realm to the Romans.
The presence of a Thracian tribe in Anatolia was already known to Pherecydes in the second quarter of the fifth century (BNJ 3 F27, though he includes the PAPHLAGONIANS as Thracian). The legend of a Teucrian and Mysian invasion of Europe which forced the Strymonians to move and change their name, however, is an attempt to explain passages of HOMER which include Thracians as Trojan ALLIES (Asheri 1990, 153–54).
SEE ALSO: Migration; Mysia; Strymon; Teucrians; Thrace; Thynians; Weapons and Armor
REFERENCE
1 Asheri, David. 1990. “Herodotus on Thracian Society and History.” In Hérodote et les peuples non grecs, edited by Giuseppe Nenci, 131–69. Geneva: Fondation Hardt.
FURTHER READING
1 Vannicelli, Pietro, and Aldo Corcella, eds. 2017. Erodoto. Le Storie, libro VII: Serse e Leonida, 386–87. Milan: Mondadori.
BITON, see CLEOBIS AND BITON
BITUMEN (ἄσϕαλτος, ἡ)
JOHANNES ENGELS
University of Cologne and University of Bonn
Ancient Greek and Roman authors often do not precisely differentiate in their nomenclature between several bituminous substances, such as native asphalts or bitumens, petroleums, types of pitch and tar. Bitumen durum in many Latin sources corresponds to Greek asphaltos (or naphtha xeron), bitumen liquidum to Greek naphtha. Herodotus especially mentions the use of hot bitumen (asphaltos) for purposes of ENGINEERING and construction of buildings or WALLS, as well as several places in Mesopotamia and Greece where bituminous natural resources were found and exploited by local people. These substances were also widely appreciated for making ships watertight and for medical or religious purposes. For fear of uncontrollable FIRES bituminous substances were only rarely used in ancient times for heating purposes. Herodotus especially mentions (1.179.2) the famous wall around BABYLON which was made of bricks using hot bitumen for cement. This substance came from the river IS (1.179.4, Hit in modern Arabic), a tributary of the EUPHRATES. After their capture in the PERSIAN WARS during the reign of DARIUS I, the Eretrians were deported to ARDERICCA in Mesopotamia about 210 stades (about 25 miles) away from SUSA (6.119), where local people exploited asphalt, salt, and oil as natural resources. As an example of strange mirabilia, Herodotus also refers (4.195.3) to pitch drawn from the water of a pool in ZACYNTHUS.
SEE ALSO: Medicine; Ships and Sailing; thōmata
FURTHER READING
1 Engels, Johannes. 2012. “Asphalt, Naphtha, Bitumen, Peche und Teere. Vorkommen, Gewinnung und Nutzung in der griechisch‐römischen Welt.” In Die Schätze der Erde: Natürliche Ressourcen in der antiken Welt, edited by Eckart Olshausen and Vera Sauer, 103–18. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
2 Forbes, Robert J. 1936. “The Nomenclature of Bitumen, Petroleum, Tar, and Allied Products in Antiquity.” Mnemosyne ser. 3 vol. 4: 66–77.
3 Forbes, Robert J. 1955. “Bitumen and Petroleum in Antiquity.” In Studies in Ancient Technology. Vol. 1, 1–120. Leiden: Brill.
4 Nies, August. 1896. “Asphalt.” RE 2.2, 1726–29.
BLACK ATHENA
EMMA BRIDGES
Institute of Classical Studies, University of London
Black Athena is the title of a controversial work in three volumes (published 1987, 1991, and 2006) by historian Martin Bernal (1937–2013), in which the author’s stated political aim was to “lessen European cultural arrogance’”(Bernal 1987, 73) by reasserting the validity of what he called the “Ancient Model” of the origins of ancient Greek civilization.
According to Bernal’s “Ancient Model,” Greek civilization had its roots in Afroasiatic cultures and arose as a result of COLONIZATION around 1500 BCE, when Egyptians and PHOENICIANS introduced their culture to the indigenous population of what later became known as “HELLAS.” Bernal argued that this was the conventional view held by Greeks of the classical and Hellenistic periods, and that it could be seen in the writings of AESCHYLUS, Herodotus, Isocrates, and Plato, and in particular in these authors’ treatment of myths relating to MIGRATION and colonization. He contended that this model had been supplanted in classical scholarship since the late eighteenth century CE by what he called the “Aryan Model,” which he suggested was the product of racist and anti‐Semitic tendencies. This alternative model, Bernal asserted, was based on distortion of the ancient evidence by European scholars and held that Greek culture arose not from the cultures of north Africa and the Levant, but from an invasion by Indo‐European speakers from northern EUROPE who had overwhelmed the indigenous “Aegean” or “pre‐Hellenic” culture. He posited instead a “Revised Ancient Model” which accepted that there was a sound basis to the stories of Egyptian and Phoenician colonization, but which modified some details relating to CHRONOLOGY and linguistic adaptations (Bernal 1987, 2).
While Bernal employed a range of different ancient sources as evidence for his thesis (using archaeological and linguistic sources to corroborate his discussion of the ancient literary texts mentioned above), Herodotus’ Histories was a cornerstone of his argument, and also provided the inspiration for the title of his work. Referring to Herodotus’ detailed description of the goddess ATHENA’s association with LIBYA (4.188–89) and the iconographic connections between Athena and the Egyptian goddess Neith (or Nēit), Bernal asserted that Herodotus thought that the Egyptians and some Libyans were black, writing, “it is the conjunction of Nēit/Athena’s Egypto‐Libyan origins, Herodotos’ awareness of the connection, and his portrayal of the Egyptians as black, that has inspired the title of this series” (Bernal 1987, 53). The first chapter proper of Black Athena Volume I opens with Herodotus’ assertion (6.55), based on the chronicles of earlier writers, that the Egyptians came to the PELOPONNESE and made themselves kings in that part of Greece; Bernal argued (1987, 75, 98–101) that this strongly suggests that in the fifth century BCE it was generally believed that Greece had been colonized by Egyptians. He focused upon Herodotus’ suggestions that PELASGIANS formed the majority of the early population of Greece and the AEGEAN, and that most of them were assimilated by the Hellenes after the invasion of DANAUS (which Herodotus placed around the middle of the second millennium BCE).
Black Athena sparked a heated debate within the academic community, with critics of Bernal’s theory focusing on the notion that we cannot necessarily view MYTH as having a kernel of real “historical truth” and that the myths used by the Greeks themselves were constructs which evolved and differed according to the particular cultural background of the tellers of the myths (see Hall 1992, suggesting that Bernal did not consider the distinction—first drawn by Max Weber—between subjective and objective ETHNICITY, and pointing out too that he failed to take into account the fact that his sources were largely Athenocentric in their bias). In 1996 Mary Lefkowitz, in Not Out of Africa, questioned the Afrocentric interpretation of Greek history favored by Bernal and others, and sought to reassert the importance of discussing historical EVIDENCE rather than presenting historical fictions as absolute TRUTH. Lefkowitz and MacLean Rogers’ 1996 Black Athena Revisited collected a series of essays by scholars discussing key elements of Bernal’s thesis and his methodology. Many agreed that the questions which Bernal’s work raised concerning the relationship between early Greek civilization and the ancient
