The Thought Police (more Bernal)

So, while putting together the previous post (which took a while, since I decided to re-read Bernal's CADMEAN LETTERS first), I came across an impassioned denunciation of myself for having at one point cited Bernal:

http://mildred-of-midgard.dreamwidth.org/209807.html

--The "volume of Tolkien scholarship" to which she refers, by the way, is not THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT (although I do indeed refer to Bernal at one point in there*) but the Blackwelder festschrift. In one of my endnotes to my essay therein ("'And All the Days of Her Life Are Forgotten'," Nt 52 p. 96) I mention in passing that Bernal's book contains a good description of the relationship between IndoEuropean and AfroAsiatic. Since reading "Midgard's" indignant denunciation, I've gone back and re-read those seven pages by Bernal, and I can't see what she was objecting to: it's a straightforward, clear account of these two major language families, with particular focus on the individual languages from both groups that came into close proximity.

I admit I'm a bit taken back by the declaration that I'm not "allowed" to cite scholars of whose work the poster disapproves. Especially when the person making the objection seems not to have actually read the work she is denouncing.

My favorite part? Finding myself criticized essentially for making one of my footnotes was too short. The note in question is attached to a paragraph in which I discuss the quest to recover lost languages, such as Gothic and IndoEuropean (or more properly IndoHittite), and included mention of this project taken to its logical extreme in the work of some scholars to try to find ever more remote ancestral languages (like 'Nostratic'), with the ultimate goal of recovering a few words of "Proto World", the original human language. Personally, I think this is a fascinating concept but a vain effort, and cite McWhorter to that effect.

Barfield, by the way, was v. skeptical about IndoEuropean for much the same reasons as McWhorter about ProtoWorld -- not the methodology the philologists had used, but doubt that that the resultant collection of roots actually bore much resemblance to the living language that had once existed; he thought they tended to treat their hypotheses as having a real existence rather than a speculative one. Whereas a living language is full of quirks and anomalies deriving from happenstance, unrecoverable by any methodology.

Anyway, it takes a good deal out of the sting of an online attack to come across it three or four months after it's been posted; harder to get worked up over, in the circumstances. Though I hope that 'Midgard' didn't just stop at BLACK ATHENA REVISITED (a collection of attacks on Bernal) but presses onward to read BLACK ATHENA WRITES BACK, his rejoinders, as well.


--John R.
current reading: AMARNA AND ITS PEOPLE (Kemp), HERESY IN THE UNIVERSITY (Berlinerblau)

*H.o.H. vol. II p. 193, where I mention in passing Bernal's support for Plato's claim that the Atlantis myth has an Egyptian origin.

Egypt

So, today I finally finished a forty-eight part lecture series, on two dozen cds, in four slipcases, courtesy of an extended loan from Jeff Grubb. It's one of the offerings from The Teaching Company, and a nice follow-up to the last one of theirs I borrowed, a joint history of Greece and Rome. I'd thought the lecturer of that series 'hearted' Greeks & Romans, but it was as nothing to Professor Bob Brier's enthusiasm for All Things Egyptian (ancient that is -- he covers the three thousand years from prehistory up to Cleopatra but ignores the last two milennia).  If you're interested in ancient Egypt but don't have an expert's knowledge, listening to this series is a good way to get sorted out who's who and what happened when, though I question Brier's judgment on some points (for example, his claim that Elizabeth Taylor's movie CLEOPATRA is extremely faithful to history). His enthusiasm is such that he ends by recommending mummy movies, mummy novels, tourist spots, societies you can join, and magazines to subscribe to to learn more.

My main take-away from this, oddly enough, is the fact that our word chemistry derives from Egypt: chemistry > alchemy > al-KMT, 'the Egyptian art'. That is, the best way the Greeks (and later Arabs) had for describing what we think of as chemistry was as that-thing-Egyptians-do. 

 

This is all the more interesting, because I just went back and re-read the chapters in BLACK ATHENA REVISITED (anti-Bernal) and BLACK ATHENA WRITES BACK (pro-Bernal) about Science. In the first book, Robert Palter tries to demolish the idea that the ancient Egyptians knew much about science, math (aside from some geometry), or astronomy -- certainly, he argues, far less than the Babylonians and incomparably less than the Greeks. Bernal counters that this was certainly not the Greek's opinion, and produces his own evidence of Egyptian achievement. 

Out of all this, the things that impressed me the most was the discovery that (1) our 12 month calendar of 365 days was an Egyptian innovation and (2) the Egyptians had a sign for "zero" (nfr, meaning 'beautiful') -- not a place-holder like our zero, but a tally-up-together sign signifying satisfaction when all the numbers in a column balanced and came out right (it was also used in architecture to mark a leveled surface). It was also rather nice to learn that Imhotep, who designed the world's first stone building, was incidentally the inventor of blueprints, which makes sense.

I was also struck by what seemed to be an impossibly high standard of evidence on Palter's part. For example, in one case, we have a statement by Aristotle that both the Mesopotamians and Egyptians compiled astronomical records of conjuctions. By great good luck, some of the Mesopotamian records (on baked clay tablets) actually survive. Rather than conclude that this shows Aristotle knew what he was talking about, Palter concludes that it shows the Egyptians never had any such records, since no astronomical papyri survive.

That in the end is what the whole argument comes down to: what do you do in situations where absolute proof is not possible? Rule out anything you can't document beyond a doubt? Construct a plausible scenario that fits the known facts but extrapolates beyond them? Establish a grey area which takes into account second-hand evidence? Here's Bernal's take on the matter:

"I contend that the demand for [absolute] proof is inappropriate in academic debate on such distant periods*. . . I believe that all that is required . . . is . . . not proof  but competitive plausibility".

In any case, I find myself hankering for a visit to a good museum's Ancient Egypt section.

--John R.

*[say, Minoan borrowings from Egyptian religion circa 1400 BC]