Ancient Model

In the preface to his controversial Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, Volume 1) , Martin Bernal describes how he moved from Chinese studies, through study of Indo-China to a study of Judaism and Hebrew and finally to comparative studies on Semitic and Hellenic language and culture. He found a large number of remarkable parallels between Hebrew and Greek, and concluded that “this number of parallels is not normal language without contacts with each other.” He realized too that “Hebrew/Canaanite was not merely the language of a small tribe, isolated inland in the mountains of Palestine, but that it had been spoken all over the Mediterranean, wherever the Phoenicians sailed and settled.”

He estimated that about a quarter of Greek vocabulary could be derived from Semitic sources, and another 40-50% from Indo-European, but that left a large proportion whose source was yet to be discovered. When he began a study of Ancient Egyptian, the last piece of his puzzle clicked into place: 80-90% of Greek vocabulary could be accounted for from this triple source, Semitic, Indo-European, and Egyptian.

What inspired his study, however, was the question, Why am I the first to notice this? And the answer is, that he wasn’t. By a long shot” “I was staggered to discover what what I began to call the ‘Ancient Model’ had not been overthrown until the early 19th century, and that the version of Greek history which I had been taught – far from being as old as the Greeks themselves – had been developed only in the 1840s and 50s.” The tendency to overlook Semitic contributions to the development of Greek culture he attributed to the anti-Semitism of 19th-century classics studies, and the marginalization of Egypt he thought was a reflex of “Northern European racism.”