Rocking the Cradle of Classical Civilization : Ideas: A Cornell University professor has challenged accepted views. He contends that Western culture is derived from the Egyptians and Phoenicians, not Europeans.

One day, someone might make a movie about Martin Bernal. It would probably be a small, British-made film. It would need a screenplay that captured, with a gesture or a word, the social and intellectual climate of the United States and England at the end of the 20th Century.

But most of all, it would be a character study of an English-born scholar--son and grandson of two renowned intellectuals--who rocked the status quo and fell from grace.

What Bernal rocked was the cradle of civilization. He did it with a book, “Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.”

A 53-year-old professor of Chinese politics and history at Cornell University, Bernal states boldly the political aim of the book: “I want to lessen European arrogance.”

He asserts that Greece was colonized by the Egyptians and Phoenicians, and that its culture was derived from those two societies. In other words, people who resemble modern Ethiopians, African Americans, Jews and other Semites--not Europeans--provided the basis of Western civilization.

Bernal’s big burn to orthodoxy, the first volume in a four-part series, is among books at the center of an acrimonious national debate over the alleged “Euro-centric” bias of Western civilization courses at American universities. On the Stanford University campus in 1988, it helped fuel demands for a revision of the Western civilization curriculum, which caused an outcry from the political right.

Volume 1 of “Black Athena,” subtitled “The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985,” focuses on European intellectual history and how views of progress, romanticism, racialism and imperialism distorted Western scholarship in general and notions of the origins of Greek civilization in particular.

“Black Athena” was conceived in the late 1970s, when Bernal was in the grip of a midlife crisis.

“I was in my 40s, that’s one reason, and I had been unmarried for six years. I realized I had to settle down again,” he said. Besides remarrying, he began to explore his far-flung Jewish roots and studied Hebrew--that began his dramatic shift from Chinese studies to Greek antiquity.

It took Bernal nearly 10 years to finish “Black Athena,” and it appeared at a time when “highly visible politicians and hack academics tout the uniqueness of the West . . . and William J. Bennett (the former U.S. secretary of education and drug czar) argues that we should get back to basics by requiring students to read the classics of Western civilization rather than think critically about what they mean,” said Thomas C. Patterson, a professor of anthropology at Temple University, writing in the Monthly Review in 1988.

A timely text, perhaps, but “Black Athena” was ignored--deliberately, Bernal charges--by most of the mainstream American press when it was published in 1987. Bernal says he believes that the media, which are “tied into the university Establishment, . . . disliked the challenge to academic orthodoxy.”

Even so, the book has sold more than 20,000 copies--an enviable sales record for any kind of book, especially a scholarly one. And three years after publication, it won the 1990 American Book Award.

“It is one of our best sellers,” says Leslie Mitchner, executive editor of Rutgers University Press, publisher of the paperback edition.

It also is a big seller in African-American bookstores across the country. And the Christian Science Monitor tagged it the next “far-in” book among college students.

But it is far out to many political conservatives. “I have enraged many right-wingers,” Bernal acknowledges calmly, because he has given ammunition to those who charge that Western scholarship is riddled with racist distortions. “They think I am selling guns to the Indians.” No, he revises, “ giving guns to the Indians.”

And he is expanding his munitions depot: He is at work on a popular version of the book, now the object of a bidding war among publishers.

A British film company, Bandung File, has produced a one-hour television documentary on “Black Athena,” to be broadcast later this year. Bernal believes the show has “some inaccuracies” and gives an unbalanced view. “They didn’t film any of my supporters,” he says. “They wanted to make it look as if I was alone, fighting the Establishment,” when in fact many dissident scholars advocate his position.

Still, his daughter, Sophie, says “he feels that bad publicity is better than no publicity at all.”

In a telephone conversation from his his home near the Cornell campus in Ithaca, N.Y., Bernal explains the tardy recognition by saying that “people just didn’t know about the book for a long time.” His calm, even tone edges to a higher pitch: “Many who did just thought it was from the lunatic fringe.”

But “Black Athena” presents views that the ancient Greeks themselves held, says the lanky Bernal, a soap opera devotee, expert on early English folk tunes and a high-voltage dancer.

The “ancient model” was repudiated only in the early 19th Century. The “explosion” of racism in the 1820s and 1830s led to the denial of any significant connection between Egypt and Greece, Bernal says.

As European anti-Semitism rose in the 1880s and 1890s, he explains, the old model was replaced by an “Aryan” one that dismissed the Phoenician contribution.

Classical Greece, according to the Aryan model, was the product of indigenous, pre-Hellenic people and, later, the culture of Indo-European invaders from the north.

Bernal’s book offers what he calls a “revised” ancient model. It allows for the European “basis” of Greek language but maintains that “higher civilization” was introduced by Egyptians and Phoenicians who also colonized Greece.

The first volume of “Black Athena” points to the findings of a 20th-Century Greek archeologist, T. Spyropoulos, to support claims of Egyptian colonizers. But most of the archeological evidence will be presented in the next volume, scheduled to be published in July.

