I...became convinced that anything up to a quarter of the Greek vocabulary could be traced to Semitic… — Martin Bernal
I...became convinced that anything up to a quarter of the Greek vocabulary could be traced to Semitic origins. This, together with 40–50 per cent that seem to be Indo-European, still left a quarter to a third of the Greek vocabulary unexplained. I hesitated between seeing this irreducible fraction conventionally as ‘Pre-Hellenic’ or of postulating a third outside language, either from Anatolian or—as I preferred—Hurrian. When I looked into these languages, however, they provided virtually no promising material. It was only in 1979, when I was glancing through a copy of Černy’s Coptic Etymological Dictionary, that I was able to get some sense of Late Ancient Egyptian. Almost immediately, I realized that this was the third outside language. Within a few months I became convinced that one could find plausible etymologies for a further 20–25 per cent of the Greek vocabulary from Egyptian, as well as the names for most Greek gods and many place names. Putting the Indo-European, Semitic and Egyptian roots together, I now believed that—with further research—one could provide plausible explanations for 80–90 per cent of the Greek vocabulary, which is as high a proportion as one can hope for in any language. Thus there was now no need for the ‘Pre-Hellenic’ element at all.
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The same social and intellectual forces that had brought down the Ancient Model in the 1820s were even more intense in the 1840s and 50s, and they clearly played a role in the increasingly ‘northern’ picture of Ancient Greece that developed in the late 19th century. At the same time, the sense that only 19th-century men knew how to think ‘scientifically’ gave the – mainly German – scholars the confidence both to dismiss ancient descriptions of early Greek history and to invent new ones of their own without any regard to the Ancients.
p. 441
The Greek War of Independence...united all Europeans against the traditional Islamic enemies from Asia and Africa.This War – and the philhellenic movement, which supported the struggle for independence – completed the already powerful image of Greece as the epitome of Europe. The Ancient Greeks were now seen as perfect, and as having transcended the laws of history and language. Thus it was now thought profane to study any aspect of their culture as one would the culture of other peoples. Moreover, with the rise of a passionate and systematic racism in the early 19th century, the ancient notion that Greece was a mixed culture that had been civilized by Africans and Semites became not only abominable but unscientific. Just as one had to discount the ‘credulous’ Greeks’ stories about sirens and centaurs, so one had to reject legends of their having been colonized by inferior races. Paradoxically, the more the 19th century admired the Greeks, the less it respected their writing of their own history.
p. 441
This view of Egyptian religion played a central role in the two major ‘novels’ of the 2nd century AD, Heliodoros’ Aithiopika and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass. In his morally elevating and romantic story with a beautiful and virtuous Ethiopian – but not black – heroine, Heliodoros expressed great admiration for the Ethiopians and their gymnosophists (naked philosophers or gurus), but Aithiopika is focused on Egypt and the moral superiority of its religion. It also stresses the passionate interest taken in it by Greek priests, who saw it as the key to their own cults. When talking about the priests of Delphi bombarding a visiting Egyptian with questions, the author wrote: "In short, they forgot none of the interesting features of Egypt, for there is no country in the world which Greeks prefer to hear about."
p. 119
