This morning I read an article about Greece in the supposedly right-wing magazine Elsevier. This article portrayed the Greeks as a sort of half-castes, which couldn't even be considered proper Europeans. Not only did the author suggest Athens wouldn't look out of place in Anatolia or the Middle-East, it also stressed the 'Afro-Asiatic roots' of ancient Greek culture to the point of proclaiming that no serious historian would deny this and that claiming otherwise would amount to 'Northern European racism' and 'continental chauvinism'. According to the author, the Greek sense of identity is based on 'wishful thinking' and distortion of historical reality. The article quoted the book Black Athens, which to the best of my knowledge is a piece of Afrocentrist crap.
I'm going to write a letter to this magazine, and would ask you for some help in countering the author's arguments. I am especially interested in the ethnic make-up of the Ottoman empire, the supposed Phoenician and Egyptian invasions (and their impact on Greece) and the ethnoracial identity of these invaders. If you have any information on the similarity or dissimilarity of Egyptian and Greek deities and their respective origins, please share, since the author is suggesting Greek pagan religion isn't really Greek, but derived from the Egyptian cults.
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