Martin Bernal

"The scattered Jewish components of my ancestry would have given nightmares to assessors trying to apply the Nuremberg Laws, and although pleased to have these fractions, I had not previously given much thought to them or to Jewish culture. It was at this stage that I became intrigued—in a Romantic way—in this part of my 'roots'. 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....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."

"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."

"I was staggered to discover that what I began to call the ‘Ancient Model’ had not been overthrown until the early 19th century, and that the version of Greek history which I had been taught—far from being as old as the Greeks themselves—had been developed only in the 1840s and 50s. Astour had taught me that attitudes towards the Phoenicians in historiography were profoundly affected by anti-Semitism; it was therefore easy for me to make a connection between the dismissal of the Egyptians and the explosion of Northern European racism in the 19th century."

"The ‘Ancient Model’ was the conventional view among Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic ages. According to it, Greek culture had arisen as the result of colonization, around 1500 BC, by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had civilized the native inhabitants. Furthermore, Greeks had continued to borrow heavily from Near Eastern cultures."

"Most people are surprised to learn that the Aryan Model, which most of us have been brought up to believe, developed only during the first half of the 19th century. In its earlier or ‘Broad’ form, the new model denied the truth of the Egyptian settlements and questioned those of the Phoenicians. What I call the ‘Extreme’ Aryan Model, which flourished during the twin peaks of anti-Semitism in the 1890s and again in the 1920s and 30s, denied even the Phoenician cultural influence."

"If I am right in urging the overthrow of the Aryan Model and its replacement by the Revised Ancient one, it will be necessary not only to rethink the fundamental bases of ‘Western Civilization’ but also to recognize the penetration of racism and ‘continental chauvinism’ into all our historiography, or philosophy of writing history. The Ancient Model had no major ‘internal’ deficiencies, or weaknesses in explanatory power. It was overthrown for external reasons. For 18th- and 19th-century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood, to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites. Therefore the Ancient Model had to be overthrown and replaced by something more acceptable."

"Müller urged scholars to study Greek mythology in relation to human culture as a whole, but was adamantly opposed to recognizing any specific borrowings from the East. When it comes to higher culture, there has been an even greater reluctance to see any precise parallels."

"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."

"This pantheism could be traced back past Spinoza to Bruno and beyond, to the Neo-Platonists and Egypt itself. The first articulate rejection of the challenge of the Radical Enlightenment—and the earliest popularization of the Newtonian ‘Whig’ scheme in science, politics and religion—was made in 1693 by Richard Bentley, Newton’s friend and a great sceptical Classicist. One way in which Bentley attacked his and Newton’s enemies was to use Casaubon’s tactics. He employed his critical scholarship to undermine Greek sources on the antiquity and wisdom of the Egyptians. Thus throughout the 18th and 19th centuries we find a de facto alliance of Hellenism and textual criticism with the defence of Christianity. The ructions caused by occasional Hellenist atheists like Shelley and Swinburne were trivial compared to the threat of Aegypto-Masonry."

"Newton had merely tried to demote Egypt in relation to Christianity; he did not try to raise Greece. By the middle of the 18th century, however, a number of Christian apologists were using the emerging paradigm of progress’, with its presupposition that ‘later is better’, to promote the Greeks at the expense of the Egyptians. These strands of thought soon merged with two others that were becoming dominant at the same time: racism and Romanticism."

"The paradigm of ‘races’ that were intrinsically unequal in physical and mental endowment was applied to all human studies, but especially to history. It was now considered undesirable, if not disastrous, for races to mix. To be creative, a civilization needed to be ‘racially pure’. Thus it became increasingly intolerable that Greece—which was seen by the Romantics not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood—could be the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites."

"Unlike the Ancients, the proponents of the Aryan Model were firm believers in ‘progress.’ Victors were seen as more advanced, and hence ‘better’, than the vanquished. Thus, despite apparent and short-term anomalies, history—now seen as the biographies of races—consisted of the triumphs of strong and vital peoples over weak and feeble ones. ‘Races’, formed by the landscape and climates of their homelands, retained permanent essences, even though they took on new forms in every new age. For these scholars, in addition, it was self-evident that the greatest ‘race’ in world history was the European or Aryan one. It alone had, and always would have, the capacity to conquer all other peoples and to create advanced, dynamic civilizations—as opposed to the static societies ruled by Asians or Africans."

"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’."

"K. O. Müller, writing in the 1820s, had denied that the Phoenicians had had any influence on Greece, but he was extreme in his Romanticism and ahead of his time in the intensity of his racialism and anti-Semitism. In some ways, therefore, the Phoenicians even profited from the fall of the Egyptians, since legends of Egyptian colonization could now be explained as having referred to them. Consciously or unconsciously, all European thinkers saw the Phoenicians as the Jews of Antiquity—as clever ‘Semitic’ traders. The predominant mid-19th-century view of world history was one of a dialogue between Aryan and Semite. The Semite had created religion and poetry; the Aryan conquest, science, philosophy, freedom and everything else worth having."

"With this reputation and the rise of anti-Semitism in the 1880s, there was a sustained attack on the Phoenicians which was particularly fierce where it came to their legendary contacts with, and influence on, the Greeks—who had by now been given semi-divine status."

