[I wrote this mail in response to Denise Eileen McCoskey's article 'Black Athena, White Power', which was published in Eidolon in November 2018. The subtitle for the article is: 'Are We Paying the Price for Classics' Response to Bernal?']
On Sat, Dec 8, 2018 at 8:40 AM Thomas Yaeger wrote:
Dear Prof. McCoskey,
Many thanks for writing the article 'Black Athena, White Power', published in Eidolon. It articulates a number of my own thoughts over the last thirty years, about classics and post-enlightenment eurocentric perceptions of ancient civilization. Black Athena made a huge impact on me on first publication, and the book was largely responsible for me moving to London to study in 1989. In London I had the option of studying ancient near-eastern languages and history, as well as Greece and Rome.
In the end, the controversy over Black Athena made me interested in the mechanics of what makes scholarly arguments acceptable, and unacceptable. That's down to education, preconceptions, and the contemporary cultural context in which the arguments are made. It is no wonder that it can take so long to shift a body of ideas which is long past its prime.
You wrote:
...most classicists did not want to take up the difficult and often messy questions that were being posed. They preferred to insist that the Greeks should not, could not be questioned at all,.... In doing so, they reinforced a powerful yet solipsistic image of the ancient Greeks and also classicists themselves as exceptional, self-created and self-sufficient...
This has resulted in the discipline of classics
essentially trading in forms of fiction since the middle of the eighteenth
century. There is also (as I quickly discovered) a cavalier disregard for
evidence which does not support these fictions (there is a lot more of that
evidence than is imagined). But the difficulty that classics finds itself in is
partly the product of a general will to shape the past in terms of what suits a
modern and distinctly western cultural perspective. That also needs to be
addressed. This 'general will' involves not only arguing for the supremacy of
the Greeks, but the twisting of the history of ideas to support this notion. As
a consequence, classics is one of the gatekeepers for two preposterous notions -
the Greeks being a wholly autocthonous and self-sufficient cultural entity, and
that no-one before them engaged with philosophical abstraction, or had the
intellectual capacity to do so.
My engagement with Black Athena largely
revolves around its implications for the general history of ideas, since the
linguistic evidence, particularly that published in the third volume, suggests
strongly that the Egyptians were as comfortable with abstract thought as the
Greeks, and there are plenty of plausible Egyptian loan words connected with
abstract concepts in the Greek vocabulary. But the Egyptians were not the only
external influence on the development of Greece, and may not have been the most
important cultural influence between the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. Ancient Assyria seems to have played a significant role in the early
intellectual and political development of Greece, particularly around 700 BCE.
Much relevant detail is now known about the Assyrian connection. But not
to classicists, who usually know little about Mesopotamia. This is not entirely
their fault, since one of the most important papers on the subject was published
in the proceedings of an ANE conference, and was not written for classicists in
any case. I also wrote a paper on the cultural influence of Assyria on Greece at
around the same time (2004), using mainly Greek sources (so far only available
on my blog, and published only recently). It has been looked at hundreds of
times, but has attracted no comments at all, despite the potential implications
of the argument for our understanding of the beginnings of Greek philosophy.
You might want to take a look at these two papers, since they both
undermine the notion that Greek civilization was self-made. They also, from the
point of view of classics scholars, come from an unexpected angle, and put new
information into any discussion about the early development of Greece.
1. Parpola, S., 2003b Assyria's Expansion in the 8th and 7th
Centuries BCE and Its Long-Term Repercussions in the West, - in W. G. Dever and
S. Gitin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism and the Power of the Past: Canaan,
Ancient Israel and their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman
Palestine. Proceedings of the Centennial Symposium, W.F. Albright Institute
of Archaeological Research and the American Schools of Oriental Research,
Jerusalem, May 29-May 31, 2000 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns), 99-111
2. Yaeger,
T., "Greece and the cultural Impact of the Assyrian Empire" https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2018/10/greece-and-cultural-impact-of-assyrian.html
(published October 11, 2018). [Parpola has read this article].
My
general thesis on abstract thought in the ancient world is: The Sacred History
of Being, which was published in November 2015 (The Anshar Press, ISBN:
9781311760678). It discusses not only the Greek and pre-Greek notions of Being,
but also the various obstacles which medieval and modern scholarship has erected
which make it very difficult to understand the early history of ideas. https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/p/the-sacred-history-of-being-as-its.html
Thanks again for writing such an excellent
article.
Best regards,
Thomas Yaeger
[Reply received Feb 02, 2019].
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