Black Athena & The Odyssey: An Informal Review

Oh my God. That’s her. How about a double feature, baby?

Black Athena

It’s hard to explain to people how fucked the field of Classics is. There’s a guy who almost exclusively writes articles about how the Metamorphoses does not depict rape on the part of the gods and is actually about art and how it captures its object (uhh). There’s an article from I think 2015 which goes back and forth about whether we should see Greece/Rome as exceptional or not, because they obviously are (mhm), but it’s not woke to say that; and it’s written by a guy who argued that the Greek alphabet was invented (i.e., modified from Phoenician) specifically to record Homer’s poems. I was grateful to have had professors in college who weren’t freaks and saw that corner of the ancient world not as exceptional but as prototypical, and not because our “civilization” originates from them, but because they dealt with the same problems and questions as us—as did other people throughout the world at different points of time. I had an archaeology professor who at the time was researching Pausanias, a sort of second-century Rick Steves, and in our seminar about the strained relationship between archaeology and history he mentioned a book called Black Athena and said (as if it were a hot take) that it gets more right than wrong.

That’s a hot take because, within the field of Classics, Black Athena is looked down upon. It was written by Martin Bernal, who taught Near Eastern Studies but whose research was mainly in modern Chinese history. Funnily enough, his doctoral thesis was titled Chinese Socialism to 1913—and I could tell from his nonstop Maoist dog-whistles in Black Athena what sort of freak he was (and so am I). Anyway, Bernal argues that Hyksos-period Egypt had colonized Greece: that the Greek language is basically an Indo-European pidgin with Egyptian and Semitic vocabulary; that Greek myth is a local adaptation of Egyptian myth with an Indo-European sky god slapped on top; that Greek history, up to the point where they start getting self-conscious about Hellenistic identity, credited Egyptian and Semitic peoples with the establishment of their culture and of cities like Athens and Thebes; and that their material culture strongly resembled that of Egyptian and Semitic culture. Bernal emphasizes that he is not arguing for zero Indo-European influence, or that the people we (unfortunately) identify as Aryan did not invade and take over the region. It’s just that the Greek culture we receive is best understood as a melting pot, and that the material vector of Egyptian and Semitic influence was not mere proximity but conquest and colonization. Personally, I think one would be hard-pressed to interpret this framework as prejudiced against Indo-Europeans unless they also believed that conquest and colonization is a sign of intrinsic cultural or racial superiority.

Which is the precise reason why the Aryan isolationist framework developed. Bernal in Volume I spends most of the time outlining the development of perspectives on Greece, Egypt, and the Levant hand-in-hand with the development of racial ideology in the West. Early discourse centered on whether the Egyptians were white, because early classicists thought it was problematic that a civilization on Africa should be such a significant force; so, for a while, the Egyptians were whitewashed by groups like the Freemasons and seen as originators of advanced civilization. But then they kept finding archaeological evidence of Egyptians not being white and were like, never mind, it was actually the Semitic people who not only tamed Egypt but originated Greek civilization (the idea is that history is just Semitic and Indo-European people carrying everyone else). But then, you had antisemitic trends in the twentieth centuries because of literal Nazis, so the story became that Greek culture was actually the purest remnant of the Aryans who conquered so much of Eurasia, and they only attributed so much to Egyptian and Semitic people because they were self-embarrassed for some reason. Did you know that that was the charge against Herodotos specifically, not only from modern classicists but also even from Plutarch? Literally, for all of Herodotos’ random bullshit, what they all considered most egregious was what he says was well-accepted (and even assumed) in his own time and even as late into antiquity as Pausanias: that Egyptian and Semitic peoples had at some point in the Bronze Age colonized Greece and imprinted their culture on generations to come.

The field of Classics has since internalized some of Bernal’s critiques and even some of his conclusions, and Black Athena was written over such a long period of time that Bernal even discusses these institutional developments in the introductions to Volumes II and III. Semitic influence has especially become well-accepted, due at least to Phoenician contact (since Egyptian influence remains less accepted). These concessions are often narrated as if Bernal were right for the wrong reasons, however, because of his maximalist approach towards evidence especially in Volume II—that is to say, instead of looking for direct proof of specific claims, he looks at (I probably misremember the exact phrasing) convergences of probability wherein coincidences are less likely to be coincidences the more they tend to coincide with each other. This is especially true of his linguistic analysis. The problem is that it’s hard to treat instances where he is correct as coincidences when they keep lining up with each other and with more specific evidence. That’s not to say I totally buy all of it, but in as vibes-based a field as Classics is, it’s telling that only works such as Black Athena are criticized for lack of rigor. Remove the plank from your own eye first, babies, and then you can see clearly to remove specks from others’ eyes.

The Odyssey (2026)

I was prepared to write a review of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey along the lines of Farya Faraji’s YouTube video about the film’s pre-release discourse, with right-wing freaks complaining about Nolan woke-ifying the story by casting non-white people (especially Zendaya as Athena and Lupita Nyong’o as Helen/Clytemnestra), and left-wing freaks saying that it’s just a fantasy myth and Nolan has no obligation to treat historically accurate a story which didn’t happen; meanwhile, actual Greeks lose out on the chance to see their culture truly represented when this work of Southwest Asian literature is treated across the board as the seminal work of a “civilization” which refuses to acknowledge its original non-whiteness (not with respect to its hypothetical author’s skin color, but to the cultural context in which the work was composed and which had been long since denied in the service of white racialist ideology). Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey may envision a Western tradition inclusive of the subaltern, but it does not envision an Odyssey beyond that apparent Western tradition. It’s not interested in the people by and for whom it was originally composed.