"It was now seen as more in character for the ‘dynamic’ Greeks to have brought it from the Middle East than to have received it passively from ‘Semites’ as the legends had stated, but it was also because borrowing was perceived to involve social mixing, and the racial contamination that this would have entailed in Greece was unacceptable."

"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."

"The fact that much of the uniquely Spartan political vocabulary can be plausibly derived from Late Egyptian is linked to the tradition that the Spartan lawgiver Lykourgos visited the East and Egypt to study their institutions. Moreover, the notion of Egyptian cultural influence there in the 9th and 8th centuries is strengthened by the strikingly Egyptian appearance of early Spartan art. All these link up with the Spartan kings’ belief in their Heraklid—hence Egyptian or Hyksos—ancestry; and would thus explain such anomalies in the Aryan Model as the building of a pyramid at the Menelaion, the Spartan ‘national’ shrine, and the letter one of the last Spartan kings wrote to the High Priest in Jerusalem, claiming kinship with him."

"The natural confusion between the rams and goats seems to have been compounded by the fact that the oracular cult at the Delta city—known to the Greeks as Mendēs—was associated with a well-endowed species of ram that—rather embarrassingly for a symbol of fertility—became extinct. In later centuries this was represented in a way that led Herodotos, at least, to describe it alternately as a goat and a ram."

"I hope to demonstrate that Herodotos’ views on the Egyptian and Phoenician settlements, though treated with condescension and scorn by most modern Classicists and ancient historians, were conventional not only in his own times but also throughout Archaic, Classical and later Antiquity."

"There have been...persistent attempts to diminish the Egyptian aspects of the play [the Suppliants of Aischylos], which in later times became so important a prop for the Ancient Model. For instance, while Io is seen as coming from Argos, most sources agree that she was only the distant ancestor of Aigyptos and Danaos. Thus the brothers and their children were Egyptianized, if not purely Egyptian, and the Danaids are explicitly described as ‘black’. The mainstream of German scholarship, however, has preferred the one scholiast who can dubiously be construed to say that the twins were the children of Io herself. The same scholiast also maintains that the whole action of the trilogy took place in Argos. This version has been preferred to all the other sources, some of which held that all the events were situated in Egypt, and all of which...had the Danaids arriving from Egypt."

"It seems to have been...the belief expressed by Herodotos that the ancestry of the Spartan kings went up to the Hyksos colonists – that, sometime around 300 BC, Areios King of Sparta wrote to Jerusalem beginning: "To Onias High Priest, greeting. A document has come to light which shows that the Spartans and Jews are kinsmen descended alike from Abraham.""

"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.""

"In 390 AD the temple of Serapis and the adjacent great library of Alexandria were destroyed by a Christian mob; twenty-five years later, the brilliant and beautiful philosopher and mathematician Hypatia was gruesomely murdered in the same city by a gang of monks instigated by St Cyril. These two acts of violence mark the end of Egypto-Paganism and the beginning of the Christian Dark Ages."

"It is hardly surprising that scholars working within the Aryan Model prefer to neglect the Christian factor and see these events as representing a resurgence of Egyptian Oriental fanaticism against Hellenistic rationalism. But, if one disregards the absurd implication that Europeans cannot be fanatical, these two explanations – that the fanatical mob was both Christian and Egyptian – are not mutually exclusive. By the 4th century AD, Egypt was a passionately – if not the most passionately – Christian province in the Roman Empire."

"As...Giorgio de Santillana has pointed out, it is not accidental that Dupuis is so little known today. His beliefs continue to form a coherent challenge to both Christianity and the myth of Greece as a cultural beginning; thus he and his work had to be buried. Dupuis was a brilliant scientist and the inventor of semaphore, and was also active in politics during the French Revolution. His great reputation as a scholar and his dedication to moderate revolutionary principles made him a natural choice for director of cultural events during the Directory from 1795 to 1799, and he became president of the legislative body during the Consulate under Napoleon that followed."

"The Classical writer most often appealed to to justify slavery was Aristotle, who had argued at length in its favour. The appeal was linked to the fact that his work was shot through with the belief that Greeks were inherently superior to other peoples."

"Winckelmann] loved every aspect of his image of Greece, seeing its two dominant essences as liberty and youth. According to him Greece epitomized freedom, while Egyptian culture had been stunted by its monarchism and conservatism and was the symbol of rigid authority and stagnation — which also happened to be non-European. In his mind, the Greek city-states contained the liberty without which it was impossible to create great art. Winckelmann, and his followers, loved this liberty and youth for their freshness and vitality. Yet he insisted upon the soft gentleness of Greek art, and the ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘serene greatness’ of Greek culture as a whole, which he saw as the result of the equable Greek climate. Moreover, central to his love of Greece was his appreciation of Greek homosexuality. Winckelmann himself was homosexual, and the major homosexual strand which has persisted in modern Hellenism has continued to be associated with him."

