The modern global civilization, according to the dominant Eurocentric model, is the product of an intellectual adventure started from scratch with the ancient Greeks, the result of exceptional and unprecedented acquisitions without history? Or the greek concept of genius (read: "Europe") as the sole source of civilization and the oldest is simply a racist and Eurocentric myth? In the latter the so-called miracle greek has served as a base the illusions of European cultural superiority (especially in the nineteenth century) and to free the history of European civilization from any debt to the civilization (certainly more old) located in the region under which the agricultural revolution in the ancient world: the Sahara desert, once fertile, and Ethiopia, through Egypt, Palestine and Phoenicia as far as Syria, Anatolia, Mesopotamia , Iran - including the Fertile Crescent and then the smallest - and the Indus valley. Minoan Crete, Mycenaean and later, it occupies a strategic position as the first European civilization in the eastern Mediterranean, both as an outpost of the oldest Egyptian and Asian cultures the West. Anticipating the subsequent dependence of European civilization from the medieval Jewish and Arab sources, Bernal argues that there is a vital contribution "Afro-Asiatic" the same origins of Greek civilization (or rather African and Asian, that is probably only one of the Afro-Asiatic language families involved), then became the European and North Atlantic today, subject to an ongoing process of globalization. The monumental work of Bernal, Black Athena, conceived as a tetralogy of which have been published so far the first two volumes, addresses these problems by following two main perspectives. The first volume, as well as presenting a preview very ambitious but very deliberate and reasoned with few references in support of promising discoveries from the opera as a whole, is essentially a fascinating study of art history and sociology of knowledge on the European academic culture. It traces the historical awareness of cultural producers from European intellectual debt to ancient Europe to Africa and Asia, and the subsequent repression of such awareness with the invention of the ancient greek miracle. The other perspective, of which the second volume is the first part is a review of converging evidence from an historical, archaeological, linguistic and mythological evidence that the debt culture. This dependence is symbolized in the historical re-interpretation of Bernal (on the basis of Herodotus) the myth of Athena, apparently the most ostentatious of the ancient Hellenic Greek gods, indeed emulation device of the goddess Neith of Sais, and then legitimately dubbed "Black Athena" (Herodotus, Histories, II, 28, 59, 83 etc.).. The identification of Neith with Athena was not confined to Herodotus, but it was generally agreed in the ancient Greco-Roman. Bernal's work so far has been the vicissitudes of life. The classicists, who do not consider it a strong criticism of the Eurocentric intellectual culture of the North Atlantic world taken as a whole, but an accusation hurled against their own discipline by an author who insists on playing a role as an outsider, I have often dismissed wrongly, has been better - especially before the publication of the second volume - with specialists in archeology, culture and languages \u200b\u200bof the Ancient Near East and comparative religion. Almost all critics were impressed by the depth and breadth of the doctrine of Bernal, but dismayed by its distance from the discussions. The environment that hailed Bernal's central thesis is that African American intellectual circles. In this context the great significance of the current Black Athena has been rightly recognized, not so much as a kind of purely academic review a history of ancient and distant, but as a revolutionary contribution to the global politics of knowledge in our time.
However, as the author of an academic white upper-class extraction, the impact of Black Athena has been remarkable. This fact contributes to the construction of a black militant, offering an alternative: do not waste full of contempt, or similar self-congratulation as the negritude of Senghor and Césaire who opposes the dominant model white North Atlantic, but short of that model. No coincidence that many criticisms are based also on the alert sparked by the aggressive politicization of the academy and the attrition that has to confront militant Afrocentrism. Have been numerous academic studies outside the context of the debate about Black Athena who insisted on the fundamental continuity between the civilizations of the Ancient Near East. These approaches have revived the old adage Ex Oriente Lux, which contains the second Bernal in fragmentary form the "ancient model" (this according to him in many classical authors, including Herodotus) of debt recognized in Greece - and thus the whole of Europe - against the ancient Near East. This motto has been rejected during the Enlightenment. "Today is the North that the light comes to us" (Voltaire, Letter to Catherine II of Russia, 1771). Ex Oriente Lux was in fact for decades as the Dutch Academy for the Study of the Ancient Near East and published by this journal. Although the heavy indebtedness of European culture against the Ancient Near East is no longer a secret like a hundred years ago, it met with hostile reception up to the eighties, for which Bernal to be given credit for having spread this crucial insight. Black Athena has done much to make it accessible to cultural clubs that had badly needed to construct and reconstruct their identities. Moreover, the original over-Bernal does not consider his argument: "It should be clear to any reader that my books are based on a tradition of modern study. The ideas and information that I use does not always come from samples of conventional wisdom, but very few historical hypotheses advanced by Black Athena are original. Its originality comes from having put together and made central information that were previously scattered and remote. " It is an indisputable fact that production systems (in part), language, deities, shrines, myths, magic, astrology, alphabet, mathematics, nautical arts and commercial arts of the ancient Greeks were not original inventions, but they were clearly identifiable antecedents among peoples neighbors with more established cultural traditions. The probable conclusions already partially anticipated in the first volume of Black Athena - but it should not and could not be discussed seriously before the full publication of subsequent volumes - had provoked a debate about the possible antecedents of Egyptian science and philosophy of Classical Greece. Several critics deplore the supposed incompetence with which Bernal refers to a current knowledge of the Egyptian - often with the name of obscurity - is alleged to permeate European culture since the late antiquity. It is difficult to know whether the views of liquidating these critics derive simply from their personal disappointment in seeing the so-called "pseudoscience", such as astrology, geomancy and alchemy, elevated to the rank of a respectable vehicle for secret transmission of knowledge is the way many Occultists have considered the issue over the centuries. Some recent studies on the Hermetic tradition, respected by the academic point of view and without the slightest connection with the debate about Black Athena, come similar conclusions. They consider the European esotericism a vehicle, not directly thought of ancient Egypt's dynastic period which extends over the three millennia before the era of vulgar, but certainly a vehicle of esoteric thought of late antiquity, in fact, details on continuity the latter with the dynastic period have yet to be determined by Egyptologists, but you can not subtract from an overall impression of continuity. Whatever the truth, from late antiquity to the Enlightenment European intellectual production in the esoteric field was massive, if not dominant, giving rise to an enormous body of literature that few researchers can be said to have competently examined; it must be said that the raids in this area of \u200b\u200bBernal are courageous and inspiring. A considerable part of the second volume of Black Athena is dedicated to a discussion that considers the paucity of archaeological traces the result of academic myopia, urging us to consider the documents available in a new light. In fact, the documentary evidence were not really low, even in the mid-eighties when Black Athena was conceived. Yet few were convinced by the argument at the beginning of Bernal in that regard. You must acknowledge the contribution Egyptian, or in general of the ancient Near East as essential to the classical Greek civilization (theory of diffusion) and at the same time that Athena was born from a supposed Egyptian model, with which the bonds have been gradually cut, in a process of transformation originated from the integration with the emerging local culture (thesis of the next location). Athena has a cult so precise that it becomes a symbol of local cultural identity of acquisitions that are specifically Greek. The origins of Greek civilization is not in the clear opposition between Afro-Asiatic and Indo-Europeans.
(translation by Marion Pelaia)
http://www.shikanda.net/ancient_models/gen3/aankten3.html
http://www.shikanda.net/afrocentrism/index.htm
