Olympic Games (interesting, actually)

[Jona Lendering]

But as for the notion that Greece evolved naturally at the confluence of various civilizations before it, that is such a truism that I wouldn't have ever considered singling it out as impressive. I cannot imagine the claim that Classicists hold Greeks as miraculously springing from nothing, as anything other than a straw man.

You're an optimist. I am afraid that there are a lot of old-fashioned classicists who do believe that it all started in Greece. And they are powerful; one of the drafts of the preambule to the European Constitution included a line about "drawing inspiration from Greece". A lot of pseudo-arguments (e.g., "yes the Babylonians knew the Pythagorean theorem, but the Greeks discovered its proof") are still around.

Worse, this image about the uniqueness of Greece is often repeated in the media; think only of Tom Holland's best-selling Persian Fire, which more or less says that if the Greeks had not won in 480-479, we would have no democracy, philosophy, science. (The theoretical debate, showing that this type of argument was nonsense, is more than a century old; go here.) The same sentiment can be found in Miller's 300, and in the movie based on 300. I am afraid you are very, very optimistic if you think that "the claim that Classicists hold Greeks as miraculously springing from nothing [is] a straw man".

As it stands, historians, archaeologists, and orientalists are bringing the Greek originality, which of course does exist (tragedy, architecture, Aristotle's Politics...), back to more normal proportions. But classicists have an impressive reputation for ignoring what's there.

As far as I am concerned, if secondary schools want to teach something about the origin of our civilization, they should give more attention to Babylon and Egypt, at the expense of Greece and Rome. 25/75 seems like a nice division. As long as classicists are not willing to give at least some room to orientalists, it is hypocritical if they say "yes we recognize that X, Y, and Z had antecedents in the east". You can not officially say A but teach B.