History 5

Debate The Historians

Afrocentrism, Eurocentrism, multiculturalism, and historians of Antiquity

For many years the writings by Western scholars about world history emphasized Europe and the West, a biased perspective known as Eurocentrism, a term that originated in the 1920s but became more widely used by the 1970s. In the conventional Eurocentric storyline, history began in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Palestine before moving to Greece and Rome, who were credited with inventing what was termed “Western civilization.” They then passed on this legacy to northwestern Europe and eventually to North America. The rest of the world, except perhaps for India and China and sometimes Islam, constituted an exotic aside to the European mainstream. The academic fields of classics (the study of the Greco-Roman world) and Egyptology specialized in the ancient Mediterranean world, mostly excluding the rest of Africa and Asia. Before the 1970s most Western historians either ignored Africa or argued that Africa was unimportant throughout world history. Furthermore, in identifying the foundations of “Western civilization” they often minimized the multicultural nature of many ancient Mediterranean societies, the links between them, and the ways they influenced each other.the problem today a broader historical perspective incorporating Africa is common, although not universally accepted, and debates about this approach can be heated. But for much of the twentieth century, many scholars agreed with an influential British historian, who wrote in 1928 that Africa had no history and that most Africans had stayed stagnant and sunk in barbarism for many centuries. In reacting to racial discrimination and lingering contempt for Africa’s historical legacy, in the past six decades, many historians have made a convincing case for the importance of Africa and its critical role in world history. But questions remain. Was Africa a key part of the larger ancient and Classical world? Was Egypt essentially an African or a Mediterranean society? Did Egypt and other eastern Mediterranean societies strongly influence Classical Greece? Finally, how has a more multicultural approach reshaped the debate? the debate in dramatic contrast to the Eurocentrism that long domi-nated the field of classics and much of historical scholarship generally, an alternative approach known as Afrocentrism emphasizes Africa’s, rather than Europe’s, centrality in history. The more radical Afrocentrists provide a mirror image to the Eurocentric model, dismissing the older history as a lie designed to glorify European culture and perpetuate the power of white people. They assert that Africa was the fountainhead of Mediterranean culture and that a new way of understanding world history must be developed. Afrocentrists like the Senegalese Cheikh Anta Diop and the American Molefe Asante argue that black Africans, including Egyptians, originated and developed many of the arts, philosophies, and technologies of the ancient and Classical Mediterranean societies.

Critics accuse the radical Afrocentrists, like the rigid Eurocentrists, of exaggeration and selectivity in their use of historical evidence, charging that they rely on largely outdated and discredited sources. Some Afrocentrists, for example, offer unsubstantiated theories that Egyptian queen Cleopatra (a Hellenistic Greek) and Athenian philosopher Socrates were black, or that African mariners established the Olmec society of Mexico. British scholar Stephen Howe even asserts that Afrocentric writings replace outmoded Eurocentric scholar-ship with a misleading version that offers a fictional history. One prong of the debate is whether ancient Egypt should be seen as essentially Mediterranean or as an African society rooted in African traditions. Most scholars now acknowledge extensive Egyptian connections to Africa, western Asia, and southeastern Europe. African ties were certainly extensive. The ancient Egyptian language was closely related to many African tongues. Some historians of Africa believe that many ideas Egyptians shared with African peoples diffused to Egypt from the south, including the notion and rituals of divine kingship that underpinned Egyptian royalty, various myths and gods, and much material culture. But Egypt’s connections were diverse. Populated by migrants from all directions, Egypt produced people of many skin colors and physical features. As a trade crossroads, it maintained trade relations with Africans, Asians, and Europeans. People moved around and intermarried. Thus the Nile Valley was a zone of contact between many groups; the considerable mingling of people occurred and, with that, creative cultural borrowing and invention, making it difficult to precisely identify foreign influences on Egyptian culture. Another controversy concerns whether Egypt spread African ideas and influences to the Greek culture emerging across the Mediterranean and whether Greece should be viewed as a European society settled by Indo-Europeans who shaped the culture that was quite distinct from other eastern Mediterranean societies such as the Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Mesopotamians. In his three-volume study, Black Athena, British-born, U.S.-based scholar Martin Bernal contended that, until the early nineteenth century, Western historians stressed the Afro-Asiatic origins of Greek culture, acknowledging Egypt and Phoenicia as core influences. Then, he argued, because of increasing racism toward black people and rising European imperialism and nationalism, Western scholars began to stress the Greeks as being a creative source of culture rather than derivative—the pure and original source of European society. African and Middle East influences, such as those from Egypt and Phoenicia, were removed from the scenario. To support his point, Bernal used the myths and historical writings of the Greeks themselves, including, for example, the claims by Greek historian Herodotus, who was born and raised in Persian-ruled Ionia, that Egyptians invented mathematics and that the names of Greek gods originated in Egypt. Herodotus spent time in Egypt around 450 BCE and admired the Egyptian heritage. Influenced by his views, Bernal agrees with Diop that a significant proportion of Greek religion, political philosophy, architecture, science, and even language was imported from Phoenicia and Egypt. For example, Bernal suggests that Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and patron goddess of Athens, was a transplanted version of Neith, a goddess from the Nile Delta. Bernal’s work provoked a storm of controversy. Critics accuse Bernal of misreading and selectively using Greek myths and historical accounts. They suggest that the Greeks credited Egypt with these accomplishments because they wanted to legitimize their own position by connecting with the older and much respected Egyptian culture. Furthermore, as most historians are aware, Herodotus was entertaining but often exaggerated or relied on unreliable hearsay, and so is not always a convincing source. Reliance on Herodotus, critics charge, led Bernal to unsubstantiated links, such as one tracing the origins of Greek philosophy to Egyptian literature on wisdom, despite many differences. In one of the stronger critiques, Mary Lefkowitz links Bernal to radical Afrocentrism (an approach he criticizes), deploring his scholarship for disputing that the Greeks invented democracy, philosophy, and science. In this debate, few classicists disagree that the Greeks admired the Egyptians and traded with them extensively. Some leading Greek thinkers, including Herodotus, Solon, Plato, Thales, and Euclid, visited or studied in Egypt. But, like Lefkowitz, many classicists believe that Bernal greatly over-states Afro-Asian influence, underestimates Greek genius, and misuses linguistic and archaeological evidence. At the same time, however, some other scholars defend Bernal or praise him for the multidisciplinary breadth of his argument, bringing out biases in classical scholarship, his inclusiveness, and stimulating and opening new vistas for needed debate. But, while they may applaud his aims, most find his methods and results disappointing. Some, including the Africanist Basil Davidson and the classicist Jacques Berlinblau, take a middle view on Bernal’s work. And the controversy has also inspired more studies placing Egypt and Africa in a larger regional or world contexts, such as those by Schofield and Davies, Ehret, and Gilbert and Reynolds.The debate between Afrocentrists and Eurocentrists may have recently calmed down but it has not ended. Yet, it also opened up new ways of thinking about the classical Mediterranean world through a more multicultural lens emphasizing interconnectedness. British Classicist Tim Whitmarsh argues that the classical Mediterranean world should not be viewed in strictly European or Greco-Roman terms but as part of a larger “Middle Eastern” Iraqi–Syrian–Palestinian–Egyptian complex in which Greeks borrowed various influences from the east and south, especially before the fifth century BCE. He points to such things as statuary and temple-building from Egypt and the relationship of Homer’s Iliad to the much earlier Mesopotamian Gilgamesh. German scholar Johannes Haubold, noting the Middle Eastern influences on Homer’s writings, posits the process as less a one-way importation than an “intertwining” of cultures. In their view, emphasizing the “uniqueness” of the Greeks is mislead-ing since they were part of a series of networked cultures in a multivoiced conversation. Italian scholar Barbara Graziosi sees this as finding different pasts, a multicultural one in which Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians lived alongside each other, and cultures were mixed rather than pure.But multiculturalist views have been challenged by more conservative scholars like Bruce Thornton, who consider them an attempt to denigrate the Greeks’ achievements. As British scholar Greg Woolf points out, it is easy to take the notion of happy multiculturalism in this era too far since there were cultural conflicts and limits to transferability, but also, he agrees, deliberate moments of hybridization, the blending of cultural influences. In the end, the debate breaks away from the longtime isolation of the classics field and the study of antiquity and a bipolar conflict between Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism.

