Talk:Black Athena

message: Since Afroasiatic refers to a language family, not to an ethnicity or culture, some comment about what is meant with "Afroasiatic roots" is needed. Is there any such term as "Orientocentrism", "Levantocentrism" to contrast with Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism? From "Afroasiatic" alone, it is not clear what the thesis has got to do with Afrocentrism, since Afro-Asiatic languages were spoken all over the ANE. dab (ᛏ) 11:39, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, in face the domain of Afroasiatic hardly includes any of "black" and sub-Saharan Africa which is what almost anyone first encountering the term thinks of. Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, etc. and more importantly ALL of the semitic languages (so most of the middle-east) are Afroasiatic.209.2.229.73 (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 15:32, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I would disagree. The reason there is a need for Afrocentrism, is that the study of Africa from the point of view of Europe does a huge disservice to the history of Africa and the world. It is too easy to slip into the eurocentric point of view. Case in point. "in face the domain of Afroasiatic hardly includes any of "black" and sub-Saharan Africa which is what almost anyone first encountering the term thinks of. Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, etc. and more importantly ALL of the semitic languages (so most of the middle-east) are Afroasiatic." I have no doubt that this statement is well intended, but it falls into the trap of separating 'black Africa' from 'white Africa' or 'sub-saharan Africa' from 'not-sub-saharan Africa', also known as the Middle East, Near East, North Africa, East Africa, on various occasions. 1) All Afro-asiatic languages are from Africa, and 8 out of 9 are only spoken in Africa. The one that is spoken outside of Africa, Semitic, again has the greatest diversity (is the oldest) in East Africa, then Southern Arabia, then the Levant, then Mesopotamia. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/Semitic_languages.svg/300px-Semitic_languages.svg.pngIn other words, the greatest diversity is in East Africa, and the farther away you get from East Africa, the smaller the diversity of Semitic languages. This means that Semitic is an East African language family, part of the African mega language family of Afro-Asiatic. Arabic and Hebrew are languages of African origin. 2) The predominant haplogroup in 'sub-saharan Africa' is E1b1a. The predominant haplogroup in North and East Africa is E1b1b. E1b1a and E1b1b are very closely related, and originate between 20k and 30k years ago, in East Africa. These haplogroups are much closer to eachother than the haplogroups of Europe or the Middle East that aren't also E1b1b. In fact haplogroup E is a typical African haplogroup.MrSativa (talk) 01:48, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Arbitrary section head

message: Yow! One or two sentences devoted to the thesis, then a whole series to controversy; little explanation of actual arguments, pseudohistory category. Let's get to work. --Carwil 21:01, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: "Problem is that the book is not well regarded by any scholars of linguistics, archaeology or history. It is literally only a political setpiece for the Afrocentrism movement." The problem is that the thesis upsets a lot of people, who would like to think that their opinions are based on science, when they are just based on more myths - can you say 'the Greek miracle'? The strongest part of Black Athena, is that it documents the changing attitudes to Ancient Egypt and ancient history among the European elites throughout the last four centuries. For that alone, it should be read.MrSativa (talk) 02:03, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: It would be a waste of time since the book is only full of unproven theories.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.86.4.223 (talk) 15:48, 5 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: NPOV Badly Needed

message: This guy wrote three large volumes, he used literally thousands of references.
:Then there should probably be more in line citations then I'm seeing now. --Pstanton (talk) 23:07, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Need help

message: Should we include a criticism section in this page? For example show how he never is able to prove that  it was central africans created the modern west. Or how he states specifically in his introduction that he intends to prove a point that has bearing on the civil rights movement?
The Isiah 07:03, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: An account of controversy around Bernal's work can certainly appear here. It should of course be expressed in neutral terms (what is here now uses loaded language, and falls down in places when judged by the NPOV policy). Charles Matthews 09:20, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

text: Don't think that's necessary. In order to give readers of all points of view confidence in the article's neutrality, the article structure should simply be as follows: describe the arguments of the three volumes, in order, but not in as much detail as chapter by chapter; then a section "responses" where all scholarly reviews and responses, as well as reviews in the serious press are presented. The responses section can either be in chronological order, or with the favourable views first and the unfavourable ones after. Itsmejudith 17:09, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

text: Sending Bernal an e-mail would seem to be the very definition of original research. We should be looking for reliable secondary sources. Msalt (talk) 15:59, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: criticism

message: I would suggest that the article does need some rebalancing and that the way to approach this is to ensure that Bernal's arguments are properly summarised before we say how they were received. We could probably also find some more favourable responses. Itsmejudith (talk) 22:57, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV 

message: As per: "In 2003, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (a group known for having distinctly American Conservative views[1]) listed Black Athena as one of the worst books of the twentieth century." I hereby nominate this article as one of the worst on the wikipedia...Colin4C (talk) 21:26, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bad... 

