,but basically a bit thick.

So it rapidly becomes the worldof the chattering mummy,

uh, the strange, unexplained phenomenon,

the weird script, everything that leads to

the Hollywood idea of theEgyptology mummy film.

(dog barking)

(narrator)Now that the influence of Egypthad been eclipsed,

Western scholars started to reassess

the other half of the ancient model,the Phoenicians.

As Europeans obsessively sought to define

that which was uniqueand superior about themselves,

there was, during the latter part ofthe 19th century,

a rising tide of anti-Semitism.

Increasingly, Bernal argues, the Phoenicians

were seen as the Jews of the ancient world.

They too, therefore, could not have been

a part of Europe's glorious ancestor, Greece.

Classics as the basis of a gentleman's

education is centuries old, but there is

something new, that starts in the later

18th century and continues into the 19th,

and that is a kind of worship of Greece.

This starts back in about the middle ofthe 18th century,

when the Earth begins to move.



You get the biggest shift in tastes andattitudes since the Renaissance.

The feeling is a reaction against all thefuss and frippery of the Baroque;

the notion is "back to simplicity, backto the Fountainhead."

And in terms of the Classical world,

that means a reaction against the Romans,

who are now seen as imitatorsand tiresome elaborators,

and back to the pure simplicity of Greece.

And this worship of Greecepasses into the 19th century.

(music)

(narrator)The Romantic movement which soon

dominated European thought was infatuated

with this new ascetic vision of Greece.

It enshrined their beliefsin simplicity over sophistication,

and feeling over reason. The Romantics

cherished the notion of childhood, as free

from the corruptions of later life.

Now they saw Greece asthe pure childhood of Europe.

The idea of Romanticism became very closely

linked to the idea ofgeographical determinism.

That is, that people are formed by

the landscape and climate they live in.

They get their feelings and their emotionalsense of community from that.

And it's also very linked to the notionthat cold is good for you,

that the further north you come from,



or the further up the mountainyou come from,

the more virtuous you are.

Now Greece, ancient Greece, fitted this

aspect of the Romantic model very well,

but it was distressingly far south and

with a distressingly equable climate,

and therefore I think from the end of the

18th century you have the desire toassociate Greece,

which was now the admired culture,

with the north, rather than withthe Mediterranean,

so it pushes people in that direction,

to look for northern roots to explainthe admired qualities of Greece.

(explosion)

(narrator)By the 20th century, the modern nation-state

could call on the Greek idealto spur its troops into war.

During World War I, the British adopted

Athens, representing democracy, as their

mascot ancient Greek city, while the Germans

identified themselves with Sparta.

They had picked the opposing sides of the

Peloponnesian War, a war foughtover 2300 years earlier.

(music)

(narrator)In the 1930s, the Nazis claimed

the ancient Greeks for themselves.

Racially cleansed of impure Semitic or

African ancestry, Greek civilization was



harnessed to confirm the superiority

and destiny of the Aryan race.

(music)

(music)

(tour guides speaking various languages)

(female voice)In my readings I came across

Martin Bernal's name, and Black Athena,

and I found it very, um, intriguing,

very challenging, and controversial because

he's challenging the myth or the old belief

that the Greeks are the fathersof Western civilization.

And tangible evidence says no, they're notthe fathers of Western civilization.

The Western civilization theory is not true,

and that's disappointing in the sense that

you lose your trust, so you don't trust

any more. You explore, you research,

you learn to come to your own conclusions.

Um, living in America we're brought up in

a European way, and it's time we learned

our own history, to let us know that we do

have one, and it's something to be very

proud of. And coming here,I'm very proud to be an African.

(voices)

(ominous music)

(narrator)In the tomb of Rekhmire,

dating from 1450 BC, wall paintings

represent people of the Aegeanoffering tributes to the Pharaoh.



In Black Athena, Martin Bernal uses this,

together with a wide range of other

archeological, linguistic, and documentary

evidence, to argue his case for substantial

contact between Egypt and the Aegeanin the Bronze Age.

He also relies on the traditions of theClassical Greeks themselves.

(male voice)How it happened that the Egyptians came to

the Peloponnese, and what they did to make

themselves kings in that part of Greece,

has been chronicled by other writers.

I will add nothing, therefore, but proceed

to mention some points which no oneelse has touched upon.

The names of nearly all the gods cameto Greece from Egypt.

(narrator)The Greek historian Herodotus,

often quoted as the Father of History,

wrote those lines a thousand years later,

during the Classical period.

