between Greece and Protestant Christianity which tended to exclude other influences. The idea of progress. The antiquity of Egypt and Mesopotamia had previously made those civilizations particularly worthy of respect and admiration, but the emergence of the idea of progress portrayed later civilizations as more advanced and therefore better. Earlier cultures came to be seen as based on superstition and dogmatism. Racism. The Atlantic slave trade and later European colonialism required the intellectual justification of racism. It became paramount to divorce Africans and Africa from high civilisation, and Egypt from Africa itself. Ancient Greeks would be divorced from Ancient Egypt through the concept of the Greek Miracle, and would be reclaimed as whites and Europeans. Romanticism. Romantics saw humans as essentially divided in national or ethnic groups. The German philosopher Herder encouraged Germans to be proud of their origins, their language and their national characteristics or national genius. Romantics longed for small, virtuous and "pure" communities in remote and cold places: Switzerland, North Germany and Scotland. When considering the past, their natural choice was Greece. The Philhellenic movement led to new archaeological discoveries as well as contributed to the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman empire. Most Philhellenes were Romantics and Protestants. Reception The response to Bernal by classicists and archaeologists has been overwhermingly negative and critical. Linguists have faulted his linguistics, historians his history, and archeologists his tendency to ignore relevant archeological data. Egyptologists, too, reacted negatively to Bernal's book. As of 1999, over 100 negative reviews had been published about Black Athena, as well as two books refuting its assertions. According to Jacques Berlinerblau: Ronald H. Fritze expands on Berlinerbau's statement, writing that: According to Christina Riggs, Black Athena was embraced by Afrocentrists and postcolonial studies even as archaeology, Egyptology and classical scholarship rejected much of Bernal's evidence and, implicitly or explicitly, his central thesis. There is no archaeological evidence that would clearly indicate a colonization which Bernal suggests. He himself says: “Here again, it should be made clear that, as with archaeological evidence, there are no smoking guns. There are no contemporary documents of the type 'X the Egyptian/Phoenician arrived at this place in Greece and established a city/kingdom (t)here', explicitly confirming the Ancient Model. Nor, for that matter, are there others denying it”. Bernal also devotes Black Athena to V. Gordon Childe and his book does fall into Childe's outdated paradigm of culture-historical archaeology. Michael