On the "we wuz kangz" crowd:
"The misreading of ancient documents has come primarily from two sources: from some specialists in the history, literature, and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean world and, increasingly in recent years, from many Afrocentrists. When errors in previous scholarship on antiquity have been pointed out, the first group has in general acknowledged and corrected them; the second group, however, has completely rejected valid criticisms of their inaccuracies and denounced their critics as either Eurocentric racists (if they are white) or misguided traitors to their race, duped by a so-called "white conspiracy" (if they are black). It is neither racist nor traitorous, however, to insist upon truth, scholarly rigor, and objectivity in the writing of history...
frocentrists frequently, and often accurately, maintain that the history of blacks has been distorted or neglected in traditional curricula. Exposing students to an unbalanced and inaccurate picture of the black man's present or past, however, will not correct such defects. Unbalanced Afrocentric accounts, for example, call attention, as A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., has noted, to the glories of West African emperors and their civilization, but not to ferocious West African warfare, tribal massacres, the squalid condition of the masses, slavery, and involvement in the Atlantic slave trade...
Blacks have not existed nor do they now exist in a vacuum; they live in a world wider than the black community - African, African-American, or Caribbean. A one-sided approach to education with an emphasis on blackness is destined to result in the development of individuals unprepared to meet the challenges that confront them as active, responsible citizens and as members of a wider society and of the international community. In short, to borrow Alexander Pope's words "The proper study of Mankind is Man" - Man with a capital M.
nd I should add that there is no single "African" culture from which African-American culture derives. Questionable also are the claims of some Afrocentrists who maintain that because they are not African-Americans, white teachers are incapable of providing blacks with the inspiration that they need to overcome the limitations that society has imposed on them. It is encouraging to see that scholars are increasingly questioning certain Afrocentric approaches to education at the risk of being branded "Eurocentric racists" or "dupes of the white conspiracy." Henry L. Gates, Jr., chairman of Afro-American studies at Harvard, has described as intellectually "bogus" some of the work currently being done in more than two hundred Afro-American studies programs around the country, because, in his view, the programs are essentially inventing a past that never was and their approach is "classic escapism and romanticism." At a recent meeting in Paris of some four hundred scholars in the field of African-American studies, Gates stated, "we wanted to have the conference here to refute the notion that only blacks can teach African-American studies." At the same meeting Robert Bone, professor emeritus at Columbia University, observed: "The cultural atmosphere in the United States among blacks is a little too tribal for its own good. . . . [Europe] restores your sense of proportion?you see yourself as a member of the human race, rather than of some sort of soul fraternity or sorority."
Many Afrocentrists are adherents of a school of black historical thought which Professor Orlando Patterson twenty years ago called "contributionism." This school, Patterson pointed out, attempts to prove that white history has been a big lie and that the black man lived not only in preliterate societies, but was a part of the "big-time" civilizations of Egypt and North Africa. This school - following what Patterson called the three P's approach to black history as the rediscovery of princes, pyramids, and pageantry - can make it four P's by adding pharaohs.
atterson properly noted that the "contributionist approach," now commonly called Afrocentric, does violence to the facts, is ideologically bankrupt, and is methodologically deficient. He pointed out that inmany respects only a small part of the history of the African continent is relevant to the Afro-American experience, because it has been long established that the vast majority of American blacks came from the western coast of Africa. And he correctly observed that there is no justification for defining the term "black" to include all the swarthy peoples of Egypt and north Africa.
Though Afrocentrists may be competent in their own specialities, many of their statements about blacks in the ancient world demonstrate clearly that they have not approached the ancient evidence with the relevant scholarly apparatus. Many shortcomings have resulted: unfamiliarity with primary sources; reliance on the undocumented opinions of fellow Afrocentrists (usually the same few); a tendency to make broad statements on the basis of a few lines from a single author, or from a few texts, without consider ing the total picture of blacks in antiquity; the use of language charged with political rhetoric; and a tendency to read a "white conspiracy" into scholarly interpretations of the ancient evidence.
