University Of Cambridge Alumni

"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."

"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.’"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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’."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"When, however, this spirit once awakened, it was perceived that the current stories of these ancient settlements afforded great room for reasonable distrust, not merely in the marvellous features they exhibit but in the still more suspicious fact that with the lapse of time their number seems to increase..."

"In a comparatively late period – that which followed the rise of historical literature among the Greeks – we find a belief generally prevalent, both in the people and among the learned, that in ages of very remote antiquity, before the name and dominion of the Pelasgians had given way to that of the Hellenic race, foreigners had been led by various causes to the shores of Greece and there had planted colonies, founded dynasties, built cities, and introduced useful arts and social institutions, before unknown to the ruder natives. The same belief has been almost universally adopted by the learned of modern times … It required no little boldness to venture even to throw out a doubt as to the truth of an opinion sanctioned by such authority and by prescription of such a long and undisputed possession of the public mind, and perhaps it might never have been questioned, if the inferences drawn from it had not provoked a jealous enquiry into the grounds on which it rests,"

"It seems possible and even necessary to take a middle course between the old and the new opinions."

"Settlers of purely Egyptian blood, crossing the Aegean and founding maritime cities, appears inconsistent with everything we know about national characters."

"Parvus denied that universal suffrage was an end in itself since the middle class would always had ways to manipulate the electoral system. Freedom could not be begged for: it had to be won. The bureaucracy and officer corps had to be eliminated. What was needed, in fact, was not just an uprising as demanded by the Bolsheviks but a commitment to a struggle to 'make the revolution permanent'."

"The Soviet communist leadership may have magnified the prospects of 'European revolution' but it did not invent them out of nothing. Country after country to the west of Russia was experiencing disorder and discontent. Russia itself emerged under Bolshevik rule from years of civil war and foreign armed intervention. The victor powers in the Great War had irresistible force at their disposal if only they could muster the will to deploy it. But they increasingly lacked that will. The Western Allies had not had properly agreed strategic aims since at least 1917, when America joined them."

"The Russian Empire was deeply fissured between the government and the tsar’s subjects; between the capital and the provinces; between the educated and the uneducated; between Western and Russian ideas; between the rich and the poor; between privilege and oppression; between contemporary fashion and centuries-old custom."

"The judges of England have rarely been original thinkers or great jurists. Many have been craftsmen rather than creators. They have needed the stuff of morals to be supplied to them so that out of it they could fashion the law."

"Ability isn't the most important thing. In most cases the facts aren't really very difficult to get at: no, the most important thing for a judge is—curiously enough—judgment. It’s not so very different from the qualities of a successful businessman or civil servant. I’m always struck by how alike men in high positions seem to be. It’s rather like seeing a lot of different parts of the stage, and finding that they’re all Gerald du Maurier in the end."

"Each jury is a little parliament. The jury sense is the parliamentary sense. I cannot see the one dying and the other surviving. The first object of any tyrant * * * would be to make Parliament utterly subservient to his will; and next to overthrow or diminish trial by jury, for no tyrant could afford to leave a subject’s freedom in the hands of 12 of his countrymen. So that trial by jury is more than an instrument of justice and more than one wheel of the constitution; it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives."

"I think...that it is not possible to set theoretical limits to the power of the State to legislate against immorality. It is not possible to settle in advance exceptions to the general rule or to define inflexibly areas of morality into which the law is in no circumstances to be allowed to enter. Society is entitled by means of its laws to protect itself from dangers, whether from within or without. Here again I think that the political parallel is legitimate. The law of treason is directed against aiding the king's enemies and against sedition from within. The justification for this is that established government is necessary for the existence of society and therefore its safety against violent overthrow must be secured. But an established morality is as necessary as good government to the welfare of society. Societies disintegrate from within more frequently than they are broken up by external pressures. There is disintegration when no common morality is observed and history shows that the loosening of moral bonds is often the first stage of disintegration, so that society is justified in taking the same steps to preserve its moral code as it does to preserve its government... the suppression of vice is as much the law's business as the suppression of subversive activities."

"For almost a century the theory of general relativity (GR) has been known to describe the force of gravity with impeccable agreement with observations. ... Far from a purely academic exercise, the existence of consistent alternatives to describe the theory of gravitation is actually essential to test the theory of GR. Furthermore the open questions that remain behind the puzzles at the interface between gravity/cosmology and particle physics such as the hierarchy problem, the old and the origin of the late-time acceleration of the Universe have pushed the search for alternatives to GR."

