In Pursuit of an African Classics: The Life Work of Dr. Graham Campbell-Dunn

          Interview by Dana

"There are very few scholars doing serious work on Linear A. They have not solved the problem themselves so think it is insoluble, and they are not receptive to unknowns such as myself. The attitude to me seems to be 'Lets ignore him and hope he goes away'". 

So writes Graham Campbell-Dunn, one of the many pioneers in the study of African influences in early historic cultures of the Aegean and early Eurasia. He claims not to be a "controversialist" yet one would never know it by some of the statements one can find in his books. In one of his latest publications, Who were the Minoans: An African Answer, he writes, "The Minoans as we shall see spoke an African language".

Representation of a Minoan female

Elsewhere in the book we read, "Africans colonised Sumeria at an early date, as place names show" and also, "The Etruscans we now know were African"! As if the title of his book werent provocative enough, Dr. Dunn posits throughout his text (and in his other books) theorizes that only the most thoroughly versed in the areas of both African and Mediterranean archeology, anthropology and linguistics would ever take seriously. In fact, judging by Western academias aversion to Martin Bernals theories in his Black Athena volumes, scholars who are focused mainly on the linguistics and history of early classical and ancient civilizations would likely have a very difficult time considering many assertions in Dunns books as anything but outlandish.

For one thing, they run counter to the pervasive anti-diffusionist theory and independent development streams of thought that have come to flood anthropological schools of thinking. Furthermore, they upset the status quo and are opposed by those who think Africans contributed little to culture north of the Sahara, but were rather, essentially peoples influenced by older and more complex civilizations of non-African origin and/or European affiliation.

It may be that some of the criticism and a small amount of peer review that Dunns work has received in the past decades is deserved. Dunn admits that some of what he has written is rather outdated. However, to play devils advocate, certain of the theories and assertions presented in his books - apparently meant mostly for laymen - are not always well-supported within the text, although they are so, presumably, outside of them. For example, stating the Philistines came from Egypt based on Biblical text and then moving to the notion that scribes and Pharisees mentioned with them in the Bible must therefore be Niger-Congo scribes and the Barisi tribe is probably more than pushing the limit of whats acceptable in academia. There probably are far too many statements of this sort in the books Dr. Dunn has authored, even if they were meant for the layman. 

If Hellanicus links the Philistines with the Phoenicians as Dunn states on p. 8 of his book, this would imply an Afro-Asiatic connection of the Pelasgians rather than a Niger-Congo one. The place names Larissa and Dodona, he states, "look African" as in Niger-Congo African.

The name "Larissa", for example, Dunn would make a relative of the word "Lari" meaning "the old ones" in the Congo dialect. However, other classical or Middle Eastern scholars, including Bernal, connect the name Larissa to the semitic El Arish, while the name Dodona is oft connected by ancient writers with that of Rhoda and the Rhodones, which would also link it to the name of the Afro-Asiatic (Afro-Arabian or semitic), Ruda. 

Nevertheless, there are other connections made in Graham Campbell-Dunn's books that frequently offset the more suspect declarations - those that would be regarded by most Western academics as incredulous. Similarities in burial and tomb types as existed between Philistines and Minoans may be evidence that Philistines were among the early "Pelasgian" or proto-Hellenic groups of the Aegean. Apparently they both used partial golden face masks and made use of Mycenaean type Tholoi or beehive shaped tombs typical of Afro-Asiatics (kushitic/semitic-speakers) in Africa and Arabia.

As one somewhat erudite critic of Dunn's work on Amazon.com has recently pointed out, although some claims are thought not worthy of consideration, "much harder to ignore is his comparison of the Vai script with Linear A, and his identification of linear A symbols with concepts (compared with Egyptian hieroglyphics) and reconstructed monsyllabic words of Proto-Niger-Congo."

Vai is a Mande language and the Vai syllabary which is actually said to have been invented in the 19^th century, never-the-less uses intrinsically African symbols, including "figure of eight" shields, also linked to modern shields of cattle herders in Africa. Cretan palaces of the Minoan period were decorated with these figures of 8 shields.

Also, for any individual knowledgeable of the archeology of African burials in Nubia and North Africa, mention of the distinct similarities between Cretan and early Libyan/Sudanese (Fulani?) tomb types by Dunn and others is very potent evidence of African influence.