Bernal lays considerable emphasis on this

ancient historical source. But Herodotus

is also known as the Father of Lies.

Now the difficulty with Herodotus is that

other stories he gives are clearly fictional.

That, if he talks about the Pharaoh

prostituting his daughter to raise money

to build a pyramid, or he talks about

a magic ring that makes people invisible,

you can't take those seriously. On the

other hand, Herodotus usually gives his



sources, who told him this, and when he has

contradictory versions he gives both of

those contradictory versions rather than

just giving his own synthesis. And I think

he was serious in this, and he should not be

neglected, because -- everything he wrote

should not be discounted because he wrote

some things that don't fitour laws of natural science.

(narrator)There are in fact few surviving texts

from the Bronze Age, so Bernal makes use

of ancient myths. He maintains, while

serving many different functions, myths can

and often do contain historical elements.

But can myths be used in this way?

(female voice)People used to think that the myths of

the Olympian gods, the fair, comely

Olympian gods overwhelming the Titans

and the giants, was actually a historical

recollection of homo sapiens taking overfrom Neanderthal Man.

Now this is laughable to us now.

In the same way, people used to think

that the myths of the cycles of gold

and bronze and iron and tin represented

an actual folk memory of historical

technological developments. Now what

Martin Bernal does is to use this historical

approach to myth which reallyfirmly belongs in the 19th century.



(Bernal's voice)Now for Greek scholars there was no doubt,

and for Greek writers as a whole, that the

Egyptian goddess known to them as Neith,

was the same as the Greek goddess Athena,and Neith was the goddess ...

a chief shrine in lower Egypt, in

Northern Egypt, was at the city of Sais.

(narrator)Critics voiced their strongest doubts

over Bernal's approach to language and wordderivations, or etymologies.

In the 19th century, linguists were able

to trace 40-50 percent of Greek words to a

language family known as Indo-European,

from which most other European languageshad also evolved,

though Bernal is trying to account forthe other missing half.

(Bernal)I am a language junkie, that when I see

something about an obscure language,

I'm tempted by it. And I was in Heffers

and I saw an etymological dictionary

of Coptic. Now this may not appeal to many

people, but to my strange tastes, it was

extraordinarily attractive, so I picked

it out and I started looking at Coptic words

and the ancient Egyptian roots that they had.

And I suddenly began to see that maybe

some of the Greek words that are not

explained in terms of Indo-European,

I hadn't been able to find Semitic roots for,

might well have Egyptian roots.



I think Martin Bernal is an enthusiast,

and he has all the good signsof an enthusiast.

When it comes to ancient languages,

it's very easy to take a bit here, take

a bit there, put them together, and come upwith the conclusion you want.

And from time to time I think you can

catch him out doing this. Not consciously,

but that is the result he's arriving at.

He wants a particular conclusion, so he tends

to make the languages fit that conclusion.

(female voice)

I myself, as someone who's by no means

a specialist in ancient languages, am not

at all persuaded by most of his etymological

arguments. I also think that to say that

one word is like another word, sounds like it,

is not really very helpful when there are

other ways in which the Greeks adopted

foreign names and translated them, and

that is much more meaningful. For example,

"Phoenicians" is presumably a Greek translation

of "Canaanite," meaning"the purple people," into Greek.

That means the Greeks understoodthis language.

They did not just pick up a name the way

Americans have used, still, Indian names

for many place names. That means that they

understood what this place name meant,

that there was all kindsof bilingual contact.



So I think etymology is one of the arguments

from the past that can be discarded.

(sound of breaking waves)

(narrator)In the Aegean, 75 miles north of Crete,

lies the island of Thera. A huge volcanic

eruption blew the island apart in 1628 BC.

Just 20 years ago, under the volcanic

debris, the remains of a sophisticatedBronze Age city were uncovered,

better preserved than the Roman Pompeii.

Excavators believe they've only revealed

one-thirtieth of the whole site,

known as Akrotiri.

Bernal believes that the population of thecity had close contacts with the Egyptians.

From what I have read in this book,

I can say that I suspect that the author

has never visited the site, because there

is no evidence of Egyptian presence here

at all, neither in architecture,nor in portrait,

nor in any other kinds. Of course, we have

evidence of contacts of this site with

the outside world, from the EastMediterranean, including Egypt,

and perhaps with the West Mediterranean.

(sound of slide advancing in projector)

(Bernal)

These slides come from the buried cityof Akrotiri, on the island of Thera,

which was overwhelmedby an eruption in 1628 BC,

and they're by far the earliest paintings



we have from Greece of any extant --that's excluding Crete.

