New from the University of North Carolina Press

Black Athena Revisited

• Was Western civilization founded by ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians?
• Can the ancient Egyptians usefully be called black?
• Did the ancient Greeks borrow religion, science, and philosophy from the Egyptians and Phoenicians?
• Have scholars ignored the Afroasiatic roots of Western civilization as a result of racism and anti-Semitism?

In this collection of twenty essays, leading scholars in a broad range of disciplines confront the claims made by Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. In that work, Bernal proposed a radical reinterpretati on of the roots of classical civilization, contending that ancient Greek culture derived from Egypt and Phoenicia and that European scholars have been biased against the notion of Egyptian and Phoenician influence on Western civilization. The contributors to this volume argue that Bernal's claims are exaggerated and in many cases unjustified.

Topics covered include race and physical anthropology; the question of an Egyptian invasion of Greece; the origins of Greek language, philosophy, and science; and racism and anti-Semitism in classical scholarship. In the conclusion to the volume, the edit ors propose an entirely new scholarly framework for understanding the relationship between the cultures of the ancient Near East and Greece and the origins of Western civilization.

ISBN 0-8078-2246-9, $55.00 hardcover
ISBN 0-8078-4555-8, $19.95 paperback
544 pp.
To order, call 1-800-848-6224, or download an order form to fax.

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The contributors are:

• John Baines, professor of Egyptology, University of Oxford
• Kathryn A. Bard, assistant professor of archaeology, Boston University
• C. Loring Brace, professor of anthropology and curator of biological anthropology in the Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan
• John E. Coleman, professor of classics, Cornell University
• Edith Hall, lecturer in classics, University of Reading, England
• Jay H. Jasanoff, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Linguistics, Cornell University
• Richard Jenkyns, fellow and tutor, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and university lecturer in classics, University of Oxford
• Mary R. Lefkowitz, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Wellesley College
• Mario Liverani, professor of ancient near eastern history, Universita di Roma, "La Sapienza"
• Sarah P. Morris, professor of classics, University of California at Los Angeles
• Robert E. Norton, associate professor of German, Vassar College
• Alan Nussbaum, associate professor of classics, Cornell University
• David O'Connor, professor of Egyptology and curator in charge of the Egyptian section of the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania
• Robert Palter, Dana Professor Emeritus of the History of Science, Trinity College, Connecticut
• Guy MacLean Rogers, associate professor of Greek and Latin and history, Wellesley College
• Frank M. Snowden, Jr., professor of classics emeritus, Howard University
• Lawrence A. Tritle, associate professor of history, Loyola Marymount University
• Emily T. Vermeule, Samuel E. Zemurray, Jr., and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor Emerita, Harvard University
• Frank J. Yurco, Egyptologist, Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago

Mary R. Lefkowitz is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College. She is author of Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (Basic Books) and coeditor of Women's Life in Greece and Rome.

Guy MacLean Rogers, associate professor of Greek and Latin and history at Wellesley College, is author of The Sacred Identity of Ephesos: Foundation Myths of a Roman City.