Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization Volume II

The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence

Martin Bernal

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press Classics
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978807174
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Black Athena, an audacious three-volume series, strikes at the heart of today's most heated culture wars. Martin Bernal challenges Eurocentric attitudes by calling into question conventional explanations for the origins of classical civilization. Provocative, passionate, and colossal in scope, this thoughtful rewriting of history continues to stir academic and political controversy.

CHAPTER 1

Crete Before the Palaces, 7000–2100 BC

The place to begin any survey of relations between the Near East and the Aegean is obviously Crete. The reasons for this are, firstly, the evidence that the island had been in contact with Southwest Asia and North Africa since the Neolithic period and that this continued during the Early Bronze Age. Secondly, there is the fact that, after Cretan palatial civilization grew up in the late 3rd and early 2nd millenniums, it acted as a transmitter and filter to later Egyptian and Levantine influences on Mainland Greece. Thus, Cretan influence was central to the formation and development of Mycenaean civilization in the 2nd millennium.

In this chapter we shall consider the earliest stage of the island’s history: the long span of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages from about 7000 to 2100 BC.

Here I am primarily concerned with archaeology. This is not because I believe that archaeology has any inherent superiority as a discipline nor because it is the only way to find out about the Aegean in the 2nd millennium BC (that is from 2000–1000 BC), with which this book is largely concerned. I focus on archaeology for two reasons: firstly, because it is always an important method of gaining knowledge even in historical or proto-historical times; secondly, because, although information gained from legendary and linguistic sources can be extremely useful, it is usually very difficult to apply with any chronological precision. When dealing with the 3rd millennium, for instance, there are relatively few contemporary documents, so information gained through archaeology is the only type of evidence which we can tie to that period. However, I do not believe that it is desirable or possible to treat the archaeological evidence in isolation even in the very early periods. Therefore, in this chapter I shall try to set it in a context provided by documentary evidence from contemporary cultures, as well as from later legends, mythology, religious cults and sometimes language and proper names.

In addition to these contextual problems there are the difficulties inherent in archaeology as a discipline. I do not intend to go into the complicated philosophical question of whether or not archaeology is an independent science (as opposed to one that uses the scientific methods of others).¹ Here, I should simply like to consider its praxis or low-level theory as it affects the specific problems with which we are concerned. There is often no doubt as to the authenticity of an object or—in a good excavation—as to where and in what stratum it was found. Nowadays it is possible to discover, by scientific study of its material, where it came from. Sometimes through radio-carbon—the measurement of the proportion of radioactive carbon, which begins to decay when an organism dies—and dendrochronology—the counting of tree rings—one can even tell its absolute date. On the other hand, how the object came to be there and what it represents are open only to the archaeologist’s or historian’s subjective interpretation. Similarly, when looking at buildings or traces of agriculture or industry, which are the major preoccupations of modern archaeologists, there is great leeway in their interpretation, particularly in tracing their relationship to those in other places. In short, the data themselves seldom provide definitive answers; the most they can do is establish limits within which the archaeologist may speculate.

The ‘Diffusionist’ and ‘Isolationist’ Debate

Naturally, fashion plays an important role in this largely speculative realm. In Volume I, I briefly discussed the relationship between colonialism and the preference for ‘diffusionism’ or the belief that ‘higher cultures’ were spread through conquest and/or migration.² It should be recalled here that the Ancient, Aryan and Revised Ancient Models for Greece are all diffusionist. Isolationism—or ‘evolutionism’ as its champions rather confusingly like to call it—with its faith in local creativity and initiative, that is to say indigenous development, was seen as a healthy reaction to this and has dominated archaeology since the 1940s.

The most explicit attack on the colonialist aspect of diffusionism came in an article written by William Adams, the distinguished archaeologist at Nubia, but it has been also a major theme in the work of Colin Renfrew and other isolationists.³ They have put forward powerful arguments against the diffusionist interpretation of archaeological evidence. Adams epitomized these with the plea at the end of his article ‘Invasion, diffusion and evolution’ which was published in Antiquity, one of the central journals in the field:

As long as there is no ultimate proof in archaeology, every existing interpretation has to be subject to reexamination in the light of fresh discoveries. There is unhappily no point at which we can forget the evidence and accept the interpretation. Since every theory is no more than a probability, any building of theory on theory will significantly reduce the probability. Only solid evidence will significantly reduce the probability. Only solid evidence can ultimately serve as the building blocks of history.⁴

Unfortunately, however, the distinction between ‘interpretation’ and ‘solid evidence’ is not so conveniently clear-cut. It is clear that right from the moment archaeologists select their site they must have certain preconceptions and that these preconceptions or their successors remain with the archaeologist in all decisions on where to dig, with what methods, where to stop, what to examine, clean, note and keep. The seeing of significance is inevitably subjective. Adams’s conclusion might appear to be impartial, but, like that of McNeal, in the article referred to in my Introduction, it is an attack on diffusionism and what he sees to be its racist overtones.⁵ In denying the validity of all hypotheses based on archaeological or other ‘evidence’ about pre-history, scholars like Adams and McNeal leave the presumption in favour of local evolution and isolationism.

