Expert account
Sir: Your columnist Taki, it seems, has just heard of Prof Martin Bernal's Black Athe- na, which was published in 1987. Bernal was for a long time a Fellow of King's, Cambridge, and now has a chair at Cor- nell. Taki calls him 'a noodle-brain I plan to give a knuckle sandwich to', and 'a Brit trying to pass himself off as a scholar scholar my arse'. The thesis of Black Athena is the influence of Egyptian and Phoenician culture on ancient Greece. Taki's account of it is: 'This intellectual bankrupt has just [sic] published an opus claiming that the ancient Greeks were in reality a bunch of towel-heads, and rubs it in by saying we [sic] were black to boot.'
Even by Taki's standards of loutish vulgarity, this is repellent stuff. Black Athena is a controversial work, but it is based on massive erudition in archaeology, philosophy, the ancient world, and the history of ideas. I doubt if there is a single paragraph in it which Taki is qualified to discuss, let alone to refute. He should keep to subjects which he knows about: regular readers of The Spectator will be able readily enough to enumerate them.
P. O'R. Smiley
Ampleforth, York
`I don't know what I'd do without you,
Giles.'
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