Ancient Greece as an autonomous European origin is an eighteenth-century construction.

Evidence

Bernal demonstrates convincingly that the fabrication of Ancient Greece as an originary and autonomous cultural formation, its sundering from the composite Mediterranean culture in which it had been placed overlappingly with Egyptian and Levantine Antiquities, and its relocation as the fount of a West European history rather than at the Afro–Asiatic–European confluence – i.e. the mapping of an Athens-to-Albion cultural grid which demarcates Europe from Asia – is really a product of the late eighteenth century onwards, after the main European interests (in both senses of the word) shift from Egypt to India, and when the Indo-Aryan linguistic model gets going as the basic explanatory model for cultural unities and mobilities. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 716

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in grand narratives being fabricated — echoes the ‘fabrications have consequences’ theme also in literary canon debates.
• DEFINE: Articulates what ‘fabrication of Greece’ means concretely: the Athens-to-Albion grid sundering European from Asian history.