It seems a truism that in modern day academia, all historical scholars who wrote in Greek are known as Greeks and all those who wrote in Arabic are known as Arabs. A curious fact is that all those scholars in all of medieval European Christendom who wrote in Latin are always referred to by their country of origin.
Does this curious historical fact betray some form of cultural bias.
The ancient Mediterranean Greek speaking world were a disparate group of cultures spreading from southern Italy through North Africa to Anatolia and western Mesopotamia.
Even the Athenians considered themselves apart from Spartans and Macedonians and they were always in conict.
Modern European scholars often disregard the debt that these Greek speaking thinkers owed to the concepts which they freely borrowed from their Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian neighbors without mention of their reference sources and consider their ideas as of primarily ‘Greek’ origin.
This ‘Hellenistic’ bias of Europeans has a complicated root which is outwith the scope of this essay.