Now here we have a section of a much longer

painting of a number of boats, and there's

been some argument as to whatthese boats represent,

but what came as a surprise to thearcheologists who discovered them

was the very strikingly Egyptian featuresto be found.

Now here we have a short section of a much

longer river scene that's admitted by all

scholars to be Nilotic, or that's the

conventional description of it. And this

is because the plants -- you can see the

palm trees, and the animals like the goose,

and the naturalistic animals -- belong to

the types found in Egypt in realityand in Egyptian painting.

(slide advancing)

(male voice)I believe that these are artistic conventions

which were common throughoutthe East Mediterranean.

Who borrowed them, and from whom, I cannot

tell. Probably the Therans borrowed itfrom Egypt.

But in general, the art of Thera, compared

with that of Egypt and the rest of the

East Meditarranean, can be considered

as European as Western art in concept,in rendering, and so on.

(narrator)The wealth and sophistication of the

buildings found at Akrotiri are proof that



its citizens had extensive contact with the

Eastern Mediterranean. The reason for

ancient Therans to travel abroad was

economics, for the islandis relatively barren.

Today, farmers scrape a livingfrom wine production.

Even modern tourism does not provide

sufficient income to support a cityanything like the size of Akrotiri.

But is there evidence to suggest settlements

from Egypt and the Aegean,as Bernal proposes?

(male voice)I think there is very little evidence that

the ancient Egyptians werea colonizing people.

Certainly in the period of which Martin

is speaking, the third millenniumand the second millennium BC,

there is no evidence for Egyptian coloniesof any sort in the Aegean world,

and I think to propose that there were

such colonies, Professor Bernal has gone to

great lengths, relyingprimarily on Greek myths,

as well as rather strange interpretations

of the archeological and historical data

in order to prove thatthere were such colonies.

I think the interesting thing about

Bernal's contribution is he says all the time,

"Let's get away from the 19th century,

Let's look at things in a way that's20th-century, or 21st."

And then he produces an idea that's



straight out of the 19th century.

He says that no civilization can really

begin unless another civilization comes in,

invades, and tells them how to do things.

Now Bernal's view of early Greece is that

there were a lot of Greeks, waiting there

not doing much, and a series of invasions

come in from Egypt and the Near East,

and teach them how to be civilized.

Now that, if you think about it,

is a really good 19th-century model.

You don't particularly need it.

When civilizations start to develop, what

they do is what you would expect them to do:

they look around themselves, they look at

other cultures, and they say, "Hmm,

we can copy that." That's something which

corresponds to a need in them,and they start copying.

I would argue that the historical record

shows that yes, that is true, but there

are many examples when the spread of

culture has taken place by conquest or by

settlement, that the spread of the Latin

language throughout Europe can be linkedto the Roman Empire.

So I think that when looking ata prehistoric culture,

or a historical one about whose origins

you don't know anything, I think you should

keep your mind open to both possibilities.



(music)

(narrator)Increasing numbers of academics, even ifthey do not accept direct colonization,

do concede some contact between the Aegean ,

Phoenicia, and Egypt during the Bronze Age.

But around 1180 BCthere descends a dark age,

which lasts for four centuries.

Traditional scholars say this creates an

impermeable barrier which seals off any

Egyptian or Phoenician influence which might

have existed from the period which saw the

memorable achievements of Classical Greece.

All right, the Greeks that we learned from,

Babylonians, Egyptians, a lot of people,

various sciences, mathematics, whatever

it might be, but on the whole it isn't

the sciences and mathematics which are

major parts of the Greek achievement,

it's things like democracy and in art,

the understanding and developmentof proportion and composition,

ideas of narrative, the recognition of

Man's role, his relationship to the gods,his relationship to each other.

They didn't learn any of that fromBabylonians and Egyptians.

They learned that themselves.

This is the essence of Greek classical

civilization, not whether you canpredict an eclipse of the moon.

As much as I myself promote the idea of

Near Eastern influence on Greece, what is



so very different about the Greeks is what

fascinates me: that they did not sacrifice

children, for example. They told stories

about it, Iphigenia and many other myths

about this, but they themselvesdid not do this.

In other words, they rejectedcertain things about the Near East.

They tended to reject the idea of kingship

for a long time, in many city-states they

evolved a system of democracywhich we still have.

So in some ways what fascinates me about

this relationship between Greeceand the Near East,

and I think it's true of everyone who

studies it, is how very differentthe Greeks were.

