Proof and Persuasion in Black Athena: The Case of K. O. Muller

Non tali auxilio.

Virgil, Aeneid II, 521

When in 1824 the German classical scholar Karl Otfried Müller (1797–1840) set down to write a review of Champollion’s first Letter to M. Dacier (1822), he was profoundly interested. ¹ For several years he had been working on Egypt, and as he told his parents in 1820, “I have come to love Egyptian antiquity so much, that, if I were not constricted by the schedule of my classes, I would have set myself to the decipherment of the hieroglyphs, which I would not deem impossible by the clues I have found.” ² During the same years (1820–25) that he wrote his early books on ancient Greece, he reviewed sixteen studies on Egypt alone. ³ In his review of the Letter, then, he wanted to draw “the attention of [the] readers to this, certainly not unfounded, discovery,” ⁴ though he feared the author was inclined to jump to conclusions. But in August 1824 he reviewed Champollion’s more complete publication of his findings of the same year and, recalling his previous anxiety, commented:

Now, however, the reading of the present work has totally convinced me, that the usage of hieroglyphs to indicate sounds is as ancient as this writing system itself. [... This discovery should also mean that ...] the history of Egyptian religion and state will be reconstructed and expanded. ⁵

From that moment he sided unequivocally with Champollion, politely but clearly reminding German colleagues who still stumbled on with decipherments of their own, that this would not do. ⁶

With these facts in mind, Martin Bernal’s rendering in his Black Athena, volume I, is bound to surprise: “[U]nlike Humboldt, Niebuhr and Bunsen [Müller] disregarded the sensational scholarly developments between 1815 and 1830. There is no indication that he paid any attention to Champollion’s decipherment” (316). The contradiction between Bernal’s statements and the sources on Müller’s life and work turns out not to be an incidental error but part of a larger pattern. To understand this pattern and its objectives, let me first summarize Bernal’s argument and my own.

In his challenging book Bernal argues that the ancient Greek world was founded on the colonization of Greece by Phoenicians and Egyptians in the second millennium bc. ⁷ The material which is to prove his thesis is offered in volume II, though volume I includes a summary. In this first volume Bernal observes that from late antiquity until the eighteenth century, awareness of the Afroasiatic roots of ancient civilization had been retained as the heritage of ancient Greece itself. Hence Bernal labels this perception underlying Western classical scholarship of the early modern period the “Ancient Model.” By or soon after the 1820s, however, it was replaced by the “Aryan Model,” which took Greek civilization to be partly autochthonous and partly shaped by invasions coming from the North. To reveal that the fall of the Ancient Model was not the result of internal developments in classical scholarship but of externalist influences, notably the belief in progress, the defense of Christianity, Romanticism, and most importantly racism, is the core theme of volume I. Bernal sustains his argument by contending that historical source criticism was not really or entirely an internal development but created to serve the external ends, and by presenting Müller as the embodiment of Romanticist racism, who was responsible for overthrowing the Ancient Model and inaugurating its Aryan successor. Hence, by thus designating Müller as the axis around which the overall turn of classical scholarship revolved, he wants to prove that the fall of the Ancient Model was unjustified in terms of scholarship but only occurred due to dishonorable ideologies.

Through a limited number of representative issues I want to argue that Bernal’s rendering of Müller and the context of his work is untenable in the light of the source material and that Bernal’s explanation of the fall of the Ancient Model is untenable as well. My aim is not just to clear Müller’s name...