"A fascinating and important debate. As a lay reader I find both the scholarly arguments and the human differences very gripping. Bernal tells the story of the process of academic diffusion very vividly and gives us the kind of background we don't usually discover." - Margaret Drabble "Bernal's material is fascinating, his mind sharp and his analyses often convincing." - Richard Jenkins, The Times Higher Education Supplement "Black Athena must be the most discussed book on the ancient history of the eastern Mediterranean world since the Bible... [It] enjoys such continued attention because it raises important scholarly questions, and because it makes a difficult subject available to a large audience." - Mario Liverani, in Black Athena Revisited "Few books published about the ancient world since World War II have provoked as much interest both inside and outside the discipline of classics as has Black Athena."-Guy MacLean Rogers, in Black Athena Revisited " Fourteen years ago, a tiny London publisher brought out a 600-page academic study of Ancient Greece... within months Black Athena had become--as one historian said--probably the most hotly debated book about the ancient Mediteranean since the Bible. That first volume was soon reissued by Random House as a mass-market paperback. Broadsheet editors pontificated in a dozen countries about Bernal's claims. TV documentaries were made, and symposia convened. A whole cottage industry of attacks and couter-attacks developed around Bernal's work. Black Athena Writes Back, his new collection of replies to his critics, is just the latest instalment in an unending saga."--The Independent, 29 December 2001 " ... I follow with continuing fascination the astonishing academic debate on deep history in Martin Bernal's Black Athena Writes Back--one of the strangest intellectual confrontations of our time."--Margaret Drabble, The Independent, 1 December 2001