Among the most blatant examples of methodological weakness is the claim that the inhabitants of Africa in antiquity were predominantly black - a claim not supported by linguistic, archaeological, or historical evidence. Afrocentrists have assumed that the word "African" and color adjectives used by ancient writers were always the equivalents of words such as "Negroes" and "blacks" in twentieth-century usage. The only Greek or Latin word, and I emphasize only, that most frequently referred to a black or Negroid type from the sixth century BC onward is Aithiops or Aethiops (Ethiopian), literally a person with a burnt face. These Negroid peoples, who exhibited various shades of pigmentation and whose facial features encompassed a variety of types, came from either the south of Egypt (Kush, Ethiopia, Nubia) or the interior of northwest Africa. Ancient sources also differentiate clearly between people who lived along the coastal areas of northwest Africa (i.e., modern Libya toMorocco) and those who inhabited the interior. "Aethiops," it should be emphasized, with few exceptions, was applied neither to Egyptians nor to inhabitants of northwest Africa, such as Moors, Numidians, or Carthaginians. Furthermore, a detailed study of the classical usage of "Ethiopian" and "African" indicates that there is no ancient evidence whatsoever to support the following statement in Chancellor Williams's The Destruction of Black Civilization: "In ancient times 'African' and 'Ethiopian' were used interchangeably because both meant the same thing; a Black." Nor have those blacks who have followed Williams in this view adduced any proof of such an equivalence. Williams attributes the failure of white scholars to equate "African," "Ethiopian," and "black" to the distortions of the "white conspiracy," a frequent terrifying specter in black studies. To quote Williams's rhetoric on this point, the equivalence of these three words "was [established] before the Caucasians began to reorder the earth to suit themselves and found it necessary to stake their birthright over the Land of the Blacks also."
Cheikh Anta Diop, a favorite "source" for Afrocentrists, misinterprets also the classical usage of color words. Diop not only distorts classical sources but, like many Afrocentrists, omits those Greek and Roman authors who clearly distinguish between Egyptians and Ethiopians. Diop writes that, according to Greek and Latin writers contemporary with the ancient Egyptians, "the Egyptians were negroes, thick-lipped, kinky-haired and thin-legged; the unanimity of the authors' evidence on a physical fact as salient as a people's race will be difficult to minimize or pass over." I agree with Diop that the salient evidence provided by the Greek and Roman contemporaries of the Egyptians cannot be minimized or passed over. But the passages cited by Diop do not prove his claim that the Egyptians, according to classical sources, were Negroes. In fact, most of the passages do not even mention lips or hair. They only verify the point which I have already made - that adjectives denoting color in classical texts were used to designate peoples darker than Greeks or Romans - a practice which by no means indicated that the persons so described were Ethiopians, i.e., Negroes or blacks. Five of the texts Diop cites describe Egyptians as black in color but mention no other physical characteristic. He omits one reference in a source which describes Ethiopians, but not Egyptians, as having extremely woolly hair. Further, a key passage from Herodotus, cited by Diop, comparing Egyptians with Colchians, not Ethiopians, makes it clear that the historian is stressing the importance of cultural, not physical criteria.
As to the physical characteristics of the ancient Egyptians, both iconographie and written evidence differentiated between the physical traits of Egyptians and the populations south of Egypt. The art of ancient Egypt frequently painted Egyptian men as reddish brown, women as yellow, and people to the south as black. Ancient Egyptians, like their modern descendants, varied in complexion from a lightMediterranean type, to a light brown inMid dle Egypt, to a darker brown in southern Egypt. There was also a mixed black-white element in the Egyptian population as early as the middle of the third millenium BC. In fact, the earliest clearly recognizable Egyptian portrait of a black is preserved in a lime stone head of a woman, together with that of her Egyptian husband, a prince from the court of Memphis. Verdi's Aida was not the first Ethiopian princess to attract an Egyptian admirer. Interracial mingling continued as black mercenaries increasingly served in the Egyptian army, married Egyptian women, and had mixed children. Intermarriages between Egyptians and women from the south were not uncommon, and the harems of the pharaohs included Nubian ladies. Nevertheless, as the Egyptologist David O'Connor has pointed out, "Thousands of sculpted and painted representatives from Egypt as well as hundreds of well preserved bodies from its cemeteries show that the typical physical type was neither Negro nor Negroid."
Ancient art also sheds light on the physical characteristics of Cleopatra, the last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt, whom many Afrocentrists describe as black or Negroid. Cleopatra was not even an Egyptian but, like the other Ptolemies, of Macedonian descent. Authentic coins struck by the Ptolemies leave no doubt about the non-Negroid features of the entire Ptolemaic Dynasty. The ancient portraits of Cleopatra, including those on coins commemorating her union with Mark Antony, depict the queen with non Negroid features like those of the other Ptolemies.
One of the first to circulate the Cleopatra myth was Joel A. Rogers, followed by many others who, with a complete disregard for the clear evidence provided by the coinage, have stated that the Ptolemaic queen was black. A recent version of the Rogers non sense appears in a chapter entitled "African Warrior Queens," by John Henrik Clarke in Black Women in Antiquity: "More nonsense has been written about Cleopatra than about any other Afri can queen, mainly because it has been the desire of many writers to paint her white. She was not a white woman, she was not a Greek .... Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superior ity, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color. Shakespeare in the opening line of Antony and Cleopatra calls her 'tawny.' In his day, mulattos were called 'tawny Moors.' ... In the Book of Acts, Cleopatra describes herself as 'black.'" In the first place, the word "tawny" does not appear in the first, but the sixth line of the Shakespearean play - a minor point, however. There is no evidence that Shakespeare, who lived more than sixteen hundred years after Cleopatra, had reliable evidence that Cleopatra was black. Nor can it be demonstrated that Shakespeare intended to suggest by his use of "tawny" that he regarded Cleopatra as a "black" - Shakespeare would have used "Ethiope," which he used in other plays. Furthermore, there is no reference to Cleopatra in the Book of Acts. Another unscholarly point made by Clarke to "prove" that Cleopatra was black is a reference to the queen as "fat and black" in Ripley's Believe It or Not. Clarke's final bit of "evidence" is a modern painting of a Negroid Cleopatra by an Earl Sweeney, but he omits completely the evidence ancient portraits offer regarding the physical features of Cleopatra.
