Free Republic

April 26 A new Egyptian king has been discovered, according to Italian archaeologists digging at Luxor. Known to be a high-ranking priest in the theocratic state of Amon at Thebes, Harwa was also a king ruling southern Egypt during the obscure period of the so-called Black Pharaohs, the Nubian kings of the 25th Dynasty. A fat, bald man with a large face, almond-shaped eyes and thin lips, as portrayed in a statue, Harwa was born in the 8th century B.C. into a family of Theban priests. He must have been at the beginning of his career when Piankhy, the black...

Martin Bernal, whose three-volume work “Black Athena” ignited an academic debate by arguing that the African and Semitic lineage of Western civilization had been scrubbed from the record of ancient Greece by 18th- and 19th-century historians steeped in the racism of their times, died on June 9 in Cambridge, England. He was 76. The cause was complications of myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disorder, said his wife, Leslie Miller-Bernal. “Black Athena” opened a new front in the warfare over cultural diversity already raging on American campuses in the 1980s and ’90s. The first volume, published in 1987 — the same year...