There is another important thing that can be said and that is, the Philistines, a people who appear in color wearing Aegean outfits on the temple of Medinet Habu walls, do otherwise seem to have a quite striking likeness to phenotypically to the lesser modified groups of Fulani, as seen in the Woodabe clan and other pastoralist Fulani in parts of the northern Sahel. The Philistines are depicted as not so much a dark red as a dark copper brown which in truth is a more accurate description of the Fulani people then "red". Viewed in this light, the linking of names and hairstyles can be seen as possibly other points of confirmation. 

The linking of the hairstyle of Philistines and Fulani would also not be the best indicator of Niger-Congo origins as several groups in Africa still wear the crest-like hairstyles including Rendili in the East and Tuareg also originally linked to the east African area. (Dunn incidently has said he thought the Minoans to be "red men" like a number of Fulani - themselves often called red in Africa" and certain East Africans.)
Nevertheless, such a hairdress probably does testify to African influence in the Mediterranean.

Philistine painted over 3,000 years ago on the Egyptian temple of Medinet-Habu. Philistines were originally semitic peoples who adopted the Aegean dialect and style of dress.

Dunn has also made the interesting point that "Minoan art, with its range of primary colours and decoration based on snakes and cut calabashes, uses numerous symbols of African subject matter." He notes connections between Minoan and African bull cults and jumping, and snake cults. Long ago Sir Arthur Evans noted connections between stone-age Crete and parts of Africa and thought Africans must have settled in southern Crete at one point. Like others he connected the name Pulasati with the Philistines or Pelishtim "the remnant of Kaphtor" and Pelasgians.

Dunn's linking of the name Philistine or Pulasati with that of the Fula or Fulani - also known as Peul, Fellata or Fulbe (who seem to have originally been mentioned as Fulitani in a Roman text in ancient Mauretania Caesaria) - may also have some basis, although it is also possible that the Philistines came directly from the Levant to Crete as semitic-speakers rather than directly from Africa. Keftiu is acknowledged by some scholars as having been at one time the name of the coastal area of the Aegean in general.

Artwork of the Minoans appears to depict more than one African type in Crete among an equally numerous European and long-haired mixed populations. When all points are considered it does seem plausible that one or more groups of Africans including Afro-Asiatics did settle in Crete and parts of the Aegean at one time, as did ancestral Europeans (a brachycephalic and mesocranic population). Judging from the heterogeneous skeletal evidence of the Minoans, the various pastoral African and African-Asiatic groups once present in coastal Syria, Egypt, and Libya appear to have greatly influenced the culture of Crete and the Aegean and contributed to the physical appearance of what look to have been a fundamentally "mulatto" or mixed Afro-European people.

Biases Challenging African Origin Studies?

A hindrance Dunn, himself, perceives as interfering with the resolution of certain linguistic questions of African influences is that "few classicists today know anything about linguistics and linguists have a low opinion of classicists." But he cites still another encumbrance saying, "There is also an anti-African prejudice embedded in the establishment. They do not want an African Classics."  This last suggestion may, nevertheless, very well be a simple and fairly understated way of thinking about the underlying bias extant in Western academics.

                                              

As with Martin Bernal, Dunn in fact surmises a black African substratum that could have carried early Eurasiatic dialects in general across the Mediterranean and feels the early Minoan dialects were just one of the remnants of this once major African presence carried forth in waves in the Aegean and Eurasiatic world. He writes at the end of his paper, Etruscan Decipherment, "Our work proves that Etruscan, like Linear A, is not a language isolate. It belongs to the Niger-Congo family of languages, and is remotely related to Bantu. It proves too that the substrate theorists were right. African substrate existed in the Aegean and Mediterranean from a very early date. This substrate population was known to the Greeks as the Pelasgians. We are now faced with interpreting the Etruscan texts in the light of this important discovery." (See the URL)
http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/gc_dunn/Etruscans.html)

In a 2004 paperback entitled, Comparative Linguistics Indo-European and Niger-Congo, Dunn points out evidence for a linguistic substratum connecting Niger-Congo African dialects with Indo -European, "particularly the Greek-Armenian-Indo-Iranian complex". He writes, "In our opinion this goes beyond mere influence from a conquered population. This is not confined to lexical borrowing, but involves the phonological system and the morphology."

