While responding to a mail from the managing editor of a scholarly magazine, who I'd pointed in the direction of a couple of articles on my blog, I found myself condensing my project into the compass of just four paragraphs. This covers both what I am doing, and why. I reproduce them here:
Years ago I read Adolf Erman's collection of Egyptian Literature in English
translation. One text in particular made me sit up, since it involved the use of
concepts I associated with classical Greece. The text was Akhenaten's 'Hymn to
the Aten'. Akhenaten lived some nine hundred years before Plato and Aristotle,
yet he seemed to be comfortable with concepts which are supposed to have been
first discussed among the Greeks. I looked for other 'anticipations', and found
them.
That propelled me to study in London (in 1989). By that time I'd started to
look at antiquity quite differently from the way I'd been taught by classicists.
Instead of seeing classical Greece (and the work of the later philosophers all
the way up to the closure of the philosophical schools in 529 CE) as the
beginnings of sophisticated thought about abstract concepts, I began to treat
major components of classical thought as the possible end point of a way of
thinking, which might conceivably stretch back into the neolithic. The notion of
excellence is one of those components, which as we now know was a concern for
the megalith builders.
That's the basic hypothesis. The idea of Greece as the birthplace of
philosophy is a modern construct. Plato himself said it was a very old
discipline, but classicists don't bother to discuss what he had to say about
that when they are writing about the history of philosophy. The evidence from
around the eastern Mediterranean however, bears out what Plato said.
My focus so far has been mainly on Mesopotamia, and back to the 14th
century BCE, because it is the area where I have the most expertise. It is now
pretty clear however that the hypothesis that the presence of abstract ideas
stretches back into the Neolithic is sound, and that this insight can deliver
great riches. If only we can escape our enlightenment presumptions about the
intellectual poverty of our distant ancestors.
Best regards,
Thomas Yaeger
The two articles the managing editor was pointed at were: Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind, and: Frazer and the Association of Ideas,
I introduced the first article as looking at the context and function of Stone Circles, particularly when
looked at as structures which may have served a similar function to divine
statues in both Greece and Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, during the installation
of divine statues, the three day ritual necessarily involved pointing them at
defined areas of the sky, because the heavens were understood to represent an
image of the Divine - of Being and Reality itself.
The second article I described as a review of J. G. Frazer's approach to the meaning of evidence from the ancient world. He was trained in Classics, and knew the works of Plato virtually backwards and his concern with the idea of Being, but chose to write his account of ancient thought entirely without reference to the idea of Being in antiquity. He suggested that since nothing could be predicated of Being, it was an entirely barren concept. So Frazer's voluminous output is really a species of fiction, replacing sophisticated thought about the nature of reality with the argument that ancient human thought was, more or less entirely, built on intellectual error.
