User:TheEgyptian/sandbox4
Etho-centric history is a form of pseudohistory that seeks to re-write history in a way that reflects favourably on a particular ethnic group. It forms of the wider ideology of ethnocentrism, and is closely related to historical revisionism.
Euro-centric History[edit]
With the rise of European colonial ~ colonialism empires ~ imperialism, there came a need to fit these events into a historical narrative. Since history is written by the winners, they naturally sought to do so in a way made them look good ~ propaganda. The Spanish ~ Spanish empire, for example, were keen to present meso-american civilizations of New Spain as blood-thirsty heathen barbarians who needed to be saved by genocide Jesus. Later, the British ~ British Empire would narrate who they @discovered@ the completely unihbaited continent of Australia, and wiped out the people un-inhabiting it peacefully settled there.
As well as whitewashing colonial rape and pillage, Euro-centric history has also traditionally ignored events and cultures other than those relating to Europe. For example, school textbooks in the Western world largely ignore the Chinese, Indian and South-East Asian civlizations, largely focusing Greco-Roman and European history, even when certain events might be relatively trivial in the wider global context.
As euro-centric interpretations of history have been dominant in the 19th and 20th centuries, critical analysis of much Western historical literature is essential. However, ocassionally this has led to the alternatives making exactly the same mistakes, most significantly with Afro-centric history, discussed below.
Afro-centric History[edit]
As the name suggests, afro-centric history, rather than seeking to challenge Euro-centric interpretations of history with a factual, scientific approach, simply seeks to switch around the same @methodology@ to create a very similar steaming pile of bullshit, but with distinct falvour all of its own.
One of the key figures in the Afro-centric historical comunity is the late Yousef Ben-Jochannan, who published a slew of books, primarily focusing on interpreting Egyptian civilization in an afro-centric light[1] and later suggested that Greek philsophy came from Africa to Greece via the Great Library at Alexandria.
The most well known text of Afro-centric history is Martin Bernal's three volume epic, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, which essentially dramatically expands on these ideas, and holds that they were once acknolwedged in Europe, but were buried by the Euro-centrist bias of 19th century academia.
Other Trends[edit]
Other ethnocentric historical ideologies have also proven popular, espeically in China (sino-centrism), which has a long historical pedigree dating back to the Imperial era and the perception of china as the only civilization, sitting splendid isolation amongst a world of Barbarians.
Relationship to Historical Revisionism[edit]
A similar but not entirely related phenomenon is historical revisionism that is most prominent modern Japan, which has consistently sought to re-write the history of the Japanese empire (and particularly WW2 ~ second world war) in a more forgiving light ~ whitewashing. Russia has also engaged in much the same behaviour in relation to the history of the Soviet Union. The key difference is that revisionism tends to focus on a particular event or series of events that would be considered to show the protagonist in a negative light, whereas ethno-centric history seeks to change the @big picture@ narrative. As such whilst ethno-centric history almost always involves at least some degree of reivionism, a revisionist history is not neccessarily ethno-centric.
- ↑ Egyptology generally approaches Egyptian civilization as being very loosely part of the very early Ancient Near Eastern civlizations, along with the Sumerians. Afro-centricist approaches typically regard it as being influenced by sub-saharan cultures