French historian specializing in ancient Greek history. Has written a seminal work on Greek mythology entitled Homosexuality in Greek Myth, published in French in 1984 by Payot, Paris, and translated into English two years later by Beacon Press.
In 1986 he followed up with a study covering early homosexuality in Europe, under the title of L'homosexualité initiatique dans l'Europe ancienne which has yet to be translated into English.
Sergent, by contrast, admits that the ethnically different contributions have merged into an admirable synthesis, e.g.: "One of the paradoxes of India is its astonishing linguistic diversity compared with its cultural unity." (p.9) Rather than denying the idea of India, he strongly sympathizes with it: though a construct of history, India is a cultural reality.
Sergent claims that the oldest Homo Sapiens Sapiens racial type of India, now largely submerged by interbreeding with immigrant Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and IE populations, is the one preserved in the Vedda and Rodiya tribes of Sri Lanka.
Sergent's first job is to disprove the Iranian and prove the Indo-Aryan character of the Bactrian culture; the second is to show a Bactrian immigration in late- or post-Harappan India and a subsequent overwhelming Bactrian cultural impact on Indian society.
In volume 2, Le livre des dieux (Payot 2004 ISBN 2-228-89926-7), Sergent argues that the Celtic and Greek pantheons derive from a common Indo-European inheritance.
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