(narrator)On the surface, the difference between

gigantic Egyptian monuments and the human

scale of Greek buildings gives every

appearance of totally different cultures.

But Bernal argues that our imageof the Greeks

has been built up from only partof their legacy.

I think that Greek religion had a lot more

mystery and animals and things like that

mixed up in it than our view of the purely

human Olympians who are, in a vague way,

associated with Greek rationality.

But I mean, Greek rationality was there,

but it was a very small proportion if one



looks at the number of Greek texts or

Greek things, most of it is dealing with

religious, superstitious things which have

nothing to do with rationalityin that sense.

Um, so that Greek culture is an eclectic

culture, adapted to fitthe Greek environment,

but that Egypt was an extraordinarily

important element in that mix, and it has

been systematically downplayedfor the last 150 years.

(sirens, then hip-hop music)

["Blackman in Effect" by Boogie Down Productions]

♪ Egypt was the land of spiritual blessing ♪♪ Egypt was the land of facts, not guessing ♪

♪ People from all over the world had come ♪♪ To learn from Egypt, Egypt number one ♪

♪ So people that believe in Greek philosophy ♪♪ Know your facts, Egypt was the monopoly ♪

♪ Greeks had learned from Egyptian masters ♪♪ You might say 'Prove it,' well here's the answers ♪

♪ 640 to 322 BC ♪♪ originates Greek philosophy ♪

♪ But in that era Greece was at war ♪♪ With themselves and Persia, what's more, ♪

♪ Any philosopher at that time was a criminal ♪♪ He'd be killed, very simple ♪

♪ This indicates that Greece had no respect ♪♪ for science or intellect ♪

In order to understandwhat happened in Greece,

in terms of this unusual rise and unusual

development, which happened so rapidly

it appears to be unique,it appears to be a miracle,



but there's no miracle. The miracle was

the relationship of Greece to Africa.

But we have to go beyond Bernal.

See, whiteness limitates you.

It limits you even when you get intosomething serious like this.

And let's deal with that.

Bernal tapped into African understanding

and knowledge, the [unclear] and knowledge

and so he was able to break out ofthis mold of European ethnocentrism.

But the value system ofthe rightness of whiteness

still impacts upon him.

So he cannot make a clear statement that

the Africans of the Nile were African.

He's still holdin' on to that maybe they

was kinda brown, and mixed.

Y'see, when you get into that mix of --

mixed with what? If you mix anything

with African you're in trouble.(laughter)

Because African genes are dominant genes.

European genes are recessive genes, so any

mixture is goin' move toward Africa.

(female voice)You have these students looking at

the Egyptians and assuming that

the Egyptians were black,

and then taking that thesis one step further

and saying since the Egyptians were black,

and Egyptians were the progenitors of

Greek civilization, so our ancestors,



blacks, were the progenitors ofWestern civilization.

And so this becomes a very, uh, useful model

of history to reinforce Black Pride,

to resupply to the black studentthe missing past.

(teacher)And then you got other Pharaoh, other

images, his brother Keppa --Keppa-ka-rah,

Senusret I, again of the 12th Dynasty,

the Middle Kingdom, obviously lookinglike my brother.

But here's my main man. He's got big

African feet: Mentuhotep II.

Now he was on the throne 2000 BC.

While he was on the throne, the Greeksdidn't have a pot to pee in.

The ancient Hebrews weren'tanywhere around, or as significant.

The Romans hadn't -- the wolves hadn'tcome up to nurture Romulus and Remus.

Europeans wasn't doin' a damn thing.

And this brother was sittin'on the throne.

And I guess he decided,you know, just for kicks,

he wanted himself pictured as Black.

(woman's voice)I would just like to draw the attention

of people that black in statuary,

in ancient Egypt,

doesn't mean that blacks came.

It means fertile, alive, as opposed to

reddish, or yellowish, which is the colour

of the desert and the lack of fertility.



So whenever you see a statuebeing painted black,

it means that it is a hope for revival,that it is alive,

not at all that it is black-skinned.

I think the ancient Egyptians would have

had a fair amount of amusement out of,

uh, this debate as to whether they wereblack or whether they were white.

The ancient Egyptians were more concerned

with nationalism, with who is Egyptianand who is not Egyptian.

The ancient Egyptian texts are very clearabout what they thought of foreigners.

They spoke of the Asiatics as being vile.

Throughout their texts we read about

the vile Asiatic, and we also read their

opinion about the Nubians,whom they call vile also.

