So a while back I did this thread about how almost everything we "know" about the Minoans was made up by Arthur Evans to soothe a European inferiority complex about Civilization arising in the Near East.

Now I wanna talk about the "Greek miracle." https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1217193460068802560

okay sorry had to talk about different species of almonds for a bit but I'm back now

so anyway, I started reading this book called Babylon - Memphis - Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture, which is actually a collection of lectures https://www.amazon.com/Babylon-Memphis-Persepolis-Eastern-Contexts/dp/0674023994

And I had also just started reading this book called Alpha Beta: How the Alphabet Shaped the Western World. https://www.amazon.com/Alpha-Beta-John-Man-ebook/dp/B0045JKENA/ref=sr_1_10?dchild=1&keywords=alpha+beta&qid=1599023227&s=books&sr=1-10

Okay, and I want to make clear that I have just *started* these books, so I don't know for sure where they're going, and I could be wrong about my sense of both of them.

I started Alpha Beta first, and right away I ran up against something that I found a little odd.

The author promises in the intro that he's going to trace the transmission of the alphabet from culture to culture, "from Egypt, to Rome, to us."

If you've spent any time learning about the history of the alphabet, that's a very... strange summary of its history.

I mean, the very name "alphabet" comes from neither Egypt nor Rome--it seems strange, if you're going to summarize its history, to focus on those two points and leave out, y'know, the Semitic peoples who invented and transported it to the West.

He then goes on to spend a lot of time talking about Greek exceptionalism, noting that "when looking for their roots, European cultures (except perhaps the Basques) quickly dig up Greeks."

I mean, one could quibble, but okay.

He then goes on to note, "So, in lesser ways, do Muslims."

The idea that Muslim culture has Greek roots is a strange framing of the relationship.

It gets weirder. He describes non-Greek alphabets as "[breaking] down after the first two letters into abjads or abugidas."

Again, it's not necessarily a technically untrue statement, but the framing of "breaking down" as if abjads are simpler or inferior is notable.

But anyway, he goes on a while about how the unique flowering of Greek genius was because they developed the best alphabet and could write stuff down.

Okay, so I'm reading all this during breakfast this morning and just Having A Reaction

(In case you didn't pick up on why I was side-eyeing a bunch of it...

...as they did their archaeology, the Victorians got very tetchy about how everything they liked had come out of the Middle East, and started coming up with a lot of theories about how ACTUALLY white people had come up with all of it, because Atlantis or some such.

Those theories are still with us in the form of Ancient Aliens shit. Brown people couldn't have build the pyramids. It had to be ALIENS.

But like they were still deeeeeeeeeply impressed by Egypt and the Ancient Egyptians (not the current ones, oh no, they're Arab, but the ANCIENT ones) got to be sort of honorary white people (and sometimes literally white people) in the Victorian mind.

This also, of course, tied into Victorian occultism, which tended to have either a supposed Greek or Egyptian (or sometimes Indian) pedigree, and was basically Victorian race "science" but mAaAaAgical.

You see where this is going? Unfortunately this is going to Nazis.

So anyway, when someone describes the alphabet, which originated and was spread by speakers of Semitic languages, as going from Egypt to Rome to us ("us" being Europeans/Americans), I start to side-eye pretty hard.)

Anyway, so I set aside Alpha Beta for a bit and picked up Babylon - Memphis - Persepolis.

And woooooow it's like it knew I had been reading Alpha Beta and had Some Shit To Say.

Like both books literally start by talking about Cyclopes.

And then BMP is like, "European tradition... used to see the Greeks... as unique and isolated, classical"

and goes on to note "Classical Greece was made to appear as an 'origin,' naturally sprouting, as it were, from the seeds of unique talents" and that "subsequently it was taken for granted that culture had to be national culture."

"Just at that time Indoeuropean linguistics were discovered and elaborated, bringing Greeks, Romans, and Germanic tribes together and building up a barrier between them and the Semites."

Ahem.

and then "[f]or Germany, this mean an alliance of German, Greek, and Protestant, which was largely to dominate the school system, the "gymnasium" of the nineteenth century."

I'm glad we're noting that clearly. There's more.

"In consequence, Hellenic scholarship largely failed to recognize the sensational progress made in the nineteenth century in the study of antiquity upon the rediscovery of the ancient Near East."

So, at the same time nationalism is on the rise, they're rediscovering both Near Eastern literature and digging up ancient sites in Egypt and Mesopotamia, which is allowing them to *read* that ancient literature.

And what's happening is they're finding out that oh yeah, that's *right*, Indo-European vs. Semitic is literally just a *language* thing, not a culture thing.

Because smack dab among all those cultures they're calling Semitic are the Hittites.

And the Hittites aren't particularly *culturally* distinct from the Assyrians or the Israelites or any of those cultures that spoke Semitic languages, but Hittite is an Indo-European language.

So that whole wall they'd been erecting between Indo-European and Semitic *peoples*?

And anyway, it's getting late so I'll get to the point: through most of the Bronze Age, Greek cultural and technological development was derived from the East. Near Eastern cultures primarily got *materials* from Greece.

But by 500 BCE, the Etruscans are using Greek myths for the pictures on their vases. The Romans are worshiping Greek gods. The Persians are hiring Greek architects.

So what happened?

Well, among many, many other things, the Late Bronze Age collapse. The most dramatic portions of it happened between 1200 and 1150 BCE, approximately, but the aftershocks continued for another half millennium or so.

And it *devastated* most of the major civilizations of the ancient Near East. They forgot how to build multistory buildings. Some cultures forgot how to write. It wiped out most of the civilizations there. Even Egypt wasn't unscathed.

And it created a major shakeup in the relative power and influence of different cultures around the Mediterranean.

So, look, no one's saying that the explosion of Greek culture at that point had nothing to do with the Greeks coming up with cool shit. What the book is arguing is that it basically gave them a break from tons of cool shit coming from the east.

Which gave them space to pull out ahead in developing art and literature and technology and philosophy and religion and science.

Look, all that stuff is still *really impressive.*

But we don't need to pretend it came out of nowhere--that it was a "miracle"--to appreciate it. They were, like every human culture that's produced great things, building on the work of people who came before them.

Sometimes the people whose work you build on are earlier versions of your own culture, & sometimes it's your neighbors.

The sooner we recognize that genius *isn't* out-of-nowhere, lighting-strike insight, but "yes and" responses to others, the better off we'll be as a species.

Then maybe we can stop obsessing over the idea that it's important that development be first and unique and out of nowhere and basically divine inspiration because GENIUS!!!

and just start sharing shit and collaborating because that's where all the GENIUS! actually comes from.