My position is that, while I fully accept their criticisms of the ‘evidence’, I believe that we should make the best of what we have and continue to construct hypotheses, while constantly reminding ourselves of their precariousness. I maintain this because I am convinced that, firstly, research without them produces a meaningless jumble and, secondly, that although they cannot be absolutely ‘true’ different hypotheses can be more or less heuristically useful and that our job is to concoct and select the least bad. There are also two corollaries to the second point: 1) a prohibition on the establishment of new hypotheses inevitably leaves in place old ones, which are frequently based on much less reliable evidence; 2) the prohibition has a definite isolationist bias in that it is wrongly felt that it is connection rather than isolation that needs to be proved. I think that this is mistaken because I take what has been called the ‘modified diffusionist’ position, that is, I believe that cultural change can take place as the result either of outside influences or of internal developments, or most commonly from a complex interplay of both.

The present isolationist intellectual atmosphere should be borne in mind when we look at present attitudes towards the Aegean during the Bronze Age (3300–1100 BC). To put it crudely, archaeologists have, until very recently, been in one of two camps. The first of these, as outlined in Volume I, contained fundamentally conservative scholars like Frank Stubbings and the late Spyridon Marinatos. These, influenced by remnants of the Ancient Model, have maintained that Greece was invaded from Egypt and the Levant near the beginning of the Late Bronze Age c. 1570 BC, but they argue that this had had no significant or long-lasting impact on Greek culture. The second group contains most of the established, middle-aged archaeologists and historians of Ancient Greece, such as John Bintliff and Peter Warren. These tend to be systematically isolationist. They incline towards Renfrew’s Model of Autochthonous Origin, the belief that there has been no culturally significant settlement of Greece from the outside since the beginning of the Neolithic period. In particular, they adamantly oppose the idea of any invasion of—or significant settlements in—the Aegean from the Near East.⁶ Indeed, Renfrew has gone beyond the founders of the Aryan Model by insisting not merely that the Greeks had no significant major contact with the Near East but that the Pre-Hellenes were equally pure and untouched.

At this point, it is necessary to fill in a serious gap left in Volume I. I argued there that the Extreme Aryan Model reigned supreme at the turn of the century. I also briefly considered the diffusionist ideas of Elliot Smith, who believed that an energetic Asiatic people had spread culture around the world from Egypt.⁷ What was not mentioned, however, was that there was a more moderate and much more influential school of archaeologists who maintained that European culture had been ultimately derived from the Near East and were tagged by their enemies as believers in ex oriente lux, ‘Light from the Orient’.

The outstanding figure among these ‘modified diffusionists’ was the Swedish archaeologist Oscar Montelius, but he had many prominent disciples, especially in Britain, of whom the most important were Sir John Myres and the great Australian theoretician of archaeology Gordon Childe.⁸ These scholars maintained that the Aegean population had received much, if not most of its technical skills from the Near East during the 3rd millennium. However, as I mentioned in Volume I, Myres and Childe were also thoroughly convinced of Aryan racial superiority and that the ancient Greeks had possessed one the finest Aryan civilizations. The potential contradictions between these fundamental beliefs were avoided by the presumed presence the ‘Pre-Hellenes’ who acted as a filter separating the Aryan Hellenes from the Near Eastern elements.⁹

Among the opponents of the modified diffusionists were men like Salomon Reinach, discussed in Volume I, who had attacked what he called the mirage oriental which sought Asian origins for all European developments. There was also Gustav Kossinna, the dominant figure in German archaeology in the early 20th century, who argued that all the master races—the Aryans, the Finns and the Sumerians—had ultimately come from Schleswig-Holstein and that, while inferior peoples benefited from mixing with superior ones, the greatest civilizations arose where the master races were pure and uncontaminated as—it just so happened—was the case in North Germany.¹⁰ While in no way endorsing this kind of racism, the work of Renfrew and Warren has in many ways been an attempt to revive the isolationist or evolutionary opposition to the modified diffusionism of Montelius and Childe and to apply the notion of uncontaminated purity to the Aegean. Thus their ideas, too, have racist overtones in that they see European civilization as the greatest in world history and as having been exclusively created by Indo-European-speaking Europeans. It is extremely significant that Renfrew’s massive book has the extraordinary and provocative title The Emergence of Civilisation: The Cyclades and the Aegean in the Third Millennium B.C., although it was paradoxily dedicated ‘To the memory of V. Gordon Childe’ against whose ideas Renfrew is struggling.

Dealing with Crete before about 1450 BC, when Mycenaeans seem to have become dominant there, we find ourselves in the thick of the battle between isolationists and modified diffusionists. Even the latter, however, tend to maintain that ‘Minoan’ civilization had a certain European ‘freedom’ and ‘virility’ lacking in Near Eastern civilizations.¹¹

Crete Before the 21st Century BC

The Neolithic, 7000–3300 BC

According to the geographer Strabo in the 1st centuries BC and AD, Crete was not...