Martin Gardiner Bernal (/bərˈnɑːl/; 10 March 1937[1] – 9 June 2013[2]) was a British scholar of modern Chinese political history.
[5] He 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.
Initially he taught Government Studies at Cornell, and continued his research on modern Chinese history.
I started looking into ancient Jewish history and— being on the periphery myself—into the relationship between the Israelites and the surrounding peoples, particularly the Canaanites and the Phoenicians.
I had always known that the latter spoke Semitic languages, but it came as quite a shock to learn that Hebrew and Phoenician were mutually intelligible and that serious linguists treated both as a dialect of a single Canaanite language.During this time, I was beginning to study Hebrew and I found what seemed to me a number of striking similarities between it and Greek ...[8]Bernal came to the conclusion that ancient Greek accounts of Egyptian influence on their civilisation should be taken seriously.