Martin Bernal is not an Afrocentric and Martin Bernal is not the first European historian to say that Egypt had a significant influence on Greece. Calling ancient Egyptians black does not make one an Afrocentric and such illogical generalizations and rhetoric are the core of what constitutes the so-called arguments against Black Athena. In other words, sure it is not far fetched that Greece owes a debt to other cultures in Asia and Africa for its greatness, but just by calling ancient Egypt black, it becomes somehow less credible and pseudo scientific. Right there is the core of Bernal's argument, that perceptions of race based on skin color are the ultimate basis of modern distortions of the ancient past. Nobody can argue that Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley predate the civilizations of Greece. There is no debate on that. But the idea that ancient Egypt may have been populated by black Africans is where all of a sudden such notions of influence upon Greece become less valid. Egypt influenced Greece along with Persia, Babylon, Asia Minor, India and elsewhere and that is a fact no matter the skin color of the people in question. Yet in any discussion of Greece's debt to other cultures, the discussion always turns to whether blacks were the indigenous population of the Nile Valley in Africa. If that is not telling history from a perspective of race based on skin color, then what is?

Martin Bernal is not claiming that ancient black Africans were mythical super humans who sparked all creative life in human beings. What he is saying is that Africa and Asia are the ancient fertile soil in which civilization flowered and was introduced to Greece. This is not "new" stuff he invented himself in some conspiracy with Afrocentrics. Nobody debates that Mesopotamia is older than Greece. Nobody debates that math, architecture and wisdom literature (philosophy) existed in Mesopotamia, Egypt and elsewhere prior to Greece. Therefore, what he is saying is that Greece owes some of its greatness to the influence of these cultures, which included migrations from Asia Minor, the Levant and Mediterranean. All of these things are based on solid archaeological fact. What he is arguing against is the idea that Greece somehow burst forward as the first "true" civilization that was the result of the superior mental and physical abilities of European whites and thus spread all over the world due to the influence and migrations of whites from Europe and Asia. This is the Aryan model and this is the fundamental framework that drove the imperial colonial expansion of Europe in the 1800s.

Just as there is no doubt that Greece had influence from the East, there is also no doubt about the racism that was prevalent in the so-called sciences of the 1800s. Almost anyone who reads anthropological literature from the 1800s will see the out and out racism that justified the slavery, oppression and genocide of millions of people in Africa. Anthropology therefore originated as a study of the peoples and cultures that the Europeans colonized, which almost always justified the aims of the European conquerors. Therefore, early anthropology in the U.S. was based on studies of Native Americans (who were being conquered) and in Europe it was based on the studies of people in Africa and Asia as they conquered them as well.

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Institutionally, anthropology emerged from the development of natural history (expounded by authors such as Buffon) that occurred during the European colonization of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Programs of ethnographic study originated in this era as the study of the "human primitives" overseen by colonial administrations. There was a tendency in late 18th century Enlightenment thought to understand human society as natural phenomena that behaved in accordance with certain principles and that could be observed empirically. In some ways, studying the language, culture, physiology, and artifacts of European colonies was not unlike studying the flora and fauna of those places.

From: [en.wikipedia.org]

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The Bureau of American Ethnology (originally, Bureau of Ethnology) was established in 1879 by an act of Congress for the purpose of transferring archives, records and materials relating to the Indians of North America from the Interior Department to the Smithsonian Institution. But from the start, the bureau's visionary founding director, John Wesley Powell, promoted a much broader mission: "to organize anthropologic research in America." Under Powell, the bureau organized research intensive multi-year projects; sponsored ethnographic, archaeological and linguistic field research; initiated publications series (most notably its Annual Reports and Bulletins); and promoted the fledgling discipline of anthropology. It prepared exhibits for expositions and collected anthropological specimens for the United States National Museum. In addition, the BAE was also the official repository of documents concerning American Indians collected by the various US geological surveys, especially the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region and the Geological Survey of the Territories. It developed a world-class manuscript repository, library and illustrations section that included photographic work and the collection of photographs.

