The World of Late Antiquity

Finally read Peter Brown's The World of Late Anqituity, a far more accessible essay on the period than the lectures The Making of Late Antiquity. Here, Brown's classic essay provides a great overview of the period, challenging the Gibbonesque paradigm of decline and fall. Instead, changes in the social, economic, religious, and spiritual conditions in the Roman Empire and its environs beginning in the 3rd century gradually brought about the features now known as "Late Antique," which created a different type of Roman Empire and new orientation to spirituality that favored Christianity's expansion. While there was undoubtedly a collapse of the western empire's political administration, when looking at the entirety of the region during the period, it is not really a tale of decline and fall brought about by Christianity. The book's definite strength lies in its analysis of religious and spiritual changes in the eastern Mediterranean and the western empire. The chapters on Sassanian Persia and early Islam may have been necessary to provide a complete overview of the "Near East" that led to the "end" of a united Mediterranean world centered on a single empire, but they are clearly not the author's area of specialization. The figure of the holy man, the growing importance of bishops and monastic communities in the eastern Mediterranean and the increasing importance of the Roman Catholic Church in the west as the inheritor of the aristocratic senatorial classes are all fascinating processes.

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.