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BLACK ATHENA Hostilities to Egypt in the Eighteenth Century Martin Bernal Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have either been very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of SCientific Revolutions My use of this quotation from Thomas Kuhn is an attempt to justify my presumption , as someone trained in Chinese history, to write on subjects so far removed from my original field. For I shall be arguing that although the changes of view that I am proposing are not paradigmatic in the strict sense of the word, they are none the less fundamental. These volumes are concerned with two models of Greek history: one viewing Greece as essentially European or Aryan, and the other seeing it as Levantine, on the periphery of the Egyptian and Semitic cultural area. I call them the "Aryan" and the "Ancient" models. 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 B.C., 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 nineteenth 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 19205 and '30s, denied even the Phoenician cultural influence. According to the Aryan Model, there had been an invasion from the north-unreported in ancient tradition-which had overwhelmed the local "Aegean" or "Pre-Hellenic" culture. Greek civilization is seen as the result of the mixture of the Indo-European-speaking Hellenes and their 48 / Early Non-Western SCientific Traditions indigenous subjects. It is from the construction of this Aryan Model that I call this volume The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985. I believe that we should return to the Ancient Model, but with some revisions; hence I call what I advocate in Volume 2 of Black Athena the "Revised Ancient Model." This accepts that there is a real basis to the stories of Egyptian and Phoenician colonization of Greece set out in the Ancient model. However, it sees them as beginning somewhat earlier, in the first half of the second millennium B.C. It also agrees with the latter that Greek civilization is the result of the cultural mixtures created by these colonizations and later borrowings from across the East Mediterranean . On the other hand, it tentatively accepts the Aryan Model's hypothesis of invasions-or infiltrations-from the north by Indo-European speakers sometime during the fourth or third millennium B.C. However, the revised Ancient model maintains that the earlier population was speaking a related Indo-Hittite language which left little trace in Greek. In any event, it cannot be used to explain the many non-European elements in the later language. 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 eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome ofEurope but also as its pure childhood, to have been the result ofthe mixture ofnative Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites. Therefore the Ancient Model had to be overthrown and replaced by something more acceptable. • • • The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been dominated by the paradigms of progress and science. Within learning there has been the belief that most disciplines made a quantum leap into "modernity" or 'true science" followed by steady, cumulative, scholarly progress. In the historiography of the Ancient East Mediterranean these "leaps" are perceived to have taken place in the nineteenth century, and since then scholars have tended to believe that their work has been qualitatively better than any that has gone before. The palpable successes...

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