Evaluating the debate

In modern times the Greeks and Romans have been tugged back and forth between opposing camps with different views of history and culture as part of ongoing “culture wars” and conflict over school curriculums. All sides of the debate have been accused of having a political agenda: to influence how the histories of Europe and Africa are taught in North American and European schools. Hence, the controversy illustrates the danger of what historians call “present-mindedness,” the tendency to interpret the past largely in light of present social and political concerns. While we can never entirely escape this tendency, we can try to see the people of the past as they saw themselves. This means not using their experiences as ammunition in current social and political debates. Since the issues of how much Egypt contributed to Greece, how much it reflected or stimulated sub-Saharan African cultures, and whether a broader multicultural approach better addresses a complex history are legitimate subjects for historical investigation, the debates will continue.

Exploring the Controversy

Critical assessments of Eurocentric history include Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, 2nd ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010); James Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians (New York: Guilford Press, 2000); John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 199); and Vassillis Lambropoulos, The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of an Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Afrocentric history was pioneered by Cheikh Anta Diop in Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology (Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill, 1991) and The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (New York: Lawrence Hill, 1974). A more radical approach can be found in Molefe Asante’s Afrocentricity (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988) and The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). The most significant scholarly challenge to the views of mainstream classicists can be found in Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 3 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987, 1991, 2001). Bernal responds to his critics in Black Athena Writes Back (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). The major rebuttals to Bernal and Afrocentrism include Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mystical Pasts and Imagined Homes(London: Verso, 1998); Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean, eds., Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and its Opponents(New York: Free Press, 1998); and Victor Hanson, Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, with John Heath (New York: Encounter Books, 1998).For thoughtful discussions of the Afrocentrist controversy, see Basil Davidson, The Search for Africa: History, Culture, Politics (New York: Times Books, 1994); and Jacques Berlinblau, Heresy in the University: The “Black Athena” Controversy and the Responsibility of American Intellectuals(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999). Useful studies of Egypt and Africa in world history include Louise Schofield and W. Vivian Davies, eds., Egypt, the Aegean, and the Levant: Interconnections in the Second Millennium(London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1995); Christopher Ehret, An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998); and Erik Gilbert and Jonathan T. Reynolds, Africa in World History: From Prehistory to the Present, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2011). On the multicultural approach to the classical world, see Tim Whitmarsh and Stuart Thomson, eds., The Romance Between Greece and the East (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Johannes Haubold, Greece, and Mesopotamia: Dialogues in Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Greg Woolf, “Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Culture, Identity, and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 40 (January 1994), 116–143; and Barbara Graziosi, Homer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). For a conservative critique of multiculturalism, see Bruce Thornton, Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization(New York: Encounter Books, 2002).