Greek Mythology Source Analysis

Source 1

Hicks, Ruth I. "Egyptian Elements in Greek Mythology." Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 93, 1962, pp. 90-108. doi:10.2307/283753, accessed 7 March 2017.

This secondary source is a journal article published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. This article was sourced from JSTOR, a digital archive of academic journals and primary sources. This article was one of the first sources in my initial search, however, I dismissed it first due to its publishing date (1962). I then returned to it, due to the content and the relevance of it. I selected this source based on the scarcity of other material that discussed Egyptian influences on Greek culture. This article discusses, in quite a lot of detail

This text was sourced from the University of Melbourne library. This book was one that was repeatedly mentioned in any online reading I did on the topic and was one I needed to review. This text presented a very interesting, yet controversial idea that Greek philosophy and culture was derived heavily from the influence of Ancient Egypt, and this was not a very well known fact because of ‘racist’ historians of the past not wanting to acknowledge that Greek civilization could possibly have ‘black’ African roots.

Source 3

Coleman, John E. ‘Did Egypt shape the glory that was Greece?’, in Black Athena Revisited, Mary R. Lefkowitz & Guy Maclean Rogers (eds), University of North Carolina Press, 1996, pp.280 – 302.

This secondary source is a chapter in an edited collection of essays. This text was sourced from the University of New England library. One of the editors of this text is Mary R. Lefkowitz, who has lead the opposition to Bernal’s arguments about the formation of Greek culture and philosophy and the so called ‘Ancient Model’. I selected this chapter because Coleman clearly outlines some discrepancies with Bernal’s work and openly questions the evidence, or lack there of. I particularly was interested in this chapter since Coleman disputes Bernal on the argument of Ancient Egyptian influence on Ancient Greek religion and

The main argument that Bernal presents is that Egyptian was a major influence on Greek culture, philosophy and mathematics. He claimed that during the Classical and Hellenistic period the Greeks believed their religious ideas came from Egypt. He refers to this as the Ancient Model of the formation of Ancient Greek origin. Bernal provides several examples from works by Plato and Aeschylus that support this idea. In the case of Aeschylus, Bernal states that it is the use of ‘peculiar vocabulary’ used in the play The Suppliants that is an indication of Egyptian influence. Perhaps, what is shocking about Bernal’s work is the Afrocentric argument he presents, which is the idea that the so called Ancient Model of the formation of Greek civilisation collapsed due to racist ideological beliefs of European historians, who could not abide by the thought that Ancient Greece actually developed their superior culture from an African Egypt. While Bernal presents an engaging argument, his work has been widely critiqued, both favourably and mostly negatively, sparking extensive debate on the subject of whether historians through time have ‘covered up’ the true origin of Ancient Greek