Dear Stanley Wilkin > "Time to give up a delusion of autonomous development of any kind?"

Very well said. Except for some lost tribes in the Amazon and some isolated parts of the African continent and the Pacific islands; I don't think modern men and their societies ever lost contact with each other, as they evolved and spread from Africa.

Abdul, I am sure that is true, but European historians and certainly classicists have until very recently constructed European development with notions of individual genesis, a product of inspiration. This occurs when roots are forgotten or dismissed. One of my essays on here demonstrates for example how European expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries meant that Europeans came against alternative ideas as well as flora and fauna which precipitated attempts not only at understanding but also of merchandising, stimulating intellectual and financial growth.

The South Pacific cultures are interesting in that recent DNA research has belatedly confirmed the Kon-Tiki hypothesis that groups of South Americans from present-day Colombia sailed over the Pacific and formed part of the Polynesian population. So, even there.....

Both extremes are wrong. There was neither an autonomous development, nor is the Greek development un-original. And this is common sense among the vast majority of scholars, therefore no "new" view is necessary. Sometimes, "orientalism" is a straw man built up out of thin air. It is especially disappointing that a mathematical formula was chosen. This or that mathematical formula was surely not the greatest achievement of the Greeks, but philosophy was. It would make sense to consider the Greeks just as the next step in human development, one step after the other. And it would be very helpful to consider the Greek heritage not as property of the European countries alone, but as the property of the entire world. Just like the inventing of writing in Near Eastern countries was and was not only "Near Eastern" but an important step for all mankind. In the end, I would say, it is your perspective on the question which has to change.

Dear Stanley,

I am now ever more convinced that European culture, language, religion, as well as agriculture and megalithism came from Central Asia at the Neolithic You can read my latest paper, which has been peer-reviewed and published in Academia letters : Article Did Indo-European Languages Stem From a Trans-Eurasian Origi...

It seems to me, in response to a previous comment, which seems curiously aggressive, that perceiving European philosophy as different takes no account of the Egyptian thinking on which it is based. The Greeks admitted as much.

So much of Greek literature was based on Near Eastern or Middle Eastern literature, the story of Lugalbanda influencing Homer and the religion influenced by Bel as well as Sumerian myths. I remember reading a paper recently, Xavier, on the Etruscans that made the point that as the Etruscans were related to the first Near Eastern farmers their differences from Latin peoples could be understood in this way. This takes us into another area of discussion.

Another position to take is the artificial break between East and West, mainly the outcome of the Persian Wars and the threat of Greek political and perhaps cultural extinction. The Greeks before, in the Bronze Age, had functioned as part of or an extension of the Eastern Mediterranean and North African societies.