ABSTRACT OF “BLACK ATHENA” BY MARTIN BERNAL
Differentiate among two views over ancient History, the Aryan and the Levantine (which he calls the ‘Ancient’).
Aryan
This view was developed only in the fists half of the 19th Century.
In its anit-Semitism peaks (1890’s and 1920’s and 30’s), it denied even the Phoenician cultural influence.
There had been an invasion from the north – unreported in ancient tradition – which had overhelmed the local ‘Aegean’ or ‘Pre-Hellenic’ culture.
Ancient
Is the version which arose since ancient times.
Greek culture had arisen as the result of colonization, around 1500 B.C, by Egyptians and Phoenicians who have civilized the native inhabitants. Furthermore, Greeks had continued to borrow heavily from Near Eastern cultures.
The author resorts to the Ancient Model, but with some revisions.
Agrees on the founding role of Phoenicians and Egyptians founding Greek, with further borrowings from across the East Mediterranean.
The earlier population spoke Indo-Hititite language which left little trace in Greek.
In the other hand it accepts the Aryan Model’s hypothesis of invasions – or infiltrations – from the north by Indo-European speakers sometime during the 4th or 3rd millennium B.C.
The replacement of the Aryan Model by the Revised Ancient 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.
18th and 19th Century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece – the epitome of Europe – to have been the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing African and Semites.
Model means to him a reduced and simplified scheme of a complex reality.
Points that such transposition always distorts.
Points that some phenomenas are best seem in two or more different ways, using different models. For this, models are not necessarily exclusive, even when they disagree radically.
Paradigm to him means generalized models or patterns of thought applied to many or all aspects of ‘reality’ as seem by an individual or community.
Points that fundamental challenges to disciplines tend to be come from outside, because people emerged in the field are shaped while still students to accept conventional preconceptions and patterns of thoughts that turn them unlikely to be able to question its basic premises.
Particularly view in the field of ancient history.
Its study is dominated by the learning of difficult languages, a process that is inevitably authoritarian: e.g. one may not question the logic of an irregular verb or the function of a particle.
Also because instructors lay down their linguistic rules and because the notions of Greek and Hebrew are taught during childhood.
Because there is the trend of relating the Classical or Jewish traditions with the foundation of Western Culture, what make some paradigm shift to be considered heretic. It means that even the Ancient approach today is jeopardized by their pro-Jewish aimed knowledge.
The maximum we have is a comparative studies of ‘myths’, with less value and always focusing on the same cases.
Karl Otfried, is considered the destrcuctor of Ancient Model, when, in the 18th Century, he urged scholars to study Greek mythology, however, without recognizing any specific borrowing from the East.
Since the 1840’s Indo-European philology, or study of the relationships between languages, has been at the heart of the Aryan model, however, they refuse to point any link between Greeks and Egyptians and Semitics.
Outsiders can never have the control of detail gained so slowly and painfully by experts, however, this does not mean that they are necessarily wrong.
While amateurs are usually unable to help scholarly advance within a model or paradigm, they are often the best people to challenge it.
The specialists negative opinions cannot be regarded with the same unqualified respect, for, while they have the necessary skills to make a judgment, they have direct stake in the case.
Although professional opinion should be studied carefully and treated with respect, it should not always be taken as the last word.
Ultimately, a lay jury has to rely on its own subjective or aesthetic judgment.
E.G:
Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated Troy and Mycenae in the 1870’s, made a naive but fruitful conjunction of legends, historical documents and topography, showing that much as academics might like it to be, the obvious is not always false.
The 2 most important break-troughs in Hellenic studies since 1850 – the archeological discovery of the Mycenaeans and the decipherment of their script, Linear B – were both made by amateurs: Schliemann and Michael Ventris (Anglo-Greel architect).
Time come to confirm some non-specialized hints at their time denied by specialists, such as the Continental Drift proposed by Prof. A. L. Wagener at the end of the 19th Century and the populist proposal to abandon the gold standard in the 1980’s and 90’s.
Differentiates among 2 patterns of paradigm challenges:
The crank: Tend to add new unknown and unknowable factors into their theories.
Sometimes those assumptions area validated by the discovery of such factors, as in the case of Saussure’s ‘coeficients’ to explain anomalies in IndoEuropeans vowels, which was further discovered to exist in Hittite laryngeals.
The less imaginative: Tend to remove actors rather than add them.
E.G: Ventris took away the unknown Aegean language in which Linear B was supposed to have been written, leaving a direct juxtaposition between two known entities, Homeric and Classical Greek, and the corpus of Linear B tablets. Thus he instantly created a whole new academic field.
The authors purpose belongs to this second category. It adds no extra unknown or unknowable factors. It removes two introduced by proponents of the Aryan Model: (1) The non-Indo-Europeanspeaking ‘Pre-Helenic’ peoplesupon whom every inexplicable aspect of Greek culture has been thurst; and (2) the mysterious disease of ‘Egyptomania’, ‘barbarophilia’ and interpretation Graeca which the ‘Aryanist’ allege, have deluded so many otherwise intelligent, balanced and informed Ancient Greeks with the belief that Egyptians and Phoenicians had played a central role in the formation of their culture.
The removal of these two factors and the revival of the Ancient Model leaves the Greek, West Semitic and Egyptian cultures and languages in direct confrontation, generating hundreds if not thousands of testable hypotheses-predictions that if word or concept A occurred in culture X, one should expect to find its equivalent in culture Y.
The Ancient, Aryan and Revised Ancient models share one paradigm, that of the possibility of diffusion of language or culture through conquest.
It goes against the dominant trend in archeology today, which is to stress indigenous development.
The modernity made 19th century scientists, especially archeologists, to think that their work, as well as the whole society, had been qualitatively better than any that has gone before. Nevertheless, the destroyers of the Ancient Model and the builders of the Aryan believed themselves to be ‘scientific’.
They made the Ancient version sounds so absurd as the Minotaur and other legends.
For the past hundred and fifty years, historians have claimed to possess a ‘method’ analogous to those used in natural science. In fact, ways in which the modern historians differ from the ‘prescientific’ ones are much less certain.
Today, the charge of ‘unsold methodology’ is used to condemn not merely incompetent but also unwelcome work.
Especially in archeology, all one can finds is more or less plausibility, but not certains. Thus, debates in these areas should not be judged on the basis of proof, but merely on competitive plausibility.
‘ARCHEOLOGICAL POSITIVISM’ is the fallacy that dealing with objects makes one objective.
The favourite tool of the archeological positivists is the ‘argument from silence’.
E.G. The Thera eruption during the Late Minoan IB.
It’s impossible to prove absence.
Moderns archeologist can’t be compared exactly to the racist ones of the 19th and 18th Century, however, they are working with models set up by men who were crudely positivist and racist.
This does not in itself falsify the models, but – given what would be seen as the dubious circumstances of their creation – they sgould be very carefully scrutinized, and the possibility that there may be equally good or better alternatives should be seriously taken into account.
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