In northwest Africa, as in Egypt, we find that some Afrocentrists frequently create "blacks" out of whites and adduce the "white conspiracy" theory. George G. M. James, in The Stolen Legacy, incorrectly used "African" and "black" interchangeably in his description of the Greek geographer Eratosthenes merely because he was a native of Cyrene in North Africa. The Roman Emperor Septimius Severus, because he was born in North Africa, at Lepcis Magna (near modern Tripoli), is described as black by Edward L. Jones, who writes, "... a rock, a piece of white marble or limestone, has successfully transformed this Black Emperor into a white 'Roman Emperor,' for almost eighteen hundred years. What is being said is that Africans everywhere have been passing by the statue of Septimius Severus and have been unable to identify with him racially because the marble iswhite and his features have been 'refined.'... Since the majority of the portraits of Severus are represented by white marble, how will Black people be able to identify with one of their ancient heroes? The answer seems obvious; his portraits must be done in Black marble and limestone. Then Black children everywhere will be able to recognize and read about an outstanding Black Emperor of Rome." There is no evidence in the entire history of ancient art to support Jones's state ment that artists deliberately "refined" the features of blacks who served as their models, or used marble or limestone to conceal the identity of Negroid types. In fact, Jones seriously underestimates the consummate skill and anthropological accuracy with which ancient artists rendered, in both limestone and marble, the features of their Negroid subjects. Despite Jones's highly emotional rhetoric, however, as iconographical studies of the Emperor Septimius Severus have shown, in none of the numerous portraits of Septimius Severus is there any evidence of Negroid characteristics. And as to the number of blacks in Mediterranean northwest Africa, also worthy of note is the fact that in the art of this part of Africa there are relatively few blacks, far fewer than elsewhere in the ancient world.
A recent book entitled African Presence in Early Europe is one of the latest examples of an Afrocentric study which ignores the ancient evidence, written and iconographical, concerning the white and black population in northwest Africa and maintains, without providing evidence, that all the inhabitants of northwest Africa have been and are black. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, for example, has been described as a black and, likemany of the blacks in Afrocentric studies, appears as such in Rogers's publications. In his discussion of Hannibal, Rogers states that the Carthaginians were descendants of the Phoenicians, a Negroid people, and that until the rise of the doctrine of white superiority Hannibal was traditionally known as a black man. Van Sertima accepts this myth; refers to Carthaginians as Africoid peoples; publishes some illustrations of coins depicting Negroes and elephants; and, though he cites no proof, states that these coins indicate the Africoid ancestry of the Carthaginians (misspelled four times on two pages). Coins with realistic portraits of Hannibal's family, the Barcids, however, depict them as obviously non-Negroid. Furthermore, there is no classical source which describes the Carthaginians who came from Phoenicia at the eastern end of theMediterranean Sea as Ethiopians, i.e., Negroes or blacks.
James's statement in Stolen Legacy that Aristotle stole important ideas from the great Library at Alexandria provides a final example of the serious inaccuracies in the publications of many Afrocentrists. How could Aristotle have purloined ideas from the Alexandrian library? In the first place, there is no evidence that Aristotle ever went to Egypt. Secondly, ancient sources, for the most part, consider Ptolemy II the founder of the Library after the death of Aristotle in 322 BC. Even if the Alexandrian Library had been founded by Ptolemy I - as is indicated in a few ancient sources - it is doubtful that itwould have been much of a bibliographic center at such an early date. Hence, a major point in the thesis that Aristotle stole important ideas from Egyptians, blacks in James's opinion, is not supported by the ancient evidence.
Considerations of space do not allow for additional illustrations of the unscholarly approach and methodological flaws of many Afrocentrists in their distorted accounts of blacks in the ancient world. Suffice it to say that the time has come for Afrocentrists to cease mythologizing and to cease claiming, in spite of the copious evidence to the contrary, that Egyptians, Carthaginian and other inhabitants of ancient Africa were blacks or Negroes in the twentieth-century sense of these terms.
