Extelligence

Extelligence is what intelligence is intelligent about. Pratchett, Stewart and Cohen – The Science of Discworld

What was it that made a city in Sicily “Greek” rather than “Native”? The clash between archaeology and history suggests that it wasn’t the architecture or the material culture of a city, it was the citizenry who gave a city its ethnicity. So this leads nicely to the question “Where do Greek citizens come from?” Greek adults presumably, who in turn come from Greek children. Where do Greek children come from? Some people would take this as a cue to sit the questioner down and explain that when a Greek Mummy and a Greek Daddy love each other very much… An example of this kind of model is found in Cavalli-Sforza’s work. He examined the genetic make up of Europe and found certain gradients in the distribution of some genes. His fourth principle component he associated with Greek colonisation. I’m sceptical of this.

If Cavalli-Sforza is right, then the Greeks did a lot of colonising in Finland. They did a fair amount in southern Italy, less in northern Italy and a lot less in France and so on. This flatly contradicts the historical and archaeological record, which shows the Greeks skipped northern Italy because of the Etruscans and colonised what is now the French Riviera. I would argue that no-one was born Greek. Children learned to access Greek extelligence.

Extelligence is a concept first described in Cohen and Stewart’s “Figments of Reality”. They define it as the cultural correlate of intelligence. It’s effectively the stored knowledge of a society. This knowledge doesn’t have to be accurate, just part of what it is to be part of that society. For instance the English extelligence knows that horse is not something edible. This is despite the fact that its delicious, but English extelligence is also very suspicious of the concept of enjoyable food.

Applied to the ancient world, extelligence can be thought of as a social cosmology. It is a model of how the world works. It also is the knowledge of how a person should interact with the world. This is interesting because different actions are appropriate for people of different statuses, genders and ages. Gender is particularly interesting because boys tend to learn from men and girls from women. This means that you could have Greek and native extelligences living alongside each other in cities leading to hybrid settlements.

A further complication is that in infancy boys also learn from their mothers, so much of the basic mechanics of how the world works is learned through the female line. Anything contradicted by Greek extelligence will be discarded as a Greek male becomes a man, but anything not explicitly contradicted by Greek extelligence will survive into adulthood. The result will be men who are Greek. They will think and act Greek and certainly do nothing un-Greek, but their native foundation will also give them something ‘other’ which isn’t easy to identify from a Greek perspective. This could be a plausible explanation for Greek Sikeliote identity. —–