Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor

An informative podcast episode about an important tale in the history of written literature. Although, sadly, it is too brief, it is not fragmentary like some of the later stories in Demotic. It also, despite its brevity, points to shipwreck, adventures at sea, and mysterious encounters with supernatural events as key themes in ancient literature. Moreover, the vast serpent met by the sailor is the self-proclaimed king of Punt, suggesting ways in which this early work of fiction can be linked to ancient depictions of East Africa (or the Horn) as a source of wonder and luxury goods. Unlike the later Setne cycle of tales, where a Nubian magician is a a source of rivalry for Egypt, the people of Punt never appear in the story. Nevertheless, both this tale of shipwreck and wonder and works like Setne II point to possible ways Egyptian fiction may have influenced the depiction of "Ethiopia" to Greek writers of ancient "novels" or romances.

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.

Black Folk Here and There by St. Clair Drake

St. Clair Drake's 2 volume essay in history and anthropology, Black Folk Here and There, inspired by a similarly titled book by W.E.B. DuBois, is an exploration of the presence of "Negro" or "Black" people throughout recorded history, ending with the rise of anti-black prejudice. In the two-volumed text, he explores the role and presence of "Black" people in ancient Egypt, the Greco-Roman world, early Christianity, and the Islamic world, searching for evidence of anti-black bias or racist views in each of these periods in world history. The founder of Stanford's African-American Studies department, and well-known for his sociological work in Black Metropolis, an analysis of Chicago's African-American population in the 1940s, Drake is well-suited to vindicate the legacy of "Black" Africans prior to the Atlantic slave trade, spending most of the first volume providing evidence of "Negro" Egyptian dynasts and contributions to the development of Egyptian civilization through documentary, artistic, and other evidence. Thus, Drake's first volume, concluding with the rise of Roman-dominated Egypt, rightfully challenges the approach of most Egyptologists and historians who render all "Negroes" into slaves and laborers for "whites" in the ancient Nile Valley and Mediterranean. However, unlike extreme Afrocentrists, Drake avoids making irrational claims and attempts to "blacken" everybody in ancient Egypt or the Near East. A weakness of his study also lies in the evidence from statuary and art, since color symbolism and ancient Egyptian art's tendency to represent the human form unrealistically makes it difficult to say or claim this or that figure, pharaoh, or god is "black" or "white," but in some cases it is uncontroversial (I am sure many readers would take qualm with his claims for "Black" Amarna pharaohs, best represented by Akhenaten) or very likely that the Early Dynastic, Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, New Kingdom, Napatan, Meroitic, and Late Dynastic art of the Nile Valley depicts people with the somatic norm of "Black Africans." Moreover, Drake uncovers no evidence of racial bias against "Nubians" or Kushites during periods of Egyptian imperialism in the Upper Nile, nor even when, under Hellenic and Roman domination, when southerners, Egyptians, and Greco-Romans alike worshipped Isis at Philae, for instance.

The second volume of Drake's major publication covers ancient Jewish perceptions of Blackness, in the Old Testament and Talmud, as well as Early Christian, Islamic, and, ending with Iberia and the New World in the 15th and 16th centuries, the signs for anti-black racism. He does not uncover signs of Jewish prejudice until the Talmud, which he attributes to Jews who, during the Babylonian Captivity, encountered enslaved East Africans and then added theories of the "curse of Ham" and black inferiority into their commentaries on the Torah. It is an interesting theory, but Drake does not provide evidence for trade linking Mesopotamia in this period with the East African coast, although it would help explain the sudden anti-black views of some Jewish religious leaders when, in the past, Moses was described as marrying a black woman, the kingdom of Judah was allied with the Egyptian-Kushite empire under Taharka against the Assyrian empire. He also discusses the color symbolism of early Christianity, in which blackness of skin was equated with sin and Christian conversion as a way of "washing the Ethiopian white," something he associates with Manichean dualism of black/white color symbolism from ancient Persia, where black/darkness was seen as evil and white/lightness as good. Although his conclusions, somewhat similar to Snowden's work on the image of the 'black' in the Greco-Roman and early Christian Mediterranean are interesting, they're far from the highlight of the of book, which is strongest in its treatment of Nile Valley societies and race. He also challenges some of the then-dominant theories of racism and the origins of it, stating that color prejudice and anti-black views were not endemic in the ancient Nile Valley nor a part of the Antiquity, nor an innate aversion to blackness in human skin.

His work also stands as a powerful rebuttal of Malvern Wan Wyk Smith's interesting but highly flawed monograph, The First Ethiopians: The Image of Africa and Africans in the Early Mediterranean World, claiming Ancient Egypt as the source for Western anti-black prejudice with very little evidence and a resurrection of outdated African racial types, such as Khoisanoid, to distinguish early Nile Valley populations from "Negroids." Furthermore, he relies on imagery of conquered Kushites and other nehesy, or southerners, in ancient Egyptian iconography as evidence for an aversion or disdain for "Negroid" Black features without any documentary evidence disparaging their facial features or showing signs of race or color prejudice. Moreover, his sources that actually do indicate denigration of dark-skinned people, come thousands of years later, under Hellenic, Roman and Christian periods. But I digress, Drake's tome, though published in the 1980s, does a much better job at describing 'race relations' in this age before race, avoiding the extreme Afrocentrism of other authors while ensuring all Nile Valley societies' ties to "Black Africa."

Two Names

I wonder how many people know the origin of two names, Phineas and Candace. The latter is derived from a title for the queens of Meroe in the Sudanese Nile Valley, best known for being mentioned in the "Ethiopian Eunuch" in Acts 8. So, believe it or not, anyone named Candace today is the bearer of a name derived from "Kandake," the title for the plethora of ruling queens of Meroe. Phineas, a rare name, is also linked to a similar region of Africa, referred to as Kush or Cush in the Hebrew texts. Aaron's child, Phineas, is actually proof of 'black' intermarriage in the tribes of Judah, dating back to their supposed captivity in Egypt. Moses also married a 'black' woman, Zipporah, of Kush, again referring to the Kushites to the south of the ancient Egyptian Nile Valley at the First Cataract. This is not to say 'blacks' were not present in Egypt, the obvious associations of ancient Egypt with blackness, Ham, and dark skin in Jewish and Christian traditions makes that clear. However, Phineas is derived ultimately from the ancient Egyptian "nehesy," a term meaning southerners and used in ancient Egyptian documents to refer to the various "Nubian" peoples to the south. Although not explicitly racial or linked to color, nehesy to the Mediterranean and Levantine peoples came to be associated with blacks, later known as "Ethiopians" or "burnt face" by Greco-Roman writers in the Christian period.