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"After the 1780s, the intensification of racism and the new belief in the central importance of ‘ethnicity’ as a principle of historical explanation became critical for perceptions of Ancient Egypt. The Egyptians were increasingly detached from the noble Caucasians, and their ‘black’ and African nature was more and more emphasized. Thus the idea that they were the cultural ancestors of the Greeks – the epitome and pure childhood of Europe – became unbearable. There was also a new crisis between Egyptian mythology and Christianity with the works of Dupuis, which represented the ideological or theological counterpart of the French Revolution’s attack on European social order. It is only with this background that one can make sense of the tormented career of Champollion during the years of reaction between 1815 and 1830. Although Champollion was an avowed revolutionary and an enthusiastic Bonapartist, one of his earliest discoveries discredited some of the theories of Dupuis’s supporters, and he and his decipherment were therefore welcomed by the Church and the Restoration nobility. On the other hand, his championing of Egypt over Greece combined with his political beliefs to infuriate Hellenist and Indianist scholars, who continued to do all they could to block his academic career."

- Martin Bernal

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"Why was Astour’s work considered so...offensive? First, it offended at a formal level, because it challenged the academic hierarchy; this was a reflection of the relative power of the two disciplines. Although Classicists had previously discussed Eastern parallels to Hellenic mythology, it was entirely different and unacceptable for Orientalists to pronounce on Greece.There were also fundamental objections to the content of Astour’s work. Scholars like Fontenrose and Walcot had made broad sweeps of world mythology – including India, Iran and so on – and they gave preference, if possible, to the less offensive sources. By contrast, Astour’s derivation of Greek names from Semitic not only poached on the sacred ground of language, but also made the connections between West Semites and Greeks disturbingly close and specific. Furthermore, two of the myth cycles he treated – those of Kadmos and Danaos – were concerned with Near Eastern colonization in Greece, and he made a plausible case for their having a historical kernel of truth. The fourth section of Hellenosemitica was even more provocative in that it went into the sociology of knowledge, and its sketch of the history and ideology of Classics and Classical archaeology has been the basis of all later writings on this subject, this volume included. In doing this Astour injected relativism into subjects that had previously been impervious to the forces of probabilism and uncertainty that have transformed other disciplines since the 1890s."

- Martin Bernal

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"I...became convinced that anything up to a quarter of the Greek vocabulary could be traced to Semitic origins. This, together with 40–50 per cent that seem to be Indo-European, still left a quarter to a third of the Greek vocabulary unexplained. I hesitated between seeing this irreducible fraction conventionally as ‘Pre-Hellenic’ or of postulating a third outside language, either from Anatolian or—as I preferred—Hurrian. When I looked into these languages, however, they provided virtually no promising material. It was only in 1979, when I was glancing through a copy of Černy’s Coptic Etymological Dictionary, that I was able to get some sense of Late Ancient Egyptian. Almost immediately, I realized that this was the third outside language. Within a few months I became convinced that one could find plausible etymologies for a further 20–25 per cent of the Greek vocabulary from Egyptian, as well as the names for most Greek gods and many place names. Putting the Indo-European, Semitic and Egyptian roots together, I now believed that—with further research—one could provide plausible explanations for 80–90 per cent of the Greek vocabulary, which is as high a proportion as one can hope for in any language. Thus there was now no need for the ‘Pre-Hellenic’ element at all."

- Martin Bernal

• 0 likes• historians-from-england• jews-from-the-united-kingdom• university-of-cambridge-alumni• university-of-cambridge-faculty• cornell-university-faculty•
"These paradigms of ‘race’ and ‘progress’ and their corollaries of ‘racial purity’, and the notion that the only beneficial conquests were those of ‘master races’ over subject ones, could not tolerate the Ancient Model. Thus Müller’s refutations of the legends of Egyptian colonization in Greece were quickly accepted. The Aryan Model—which followed his success—was constructed within the new paradigms. It was encouraged by a number of factors: the discovery of the Indo-European language family with the Indo-Europeans or Aryans soon seen as a ‘race’, the plausible postulation of an original Indo-European homeland in central Asia, and the need to explain that Greek was fundamentally an Indo-European language. Moreover at precisely the same period, the early 19th century, there was intense historical concern with the Germanic overwhelming of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, and the Aryan conquests in India in the 2nd millennium BC. The application of the model of northern conquest to Greece was thus obvious and very attractive: vigorous conquerors were supposed to have come from a suitably stimulating homeland to the north of Greece, while the ‘Pre-Hellenic’ aborigines had been softened by the undemanding nature of their homeland. And although the large number of non-Indo-European elements in Greek culture could not be reconciled with the ideal of complete Aryan Hellenic purity, the notion of a northern conquest did make the inevitable ‘racial’ mixing as painless as possible. Naturally the purer and more northern Hellenes were the conquerors, as befitted a master race. The Pre- Hellenic Aegean populations, for their part, were sometimes seen as marginally European, and always as Caucasian; in this way, even the natives were untainted by African and Semitic ‘blood’."

- Martin Bernal

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"In the Timaios, ... Plato admitted an ancient ‘genetic’ relationship between Egypt and Greece, in general; and Athens and Sais, the major city at the north-western edge of the Delta, in particular. But, rather implausibly, he claimed priority for Athens. Like some other Greeks, Aischylos and Plato appear to have been offended by the legends of colonization because they put Hellenic culture in an inferior position to that of the Egyptians and Phoenicians, towards whom most Greeks of this time appear to have felt an acute ambivalence. The Egyptians and Phoenicians were despised and feared, but at the same time deeply respected for their antiquity and well-preserved ancient religion and philosophy. The fact that so many Greeks overcame their antipathies and transmitted these ‘traditions [of colonization] so little accommodating to national prejudice’ greatly impressed the 18th-century historian William Mitford, who used it to maintain that ‘for their essential circumstances they seem unquestionable.’ Before Mitford no one questioned the Ancient Model, so there was no need to articulate a defence of it. Such motives of ‘national prejudice’ would help explain Thucydides’ failure to mention these legends, of which he was certainly aware."

- Martin Bernal

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"The upholders of conventional wisdom have been...disconcerted by Hellenosemitica, a major work by...Michael Astour, which first appeared in 1967. Hellenosemitica, a series of studies of striking parallels between West Semitic and Greek mythology, showed connections of structure and nomenclature that were far too close to be explained away as similar manifestations of the human psyche. Apart from the challenge posed by this basic theme, Astour made three other fundamental attacks. First, the fact of his writing the book at all upset the academic status quo. While it was permissible for a Classicist, coming from the dominant discipline, to discuss the Middle East in its relation to Greece and Rome, the converse did not hold true. A Semitist was felt to have no right to write about Greece. Secondly, Astour questioned the absolute primacy of archaeology over all other sources of evidence about prehistory—myth, legend, language and names—thus threatening the ‘scientific’ status of ancient history. Thirdly, he sketched out a sociology of knowledge for Classics, indicating links between developments in scholarship and those in society. He even implied a connection between anti-Semitism and hostility to the Phoenicians and cast doubt on the notion of steady accumulative progress of learning. But the worst threat came from his basic message that the legends of Danaos and Kadmos contained a factual kernel."

- Martin Bernal

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