Black Athena : : The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilation Volume III: The Linguistic Evidence / / Martin Bernal.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2020 English
• VerfasserIn: Bernal, Martin,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (1066 p.)

What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the most audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the foundation of our thinking about this question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic cultures. But these Afroasiatic influences have been systematically ignored, denied or suppressed since the eighteenth century—chiefly for racist reasons. The popular view is that Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers—Aryans—from the North. But the Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this “Aryan model.” They did not see their institutions as original, but as derived from the East and from Egypt in particular. This long-awaited third and final volume of the series is concerned with the linguistic evidence that contradicts the Aryan Model of ancient Greece. Bernal shows how nearly 40 percent of the Greek vocabulary has been plausibly derived from two Afroasiatic languages – Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic. He also reveals how these derivations are not limited to matters of trade, but extended to the sophisticated language of politics, religion, and philosophy. This evidence, according to Bernal, greatly strengthens the hypothesis that in Greece an Indo-European-speaking population was culturally dominated by Ancient Egyptian and West Semitic speakers. Provocative, passionate, and colossal in scope, this volume caps a thoughtful rewriting of history that has been stirring academic and political controversy since the publication of the first volume.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface and Acknowledgements -- Transcriptions and Phonetics -- Maps and Charts -- Chronological Tables -- Introduction -- 1 Historical Linguistics and the Image of Ancient Greek -- 2 The “Nostratic” and “Euroasiatic” Hyper-and Super-Families -- 3 Afroasiatic, Egyptian and Semitic -- 4 The Origins of Indo-Hittite and Indo-European and Their Contacts with Other Languages -- 5 The Greek Language in the Mediterranean Context: Part 1, Phonology -- 6 The Greek Language in the Mediterranean Context: Part 2, Morphological and Syntactical Developments -- 7 The Greek Language in the Mediterranean Context: Part 3, Lexicon -- 8 Phonetic Developments in Egyptian, West Semitic and Greek over the Last Three Millennia BCE, as Reflected in Lexical Borrowings -- 9 Greek Borrowings from Egyptian Prefixes, Including the Definite Articles -- 10 Major Egyptian Terms in Greek: Part 1 -- 11 Major Egyptian Terms in Greek: Part 2 -- 12 Sixteen Minor Roots -- 13 Semitic Sibilants -- 14 More Semitic Loans into Greek -- 15 Some Egyptian and Semitic Semantic Clusters in Greek -- 16 Semantic Clusters: Warfare, Hunting and Shipping -- 17 Semantic Clusters: Society, Politics, Law and Abstraction -- 18 Religious Terminology -- 19 Divine Names: Gods, Mythical Creatures, Heroes -- 20 Geographical Features and Place-Names -- 21 Sparta -- 22 Athena and Athens -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Glossary -- Greek Words and Names with Proposed Afroasiatic Etymologies -- Letter Correspondences -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author