(music)

(male narrator)
Four years ago, a book was published
that laid bare the very roots
of 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 it
owes to Black and Eastern cultures.
This spring a second volume
is 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 the
fifth century were presented to the ...
... des Gaules, les hommes et les femmes ...
... whereas the Ionic columns that they
erected 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's
history 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 than
I expected it to be.
But this is the root of civilization.
(narrator)

The Parthenon, symbol of Classical Greece,

is being rebuilt. As the architects
and masons repair the broken stones,
their aim is to preserve the image
that we have of it now:
bleached white and standing alone,
not brightly painted and enclosed by
other buildings as it was originally.
But are we interested in having an accurate
picture of this ancient civilization,
or have we reconstructed its past
to 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 society
that 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 which
Western 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 Greece
true to her real history?
And more importantly, how is the image
of 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 roots
in 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 continents
can 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 pedestal
of 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 happened
in 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't
a great deal of evidence there.
(different male voice)
And I for one do not think
that he has provided anywhere near the
amount 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 hostile
criticism in print.
(narrator)
In 1989, the leading American Classicists'
organization held a Presidential panel
at their annual conference
to debate Black Athena.
Articles followed from leading academics.
Much to Bernal's surprise, they gave
a serious and enthusiastic response
to his project.
The idea to hold a forum was put forward
by Molly Levine.
Bernal's prediction for this book was that
it would be ignored by
the Classics establishment,
and as a Classicist, I couldn't bear to
believe 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 Bernal

made us out to be.
(narrator)
Bernal teaches here at Cornell University
in New York State.
He's not a Classics professor, but
teaches 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 supported
by his own department.
But how have other colleagues at Cornell
reacted 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 for
the 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 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 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 remain
mixed up together.
It seems to me that's the
reality 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 myth
of the Aryan origin

and the myth 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 with 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 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 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 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 proper
understanding 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 their social backgrounds,
I myself must be equally
influenced by them.
And I think that there's some truth
in this accusation,
but my defense against it would be
that my version is closer to the
traditional notion,
held for the last 1800 years
-- or more, the last 2000 years -and I think that the Aryan model is more
of an aberration than mine.
(music)
(audio cuts in suddenly)
(narrator)
-- only for having preserved part
of this lost wisdom.
During the Enlightenment, the Freemasons,

who included the aristocracy, artists and

philosophers, used Egyptian rituals and
signs 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 Egypt
fell from grace.
The decipherment of hieroglyphs was like
discovering a new planet, and finding that
the planet didn't behave like planets
that you were used to.
So suddenly we could read hieroglyphs,
and what we expected to find was something
like Greek philosophy,
or we expected to find
the secrets of the universe,
laid out in very plain language.
It didn't happen like that.
The preoccupations of the Egyptians are not
the 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 them
as "merely craftsmen, not artists."
That idea dies rather hard, because even
when we could read the hieroglyphs,
we didn't understand the preoccupations
behind 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 world
of the chattering mummy,
uh, the strange, unexplained phenomenon,
the weird script, everything that leads to
the Hollywood idea of the
Egyptology mummy film.
(dog barking)
(narrator)
Now that the influence of Egypt
had 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 unique
and superior about themselves,
there was, during the latter part of
the 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 of
the 18th century,
when the Earth begins to move.

You get the biggest shift in tastes and

attitudes since the Renaissance.
The feeling is a reaction against all the
fuss and frippery of the Baroque;
the notion is "back to simplicity, back
to the Fountainhead."
And in terms of the Classical world,
that means a reaction against the Romans,
who are now seen as imitators
and tiresome elaborators,
and back to the pure simplicity of Greece.
And this worship of Greece
passes 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 beliefs
in 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 as
the pure childhood of Europe.
The idea of Romanticism became very closely
linked to the idea of
geographical determinism.
That is, that people are formed by
the landscape and climate they live in.
They get their feelings and their emotional
sense of community from that.
And it's also very linked to the notion
that cold is good for you,
that the further north you come from,