The black experience as documented in antiquity - our oldest account of black-white relations - is in itself a fascinating chapter in the history of blacks, even when stripped of Afrocentric myths. It is this type of carefully documented information that should be included in courses of study designed to present an accurate picture of the black man's past. It is unfortunate that this chapter has been omitted almost entirely in Afrocentric publications. As Timothy Kendall, a specialist on Nubia at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has pointed out, the distorted Afrocentric emphasis on ancient Egypt has contributed to the neglect of ancient Nubia, "which really was a black African culture of enormous influence and power." Furthermore, the pattern of black-white relations in the Greco-Roman period helps us understand better some of the reasons for the later development of virulent color prejudice in the modern world.
What are some highlights of this chapter in the history of blacks neglected by Afrocentrists? The chronicle begins with Egyptian efforts to exploit the human and natural resources of the country to their south?most commonly known as Kush, Ethiopia, or Nubia. As a military power on the periphery of theMediterranean world, this region was featured prominently in the ancient profile of blacks. Long before Egypt conquered Kush, and then occupied it for almost five hundred years beginning about 1570 BC, Egyptians employed southerners in their armies out of respect for their skill as archers. About 751 BC, after the long period of Egyptian occupation, the Napatan kingdom of Kush turned the tables on its former conquerors, came north, conquered Egypt, and ruled the Nile valley from deep in the south to the Mediterranean before being driven out in 663 BC by a powerful Assyrian war machine. This was the only time in history that a state from deep in the interior of Africa played an important role in the politics of the Mediterranean. The Napatans, however, in the meantime had laid the foundation of a state that, with its later capital at Meroe, survived for more than a thousand years, longer than any single period of Egyptian unification.
The ability of the black southern neighbors of Egypt to defend themselves from foreign aggression gained the respect of their enemies, even of Egyptians and Assyrians, in spite of the often exaggerated, contemptuous claims of their "official" accounts. Later, in the time of Augustus, the Romans decided that the best way to prevent the recurrence of an Ethiopian attack upon the Roman border in Egypt was by diplomacy, not by arms. And Augustus, according to Strabo, granted the ambassadors of the Ethiopian queen everything they pleaded for, including the remission of the tribute he had imposed.
The overall Greco-Roman view of blacks - influenced to a great degree by the Ethiopians' demonstrated piety and love of justice - was very positive. The "blameless" Ethiopians of Homer were favorites of the gods and, according to Herodotus, were both champions of justice and the most handsome men on earth. Ethiopians, as reported by the historian Diodorus, were said to be the first of all men and the first to worship the gods, whose favor they enjoyed so much that the Olympian deities doomed to failure attempts of foreign rulers to invade and occupy their country. Ethiopians, in Diodorus' accounts, were not only pioneers in religion but the source of many Egyptian beliefs and practices. As late as the fourth century the writer Heliodorus described Ethiopian king Hydaspes as a model of wisdom and justice and as a ruler who, like earlier Ethiopian kings, preferred not to put captives to death but to take them as prisoners.
Greeks and Romans attached no special stigma to the color of the skin and explained the physical differences of all men as the effects of diverse environments upon a uniform human nature; there were no hierarchical notions concerning race, with whites occupying the highest and blacks the lowest position. Blacks suf fered no detrimental distinctions excluding them from occupational, economic, social, or cultural opportunities available to other newcomers. Ancient slavery was color-blind. Both blacks and whites were slaves, but slaves and blacks were never synonymous; in fact, the majority of slaves were white, not black. Like other slaves and freedmen, blacks engaged in occupations at the lower end of the economic scale. But blacks with special qualifications found a place for their talent or skill, whether, for example, in the military, the arena, the theater, or agriculture. Miscegenation was as old as the Old Kingdom of Egypt. Classical legends of the interracial amours of gods and heroes caused no embarrassment and evoked no apologies from poets or artists. References to black-white racial mixture included nothing resembling later strictures. Blacks were to be counted among those who assimilated classical culture. Greek was taught at Meroe, deep in Ethiopia; the Ethiopian king Ergamenes had a Greek education and studied Greek philosophy; and included among the distin guished followers of Epicurus were two men from Alexandria named Ptolemaeus, one black, the other white. The dark-skinned playwright Terence, who might have been of Negroid extraction, arrived in Rome as a slave and received his freedom and a liberal education from his owner, a Roman senator. Achieving fame as a comic poet, Terence became amember of the learned Scipionic circle, and his daughter is said to have married a Roman knight. In no Afrocentric study have I found any mention of the prominence given to Ethiopians in the ecumenical creed of early Christianity or to the role of blacks in the early church, where they were welcomed in the Christian brotherhood on the same terms as others, and where they found equality in both theory and practice. In short, the curse of acute color prejudice did not have its origins among the ancient Greek or Roman forerunners of the "Eurocentric tradition" that has been much maligned by Afrocentrists."