Dunn's findings are in accord with the genetic evidence of the Mediterranean peoples. Unfortunately, the paper cites some rather controversial and questionable scholarship by Arnaiz -Villena, Gomez-Casado and Martinez-Laso (2002) as well as by others who probably would have best remained unmentioned due to their lack of credentials. The paper by Arnaiz-Villena et al. posits that, based on just HLA genetic alleles, Greeks are closer to Africans than to modern Europeans. The papers authors have suggested Greeks aside from not being closely related to Macedonians "shared an important part of their genetic pool with modern Ethiopians."

Although there is other evidence, aside from HLA traits, of a connection between Greeks and Africans such as the Benin sickle cell trait, the conclusions of the paper of Greeks being more related to Africans than other Europeans have been rejected by some geneticists on the basis of the study's usage of "a single marker". Obviously the phenotype of modern Greeks would also suggest closer relationship to Europeans.

In any case, there are certain other studies that have been done by Loring Brace and others employing analysis of traits proven to be genetic determinants, which purport to show that modern Mediterraneans of southern Europe and North Africa in general are not as closely related to ancient Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Mediterraneans as are modern sub-Saharan Africans and East Africans.  This would probably better explain some of the common genetic traits now shared between Greeks, Sicilians and Africans, etc.

Ancient portrayal of men of the Etruscans

Dunn considers the evidence of the survival in antiquity of a Niger-Congo language on Lemnos that was closely related to Etruscan as more proof of the presence of people of Niger-Congo affiliation in the region. "The shores of the Aegean and Mediterranean therefore were originally occupied by Africans, and subsequently overlaid by Afro-Asiatic farmers. It follows that the Mediterranean was once, in the remote past, the home of African blacks".

A Classicist's Anthropological and Linguistic Explorations: Beginnings

Before his retirement Graham Campbell-Dunn had taught Minoan art and lectured extensively on the classical Greek and Latin languages for 20 years. He had always been fascinated with anthropology and interested in African art and ancient Egyptian culture. This interest began when he was a young child after his mother introduced him to books like, A Thousand Miles up the Nile by English journalist, adventurist, and travel writer Amelia Edwards.

Dunn attended undergraduate school in New Zealand and also obtained a masters degree in classics from Cambridge University. He then received his Ph.D. degree from Canterbury in New Zealand with a focus on Herodotus. He also engaged in post-doctoral studies at Cambridge and learned both Etruscan and African dialects.

A young Campbell-Dunn attends University in New Zealand

It was in the sixties, on a rainy afternoon, that his wife Atenasia showed him a Swahili grammar book her uncle had brought back from Africa, thus he began a rather extensive journey into East African/Bantu linguistics. Along the way he noticed what he and others have felt to be certain clear connections of African dialects with those from regions as geographically distant as Spain, Mesopotamia, Italy, Greece and Polynesia.

Through his studies he was able to work under John Chadwick, author of The Mycenaean World. And study with Robert Coleman. Dunn himself was an early follower of Diedrich Hermann Westermann, an Africanist and linguist, still highly regarded in the field of African linguistics in particular. He is also an admirer of some of the works of Catherine Acholonu-Olumba another fairly controversial researcher who also sees a lot of West African links to early civilizations. According to Dunn, although Westermann used a phonetics that would appear somewhat antiquated today, "he remains the only one that attempted to deal with Niger-Congo as a whole."

"His reputation is therefore still high" comments Dunn. "His work is widely read, in spite of its age. His work does have serious gaps, and does not take sufficient account of loanwords, but his unstarred reconstructions or Stammwrter" are close to real words from a remote period. He was followed by his student the more modern Mukarovsky, who excluded Mande from Niger-Congo, but used more up-to-date phonetics."
Over the years Graham Campbell-Dunn has developed his own answer to such enigmas as the "Sumerian Problem".