or the further up the mountain

you 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 to
associate Greece,
which was now the admired culture,
with the north, rather than with
the Mediterranean,
so it pushes people in that direction,
to look for northern roots to explain
the admired qualities of Greece.
(explosion)
(narrator)
By the 20th century, the modern nation-state
could call on the Greek ideal
to 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 fought
over 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 fathers
of Western civilization.
And tangible evidence says no, they're not
the 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 Aegean
offering 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 Aegean
in the Bronze Age.
He also relies on the traditions of the
Classical 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 one
else has touched upon.
The names of nearly all the gods came
to 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 fit
our 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 over
from 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 really
firmly 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 word
derivations, 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 languages
had also evolved,
though Bernal is trying to account for
the 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 signs
of 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 up
with 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 understood
this 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 kinds
of 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 sophisticated
Bronze 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 the
city 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 East
Mediterranean, including Egypt,
and perhaps with the West Mediterranean.
(sound of slide advancing in projector)
(Bernal)
These slides come from the buried city
of Akrotiri, on the island of Thera,
which was overwhelmed
by 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 what
these boats represent,
but what came as a surprise to the
archeologists who discovered them
was the very strikingly Egyptian features
to 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 reality
and in Egyptian painting.
(slide advancing)
(male voice)
I believe that these are artistic conventions
which were common throughout
the East Mediterranean.
Who borrowed them, and from whom, I cannot
tell. Probably the Therans borrowed it
from 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 island
is relatively barren.
Today, farmers scrape a living
from wine production.
Even modern tourism does not provide
sufficient income to support a city
anything 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 were
a colonizing people.
Certainly in the period of which Martin
is speaking, the third millennium
and the second millennium BC,
there is no evidence for Egyptian colonies
of any sort in the Aegean world,
and I think to propose that there were
such colonies, Professor Bernal has gone to
great lengths, relying
primarily on Greek myths,
as well as rather strange interpretations
of the archeological and historical data
in order to prove that
there 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's
20th-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 linked
to the Roman Empire.
So I think that when looking at
a 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 if
they do not accept direct colonization,
do concede some contact between the Aegean ,
Phoenicia, and Egypt during the Bronze Age.
But around 1180 BC
there 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 development
of 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 from
Babylonians and Egyptians.
They learned that themselves.
This is the essence of Greek classical
civilization, not whether you can
predict 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 themselves
did not do this.
In other words, they rejected
certain 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 democracy
which we still have.
So in some ways what fascinates me about
this relationship between Greece
and the Near East,
and I think it's true of everyone who
studies it, is how very different
the 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 image
of the Greeks
has been built up from only part
of 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 rationality
in that sense.
Um, so that Greek culture is an eclectic
culture, adapted to fit
the Greek environment,
but that Egypt was an extraordinarily
important element in that mix, and it has
been systematically downplayed
for 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 understand
what 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 into
something 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 of
this mold of European ethnocentrism.
But the value system of
the 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 of

Western civilization.
And so this becomes a very, uh, useful model
of history to reinforce Black Pride,
to resupply to the black student
the 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 looking
like 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 Greeks
didn't have a pot to pee in.
The ancient Hebrews weren't
anywhere around, or as significant.
The Romans hadn't -- the wolves hadn't
come 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 statue

being 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 were
black or whether they were white.
The ancient Egyptians were more concerned
with nationalism, with who is Egyptian
and who is not Egyptian.
The ancient Egyptian texts are very clear
about 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 coloured
a 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 your
own conclusions from this remark.
(boat motor, murmur of voices)
(Bernal)
I don't believe that race is a very useful
concept, as I say in my book.
Nevertheless, I think bringing out
the African nature of
Egyptian civilization is important
for 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 creativity
of 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 today
than 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 clear
picture of the past.
They should correct the distortions
in history,
but without creating
a 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't
remain mixed up together.
It seems to me that's the reality
of 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 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 altogether these myths
of ethnicity, myths of ethnic origin,
and we have to abandon both the myth
of 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 model
will crumble,
but he has many academics yet to be
convinced 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 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 a proper
understanding 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 their
social backgrounds,
I myself must be equally influenced by them.
And I think that there is some truth
in 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 more
of an aberration than mine.
(music)