African Athena Controversy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

African Athena Controversy - Essay Example In his first volume, â€Å"The Fabrication of Ancient Greece†, the author has attacked the nineteenth century notion that Greeks were basically Aryans from the North and he proposes to dissolve his ideas from the Aryan Model to Ancient Model and stated that the religion of the Greeks were derived from the East with Egypt in particular. The controversy is that the western ideological thinkers have criticized Bernal’s views of the Greek’s influence (p.1). Bernal argues that the widely influential books like Flaubert’s Salambà ´ (1862) suggested that the African cultures were pugnacious and uncivilized than that of the Greeks or the Romans. Bernal describes that Flaubert had originally meant to elucidate a historical novel about Egypt but later on fixed on ancient Carthage as his subject because the Egyptians were not sufficiently degenerated for his purposes. Bernal describes the authors’ work as a typical reflection of the western hypocrisy. â€Å" Flaubert implied that Europeans-with the possible exception of the English-were incapable of such things. In fact, the Romans outdid the Carthaginians in virtually every luxury and outrage while the Macedonians [i.e., Greeks] were not far behind† (p. 2). The paper focuses on the influence of the Greeks and the Phoenicians on the Greek society on the lines of Bernal’s elucidation in his â€Å"Black Athena† but at the same time criticizes his views and highlights the area of loopholes of his findings. From the initial findings of the book Black Athena project, Bernal saw the competition between the Aryan and the revised models in terms of competitive plausibility from the documents of the Late Bronze Age in terms of archaeology, language, culture and religious rituals and historical analogy and topology (p.3). In terms of the archaeology and documents the evidence hardly points out to the Revised Ancient Model but in terms of cult and language the evidence supports the very dominance of the