The Flaws of The First Ethiopians: The Image of Africa and Africans in the Early Mediterranean World

After reading The First Ethiopians and a brilliant critique by Hilton, that the book’s evidence is flimsy and he does not prove his premise of the origin of anti-black racism in Africa, being passed from Ancient Egypt to the Greeks and Romans and from there on to Western Europe. Malvern wan Wyk Smith racializes the ancient Egyptian word nehesy to mean “black African” and is not a classicist or ancient historian, so he relies on secondary translations and sources for most of his claims. As for the evidence of ancient Egyptian anti-black prejudice, I recall most of it coming from depictions of “wretched Kushites” and other defeated, subjugated “black Africans” from what is now Nubia/Sudan and ancient Egyptian imperialist rhetoric. To me, that does not conclusively proof any anti-black racist attitudes because ancient Egyptian art during the Middle and New Kingdom included derogatory references to Asiatics and Libyans as well as depictions of defeated peoples in the Near East with less than flattering descriptions, etc.

Moreover, some of his claims (such as a “Khoisanoid” presence from southern Africa to Ethiopia and perhaps predynastic Egypt) are either very unlikely or ludicrous. Hilton’s review focuses on his claims for the Classical/Greco-Roman world, and here we see that van Wyk Smith’s premise is again untenable. Although there may be some evidence of “proto-racist” thought and writing from ancient Rome, there is no evidence for a precedent of “worthy” and “savage” Ethiopias in ancient Greco-Roman thought. He also claims that the Kushites and their Meroitic successors perpetuated this false dichotomy of black-skinned peoples, which, again, he does not prove with any significant sources from the period.

I think St. Clair Drake’s Black Folk Here and There (two volumes, each worth reading) does a better job documenting the presence of “Blacks” in Ancient Egypt and beyond while also covering the emergence of anti-black racism after the advent of Christianity, etc (evidence from patristic literature as well as rabinnical sources reveal some disturbing anti-Black views that equate black skin with sinfulness, lust, immorality, depravity, and the list goes on, although some of these negative qualities were present in some Greco-Roman writings. Anyway, I suggest Black Folk Here and There, The Curse of Ham by David Goldenberg, Lloyd Thompson’s Romans and Blacks, and Gay Byron’s Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference for race, color symbolism, and evidence of racial thought and attitudes. What’s interesting with Byron’s and other work on Christianity in Late Antiquity is, as one can see in the Greco-Roman period, many sources associate Egyptians with black “Ethiopians” (Ethiopia in the Classical sense referred to dark-skinned people, not the modern nation), some Jewish and Christian writers depicting Egyptians as black or linking them with demons, sin, lasciviousness, and other negative associations that were also applied to “Ethiopians.”

In my opinion, St. Claire Drake's Black Folk Here and There does a much better job trying to locate the 'moment' where racism arose and the contours of 'racial thought' in the ancient world. Read that instead, and while you're at it, read my blog post on St. Claire Drake's work.