William
Moderator
Joined: 30 Mar 2005
{Posts: 1047 }
Location: New Jersey
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 Posted: Fri 07 Sep 2007 23:12 Post subject: Blacks in Antiquity; Before Color Prejudice |
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I've had Frank Snowden's Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1970) and Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1983) for years, and I thought I already wrote a review of them, but I was mistaken. They certainly deserve to be mentioned, as I've relied on them for what I've written.
These books deal with the presence of sub-Saharan Africans, known to the ancients as Aethiops, in the worlds of the ancient Greeks and Romans, including Greece and Italy proper. Snowden presents vast amounts of evidence of this in the forms of texts by ancient writers and many photographs of coins, sculptures, vases, urns, etc. from these regions that depict sub-Saharans. Followers of the Isis cult also migrated to Greece and Italy. Sub-Saharan Africans weren't only present as slaves in these regions; in fact, most of the slaves weren't Black Africans. Some of course were, but many Aethiops came as craftsmen, scholars, and entertainers, and some were recruited as soldiers.
Also dealt with is the intermixture between Blacks and Whites of the region, and the former's eventual absorption into the latter. Ancient texts provide data on this, and the artwork also shows what can be interpreted as mixed types.
Anyone seriously interested in the sub-Saharan presence in ancient Greece and Italy must have these books.
Snowden was a very conservative writer, and didn't include data unless he was certain it was valid, and he is sometimes scorned by ultra-Afrocentric writers for this -- for not claiming the ancient Egyptians as "Black," for example. That they had sub-Saharan admixture he is certain of, but he shows that the ancients -- Egytians included -- distinguished between Egyptians and Ethiopians.
I've noticed that history correlates with genetics, in that, generally speaking, the broad areas Snowden shows sub-Saharans (Ethiopians) to have been present in Greece, Arnaiz-Villena found Ethiopian HLA alleles in the Greek population -- notably, Cyprus, the Aegean Islands, and the Athens area (Attica).
Snowden had published articles on Black Africans in Greece and Italy as far back as the 1940s. I have the original versions of The Negro in Ancient Greece and The Negro in Classical Italy. Someday, when I have time to sit at my scanner, I will scan them in. The former is sometimes available online (sometimes the link doesn't work), and I link to it on my Greek page. I will scan in the originals of both anyway, and upload them, so they will always be available. |
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