Essays on geopolitics
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Euro-Americans have an interesting myth which traces the roots of the white-skinned race and civilisation back to Aryans or Indo-Europeans. This myth is not very old – it was adopted only in the early 1800s. The idea derives from the growth of racism and eurocentrism during the colonial period, when white Europeans first properly encountered non-whites. Previous to this time blacks and orientals were mere objects of fantasy, oddities which haled from far-off fantasy-lands. Yet, if the Europeans had not been so backward and parochial, and if they had gone exploring but one hundred years earlier, they would have seen most African and Oriental civilisations in a much healthier, richer and more advanced state than they subsequently saw them – especially in Africa. As a result, European racialist attitudes would subsequently have been very different.
This might have led to an almost complete absence of blacks in the Americas, because the slave trade would possibly never have got started. It might have led to much more inter-cultural cooperation instead of crass colonialism during the period of white ascendancy. Instead, the idea arose that people living in temperate climates possessed greater intellectual ability and moral fibre – an observation derived from the mental and moral difficulties whites themselves encountered in hot climates, and from the tendency of open-minded whites to 'go native' when they personally discovered the richness, depth and relative sensuality of the 'inferior' cultures they were encountering. Thus, to block growing tendencies toward moral lassitude and 'going native', to justify the rough actions of the colonialists and to stem a growing sense of cultural self-questioning, the idea of white supremacy was set in motion.
Within the intellectual elites of the time, there were two predominant schools. The first was centred around Masonic and Rosicrucian fascination with ancient Egypt – deriving from a fascination with architectural, mystical and mathematical lore originating in Egypt. Masons regarded Egypt as the origination-point of civilisation. When Masonry had earlier ceased being a pan-European guild of craftsmen and transformed into a privileged gentleman's society, it had become the core of an Enlightenment intellectual tradition which sought to move away from narrow Christian thinking into the realm of Reason. This school of thought assumed that classical knowledge had been passed to the Greeks through colonisation of early Greece by Egyptians and Phoenicians and through visits by Greeks to Egypt. Thus, Greece was seen by Masons as an Egyptian-Semitic cultural outgrowth, the vital link between Europe and the taproot of civilisation, Egypt. Hence that Napoleon invested much in conquering and researching Egypt.
The second school of thought was equally ideological, yet it was rooted in the stories of world travellers of the time who had decided that all cultures were inferior to their own. The Chinese were exempted until the later 1800s – they were quietly regarded as equally civilised to Europeans. The wealth and sophistication of Imperial China had reached Renaissance Europeans long before the colonial period through intrepid travellers such as Marco Polo. This attitude changed in the 1800s when Europeans sought to capitalise on the arthritic vulnerability of Manchu dynastic China – the Manchu China of the time was indeed much less impressive than it had once been, and the Western merchant adventurers of the China Trade were not exceptionally good judges of civilisation. Get-rich-quick Western values had no time for the age-old subtleties and formalities of Chinese culture.
This school of thought endowed Europeans with cultural legitimacy and superiority, with an originality of genesis which eliminated non-white cultural connections. The ancient Greeks were therefore identified as artists, scientists, philosophers and civilisers greater than the Egyptians and Phoenicians had been. It was quietly forgotten that most ancient Greek knowledge had been conveyed to Europe by Arabs and Sephardic Jews (since the fall of Rome and the obstruction of the Church had separated Europe from most Mediterranean classical roots it once had). This search for cultural roots accelerated around the time of the Age of Reason and the industrial revolution (1750s-1820s), in a romantic response to the rampant wrenching growth of industrial cities and free-trade. The rise of 'dark, satanic' mills invoked a search for nobler origins. The idea that ancient Greece had been heavily influenced by the Levant, Persia and Egypt thus became untenable from a white-supremacist viewpoint.
The discovery that ancient Greek and mainstream European languages derived from an Indo-European source added to a racist ascendancy in the 1830s-40s. Missionaries were central to the colonial effort, adding their input to the sense of cultural superiority which the colonialists employed to rationalise their atrocities – slavery was abolished only in the 1830s-60s. Egyptians (with their sexually-active gods) were seen to be alien to European cultural roots. Jews were passed off as Christ-killers and Phoenicians declined in status with the rise of anti-Semitic ideas in the 1880s – ideas which reached their zenith in 1930s-40s Germany.
When Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered in 1822, the Egyptians were disappointingly demonstrated to be polytheists. This relegating them to inferior status in Christian eyes: monotheism was seen as the apex of religious development and Christianity as the apex of monotheism. Stories about Levantine and Egyptian colonisation of Greece and of Greek cultural cloning from Egypt were seen to be absurd. Ancient Greek respect for Egypt was seen to be a mistaken delusion. Late in the 1800s, Western fascination with high civilisation in India and China declined also. The white man was supreme – in his own estimation.
Though the idea of 'diffusionism' arose in the early 1900s, suggesting the spread of civilisation from Egypt and Mesopotamia through Greece and Rome to Europe, ideological racism retained its hold, denying anything but the trans-Caucasus (central Asia) as the source of Western culture. The rise of classical studies during the 1800s, used to inculcate the upcoming heads of society with civilised values, reinforced the importance of the prehistoric Aryan invasions of Greece and India from the north. There was evidence in Indian tradition for this, but there was (and is) little overwhelming evidence of large-scale Indo-European invasion in Greece. There are, however, signs of interaction between Greece and central Asia which imply that Greek culture was formed from many diverse sources. The interesting thing here, though, is that while racist and anti-Semitic values subsided during the 1950s-80s, the idea of Aryan origination of the European culture stuck, even if toned down. It was well built into the world-view of the West.
Greece was multiply influenced from Egypt, the Levant, Persia, India, the Caucasus and Celtic Europe. European culture owes less to classical Greek and Roman culture than is frequently believed. There were even deeper global influences too, arising from the powerful influences of travellers who, as we shall see later, roamed the whole world in prehistoric times. The point here is that the Aryan myth has to this day remained the prevailing picture of European origins and identity – a myth created to give ideological substance to the European claim to world superiority. The last laugh on the matter is that the indigenous ancient European culture – Megalithic, Celtic and Germanic – has a far larger influence in modern times than we have given credit. Not only this, but European Megalithic culture may well have crucially influenced Egyptian and Levantine culture and somewhat pre-dated Pharaonic Egypt.
This myth has arisen out of an underlying sense of European cultural inferiority to other civilisations, and out of the need to find noble and legitimate roots. 'Diffusionism' has now been effectively shelved. However, this leaves one further myth unexamined: where did ancient European culture derive from?
Essays on geopolitics
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© Palden Jenkins, 1996-2002. These essays may be quoted with proper attribution and printed out in single copies for personal use and study, without permission. For publication on websites, print publication or reproduction for commercial gain please e-mail the author for permission.