GenZedong

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[:] … 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 BC, 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 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, … flourished during the twin peaks of anti-Semitism in the 1890s and again in the 1920s 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 over-whelmed 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 indigenous subjects. It is from the construction of this Aryan Model that I call this volume The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985.
 I [propose a] return to the Ancient Model, but with some revisions; … [a] 'Revised Ancient Model'. This accepts that there is a real basis to the stories of Egyptian and Phoenician colonization of Greece …. However, it sees them as beginning somewhat earlier, in the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. 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 4th or 3rd millennium BC. 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-Indo-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 18th- and 19th-century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood, to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites. Therefore the Ancient Model had to be overthrown and replaced by something more acceptable.

Isokrates insisted that the Spartans had failed to apply the Egyptian principle of the division of labour and that their constitution fell short of the perfection of the Egyptian model, about which he wrote: 'philosophers who undertake to discuss such topics and have won the greatest reputation prefer above all others the Egyptian form of government …’

To whom was Isokrates referring? [It was] plausibly … to the Pythagoreans, and … their concept of, or even actual writing on, ‘Egyptian Politics’. It takes the greatest Aryanist ingenuity to deny the strong ancient traditions – referred to by Herodotos and … later writers – that there was such a person as Pythagoras and that his school was established on the basis of his long studies in Egypt. Nevertheless, it has been attempted. … Isokrates was quite explicit about it: 'On a visit to Egypt he [Pythagoras] became a student of the religion of the people, and was the first to bring to the Greeks all philosophy.

[Or,] less likely … 'philosophers' … meant his great rival Plato and his Republic. It is generally thought that the latter was written between 380 and 370BC, that is after Bousiris, c390. It is also believed that the work was the result of many years of thought and teaching, and that there were possibly earlier drafts. The likelihood is, however, that priority should be given to Bousiris. … [T]here are striking similarities between it and Plato's Republic. In the latter, too, there was a division of labour based on castes ruled by enlightened Guardians produced by careful selection and rigorous education. Plato was sharply hostile to the turbulence of democratic politics in Athens, and this kind of model was clearly comforting.

To what extent can it be related to Egypt? Apart from the resemblance to the explicitly Egyptian Bousiris we know that Egypt, where Plato had spent some time, probably around 390 BC, was a central concern of his later works. In Phaidros, Plato had Sokrates declare that 'He [Theuth-Thoth the Egyptian god of wisdom] it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry . . . and most important of all letters …’.

In Philebos and Epinomis Plato went into more detail on Thoth as the creator of writing, even of language and all sciences. Elsewhere Plato praised Egyptian art and music and argued for their adoption in Greece. … [T]he only reason for doubting that his Republic was based on Egypt is the fact that he does not say so in the text. This omission, however, has an ancient explanation. As his earliest commentator, Krantor, wrote …:

Plato's contemporaries mocked him, saying that he was not the inventor of his republic, but that he had copied Egyptian institutions. He attached so much importance to the mockers that he … ma[d]e [people] say that the Athenians had really lived under this regime at a certain moment in the past.

Faced with all this evidence in favour of an Egyptian derivation, early modem scholars still associated Plato's Republic with Egypt. As Marx put it: 'Plato's Republic, in so far as division of labour is treated in it, as the formative principle of the state, is merely an Athenian idealization of the Egyptian system of castes.’

Popper, who hates Plato, would have loved to tar him with an Egyptian brush. However, he was writing in a more systematically Aryanist age and, though fully aware of Krantor's charge, he has confined it to the footnotes and appears puzzled by Marx's remark. … The majority [of scholars] simply omit any mention of Egypt in connection with the Republic.

Thus, for Plato … [and] Isokrates … [t]he deeper they went towards the true Hellenic roots of Greece, the closer they came to Egypt. … [B]oth Isokrates and Plato maintained that the great lawgivers and philosophers like Lykourgos, Solon and Pythagoras had all brought back Egyptian knowledge. Furthermore, Isokrates and Plato both believed in the colonizations of Pelops, Kadmos, Aigyptos and Danaos and seem to have accepted with Herodotos that the 'barbarians' brought important cultural baggage with them. Even on the issue of the foundation of Athens, Plato … accepted that there was a 'genetic' cultural relationship between it and Sais. Thus, despite their ambivalence if not hostility to the ideas, the two leading intellectual figures of the early 4th century BC were forced to admit the critical importance of foreign colonization, and massive later cultural borrowing from Egypt and the Levant, in the formation of the Hellenic civilization they both loved so passionately.