Reply #11: I don't know about that

[semillama]

Admitting that I've never read the book, but this comes from the wikipedia link you posted:

"Black Athena ignited a a furious debate in the academic community. While most reviewers admitted that studies of the origin of Greek civilization were tainted by a foundation of 19th century racism, many excoriated Bernal for the admittedly speculative nature of his hypothesis and for working far outside his field of expertise. Some subsequent writers have been heavily critical of what they consider to be Bernal's confusion of culture, ethnicity and race, and his unsystematic and linguistically incompetent handling of etymologies. Bernal in turn accuses academe of deliberately and continually obscuring the importance of African and Semitic civilizations since the 19th century."

If the work is "Admittedly speculative" from an author "working far outside his field of expertise" then there's probably not much to it. Although searching for more about the book lead me to THIS book, which looks really interesting: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/__Heresy_in_the_University_298.html