"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."