(narrator)In the Cairo museum, models of Nubian soldiers

are painted black, in contrast to models

of Egyptians, who are coloureda reddish-brown.

(wooden clanking, cow mooing, water splashing)

(female voice)I don't think that the ancient Egyptians

were any different than what we are.

The only thing I can tell you for a fact

is that they differentiated themselves

from black Africa,

uh, from Negroid Africa, because in

their beliefs, and in the terminology,

in the names and everything,they show ethnics.

The Egyptian looks completely different



from what is an African [unclear] man.

This is the only thing I can tell you,

and I suppose that you can draw yourown conclusions from this remark.

(boat motor, murmur of voices)

(Bernal)I don't believe that race is a very usefulconcept, as I say in my book.

Nevertheless, I think bringing outthe African nature of

Egyptian civilization is importantfor our politics today.

And this argument that I shouldn't be

feeding the black racists --I don't like racism of any sort.

I don't like black racism. I mean my ...

I believe in the cultural creativityof mixture, and of ... uh ...

But I'm much less frightened of giving

ammunition to black racists than I think

orthodox Classicists should be of giving

ammunition to white racists, because I

think white racism is a far more present

and acute danger to our society todaythan black racism.

I part company with Martin Bernal on

the issue of white racism is bad, black

racism is tolerable, because after all,

blacks have suffered so much

from white racism,

and historically whites have not suffered

any proportion of the way blacks have.

Racism in any form is counterproductive.

It's also disgusting. And, um, I think that



it's -- I say counterproductive because

it's counterproductive for the black

students themselves. What they should be

getting is an accurate and clearpicture of the past.

They should correct the distortionsin history,

but without creatinga whole new distorted model.

Because in the end, if their own picture

of their own past is built on distortions

and lies, it does them no good. It'll

crumble apart at the first opposition.

(black professor)

So I'm sayin' we've got to begin to deal

with the reality, and we can't expect the

Bernals to do it. They've done their job,

by taking us to a certain level.

We have to go beyond it.

I mean, the search for roots and origins

is essentially an affirmation of identity --

ethnic identity, religious identity,

historical identity, national identity --

and that is almost always a construction.

There is no such thing as a pure Greek, or

a pure Egyptian, or a pure anything.

Everything is hopelessly mixed up together

and I don't see why they couldn'tremain mixed up together.

It seems to me that's the realityof the world of the '90s.

(music)

(female professor)Should we be actually concerned about who



the Greeks were by blood, or should we be

asking about how theyconstructed their own past?

I actually think to even ask the question,

"Who were the Greeks really? Were theyblack, were they Jewish?"

is to fall into a racist trap. What we've

got to do is abandon altogether these myths

of ethnicity, myths of ethnic origin,

and we have to abandon both the mythof the Aryan origin

and the myths which he's trying to replace

the Aryan model with, of the Egyptian

Semitic origins of the Greeks, and ask

why their ideology works, how it does,

what are these myths actually saying?

(narrator)Whether or not his work is welcome to all

Classicists, Bernal intends to continue

his project. The second volume of

Black Athena is due out in the spring,

and there are two more to follow.

He firmly believes the Aryan modelwill crumble,

but he has many academics yet to beconvinced with his evidence.

(male professor)Lots of very interesting new ideas and

approaches in Classical studies about

the place now. Some are motivated partly

politically, partly by other current

interests in racism, feminism, whatever it

might be. They all make their contribution.



They're all -- most of them, at any rate --

a good deal less hot-headed than theymight have been a generation or so ago.

And, um, they all help, but if we say to

ourselves, "Yes, of course we realize that

each generation takes its ownview of the past,

or each faction in each generation will

take its own view," the honest scholar

ought to be able to makesome sort of allowance for that,

and one hopes that the common view which

emerges will take allowance for that, and

one can recognize, as one does,

that is a feminist work,that is an anti-racist work,

this is a structuralist work,this is a Marxist work,

and so forth, and make due allowance,

and that the single-minded who write these

sort of things are making their points,

no doubt, but they're not making such a

major contribution to a properunderstanding as they may imagine.

Well, I think that the accusation has often

been leveled at me, and I'm sure it's been

thought by many other people, that if I

accuse other scholars of being influenced

by their times and by theirsocial backgrounds,

I myself must be equally influenced by them.

And I think that there is some truthin this accusation,

but my defense against it would be that



my version is closer to the traditional

version held for the last 1800 years,or more -- the last 2000 years.

And I think the Aryan model is moreof an aberration than mine.

(music)

Black Athena - Full Version.en

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