African Athena: New Agendas ed. by Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Tessa Roynon (review)

The inspiration for this book derives from a 2008 conference at the University of Warwick that was held in recognition of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Black Athena. African Athena is the title Martin Bernal once said that he “should have used” for his multivolume project, but his publisher “insisted on” using Black because it would “sell” (“Black Athena and the APA,” Arethusa 22 [1989]: 31–32). In his autobiographical afterword to this volume, he admits that the title Black Athena “may well have had the effect” of exposing critics of his books to charges of racism, as indeed it did. So the use of the alternate title for the present volume represents a welcome shift in emphasis from issues of race to issues of culture and nationality, and the reception of Greek and Roman ideas by later writers. Some of the essays in the volume are based on papers given at the Warwick conference; other contributors were specially invited. The chapters in the first part of the book are primarily historiographical in nature, while most of the essays in the second part consider the literary and historical productions of particular authors. The editors provide an introductory overview of each contribution, with a helpful survey of some of the other recent work in this emerging field, and offer some brief general remarks. But it is not clear why certain important topics (e.g., the works of Jean Terrasson or Cheikh Anta Diop) were not treated in more depth. Of course, no collection can have the coherence of a work by an individual author, and the essays in this volume seem largely independent of one another. If there was any discussion among the authors who presented their papers in the conference, or commentary on them by Bernal himself, few traces of such interchange appears in the published book. Readers are left to make such connections as best they can.

There are, however, some commonalities among the papers. Most concentrate on reception, and do not consider the historical issues that have made Black Athena the subject of such heated debate. That does not mean that the editors or most of the authors believe that the debate has been in any way resolved; rather, it appears that they have sought to avoid discussion of the historical issues involved in Bernal’s reconstruction of the ancient past, seeking instead to concentrate on the “ongoing relevance of the issues Bernal raises.” Although works by Bernal’s most outspoken critics are mentioned, there is only occasional reference to what they actually said and no specific discussions of the particular reasons why most scholars of the ancient world believe that Bernal has vastly overstated the degree of Egyptian influence on Greece and misinterpreted such evidence as there is, especially in the case of his proposed new etymologies. Some of the contributors seem sincerely puzzled by the relative lack of attention accorded to Black Athena. Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence (New Brunswick, N.J. 2006). For example, Patrice Rankine in his chapter “Black Apollo?” is impressed by the “patience and meticulous attention to sources” displayed in Bernal’s claim (based on the epithet λυκηγενής) “that European scholars dislodged Apollo from his Egyptian connection” to Sun worship. Rankine believes that it is mainly because of “the context of North American intellectual life” that such proposals failed to persuade classicists and Indo-Europeanists. He does not appear to have supposed that there might be other, far more compelling reasons why linguists have thought that Apollo’s origins might more credibly be traced to Lycia or Anatolia.

Rankine and other contributors to the volume call attention to the nationalism and other types of Zeitgeist that have caused European scholars to ignore or downplay the contributions of Egypt and other African cultures. Toby Green observes, “In the long run, the most deep-rooted impact of Black...