12 Facts About Martin Bernal

Martin Gardiner Bernal was a British scholar of modern Chinese political history.

Martin Bernal was a Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University.

Martin Bernal is best known for his work Black Athena, a controversial work which argues that the culture, language, and political structure of Ancient Greece contained substantial influences from Egypt and Syria-Palestine.

Martin Bernal was educated at Dartington Hall School and then at King's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a degree in 1961 with first-class Honours in the Oriental Studies Tripos.

Martin Bernal carried on as a graduate student at Cambridge, and with the assistance of the Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship at University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University, finishing his PhD in Cambridge in 1965 with thesis titled Chinese Socialism to 1913 when he was elected a fellow at King's.

Related searches

In 1972 Martin Bernal moved to Cornell University in New York, United States.

Martin Bernal taught there for the rest of his career, retiring in 2001.

Martin Bernal came to the conclusion that ancient Greek accounts of Egyptian influence on their civilisation should be taken seriously.

Martin Bernal had been interested in ancient Egypt since childhood, in part inspired by his grandfather Sir Alan Gardiner.

Martin Bernal wrote the book Cadmean Letters, devoted to the origins of the Greek alphabet.

Martin Bernal devoted his next twenty years to writing the next two volumes of Black Athena, with the second volume devoted to archaeological and documentary evidence, and the third to linguistic evidence.

Martin Bernal became Professor Emeritus upon his retirement in 2001.