"This view of Egyptian religion played a central role in the two major ‘novels’ of the 2nd century AD, Heliodoros’ Aithiopika and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass. In his morally elevating and romantic story with a beautiful and virtuous Ethiopian – but not black – heroine, Heliodoros expressed great admiration for the Ethiopians and their gymnosophists (naked philosophers or gurus), but Aithiopika is focused on Egypt and the moral superiority of its religion. It also stresses the passionate interest taken in it by Greek priests, who saw it as the key to their own cults. When talking about the priests of Delphi bombarding a visiting Egyptian with questions, the author wrote: "In short, they forgot none of the interesting features of Egypt, for there is no country in the world which Greeks prefer to hear about.""
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Historians from EnglandJews from the United KingdomUniversity of Cambridge alumniUniversity of Cambridge facultyCornell University faculty
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
1. The Ancient Model in Antiquity (p. 119)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Bernal
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Martin Bernal
Martin Gardiner Bernal (10 March 1937 – 9 June 2013) was a British scholar of modern Chinese political history. He was a Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is best known for his work Black Athena, a well-known, controversial work which argues that the culture, language, and political structure of Ancient Greece contained substantial influences from Egypt and Syria-Palestine.
40 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Martin Bernal →
Related Quotes
"I...became convinced that anything up to a quarter of the Greek vocabulary could be traced to Semitic origins. This, …"
"I was staggered to discover that what I began to call the ‘Ancient Model’ had not been overthrown until the early 19t…"
"The ‘Ancient Model’ was the conventional view among Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic ages. According to it, Gr…"
"Most people are surprised to learn that the Aryan Model, which most of us have been brought up to believe, developed …"
"If I am right in urging the overthrow of the Aryan Model and its replacement by the Revised Ancient one, it will be n…"
"Müller urged scholars to study Greek mythology in relation to human culture as a whole, but was adamantly opposed to …"
"In the Timaios, ... Plato admitted an ancient ‘genetic’ relationship between Egypt and Greece, in general; and Athens…"
"This pantheism could be traced back past Spinoza to Bruno and beyond, to the Neo-Platonists and Egypt itself. The fir…"
"Newton had merely tried to demote Egypt in relation to Christianity; he did not try to raise Greece. By the middle of…"
"The scattered Jewish components of my ancestry would have given nightmares to assessors trying to apply the Nuremberg…"