Louise Hitchcock

The reception of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena in 1987 by classicists focused on Bernal’s errors of fact rather than on the content of his message. The thrust of this message was that Classics is a Eurocentric project that systematically excluded the Levantine and Egyptian contribution to European civilization. In 1996, I was hired to develop a Black Athena course to counter the Afrocentric view that black people were systematically excluded from their contribution to the fetishization of “Western Civilization” in Classics, Near Eastern Studies, Art History, and History, among other fields of study. I chose to avoid devaluating Afrocentric views or valorizing traditional views of Greece as the ethnically pure fount of European civilization. Instead, the course structure underscored that a thorough interrogation of the evidence could promote inclusive and multicultural histories by focusing on how civilization began in the east. Fast forward to the present: classicists have embarked on numerous projects to decolonize the fields of ancient studies through outreach, “colorizing” the Classics, and by recruiting people of color to reshape these fields. In considering the ethical issues involved in this project to decolonize Classics and related areas of research, I argue that the institutional positionality of a discipline that inscribes itself as central can never de-colonize itself but should de-center its privileged position in favor of a broader approach including neighboring regions.

As a libertarian studying, embracing, and teaching a philosophy of individual freedom, John Hospers, like many of us, was heavily influenced by the philosophical writings of Ayn Rand. Rand’s major novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged continue to delight and empower readers through embracing the heroic creator or inventor, technological and scientific progress, and the competent individual. These are some of the archetypes of the Randian hero. At the other end of the scale were the incompetent looters and moochers who could only function in her world by controlling those with ability and the savages of ancient or undeveloped cultures who could not comprehend ability, seizing the means of progress before killing the inventor, then retreating into mysticism and magic. Rand was not an archaeologist and wrote at a time before scholars of prehistory focused on the rational and productive aspects of ancient civilizations upon which enabled the present to emerge in fits and starts. These aspects include technology, record keeping, maritime trade, and pre- monetary economies. This paper will consider the emergence of globalized connectivites in the Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1700-1300 BCE) which was arguably the first age of globalization in human history. It was also one of the first ages of social acceleration characterized by a confluence of increasing technological and economic interdependency, yet fragile in its susceptibility to climate change, plagues, and authoritarian city-states and small empires ruled by kings claiming divinity or divine authority. Thus, the Late Bronze Age was also an economically fragile era with a high concentration of wealth distributed among supra-regional global elite plutocrats unified more by wealth and shared symbolism than by cultural tradition or ideology. This era was susceptible to populist resistance in the form of piratical activity and banditry. This paper explores the globalist and populist aspects of the ancient Mediterranean. In doing so, I suggest that some globalized elites of the present day perpetuate another Randian archetype, the moochers and looters. In doing so, it transcends ideology to focus on how the non-productive in current society acquire vast concentrations of wealth and power.