"I have looked at Sumerian and can explain all the Sumerian determinatives as Niger-Congo", asserts Dunn. Perhaps a bit naively, he also adds that people "don't seem interested" in his two books on Sumerian. His linguistic analysis and rather widely spread knowledge and interest in ancient archeology and African population movements may allow him to see Sumerian as a derivative of Niger- Congo where other Africanists, more specialized, can't or won't.

Dunn's theories have taken some shots from other up- and-comers. At least one recent and relatively young scholar, a Mark Dingemanse, specialist on Bantu dialects (including Siwu), commenting on a proposed Basque-African connection has referred to Dunn's methods as "crackpot" science, citing what he sees as tendency to "stipulate" without arguing in making his case.

According to Dingemanses critique, some of the invalid methods Dunn (he uses CD for Campbell-Dunn) has employed included, "taking some surface forms from various languages (sometimes even from hypothetic constructed states of protolanguages), and "linking these forms together by making some unqualified and unargued claims about various changes that are needed to link these surface forms visually"

He adds, "What one needs for positing a sound change is evidence from a large number of roots. Only after assembling large lists of potential cognates (a step wholly overlooked by CD there is only one list of 10 items on page 113) can one start to establish regular correspondence sets (another step skipped by CD)." (The parentheses were part of Dingemanses communication with another blogger).

Dr. Dunn in response to some of his critics has expressed the following: "Most of my work is based on root words from Niger-Congo. These are the core of the languages. What happens regarding prefixes, suffixes, etc. becomes irrelevant".

He also comments, "I take the view that Proto-Niger-Congo can be reduced to a list of monosyllabic roots - CV, or CVC. These can be found in a great range of languages by trimming off the prefix(es) or suffix(es). The actual languages are (a) mainly prefixing (b) mainly suffixing. Sumerian seems to undergo the most attrition, but still has the same roots. I am not in the business of combinations. The ideas expressed by the roots often derive from body parts, or actions of these body parts. It seems to me that some modern linguists have lost their way and have become obsessed with perfect proof. This may be achieved after eons of endeavour by millions of linguists. But it is not the world I live in."

Though Dingemanse may look at Dunn's methods as simplistic, Dunn is not the only one, nor anywhere near the first Western or European scholar to propose Sumerian and Elamite correspondences with dialects of the sub-Saharan Bantu. In fact, quite a few early observers would not have thought twice about it.

The First Theorists on a Bantu Substratum in Asia

A Willibald Wanger wrote a book published in 1935 entitled, Comparative Lexical Study of Sumerian and Ntu ( " Bantu " ): Sumerian, the " Sanscrit " of the African Ntu Languages. Dunn notes that Wanger "was trashed by a German reviewer", but believes him to have been on the right path. Also, in the early 1900s a J. Frederik van Oordt stated with some confidence in, The Origin of the Bantu: A Preliminary Study, the following:




I have in the first list given a considerable number of Sumerian words which seem to be immediately connected with Bantu expressions having the same meaning. In the comparative list of Bantu, Indian and Malacca languages, it will be, however, seen that the Sumerian, as an Ugro-Altaic language is derived from the same original stock as Bantu. But there are certain facts which show that the connection between Sumerian and Bantu must have been more close and more direct than would have been the case if only common influences were at work.  Van Oordt evidently conceived of a proto-Negroid or black African substratum stretching from the Malaccas to Africa, but with India as the starting point (an Indian origin of humanity being a not uncommon presumption in that era). In response to this supposition, a William Crabtree in 1918 offered some constructive criticism in a book called Bantu Speech a Philological Study, while at the same time claiming on the basis of his own findings that Bantu may reasonably be claimed to belong to the Ugro-Altaic group". One famed Harry H. Johnston a scientific raciologist, National Geographic contributor and author of the book, The Negro in the New World (a title which speaks for itself), considered Van Oordts proposition "wild theorizing" on the basis of what he claimed were the authors persistent "mixing up Bantu word roots and prefixes. He also thought it was unjustified simply because Bantu has so much in common with other African dialects.
 In more modern times, however, certain linguists of European, African and Dravidian birth have each pointed out what they see as undoubted links between African dialects as well as culture with not only Sumerian, but Elamite and Dravidian dialects.
A Koenraad Elst, in fact, wrote of the still suspected African links to early Dravidian peoples in his text, Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate (1999). Some of these correlations between African dialects and Dravidian are unquestionably strong and have been acknowledged not only in the linguistic arena, but in the areas of culture and osteology.