message: ..it's from what we now call the Middle East..  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.25.187.228 (talk) 16:58, 10 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: No, but it is Afroasiatic. Afroasiatic refers to a language group which includes (among others) all the semitic languages (including phoenician), egyptian, berber, etc.209.2.229.73 (talk) 15:29, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

text: Phoenicia is a location. It used to be a satellite of Ancient Egypt. Phoenician belongs to the Semitic language family, which is most proliferous in East Africa, and is a member of the Afro-Asiatic super language family which is almost exclusively African (almost, except for Semitic). Phoenicia and Palestine border Egypt, which is where the African continent officially begins. Oh and they indirectly received their alphabet from Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. So much for Phoenicia having 'nothing to do' with Africa.MrSativa (talk) 01:51, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phoenician civilization is not actually African, 

message: The Article is about a book, then why citations? It is implicit that whatever is writen here comes from the book. If it were about the thesis in the book then it should be in more detail and with citations, but again, it's just a book report. loulafg 20:43, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes!  I agree.  The citations tag is pointless, at least regarding what are obviously claims derived from the book.131.96.91.191 (talk) 19:48, 28 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citations 

message: I agree with most of the above comments. This article needs a lot of work. First off it's confusing to most people who read it. I have a whole class of college students who think that. Second, there needs to be more references. My suggestion would be to better explain the Black Athena conterversy. Make it easy for someone, who has never heard of the issue, to understand what is being argued and the different perspectives. Also add some perspective of people who agree with Bernal because there really aren't any from that point of view. --LittleDuck17 (talk) 23:36, 20 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Excellent. The way wikipedia works is that those who make suggestions have to implement them. SamuelTheGhost (talk) 00:16, 21 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Needs Improvement 

message: (copied from user talk page)
May I ask why you reverted my three edits on the Black Athena article? what did I do wrong?
yannako  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Yannako (talk • contribs) 13:56, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I reverted because the article was tolerably well-balanced, and your edits altered that balance to push the anti-Bernal POV. My attention was imediately drawn by two uses of the word "claim" (see WP:WTA) and the purely abusive word "Pseudohistory". The edits introduced no sourced information, just opinion. SamuelTheGhost (talk) 17:12, 10 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  reversion 10 October 2012‎  

message: Simply reading through this article, its obvious that the entire thing is biased against Banal. This is an encyclopaedia. We're not trying to argue in favor or against a particular person! I don't have a copy of this book so I can't fix it myself, but even without reading it I can tell that this article is seriously messed up and should probably be rewritten from scratch. 19:58, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article is biased. 

message: Please stop.
Marsh, Herbert (2009). Horae Pelasgicae. BiblioBazaar, LLC. . (Reprint from 1815 edn.)
has been removed. It is cluttering. This source is not concerned in anyway with foreign sources of greek, or Pelasgian, for that matter. Further and worst, it hasn't been used in the thesis synopsis(ed) (allow it please).
--Connection (talk) 20:51, 25 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Shameless Promotion Removed 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Of course Bernal is a joke. He sees correctly, that there are lots of roots in Greek vocabulary, that cannot be traced back to an Indo-European root. And then Bernal looks into an Egyptian dictionary and finds all these roots. The joke is, this dictionary is Czerny's Coptic dictionary! Coptic is a late stage of the Egyptian language and a mixture of Greek and Egyptian words. So it's just the other way round. All these words found their way from Greek to Egyptian via the Gospel.--183.182.120.170 (talk) 10:35, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Egyptian origin of Greek words 

message: On Sept. 4th 2019 I had added a section on Genetics citing recent genomic research by Lazaridis and colleagues, published in the highly acclaimed journal Nature (Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, 2017). This study directly rejects any significant genetic contribution of Levantine or African settlers to the Aegean populations, thus directly disproving Bernal's wild hypotheses. To my surprise, the addition was instantly censored by "Freeknowledgecreator" with the following excuse: Thank you, but the addition has very little to do with the subject of the article - I looked up at the Nature article; the only connection it has with "Black Athena" is that it cites the book a single time. That makes it undue to include such an addition. If Freeknowledgecreator has really read (and understood) the above paper, I challenge him/her to publicly explain WHY the above article (which directly and unequivocally disproves Bernal's controversial hypotheses with hard genetic data) is, according to the editor, "undue". I must say that such biased and irresponsible censorship is not flattering for Wikipedia.
:My removal of your addition was not "censorship". The relevant policy is WP:NPOV, especially the section WP:PROPORTION, which states, "An article should not give undue weight to minor aspects of its subject, but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject." An article that has no connection with Black Athena except that it cites it a single time is obviously minor in relation to Black Athena. I don't care that you think the article refutes Bernal. It is irrelevant to me whether it does or not, since the article isn't about his book and has almost no connection to it. If you can find an article that is actually about Black Athena, and claims to refute it, then by all means summarize it here, so long as it was published in a reliable source. Freeknowledgecreator (talk) 06:04, 4 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Your addition read, "In a 2017 publication in Nature by Iosif Lazaridis and colleagues, genome-wide data from 19 ancient individuals, including Minoans from Crete and Mycenaeans from mainland Greece was successfully analysed. The authors colcluded that there is no measurable Levantine or African influence in the Minoans and Mycenaeans, thus rejecting the hypothesis that the cultures of the Aegean were seeded by Egyptian or Phoenician colonists." Not a word of that is even about Bernal or Black Athena. Why then be surprised that it was removed? Freeknowledgecreator (talk) 06:22, 4 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Bernal's wrong, but we can't use that source. , I think we need to remove the last paragraph at Thor Heyerdahl#Controversy for the same reason, plus the fact that it's a new article,  not a reliable source for archaeology. Doug Weller talk 07:32, 4 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Editor bias and censorship

