Re-drawing the Map? including a few in Greek translation, actually written in the Hellenistic or
early Roman period.
A Different ‘‘Ancient History’’?
Lying behind the loosely connected observations which have been offered so
far is a proposal, or suggestion, for a different way of approaching at least part
of the history of the ‘‘ancient,’’ meaning ‘‘Graeco-Roman,’’ world. Further-
more, lying in its turn behind this proposal, to which we will come in a
moment, is a recognition that in certain essentials Martin Bernal’s project
inBlack Athenawas justified in principle, even if the execution was marred
by many conceptual errors, and by a misplaced concentration on a period of
which too little is known, the mid-second millennium..^34 The fact that
the study of the Mediterranean region, as it was in the last two millennia..
and the first millennium.., has, since the early modern period, been a
‘‘Western’’ activity, combined with the primary educational role of Greek
and Latin, has inevitably meant that earlier Greek history has generally been
studied in relative isolation from its Near Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean
context, and that later Greek history has been explored first in the context
of Macedonian imperialism, and then in that of the Roman Empire.
This is simply a fact about the structure of school education and of higher
scholarship in the West over the past few centuries (and of the effective
absence of any comparable tradition of advanced historical education and
scholarship in Islamic societies), and it is futile to denounce it for its inevi-
table limitations. If a much wider view would have been desirable in prin-
ciple, as it clearly would, we would at least have to acknowledge that it is
hard enough to create frameworks in which the young learn Latin or Greek
(or have any awareness of past societies at all), without imagining a system in
which it would be common for them also to study Hebrew, Syriac, Egyptian,
or Akkadian.
All the same, to revert to themes explored in the ‘‘Taking the Measure of
the Ancient World’’ in volume (pp. –), it is remarkable how firm an
intellectual and educational barrier has been erected against the incorpora-
. See M. Bernal,Black AthenaI:The Afroasiatic Roots of Western Civilisation(), with
the invaluable set of responses edited by M. Lefkowitz and G. M. Rogers,Black Athena Re-
visited(). The essential point, that Greek history and culture has been studied as the
key element in ‘‘classics,’’ or ‘‘Greek and Latin,’’ but not as one element among others in
the pattern of cultures in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, is accepted by Walter
Burkert inBabylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture().