Race, Class, and Gender in the Formation of the Aryan Model of Greek Origins

Martin Bernal

My work Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization is concerned with the formation of ancient Greece, which I believe is quite rightly seen as the largest single source of European culture. In this project I have found it useful to classify the many different stories of Greek origins according to what I call the Ancient and Aryan models. By "model" I mean a reduced and simplified representation, and I am acutely aware that creating models inevitably distorts the complex contours of the past. As the Italian proverb states, traduttore traditore (translator, traitor). Even the translated text has problems; as David Lodge puts it in his novel Small World, "Decoding is merely re-encoding." Having said all this, I believe that models, like words, are essential for organized thought and that some codes are better than others—in terms of the accuracy of their representation of "reality" and/or their comprehensibility. Thus it has been helpful to set up these two models of Greek origins.

According to the Aryan model with which I and my contemporaries were brought up, Greek civilization was the result of the conquest of the Aegean basin from the north by the Hellenes, speakers of an Indo-European language, or as slippage between language and "race" was very easy—"Aryans." Among many other things, the original inhabitants of the region are supposed to have lost their name, so for convenience modern scholars have simply called them "pre-Hellenes." Greek language and society are believed to have emerged from this mixture, and all of the considerable portion of it that could not be related to other Indo-European-speaking cultures was designated "pre-Hellene." By definition, the pre-Hellenes must not have been Indo-European speakers, yet they are seen as Caucasian and definitely unrelated to Africans or Semitic speakers from Southwest Asia. The nineteenth-century creators of the Aryan model saw Greece as fundamentally different from India, where the Aryans had conquered a "dark" people but had eventually been corrupted by them; Greece, by contrast, was seen as racially pure and essentially European, an appropriate cradle for "Western Civilization."

This picture was essentially created in the 1830s and 1840s. Before that, the predominant view of Greek origins was informed by what I call the Ancient model, which was fully articulated in the fifth century B.C., but there is strong evidence to suggest that it had existed much earlier. According to this model, the ancestors of the Greeks had lived around the Aegean in idyllic simplicity until the Phoenicians and rulers from Egypt arrived and acquired territories, built cities, and founded dynasties. The strangers also introduced many of the arts of civilization, notably, irrigation, various types of armaments, writing, and religion. These had later been refined by Greeks studying in Egypt and, to a lesser extent, in Mesopotamia. This image of cultural dependence was not one that made fifth-century Greeks happy, so the Athenians developed a myth whereby the Thebans and Peloponnesians had foreign ancestry, but they themselves were autochthonous sons of the soil. However, the credibility of the Ancient model is increased precisely because it went against the Panhellenic, anti-"barbarian" passions of the time. This point was taken up by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars who felt obliged to defend the Ancient model against skeptics. Before that, there had been no need for any defense, as it was accepted by all scholars who considered the subject.

My project has two aspects, one historical and the other historiographical. In the historical one I set up a compromise model, the "revised Ancient model." This accepts the arguments behind the Aryan model that it is plausible to postulate a single, ancestral proto-Indo-European language originally spoken somewhere to the north of the Balkans and that Greek is therefore fundamentally an Indo-European language. Thus at some stage the Aegean basin must have been substantially influenced by the north, and this influence could have been the result of migration or conquest. On the other hand, there is no reason to see this northern influence as precluding the possibility of substantial cultural influence from the south and east as well. The fundamental structure of Greek is Indo-European, and the Greek tradition remembered the overseas settlements rather than conquests from the Balkans. It is plausible to suppose that, rather than being the result of a pre-Hellenic substrate, the non-Indo-European elements in the Greek language and culture were largely later Semitic and Egyptian superimpositions on an Indo-European base. Possibly these were the result of conquest and elite settlement around the Aegean, and certainly they came from trade and diplomatic contacts between Egypt and the Levant, on the one hand, and the Aegean, on the other.

When I wrote volume one of Black Athena in the late 1970s I had hoped to measure the utility of the revised Ancient model against that of the Aryan model simply by confronting the "evidence" from archaeology, linguistics, religious cults, and so on. In preparing volume two, however, I came to realize that such an approach had two devastating flaws. At a superficial level, it would have been disingenuous for me to claim impartiality toward the two models. More fundamentally, I came to realize that there is no objective evidence above or beyond the models. Even in volume one, I had specifically rejected claims of certainty or proof, maintaining that the best one could hope for was what I called "competitive plausibility," or the least bad historical narrative. In volume two, I merely set out to show that it was more interesting and satisfying to work with or live in the revised Ancient model than it was to inhabit the Aryan one.

Here, however, I shall not be concerned with reconstructing the history of the origins of ancient Greece, but with trying to understand its historiography. I am particularly interested in the crux of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when first the Ancient model was abandoned and then, a little later, the Aryan one was created and adopted by most scholars. Before getting down to this, however, I should like to take an approach formerly used in the history of...