Bernal proposed that a change in the Western perception of Greece in the 18th century lead to the denial of any significant Egyptian and Phoenician influence on ancient Greek civilization.

[4][5] Academic reviews of Bernal's work overwhelmingly reject his heavy reliance on ancient Greek mythology, speculative assertions, and handling of archaeological, linguistic, and historical data.

[7] Bernal defends instead what he calls the Ancient model; the name refers to the fact that Egyptian and Phoenician (as well as Mesopotamian and Anatolian) influences on the Greek world were widely accepted in antiquity.

Casaubon's textual analysis partly discredited the Hermetic corpus, but Bernal maintained that respect for Ancient Egypt survived and contributed to the Enlightenment in the 18th century.

The first volume of Black Athena describes in detail Bernal's views on how the Ancient model acknowledging Egyptian and Phoenician influences on Greece came under attack during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Romantics longed for small, virtuous and "pure" communities in remote and cold places: Switzerland, North Germany and Scotland.

The original response to Bernal by Near Eastern scholars, historians, classicists, biological anthropologists, linguists, egyptologists and archaeologists was overwhelmingly negative and critical.

[15] According to Jacques Berlinerblau:[16] By my rough estimate, negative scholarly reviews of Black Athena have outweighed positive or moderate ones by a margin of approximately seven to three.

What is significant — note this — is that the majority of Bernal's defendants have emanated from the radical tier of the academic world.Ronald H. Fritze expands on Berlinerbau's statement, writing that:[17] Actually, what seems even more significant, if one continues to believe in the existence of scholarly expertise and authority, is that most of Bernal's positive reviews were written by people who are not scholars of the classics, Egyptology, ancient Near Eastern history studies, archaeology or European intellectual history.

An observation of this nature raises the issues of authority, credentials and evidence – all aspects of the scholarly enterprise that Bernal seeks to ignore, minimize or reject.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.

Michael Shanks criticized this outdated approach to archaeology stating: Imagine a peasant in a Cretan field in the second millennium BC.

Perhaps the boundaries which we apply to the geography of the eastern Mediterranean are not sensible for understanding the second millennium BC when there was a widespread cultural mix joining Aegean, Levant and Egypt in a social system which included all three as essential components.

to the present; dangerous, because in reopening the nineteenth-century discourse on race and origins, the work, sadly, inevitably, has become part of the problem of racism rather than the solution that its author envisioned... every element of the enormously complex plot meshed perfectly to create a story with good guys (Herodotus, Egyptians, Semites) and bad guys (Aryans, racist German philologists); in which the hero-author, the indefatigable neophyte detective, rereads the files and reworks the clues to uncover the truth that had long been covered up by a contemptibly corrupt and lazy police department (contemporary classicists).

[21]Paul Oskar Kristeller, writing in the Journal of the History of Ideas, states that Bernal’s work is full of gross errors and that it has not received the criticism it deserves due to political reasons.

[26] Edith Hall compares Bernal's thesis to the myth of the Olympian gods overwhelming the Titans and Giants, which was once thought of as a historical recollection of Homo sapiens taking over from Neanderthal man.

What they could not and cannot accept, however, is continuity of Afroasiatic influences across the Dark Age—not because they are racists, but because all the evidence is against it… Bernal’s denunciations, delivered with a uniformly spiteful tone, give his work the same moral and scholarly status as the Aryan science of the Third Reich or the Lysenkoite genetics of Stalinist Russia; that is, none whatever.

[30] Thomas McEvilley concluded in 2002 that while Bernal's "analysis of earlier periods of anti-Semitic attitude in regard to ancient Near Eastern culture may remain valuable, his attempt ... to derive Greek philosophy from Africa seems so glaringly unsupported by evidence that it is likely to pass without leaving a trace.

"[31] Classicist and linguist Jean-Fabrice Nardelli, in one of the very few reviews of Black Athena's third volume, writes that Bernal's "faith in his ability to pinpoint sound shifts in (P)IE matching, or stemming from, Afroasiatic and in the rightness of multilateral lexical comparisons à la Greenberg over the standard comparative method, looks misplaced; for he has not checked his facts and stands at the mercy of sources notorious for their quirks and errors.

Nardelli concludes that Bernal "applies no method but ad hoc reasoning based on contingency" and that "[t]he book is full of red herrings that betray its quality".

For instance, a 2017 study from Harvard University led by leading population geneticist Iosif Lazaridis, the full genomes of 19 Bronze Age individuals, including Minoans from Crete and Mycenaeans from mainland Greece were extracted and analysed.

With regards to Bernal's claims, the authors concluded that: Proposed migrations, such as settlement by Egyptian or Phoenician colonists, are not discernible in [the] data as there is no measurable Levantine or African influence in the Minoans and Mycenaeans, thus rejecting the hypothesis that the cultures of the Aegean were seeded by migrants from the old civilisations of these regions.