Gordon Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations

by Cyrus H. Gordon

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393002934
• ISBN13: 9780393002935
• Release Date: January 1965
• Publisher: Not Avail
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Beyond a single-compartment scholar's horizon!

In the 1960s Gordon challenged conventional wisdom in his field by declaring that his examination of Minoan texts furnished new corroboration of his long-held theory that the Greek and Hebrew cultures stemmed in common from a Semitic heritage that spanned the eastern Mediterranean from Greece to Palestine in the Minoan era. The Gordon Thesis: "... the tacit assumption that ancient Israel and Greece are two water-tight compartments, totally different from each other. One is said to be sacred; the other, profane; one, Semitic; the other, Indo-European. One, Asiatic and Oriental; the other, European and Occidental. But the fact is that both flourished during the same centuries, in the same East Mediterranean corner of the globe, with both ethnic groups in contact with each other from the start." He believed that, "a study limited to the Greek and Hebrew cultures has the effect of bringing out the many differences between the two. But the similarities between them come to the fore if we contrast them with cultures alien to the East Mediterranean. The early Hebrews are no more different from the early Greeks than they are from the Egyptians or Mesopotamians where the interrelations are universally recognized." Bernal's Affirmation: Martin Bernal, who championed the recent controversial revelation of the Origins of Greek Civilization, has quoted Cyrus Gordon on 18 occasions, in part I of his Book Black Athena. What they both agree with prominent Orientalists is based on tracing the development of the Proto Canaanite from middle Egyptian, Proto-Sinaitic, the mother language of all East Mediterranean civilizations. While the Canaanites are assumed to have a major influence on the development of Greek culture, the mere historical facts attested by the Greeks was their direct visits and learning of the eternal Egyptian civilization. Meanwhile, the eminent Jewish scholar who exposed the Ugaritic link of Canaan and the Aegean wrote in anticipation of Martin Bernal, "Ugarit is of unique importance for reconstructing the origins of Western civilization." The Minoan Tablets: The late author, gifted with a vast versatile scholarly knowledge of archaeology and linguistics, a first class Orientalist, represented the evidence that unite Greek with the ancient Near East. He devotes a chapter to develop this cultural link through Crete's Minoan Tablets, as, "a wave of highly gifted Northwest Semites occupied central and eastern Crete, bringing with them a knowledge of art, architecture and writing from the Nile Delta. ... The system marks the transition from the older cumbersome systems to the alphabet." Gordon's Further Observations: In the last two chapters VII and VIII, professor Gordon masterfully states, "The key to understanding Mycenaean civilization is its positioning the international framework of the East Mediterranean during the second half of the second millennium. Mycenaean Greece lay on the northwest fringe of the Amarna Order." His observations