Is this worth reading? It's about how classical civilization came from African...

Is this worth reading? It's about how classical civilization came from African, and that the idea white Greeks invented it is a myth.

>inb4 WE WUZ
It's not a pop work, it's a four-volume academic work that is highly respected and meticulously researched

My personal philosophy when reading books is to read different perspectives.

WE

>white
>greeks

Read it alongside a paper that argues against it

His thesis suggests Greeks were in fact black, originally, but that whites overthrew the black colonists.

>It's not a pop work, it's a four-volume academic work that is highly respected and meticulously researched

Is that why I've only heard about it on the Chinese cartoon website that is Veeky Forums?

If you say so, I believe you, but it's a pretty well known work.

Yes, they are not whites, they were blacks, good goy!

I am guessing the reasoning goes something like this.

Greece got some of its ideas from Egypt
Egypt is in Africa
Africa is black
therefore Greece was black

No, he suggests Greece was originally colonized by Africans, who were later driven out by whites, and that the idea that the Greek settles were Indo-Europeans is a 19th Century racist myth..

Additionally, what I always do is check the best Amazon critical review. Often it helps.

Black Athena is almost Edward Said levels of being "highly respected and meticulously researched". It's WE WUZ but with more thought into it.

user, I've been a professor of history with a focus on classical Greece for almost 30 years and never in the course of my tenure have I seen such flawless reasoning. Not only am I giving you an A+ for the semester, but I'll be recommending you for the prestigious Shekelberg fellowship in hopes of giving your ideas some more visibility. Trust me kid, I've been in the academy for a long time so believe me when I say that ideas like yours are going to be making big, and I mean big, waves in the near future.

Agriculture was introduced the Greece during the neolithic migrations after the development of agriculture in the fertile crescent.

That literally is what it propounds.

Well known does not equal correct. Plus if you read anything about it you find that almost every scholar disagrees with it.

then why were the Helots (slaves to the Dorian Spartans) fucking caucasian?

I don't know, I haven't read it. I'm asking if it's worthwhile.

>that is highly respected and meticulously researched

lmao no it's not

"The book also ignited a debate in the academic community. While some reviewers contend that studies of the origin of Greek civilization were tainted by a foundation of 19th century racism, many have criticized Bernal for what they perceive to be the speculative nature of his hypothesis, unsystematic and linguistically incompetent handling of etymologies and a naive handling of ancient myth and historiography. The claims made in Black Athena were heavily questioned inter alia in Black Athena Revisited (1996), a collection of essays edited by Mary Lefkowitz and her colleague Guy MacLean Rogers.[4]

Critics voice their strongest doubts over Bernal's approach to language and word derivations (etymologies). Cambridge Egyptologist John D. Ray has accused Bernal's work of having a confirmation bias.[5] Edith Hall compares Bernal's thesis to the myth of the Olympian gods overwhelming the Titans and Giants, which was once thought of as a historical recollection of Homo sapiens taking over from Neanderthal man. She asserts that this historical approach to myth firmly belongs in the nineteenth century.[6]

1/2

Others have challenged the lack of archaeological evidence for Bernal's thesis. Egyptologist James Weinstein points out that there is very little evidence that the ancient Egyptians were a colonizing people in the third millennium and second millennium BC.[7] Furthermore, there is no evidence for Egyptian colonies of any sort in the Aegean world. Weinstein accuses Bernal of relying primarily on his interpretations of Greek myths as well as distorted interpretations of the archaeological and historical data.[7]

In 2001 Bernal published Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to Critics as a response to criticism of his earlier works.

Thomas McEvilley concluded in 2002 that while Bernal's "analysis of earlier periods of anti-Semitic attitude in regard to ancient Near Eastern culture may remain valuable, his attempt...to derive Greek philosophy from Africa seems so glaringly unsupported by evidence that it is likely to pass without leaving a trace."[8]"

2/2

probably not desu

you'd be better off just learning Greek and jumping into their mythology instead of getting hung up on identity politics.

It's not. "Black Athena" is classic pseudo-scholarly WeWuzism. The book takes cherrypicked facts (like Greek depictions of Ethipians on vases), mixes them with misinformation (Africa = black, therefore Egypt = black) to create a completely false theory.

Shouldn't there be quite big traces of African DNA if that was true?

>Is this worth reading?

Eh. Save yourself the trouble and just read pic attached ("Black Athena Revisited"). A number of leading classicists took Bernal apart -- his faulty methodologies, and his conclusions.

If you want to read both, go ahead, but I'd suggest reading "Revisited" first, so you can know what to look for.

>highly respected

lulz

Well known for being trash tb h .

t. Mary Lefkowitz

It is Wewuzian research.

In real life, the Greeks were influenced by Indians (dot, not feather).

This
>it's a four-volume academic work that is highly respected and meticulously researched
Just because it's big and has a lot of big words doesn't mean it's any less bullshit than WE WUZ arguments. A golden turd is still a turd; and the turd in this case isn't even golden, it's just spray painted

And Veeky Forums told me that wewuzism is something exclusive to black twitter and completely alien to universities, huh?

That book only makes connections between Greece and Ancient Egypt, and then pretends Egyptians were black.

Pic related, "black Athena".

Egyptian influence is obvious on Minoan and later Greeks civilizations, but I don't think they would therefore be "black" or "African"

it's more of a cultural sphere
the bronze age civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Minoa, and later Greece all happened in relative proximity to one another
that's probably not a coincidence

and it is known that the greeks were barbarians from the north
I think the Dorians were Nordic, as they described their homelands as snowy

Minoans: unknown
Myceans: Greek/white
Dorians/Sea people: Nordic
Modern Greeks: Turks

>Scandinavia is the only place with snow

Know any good sources on the relationship between Minoan culture and Egypt?

Maybe something that isn't designed to be anti-racist propaganda.

Or racist propaganda for that matter, I just read the rest of your post.

There's snow all over Europe you know.

Yeah like Mein Kampf is also well known.

Shit book based around ideology and not evidence, no credible people backing it, just stop.

>There's snow all over Europe you know.
not really, and in the Bronze age there was a warming period
much warmer than today, even grapes grew in Scandinavia
I'm not even Nordic (I'm Greek, and the Turk thing was a joke... sort of)
I don't give a fuck

As for the Minoan-Egyptian connection
I don't have any good sources, just wikipedia and blogs, sorry
not professional at all

>sea people
>nordic

What

>Minoans
>unkown

It is known what they were, farmers from Western Anatolia.

Also the Dorian theory has been pretty much debunked.

>modern greeks: turks


Oh I see, shouldn't have even bothered.

...

Everyone was black before Whitey and Yellow skins appeared outta nowhere and stole the black culture, Ancient Greeks, Romans, Germanic peoples (all of them) Celts/Gaels/Picts, Egyptians, Jews, Chinese, The Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Japanese, Native Americans/Aztecs/Olmecs, Arabs, Maori, Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Slavs, every king in England. Etruscan, Crete folk, can go on.

The evil scientist Yakub created white people as a warrior race to help him seize power. But he was defeated. The black people in their mercy and generosity not only allowed the whites to keep living, but also shared their wealth and knowledge with them. But the whites were wicked and evil, so they used their stolen knowledge to destroy the great black civilisations and erase true history.

100 percent solid gold pure bullshit!