"Gravity is the reason why the Universe itself can even exist and evolve. It elevates space and time from mere pieces of scenery into central actors in the unfolding drama of reality. As we embrace gravity, we can't help but also pit ourselves against it: leaping, floating, or flying as we pursue brief moments of freedom from its command. I, for one, have been chasing gravity my entire life—seeking, like so many scientists who have come before me, to unravel its deepest mysteries."

"After the Big Bang, the universe expanded and cooled down. And we expect this expansion to gradually slow down because the universe has things like galaxies inside it, and they are attracted to each other by gravity. But in the past 25 years or so, observations have shown precisely the opposite: The expansion of the universe is speeding up. It’s accelerating. This is the concept of , and it points to something that we are missing in our description of the universe. Dark energy is sometimes seen as this mysterious, magical source of energy that accelerates the expansion of the universe. But this isn’t really the core of the problem. We can cook something up for dark energy — just as we do for dark matter — and hope we’ll detect it later. It’s not particularly satisfying, but we do this, we’ve done it before. Really, ."

"... we can never really shield ourselves from gravity. You can think of a for electromagnetism — where you can shield yourself from . But that is not the case for gravity. Everyone is connected through gravity."

"A theory of is one in which the , the particle that is believed to mediate the force of gravity, has a small mass. This contrasts with general relativity, our current best theory of gravity, which predicts that the graviton is exactly massless. In 2011, Claudia de Rham (), () and Andrew Tolley (Imperial College London) revitalised interest in massive gravity by uncovering the structure of the best possible (in a technical sense) theory of massive gravity, now known as the dRGT theory, after these authors. Claudia de Rham has now written a popular book on the physics of gravity. The Beauty of Falling is an enjoyable and relatively quick read: a first-hand and personal glimpse into the life of a and the process of discovery."

""Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-ey'd sons of Achaia; Known to me well are the faces of all; their names I remember; Two, two only remain, whom I see not among the commanders, Castor fleet in the car—Polydeukes brave with the cestus— Own dear brethren of mine—one parent lov'd us as infants. Are they not here in the host, from the shores of lov'd Lacedæmon, Or, tho' they came with the rest in ships that bound thro' the waters, Dare they not enter the fight or stand in the council of Heroes, All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awaken'd?" So said she;—they long since in Earth's soft arms were reposing, There, in their own dear land, their Father-land, Lacedæmon."

"The Londoners’ faithful love and their money were both important to Richard; unfortunately he sought the latter at the expense of the former, while imagining them to be the same thing."

"It took a particular genius and a great deal of luck to make war pay, and Richard had neither."

"Being thought to be untrustworthy is no better – indeed in political terms much worse – than actually being untrustworthy."

"This kind of moral analysis is characteristic of medieval thought: the aim is to condemn where condemnation is due, but to salvage from the criticism the ideals which animate and support society."

"The long story of the medieval cult of chivalry, from its emergence in the twelfth century to its belated glories in the court of the young Henry VIII, is punctuated by the ongoing conflict between knighthood’s idealistic claims to virtue and divine favour, and the Church’s condemnation of all chivalric values as empty and worthless."

"The government’s reassertion of control over England in the aftermath demonstrated a merciless insistence on the social structure, which tied all into the hierarchy, supporting the king at the top. It was part of Richard’s failure that he did not understand, or would not accept, his throne’s dependence on the stability of that structure."

"As we approach him through contemporary records and chronicles, any sense of the real man beneath the image recedes, never to be caught. Chroniclers tell us what they think he said or did, or that bias or rumour believed he had done or said – and even then they give us a Richard who baffled those around him. But the idea of Richard II is as real an object of historical study as the man himself. When it comes to trying to understand the fate of a king, the idea of him may be the only real object of study there is."

"Richard’s will was sovereign, and yet it could not be trusted not to change. He had demonstrated that he would erase history, change the statutes of the realm, rather than remit his desires."

"Richard understood his own reign through the distorting lens of the court he made for himself; he could not understand why the regality he regarded as his right was denied to him on the broader stage."

"The court was by definition in place of extreme instability, of faction and favourites, in which men could rise and fall as they pleased or displeased of the king. For the nation to function at large, this could not be the case. The noble men of the realm needed the security of their patrimony, their status and their rights; for them to support the king they needed to know that he would support the social structure which maintained them all. Richard had demonstrated, fatally, that everything was personal to him."

"Once again, the viewer is made to recognize the sheer glory of kingship, its otherworldly status, and Richard’s distance from his subjects. This majesty is revealed by the actual events of Richard’s life and death to have been empty at its heart."

"This is no Henry VIII to command obedience by sheer force of personality; rather, Richard’s image enacts kingship itself, around a curious void. As an individual, he is absent from the portrait; as king, he is presented for our veneration."