message: I have been having a discussion with User:Freeknowledgecreator on their talk page about the entry in the infobox of this article saying that Black Athena was published by  Rutland Local History & Record Society. I have been referred by him to  
 and by User:Ian.thomson to 
. These both show the publisher as Rutland Local History & Record Society. However, this 
shows it as published by Rutgers University Press. This 
also shows the 1987 publisher as Rutgers University Press. 
Black Athena does not appear as a publication on the website of Rutland Local History & Record Society. 
You can see that the publications of this society are related to the local history of Rutland, as you would expect. It is inherently implausible that a controversial book about the racial politics of ancient history written by an academic at an American university should be published by the local history society of a small county in England. If it had been, this would have been newsworthy, and I cannot find any reference to this on the internet. The reference by Amazon to Rutland Local History & Record Society must be a mistake. 
Any comments?  Sweet6970 (talk) 19:05, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Was ''Black Athena''  first published by Rutland Local History & Record Society? 

message: I have noticed a "dubious" annotation has been added to my addition to the overview of this article: "Bernal himself has been accused of pursuing political motives and enlisting Bronze Age Greece in an academic war against Western civilisation".
Regardless whether one might agree or disagree with this statement, this accusation is factual and was made by D. Gress in his review paper "The case against Martin Bernal" (1989), published in The New Criterion 1: 36–43. Gress specifically writes: "Who would have thought it possible to enlist Bronze Age Greece in the current academic war against Western civilization?...Just this is Martin Bernal’s objective in his recent book, Black Athena, subtitled The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Bernal, professor of government at Cornell University, a former Sinologist...tells his readers candidly that “the political purpose of Black Athena is, of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance.” Apart from the fact that this charge has become a straw man—the chief problem in the academy today isn’t European cultural arrogance but its opposite— Bernal’s account, and the political circumstances in which it appears, raise some important questions about scholarship and propaganda in the academy and, a fortiori, in what remains of the general culture".
Considering Bernal himself has openly stated in the introduction of his book that "the political purpose of Black Athena is, of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance", Gress has a point. Gress's critique and the relevant citation of his paper are provided in the main text below under "criticism". As far as I understand from other Wikipedia articles, the overview of an article provides no citations but simply a summary of what is included in the main article, is this not the case? If it is necessary, many citations can be directly added in the overview/introduction as well, including the statement stating the obvious, that "Black Athena has been heavily criticised by academics" (to which someone has also added that a citation is needed). I have simply refrained from adding the long list of relevant citations in the overview because these are discussed and cited under "Criticism". In fact, many more review papers and criticism of this book can be added, which has received overwhelmingly negative reviews and has been discredited by academics.
Please clarify whether citations are to be added in the summary as well. Otherwise, the relevant citations are all provided in the main text and do not need to be repeated in the overview in my opinion.
46.251.117.65 (talk) 07:06, 28 June 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: The relevant guideline is MOS:LEADCITE. Basically, while it is a common practice to remove citations from the lead once there's a stable and well-referenced article in which the lead only contains a summary, there is explicitly no prohibition on adding citations to the lead, and when something is regularly challenged or in some other way controversial it may be a good idea to add a citation to the lead anyway. So I added a citation to the part that was tagged 'dubious', for the time being. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 16:49, 4 March 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: The criticisms of Bernal are well-represented in this article, both generally and in the lede. It seems unnecessary and non-encyclopedic to include specific criticisms from individual authors in the lede, since they are raised later in the article.  It seems more appropriate to include only the summaries in the lede. Therefore, I am going to remove these last two points from the lede: "The book has also been accused that, by "reopening the nineteenth-century discourse on race and origins," it "has become part of the problem of racism rather than the solution that its author had envisioned." Bernal himself has been accused of pursuing political motives and enlisting Bronze Age Greece in an academic war against Western civilisation." Msalt (talk) 16:11, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: "Dubious" annotation added by someone