"By the 1830s [European fascination with Sanskrit] had led to a general perception of the Indo-European language family which, in the racist atmosphere of the time, developed quite quickly into the notion of an Indo-European or ‘Aryan race’. The passion for India also meant that it replaced Egypt as the exotic ancestor of Europe. This time, however, the ancestry was not seen in terms of the transmission of philosophy and reason but as a Romantic one of ‘blood’ and kinship."

"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."

"At the core of Altertumswissenschaft was the image of the divine Greek, both artistic and philosophical. Greeks also had – like the idealized image of the Germans themselves – to be integrated with their native soil, and pure. Thus the Ancient Model, with its multiple invasions and frequent cultural borrowings and the implicit consequences of racial and linguistic mixture, became increasingly intolerable. It is only within this political and social context that one can understand the attack by one of the first products of the new system, Karl Otfried Müller, on the overwhelming ancient authority of the Ancient Model."

"Most later historians, and some of his contemporaries, have regarded Müller as essentially Romantic in maintaining a categorical distinction between Greek and other cultures. In Orchomenos he denied the charge and, after apologizing for having treated Greek mythology as if it were all mythology, he claimed that Greece was part of the world, and that therefore Greek mythology had the same basis as that of the rest of mankind. What he objected to was the belief in colonial bonds and the wholesale borrowing of Greek religion and mythology from the East. He was convinced that he had shown these to be unhistorical, though illusions about them had led all previous research astray.In Prolegomena, Müller made an eloquent appeal for scholars to do what he had failed to do, and investigate all mythologies for insights into the Greek one. The ‘anthropological’ school of the Cambridge Classicists James Frazer and Jane Harrison, which flourished at the beginning of the 20th century, in no way overstepped these bounds. What Müller outlawed was any special relationship between Greek and Eastern myth. Indeed, as he put it, ‘the entire book is opposed to the theory which would make the majority of myths importations from the East.’"

"After Müller’s demolition of the Ancient Model, it was relatively easy to fill the vacuum with the model of Indo-European conquest from the north. In this case, unlike the destruction of the Ancient Model, there was a good internalist explanation for the change: the need to explain the Indo-European basis of Greek. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that German and English scholars were particularly attracted to ideas of northern invasion, which fitted so well with the prevailing racism and with Niebuhr’s scheme of ethnic history."

"Despite his enthusiasm for the character and institutions of the Aryan Hellenes, Gobineau was convinced that Ancient Greece as a whole had been thoroughly ‘blackened’ and ‘Semitized’. He was among those who maintained that the modern Greeks were so mongrelized that they could no longer be considered as descendants of the Ancients. Indeed, his belief in the Phoenician influence on Greece was part of his general belief that Southern Europe had been irredeemably ‘Semitized’ and that only the Germanic peoples of the north had retained their ‘white’ purity. In this, however, he was clearly in the minority. While they were coming to share his views on Aryan superiority, most Northern Europeans were not prepared to give up Greece and Rome."

"To use a military analogy of the type favoured by Reinach himself, the demotion of China, Egypt and the Turks had been achieved by an Indo-European-Semitic alliance. In the 1820s only K. O. Müller, whom Reinach described as 'always in advance of his times', had had the courage to discard Europe's allies.By 1885 Europe’s conquest of the world was so complete that this courage had become commonplace and could now cast the Indians and the Semites aside."

"It seems...that the Aryan Model is being maintained very largely by its own tradition and academic inertia. Neither of these forces should be underestimated; nevertheless, they have been considerably weakened by a number of startling internal developments – all of which show that the Bronze Age civilizations were much more advanced and cosmopolitan than had been thought, and that in general the ancient records are more reliable than more recent reconstructions. Given these externalist and internalist contexts, I am convinced that even the Broad Aryan Model is untenable and that the Ancient Model will be restored at some point in the early 21st century."

"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."

"It is absurd to try to summarize this book in a dozen paragraphs, when even the previous hundreds of pages in which I have attempted to set out some of the complications of this vast and extraordinarily ramified theme can best be described by the Chinese expression ‘looking at flowers from horseback’."

"The Greek War of Independence...united all Europeans against the traditional Islamic enemies from Asia and Africa.This War – and the philhellenic movement, which supported the struggle for independence – completed the already powerful image of Greece as the epitome of Europe. The Ancient Greeks were now seen as perfect, and as having transcended the laws of history and language. Thus it was now thought profane to study any aspect of their culture as one would the culture of other peoples. Moreover, with the rise of a passionate and systematic racism in the early 19th century, the ancient notion that Greece was a mixed culture that had been civilized by Africans and Semites became not only abominable but unscientific. Just as one had to discount the ‘credulous’ Greeks’ stories about sirens and centaurs, so one had to reject legends of their having been colonized by inferior races. Paradoxically, the more the 19th century admired the Greeks, the less it respected their writing of their own history."

"The same social and intellectual forces that had brought down the Ancient Model in the 1820s were even more intense in the 1840s and 50s, and they clearly played a role in the increasingly ‘northern’ picture of Ancient Greece that developed in the late 19th century. At the same time, the sense that only 19th-century men knew how to think ‘scientifically’ gave the – mainly German – scholars the confidence both to dismiss ancient descriptions of early Greek history and to invent new ones of their own without any regard to the Ancients."