Martin Bernal

“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.”

“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’.”

“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.{{pb}}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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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."”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”