ABSTRACT
THE ANCIENT MODEL The argument of Bernal's Black Athena sets up two rival models of Greek prehistory. The one, which he terms "the Ancient Model," was, he claims, the conventional view held by most Greeks in the classical and Hellenistic eras; according to this model, Greek culture had arisen as a result of colonization, around r 500 B.C.E., by Egyptians and Phoenicians who civilized the native inhabitants of (what was later called) Hellas. This model therefore sees ancient Greece as essentially a Levantine culture, on the periphery of the Egyptian and Semitic spheres of influence. The rival model, on the other hand, which he chooses to term "the extreme Aryan Model," was invented, he argues, in the early nineteenth century. It saw the Greeks as Indo-European-speaking invaders from the north, who had overwhelmed the indigenous pre-Hellenic culture; sometimes the myth of the return of the Heraclidae was interpreted as holding a kernel of the historical "truth" of these invasions from the north. Ancient Hellas, according to this model, is thus viewed as European, the pure Aryan Ursprung [origin] of modern Europe. Bernal argues from a historically relativist standpoint that the original "Ancient Model," though surviving until fairly recently, was overthrown by the "Aryan Model" as a result of the contingent ideological requirements of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The theory of the biologically distinct races of humankind and their congenital inequalities in terms of intelligence and so on, which was to develop so disastrously into the practical policies of National Socialism, was
first promulgated in print by Blumenbach in I 77 5; it was a product of the racist tendencies of European artists, intellectuals, and academics, and it was fed by their romanticism. They found it intolerable to admit any Semitic or African influence on the "pure childhood" of Europe. The "Ancient Model" was officially overthrown by Karl Otfried Muller in I820.