A passage from Elsts Update, for example, speaks of the conclusions of French historian Bernard Sergent, author of Genesis of India (1997). It reads, "Sergent offers the hypothesis that at the dawn of the Neolithic Revolution, some 10,000 years ago, the Dravidians left the Sudan, one band splitting off in Iran to head north to the Urals, the others entering India and moving south.Like others, Sergent suggests that the early Dravidians can be equated with the southern Neolithic of 2500-1600 BC. Their round huts with wooden framework are the direct precursors of contemporary rural Dravidian housing."
In fact physical anthropological evidence does link certain Africans, particularly along the pre-dynastic Nile, to Dravidic speakers and to populations settling in Mesopotamia, Elam and along the Indus as well. 

Sergent himself wrote, "Now, if we recall that the resemblances among Nubians, proto-dynastic Egyptians, Dravidians and what was formerly called Hamites appear henceforth through multivaried cranial measurements as being very evident, and that among the so-called Hamites, the Somalis and Galla are black-skinned, it is probable that the Dravidians have conserved their color on leaving Africa; their installation in the Indian tropical zone could have subsequently only confirmed and augmented this pigmentation." (Le Genese de lInde, 1997, p. 47)

Supporting this view, Elst states, " we have several separate studies by unrelated researchers, using different samples of languages in their observations, and that each of them lists large numbers of similarities, not just in vocabulary, but also in linguistic structure, even in its most intimate features" (Elst, 1999 ) (Some of these researchers in the past include Lilias Homburger, Tidiane Ndiaye and U.P. Upadhyaya and S.P. Upadhyaya).
Elst thought, "the case has been made in most detail for the Senegalo-Guinean languages such as Wolof," however a few other scholars have suggested the Afro-Asiatic linguistic group as a closely linked relative or possibly even linguistic originator of both Dravidian and Elamite. A Czechoslovakian specialist in Afro-Asiatic linguistics, Vaclav Blazek has written extensively about some of these strong lexical connections and has written "The new Dravidian-Afroasiatic lexical parallels in the book Nostratic, Sino- Caucasian, Austric and Amerind.

David MacAlpin wrote about the Elamite-Dravidian connection in articles like "Toward Proto-Elamo-Dravidian", in Language 50 (1) published in 1974 (and see also "Elamite and Dravidian, Further Evidence of Relationships", Current Anthropology 16 (1), published in 1975).

Dunn has seen the Bantu dialects of Niger-Congo as the most likely candidate for Sumerian, Elamite and Dravidian linguistic origins, like U. P. and S. P. Upadhyaya, authors of the seminal work, "Dravidian and Negro Africaine" published in the International Journal of Dravidian linguistics. The latter found a number of correlations between Bantu dialects and Dravidian.





A simple system of five basic vowels with an opposition short/long, vocalic harmony, absence of consonant clusters in initial position, abundance of geminated consonants, distinction between inclusive and exclusive pronoun in the first person plural, absence of the comparative degree in adjectives, absence of adjectives and adverbs acting as distinct morphological categories, alternation of consonants or augmentation of nouns noted among the nouns of different classes distinction between accomplished and unaccomplished action in the verbal paradigms as opposed to the distinction of time-specific tenses, separate sets of paradigms for the affirmative and negative forms of verbs, the use of reduplicated forms for the emphatic mode, etc. (Elst, p. 47).  The physical anthropological link that bridges these theories is, of course, the African one and it is bolstered by archeological and cultural connections which are, to be sure, too numerous and distinctive to be attributed to a series of population borrowings or commercial exchanges. 
Besides that, there are new theories that suggest a haplotype T in Ydna could be the missing genetic link between African Sahelians, Central East Africans and Dravidians. Buts thats the fodder for another posting.

In addition Mukarovsky, an early student of Westermanns originally proposed there could be a common older linguistic substratum to which both Basque and Hamito-Semitic or the Afro-Asiatic linguistic family had both some connection to. "Assuming genetic relationship between Basque and the Hamito-Semitic family does not however mean that Basque must be affiliated to it. 

