| To: Retort From: MB [Martin Bernal weighs in on the vexed question of civilizational origins. Martin is no stranger to such debates and their ideological freight. The original Newsweek piece is a good example, with its uncritical boosting of highland Kurdistan over Mesopotamian floodplains, not to mention Schmidt's neo-idealist "urge to worship" (biologized, to boot). Bernal's Black Athena struck a devastating blow to the intellectual foundations of the West's charter myth and white supremacism. E.R.Dodds himself was expelled from boarding school in Ulster for "gross, studied, and sustained insolence", then expelled from Oxford for his support of Irish liberation, and later shunned by many of the classics establishment for his radical politics. IB] The discovery at Göbekli, dating to 11,500 BP, is impressive and wonderful and it provides powerful confirmation of the theory that one does not need agriculture to create and sustain an elaborate and sophisticated society. This theory is not, however, completely new or revolutionary. Megaliths sometimes set in patterns that appear to have astronomical or religious significance, have been erected all over the world, in regions where there are no or very slight traces of agriculture. See for instance the site at Nabta Playa in the Eastern Sahara from the 8th millennium BP, the heads at Rapanui or the tradition of megaliths in Vanuatu. Similarly, signs of decoration in Middle Stone Age sites from the Blombos cave in South Africa to the Levant from well before 70,000 BP have been found. At Katanda on the Semliki river there was a sophisticated bone carving tradition of a similar age. At Ishango to the South, bones notched in clusters indicate numeracy from before 25,000 BP (though here there are signs of agriculture). The wonderful paintings dating from approximately the same age discovered at Lascaux, Altamira and elsewhere demonstrate both religious feeling and artistic sensitivity. I believe that there have been people in North and South America since before the last Ice Age and I agree with Geoffrey Sea that there have been many ancient and sophisticated societies in the two continents. Some of these were based on grains but the earliest emerged before any “granarian” revolution. Where Sea and I disagree is on his view that the introduction of “irrational” religious ideas to Greece from the Steppe precludes others from Egypt and the Levant. It is evident that Greek as a fundamentally Indo-European language received major early cultural influences from the North East. Interestingly, however, the vocabulary of ritual, abstraction and religion is non-Indo-European, and I maintain much of it can be explained as deriving from Ancient Egyptian or West Semitic. There was plenty of the irrational in Egyptian and Levantine religion and “rationality.” Dodds whom I knew slightly, was a charming, cultivated and intelligent man, but he was also belonged to the Russophil generation of the turn of the 20th century; such as Ellis Minns and Jane Harrison. This they linked to new angles on Greek culture and championing Nietzsche against Winkelmann. The Greek tradition and the intricate etymological, cultic and material pattern of evidence linking Egypt and the Levant to Greece seem to me to be undeniable. ---Martin
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