"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."
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Historians from EnglandJews from the United KingdomUniversity of Cambridge alumniUniversity of Cambridge facultyCornell University faculty
Original Language: English
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1. The Ancient Model in Antiquity (pp. 89-90)
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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.
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