Scientific Racism and the Quest for Greek Racial Origins

Abstract

As scientific approaches were increasingly applied to the study of human variation throughout the nineteenth-century, they would come to have an enormous impact on the study of history as well.  This seminar examines the specific ways contemporary ideas about race and the attendant methods of racial classification influenced classical scholars’ quest to identify the racial origins of the ancient Greeks, a major preoccupation of early classical scholarship that relied on both literary evidence and material being uncovered by the newly emerging field of classical archaeology.  While classical scholars of the early twentieth century disagreed on how to conceptualize the very earliest periods of ancient Greek history (offering competing theories that posited a wide and often-bewildering array of prospective invasions and encounters between various alleged racial groups), most classical scholars argued for the eventual domination of so-called “Nordic” and “Aryan” populations, groups whose meaning and importance can be linked directly to contemporary scientific racism. 

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