Martin Bernal

Quotes

1. There have been...persistent attempts to diminish the Egyptian aspects of the play [the Suppliants of Aischylos], which in later times became so important a prop for the Ancient Model. For instance, while Io is seen as coming from Argos, most sources agree that she was only the distant ancestor of Aigyptos and Danaos. Thus the brothers and their children were Egyptianized, if not purely Egyptian, and the Danaids are explicitly described as ‘black’. The mainstream of German scholarship, however, has preferred the one scholiast who can dubiously be construed to say that the twins were the children of Io herself. The same scholiast also maintains that the whole action of the trilogy took place in Argos. This version has been preferred to all the other sources, some of which held that all the events were situated in Egypt, and all of which...had the Danaids arriving from Egypt.

   p. 89

2. 

   At the core of Altertumswissenschaft was the image of the divine Greek, both artistic and philosophical. Greeks also had – like the idealized image of the Germans themselves – to be integrated with their native soil, and pure. Thus the Ancient Model, with its multiple invasions and frequent cultural borrowings and the implicit consequences of racial and linguistic mixture, became increasingly intolerable. It is only within this political and social context that one can understand the attack by one of the first products of the new system, Karl Otfried Müller, on the overwhelming ancient authority of the Ancient Model.

   p. 282

3. 

   To use a military analogy of the type favoured by Reinach himself, the demotion of China, Egypt and the Turks had been achieved by an Indo-European-Semitic alliance. In the 1820s only K. O. Müller, whom Reinach described as 'always in advance of his times', had had the courage to discard Europe's allies.By 1885 Europe’s conquest of the world was so complete that this courage had become commonplace and could now cast the Indians and the Semites aside.

   p. 371

4. 

   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.

   p. 2

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