Long before Bernal, many African and African-American scholars claimed Egypt was a major contributor to Greek--and hence, Western--civilization. They were largely dismissed by the academic Establishment.

Bernal has been harder to ignore.

He is a former Fellow of King’s College at Cambridge University, an expert in Chinese history and politics, the son of John Desmond Bernal--the historian of science, wartime adviser to Mountbatten, utopian physicist--and grandson of Alan Henderson Gardiner, considered the grand old man of 20th-Century Egyptology. He is an insider.

To many classical scholars, however, he and “Black Athena” remain heretical.

“When the book came out in England, half of the traditional academic scholars in Cambridge had a very hard time accepting it,” says Sophie Bernal, the author’s 27-year-old daughter, a film editor who lives in London. “They still don’t accept it.”

“There is no question that the early Greeks were impressed with Egypt and that Egyptian influence on Greece was strong,” says James Muhly, professor of ancient history at the University of Pennsylvania. “But to consider Greece a cultural derivative of Egypt” would be a distortion, he adds.

“I know of no archeologist working in the Aegean who would accept the argument” that the Egyptians or Phoenicians colonized Greece, says Muhly, who proved to be one of Bernal’s harshest critics during a Temple University conference on “Black Athena” last year.

Further, Muhly argues, to call the Egyptians who influenced Greece black--as the title “Black Athena” suggests--is another distortion. Egypt was a multiracial society, he says.

“The difficulty comes in what you mean by black,” Bernal says. “If you mean some (stereotypical) West African type, then the Egyptian was not black. If you mean dark or dark brown with a considerable proportion of Negroid characteristics, the southern Egyptians were black.”

But Muhly and Bernal agree that Egyptians resembled contemporary Ethiopians and African Americans, both genetically mixed groups.

For now, claims that Egypt and Phoenicia were the primary contributors to language and culture rest on Bernal’s linguistic evidence.

An amateur philologist who speaks Greek, Coptic, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, French and German, among other languages, Bernal made the connection between Greek and Hebrew when he studied the latter in the 1970s.

Phoenician and Hebrew were dialects of the same language, he realized. After examining ancient etymologies, he decided that about “20% of the Greek vocabulary seemed to me” to be Phoenician.

It took him five years to make the Egyptian connection. When he looked at an etymological dictionary of Coptic, “which is the latest form of Egyptian, I suddenly got a sense of what late Egyptian sounded like. And late Egyptian is contemporary with very early Greek.” He found that about 20% of the Greek language derived from Egyptian.

Bernal now believes that about 40% of Greek came from Phoenicia and Egypt, about 50% from Europe and 10% from unknown sources.

Although an expert in Chinese studies, Bernal knows he lacks credibility in the eyes of many scholars of Greek antiquity.

“Outsiders can never have the control of detail gained so slowly and painfully by experts,” he acknowledges in “Black Athena.”

On the other hand, “I can see things that specialists can’t.” If he’d been “properly” trained, he says, “I would have never had these ideas, because training is precisely to fit you into the (model) within which the discipline is working. You’re gradually introduced to the new field as a mystery, and by the time you have reached its center, you are thoroughly inculcated with its way of looking at things.”

But he admits that his role of exotic interloper causes him anxiety.

Throughout most of his academic career, “I’ve taken my grandfather, who was a very sound, cautious scholar, as my model,” Bernal says. “With the taking up of the new subject, I find myself very much more like my father in breadth and shallowness.” His father, he adds, was a “polymath. He was broad; he took leaps.”

“Black Athena” is dedicated to J. D. Bernal, a man “who taught me that things fit together, interestingly,” writes the son.

Sophie Bernal says she is not sure what the father-son relationship was like: “My father went to boarding school when he was 4 years old.” And his parents had separated when he was young, says Sophie, the oldest of Bernal’s five children.

“I just know that my grandfather knew a lot about basically everything. My dad knows so much about so many incredible things too--like soap operas on television . . . and playing Trivial Pursuit with him is amazing. . . . He can relate to so many kinds of people.”

When she was growing up, she recalled, “he would quiz me. He’d asked what I was doing in history or something, then he’d give me his view, which wasn’t always what my teacher wanted.”

Although her parents divorced when she was 7, Sophie Bernal says she has remained close to her father. She pauses a moment. “I’m close to him in a way, but he’s fairly distant as well. He always seems to be thinking about something else--probably what he’s working on.”

Her father knows that the denouement of any film about him will depend on the evidence he provides in future volumes of “Black Athena.”

“People are waiting for the later volumes, which provide the archeological and (more) linguistic evidence. I have a lot more archeological evidence than I thought I’d have,” he says.

But so far, no one disputes his critique of several centuries of Western scholarship.

“Every classical scholar should read the book and learn about the historical development of his discipline,” Muhly says. That racism and anti-Semitism have been factors in the writing of Western history is not something “we should be proud of, but we cannot deny it,” he notes.

Says Bernal: “If I am right in urging the overthrow of the Aryan model and its replacement with the revised ancient one, it will be necessary not only to rethink the fundamental bases of ‘Western civilization’ but also to recognize the penetration of racism and (European) chauvinism into all our . . . philosophy of writing history.”