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Martin Bernal is an English Marxist (born in London) whose real specialty is China, not the Bronze Age Aegean. No reputable Minoan scholars have gone along with his African theory of Minoan origins.

Thanks for the clarification. I had never heard that Minoans came from Africa before.

[Verginius Rufus]

Bernal plays fast and loose with myths and supposed linguistic evidence. There is a story in Greek mythology of someone coming from Egypt to Greece (but I think that person had earlier ancestors in Greece) and that becomes a memory of Egyptians coming to Greece and bringing civilization with them. It's a little more sophisticated than the usual Afrocentrist theories but equally far from the evidence.

Bernal likes to accuse his opponents of racism--he constructs what he calls an "Aryan Model" of conventional views, insinuating it's somehow linked to Nazi ideas, and has no hesitation about smearing very honorable scholars with baseless allegations. It's all essentially agitprop--tearing down "bourgeois" scholarship in the name of socialism.