Black Athena?

Did Western civilization come out of Africa?

Tonight at our Classics Society meeting we watched and discussed a documentary called "Black Athena." It is about a debate that centers around a book of the same title, written by a professor of Near Eastern and African culture. He claims that Greek culture comes directly from African and Near Eastern sources, and therefore that the idea of Greece, a country of white people, as the birthplace of Western culture is completely false.

Sounds interesting, eh? Well, it's actually not very well founded. The author of this book, as mentioned earlier, is not a classicist, but more importantly, he doesn't seem to allow for the idea of influence separate from domination. It is widely recognized that Greek society had a lot of contact with the Egyptians and Phoenicians; the Greek alphabet was borrowed directly from the Phoenicians, and the Greeks themselves identified their gods with various Egyptian deities. Archaeology gives us clear evidence of extensive trade and artistic influence between these cultures. But the view of Black Athena basically asserts that the Egyptians and Phoenicians dominated the Greeks and taught them to be civilized. There really isn't any evidence for that. Of course, our intrepid professor tells us that the evidence has been covered up by whites who don't want to admit that blacks had a share in founding Western civilization.

Well, the whole thing about "black" heritage in Greece is very tenuous indeed, since he cites Egyptian and Phoenician influence (or domination)...and neither culture was black. Some people like to say that the Egyptians were black, but the only evidence they have is that they lived in Africa (which is, by the way, a huge continent capable of housing more than one ethnic group). There are vast quantities of paintings in which the Egyptians portrayed themselves with reddish-brown skin and straight, flowing hair. Clearly, they weren't ethnically the same as, say, the Numidians, who were quite certainly black, and from whom the Egyptians clearly differentiated themselves.

So, all in all, I think it's a silly argument, and it reeks of an attempt to project the political and social issues of our time onto the distant past. The evidence just isn't there to support the idea that ethnically black people taught the Greeks civilization, who in turn taught everyone else. Still, black people certainly have a claim to a heritage in the classic civilizations, just the same as I do. I am ethnically descended from Germans, who come from the old Germanic tribes in Europe, who had zero contact with the Classical world until they were conquered, fairly late in Antiquity, by the Romans under Julius Caesar. My bloodlines have nothing to do with Greece, but Greece is ultimately my cultural heritage. This is every bit as true for black people, hispanic people, oriental people...anyone in the Western world. Classic society is certainly not a realm exclusively for white people, nor should it be. It affects all of us. This why we still study it!