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No. I'll stick with Eric Cline, who is a little too pro-Israel for my taste---but close enough. His work on the Mycenaean period was pretty stellar. It really did expand the depth of Egyptian cultural penetration into the Mediterranean beyond what I was taught and what is commonly presented in most Western Civ classes.
The protracted Afrocentrism debates brought in another controversy that really threatened to derail the show when Jewish and Christian biblical scholars started in on whether or not Moses could be traced to the Ramses II. That wing of the argument morphed off into the ANE list (ancient near east), where yet another debate issued as to how much influence flowed from Mesopotamia through Syria-Palestine or the Levant back to Egypt. The African scholars stirred up a whole new hornets nest when they started in on the importance of the Nubians and Ethiopians on the Old Kingdom Egyptians who claimed they were conquered in the unification---about I don't know 3200 bce. Let's see that's about five thousand two hundred years ago. I love the depth of time--Mann called it the Well.
Meanwhile the Afrocentrism mainline against the hard core Classicists moved to the old Classics list where it turned into the Herodotus footnote society.
It was a wild intellectual ride with teeth, claws, and blood everywhere. In some ways it was hilarious that everybody wanted to be first under the civilization tree---when it was obvious that everybody started under the same Acacia in the blistering African savanna.
In relation to the review posted above, I'll just select this:
``It has been Bernal's merit[4] to make us aware of the immense historical and political significance of one such historiographic paradigm, whose demolition has been the purpose of his Black Athena project:
(a) Greek classical culture was essentially independent from any inputs
from the Ancient Near East (Anatolia, Phoenicia, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia... ''
Eric Cline answered this question in the negative---Greece was an amalgam of sources like everybody else---with an exhaustive empirical analysis of the undersea excavations. There is no debate.
Cline has since moved on to other controversial locations including Troy, Jerusalem, Jericho, and Megiddo.
Under all these controversies is an anthropological, archaeological theoretical debate on how cultural centers and periphery interact in their asymmetries of power (something like the Machian principle, or imperialism and blow-back).
It's apparent to me as euro-trash, we are living within such a world, and always have. We are experiencing the push-pull of numerous and diverse influences in the world on our own cultural ideals (which were none too solid to begin with)---and experiencing our own relative and reciprocal reactions (hard core imperialist neocon and neoliberal dogma). In turn our domination has produced a hardening of insecurity and reaction almost everywhere, but especially in the Arab and Muslim world.
Here is a sketch of a more general discussion from,
http://weber.ucsd.edu/Depts/Anthro/classes/tlevy/Tillah/project.html:
While studies which focus on the adaptive success of these formative social formations have been extremely useful for identifying local processes of change, they have tended to pigeon-hole social formations into one social evolutionary category or another without explaining how change occurs (Yoffee 1993). In the search for broad evolutionary models, these studies have failed to identify the rich diversity of social formations which make up the tapestry of ancient societies in world history. In terms of world archaeology, this problem is thrown into relief when social transformations occur along the interface between the prehistoric and historic periods. This is when asymmetric interactions between different socio-economic organizations become markedly clear in the archaeological record.
An essential framework for examining asymmetric social interaction is the study of center-periphery relations. Center-periphery studies are rooted in geographical studies of human spatial organization as early as von Thuenen (1826) and are commonly represented in the diffusionist and hyper-diffusionist studies of the early part of this century when all culture change throughout the world was thought to come from Egypt (Smith 1923) or the other centers of ancient Near Eastern civilization (Childe 1934). In the 1980s, archaeologists reconstituted center-periphery studies by concentrating on changes in power relationships between social formations of distinct unequal levels of organization (Cherry 1987; Renfrew and Cherry 1986; Champion 1989). The central issue in secondary state formation are the of dynamics of core-periphery relations and how core civilizations influence culture change in their less developed neighbors. This issue has been recently highlighted through the application and debate surrounding E. Wallersteinës (1974) world systems model which examines the economic asymmetries of these ties and is discussed below.. . This has led to alternative models, based on the notion of distance-parity which assumes that the Tyranny of Distance works toward symmetrical relations of power between center and periphery (cf. Bairoch 1988:11; Stein 1993).
CG