In 1897, the Bureau of Ethnology's name was changed to the Bureau of American Ethnology to emphasize the geographic limit of its interests, although its staff also briefly conducted research in US possessions such as Hawaii and the Philippines. In 1965, the BAE merged with the Smithsonian's Department of Anthropology to form the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology within the United States National Museum (now the National Museum of Natural History). In 1968, the SOA archives became the National Anthropological Archives.

From: [en.wikipedia.org]

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The first European colonization wave took place from the start of the 15th century until the New Imperialism period in the second part of the 19th century. It was mainly concerned with the European colonization of the Americas and the creation of European colonies in India and other Asian countries. Africa would be effectively colonized only in the 19th century: before, it was only used as trading posts. The interior was not explored. However, the Atlantic slave trade did included the "Black Continent" in this first phase of capitalism (see Fernand Braudel).
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Religious zeal played a large role in Spanish and Portuguese overseas activities. While the Pope himself was a political power to be heeded (as evidenced by his authority to decree whole continents open to colonization by particular kings), the Church also sent missionaries to convert to the Catholic faith the "savages" of other continents. Thus, the 1455 Papal Bull Romanus Pontifex granted the Portuguese all lands behind Cape Bojador and allows to reduce pagans and other enemies of Christ to perpetual slavery[1].

Later, the 1481 Papal Bull Aeterni regis granted all lands south of the Canary Islands to Portugal, while in May 1493 the Spanish-born Pope Alexander VI decreed in the Bull Inter caetera that all lands west of a meridian only 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands should belong to Spain while new lands discovered east of that line would belong to Portugal. These arrangements were later precised with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.

The Dominicans and Jesuits, notably Francis Xavier in Asia, were particularly active in this endeavour. Many buildings erected by the Jesuits still stand, such as the Cathedral of Saint Paul in Macau and the Santisima Trinidad de Paraná in Paraguay, an example of a Jesuit Reduction.

Spanish treatment of the indigenous populations provoked a fierce debate at home in 1550-51, dubbed the Valladolid Controversy, over whether Indians possessed souls and if so, whether they were entitled to the basic rights of mankind. Bartolomé de Las Casas, author of A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, championed the cause of the natives, and was opposed by Sepúlveda, who claimed Amerindians were "natural slaves".

From: [en.wikipedia.org]

Therefore, anyone who argues that those in the service of colonial anthropological and archaeological missions in the 18th century were not working in the service of colonialism and racist eugenic thought are blatantly distorting history. All of these fields arose out of the institutions of colonialism and were not purely for the spread and advancement of human thought and intelligence. Egyptology is no different. France invaded Egypt and then fought the British over control of the country as a form of French colonialism. Much of the Yes, they also brought historians and artists, but still they were in the service of Napoleon's colonial ambitions, not in the service of history for history's sake. Evidence of this can be seen in the fact that the civilizations that existed in Africa, Asia and the Americas are given short discussion, versus an overemphasis of people in Africa, Asia and America as purely savages or tribal with no tendencies towards civilization. This does not square with the multiple Miedeval Kingdoms of the Sahara and Sahel like Kanem, Bornu and elsewhere in Africa. The various Kingdoms and Sultanates of the Levant, Arabia and Asia, the ancient Bhuddist Kingdoms of India and Asia, the Kingdoms in the Pacific and Asia or the civilizations and cultures of the Americas. Therefore, to say that modern researchers who are correcting the past distortions are somehow racist, as if they are promoting black supremacy and going around the world bashing everyone over the head in the name of blackness, is laughably absurd. This is especially so considering the attempts to minimize the racist nature of early anthropological and ethnographic "sciences" which many times promoted euthanasia, genocide and oppression as a form of "advancement" for the non white populations of the earth. It is these sorts of ideas that directly led to the Hitlers, Stalins and Mussolinis of the 20th century, which is as important an indication of the "progress" brought by Europe in the modern world as any other.





Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/23/2007 09:34PM by Doug M.