Dr. Campbell-Dunn on the other hand takes the plausibility a little further, implying there was anciently a relationship between speakers of dialects in Bantu who may have colonized the Canary islands in ancient times and influenced the region.

Finally Dunn also finds much evidence of a connection to modern Polynesian dialects. He has boldly asserted, "We now have conclusive evidence (basic vocabulary, morphology, sound correspondences) that Maori and the other Malayo-Polynesian languages are African and are related to Bantu and the Niger-Congo group. Bantu kumi "ten", Maori kumi "ten fathoms", Bantu pa "fire", Maori ahi (Malay api) "fire", Bantu N "drink", Maori inu (drink). The Maori singular and plural articles and possessives match singular and plural prefixes (e.g. 5 & 6) in Bantu. Indeed most of the Bantu noun prefixes can be identified in Maori. The following investigation reveals a relationship that envelopes the entire grammatical systems of Maori and Niger-Congo. This cannot be due to chance."

Enter the Rhetoric of the Anti-diffusionist School

One of the drawbacks of current study that individuals such as Dunn and Bernal hold is that most classicists are not aware of the numerous and indubitable evidences linking late Holocene or early pre-Bronze age Eurasiatic populations to black Africans. The fact that most early Eurasiatics might have been a group of African-affiliated peoples present in Europe and Asia before the later spread of the direct ancestors of modern Europeans, has yet to be absorbed mentally by those dealing in subjects outside of the forensic study of ancient Europeans. Thus, the idea of a civilization of African origin that preceded classical civilization runs contrary to the tightly held theories of independent in situ evolution. Yet, it was something even the early physical anthropologists of the colonial period were aware of.

The rather kneejerk and apprehensive reaction to the scholarship of individuals like Dunn and Bernal has its roots in part in anticolonialist historical views. Many of the earliest colonialist historians had the mindset and touted the idea of a hierarchy of "races" and that everything civilized in the world came from Europeans, or else European-related peoples. This led to the emergence of an opposing view that indigenous people could invariably develop things on their own if confronted with similar environmental stimulii and quite similar cultural mores or forms werent necessarily a sign of contact with other groups, even if the cultural forms were identical.

Of course this was true to a certain extent. However, some of the cultural practices of early societies, for instance names in a pantheon of deities, specific burial practices rituals involving cattle, or megalithic construction sites in different parts of the world share similarities or congruences that can not always be easily explained away as parallel independent development a result of similar ecological or environmental stresses.
In the past, instead of acknowledging that people apart from the direct ancestors of Europeans could have built ancient stone age cultures of Europe or Eurasia, they gave anthropological names or typonyms to people associated with these cultures in Africa and Europe that were often euphemisms meant to hide the affiliation of these ancient folk with modern sub-Saharan Africans. The Australian anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith for example, chose the phrase "brown race" for the skeletons associated with megalithic culture in Europe claiming it represented by certain Cushitic types in the Horn and Nubia and separated from the so-called "black race". Guiseppe Sergi and others chose terms like "Eurafrican" or "Mediterranean" or Afro- Mediterranean or simply "hamite" and designated them "Caucasoids" so that anybody living between Tanzania and Scandinavia with a long head or narrow nose (relative to Central Africans could be classified under a single term.

More recently however a trend toward scholarship that is often either politically motivated or else rife with nationalistic biases has been the major impediment to objective scholarship and science which has found early cultures were in many cases not linked to populations that are present today in regions being studied. People have always generally believed themselves to be direct descendants of the lands they occupy. They rarely view themselves as descendants of immigrants, especially if they are in the far distant past.

It is, as usual, up to the more progressive scholar (as it always has been) to keep abreast of the new findings of geneticists and anthropologists who are uncovering once again the Africanness of the Mediterranean, Europe and Eurasia of the late Holocene and early historic periods.

Graham Campbell-Dunn is the author of the following texts:

The African Origins of Classical Civilization, 2008

 

Maori the African Evidence, 2007

Who were the Minoans: An African Answer, 2006

Comparative Linguistics Indo-European and Niger-Congo, 2006 

The African Origins of the Alphabet, 2004

The above can be purchased from his website at the url below:
  http://www.filedby.com/author/graham_campbell_dunn/2342637/works/