And that’s generally true. The movie is just weirder than that. I wasn’t bothered the same way a lot of people apparently were that its language was more contemporary and casual than doing what Sarah Ruden has called in her commentaries “Anglo-Saxonese” (basically a dialect of English which exists solely in literature and film to seem grand and antiquated, but registers as hopelessly contrived to anyone who isn’t a sucker), but I realized not long into the movie how many British actors were doing American accents. I put a pin in it and my catch was seemingly rewarded: by the end of the movie, I was pretty sure that its aim was to comment on American foreign policy, and perhaps specifically on the Iraq War and its implications on the world order since it had took place. Odysseus is portrayed as he is often framed, as a war veteran wrecked with guilt not only over his survivorship but even the shameful decisions he made in war—in his case, constructing a giant wooden horse as an apparent peace offering to sneak his soldiers inside Troy’s walls and (as the film would depict it) commit genocide against them. It’s revealed that the woman whom Odysseus kept imagining as Athena—basically, Zendaya silently judging him with her Zendaya face—was actually a priestess of Athena whom the Greeks had slaughtered in front of Odysseus and made him realize he was no hero. Throughout the movie, characters express paranoia about the Sea Peoples (historical seafaring warriors who were central to the Bronze Age collapse) coming to invade Ithaca while its king Odysseus was absent, but then Penelope realizes from Odysseus’ recounting of his story that the Greek veterans of the Trojan War were in fact were the Sea Peoples all along (and this is true!). Odysseus’ long voyage was not because of some gods’ anger but because he personally couldn’t bear to return home to the destruction of the world order, “of palaces and trade” and Xenia (here “Zeus’ Law”), which he himself had started.

That’s why I can’t help but feel that Nolan’s adaptation was a shockingly intentional work, even if some choices are eye-rolling. I immediately clocked and appreciated its magical-realist approach where, even though there are supernatural elements such as monsters and ghosts in play, the narrative itself is grounded in people’s decisions and mental states, of which the gods are mere expressions. I thought it was funny when Helen tells sweet baby boy Telemachus that her recapture from Troy was a mere pretense to sack the city and its relinquish its control of trade routes. I thought it was less funny that Calypso was recast as Odysseus’ therapist-mommy (as my partner put it, “I know! Instead of a whore, I’ll make her a madonna!”). I saw the sea peoples ‘twist’ coming a mile away from a line at the beginning of the movie where Odysseus’ first mate tells a captive old man, “We’re not sea peoples. We’re Greeks! :D From Ithaca! :D” but I still felt like the movie was actively undermining that theme up until the war crime reveal at the end. Polyphemus is totally monsterified: there’s no “No-man” bit, for which I understand Nolan’s reasoning, but he doesn’t really talk at all or demonstrate his humanity; after Odysseus attacks him, he does start to mumble and the crew interprets this as him praying to Poseidon, but it’s framed as superstitious paranoia centered on a freaky monster. Circe also turns Odysseus’ crew into pigs because of her own paranoia that they’ll hurt her, and the whole time I couldn’t believe they didn’t actually do anything because the movie in other places was willing to criticize the mythic narrative as a cover for human barbarism. I was impressed at the end that Nolan pulled through with the overall theme, but still felt like it was compromised at many points where it could have been more strongly reinforced.

Still. It’s a good adaptation of the ultimate shooting and crying story, and I think the best possible version of an Odyssey which is valued for being an archetypal story rather than a culturally specific one (not that culturally specific stories can’t also be archetypal—usually it’s specificity which brings out universality—but no one is interested in cultural specificity in this case, unfortunately). For the way in which it literalizes the work’s own subtext and its modern reception, I see a point of comparison in Emerald Fennell’s recent adaptation of Wuthering Heights (which I very much enjoyed!). I even told my partner on the phone that night that though Nolan’s Odyssey was one definitely part Iraq War metaphor, it was another part Wuthering Heights (2026) for men? I think both films deserve their flowers in precisely as much as they both also deserve criticism. And both could have also had more brown-ish people, come to think of it.

Conclusion

Again: I expected to write a different review of Nolan’s Odyssey than I did, and the vision of that made more sense to combine with a review of Black Athena because the thematic through-line would have been about the social refusal to acknowledge the non-Western roots of so-called Western civilization (or rather, that Western-ness is a modern construct imposed on cultures that don’t have much in common with their romantic reinterpretations). But now I think we have an interesting nuance in that we've seen how far an overtly universalist interpretation of a myth can take us, and what gaps it leaves behind. Nolan's Odyssey is a movie movie, and that's fine for how it develops its themes and so on, but I wish we took more of an interest in people's actual lives. I feel like I keep saying it's the specificity that brings out universality, but it's because I really believe it and want to see it: not for historical accuracy in itself, but because I think we owe it to people from the past to remember them as they were. I think they would appreciate it.