Summary
The Cornell political scientist whose Black Athena is the third example of cultural analysis in “The Clash of Definitions”, the final essay of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays: a civilization — classical Greece — retrospectively created and frozen into a definition despite evidence of hybridity and mixture (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.536-537).
Details
- The conception held today about classical Greece does not correspond, in his account, with what Greek authors of that period say about it: since the early nineteenth century Europeans and Americans have grown up with an idealized picture of Attic harmony and grace, of Athens as the birthplace of democracy and of a Western mode of life completely different from Asia’s or Africa’s (PDF p.536-537).
- Many ancient authors comment on the existence of Semitic and African elements in Attic life; he demonstrates from a great many sources that Greece was originally a colony of Africa, more particularly of Egypt, and that Phoenician and Jewish traders, sailors and teachers contributed most of what is known today as classical Greek culture — an amalgam of African, Semitic and later northern influences (PDF p.537).
- With the growth of European, in particular German, nationalism, the original mixed portrait of Attic Greece that obtained into the eighteenth century was gradually expunged of all its non-Aryan elements; Greece was transformed from the product of an invasion from the South — Africa — into the product of an invasion from the Aryan north, and purged Greece has stood in Western self-definition as its fons et origo (PDF p.537).
- The principle his book underlines is the extent to which pedigrees, dynasties, lineages and predecessors are changed to suit the political needs of a later time (PDF p.537).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Samuel Huntington, Clash of civilizations, Edward Said