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Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience

Amazon.com Price:  $29.08 (as of 01/05/2019 18:42 PST- Details)

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The Africans who came to ancient Greece and Italy participated in crucial chapter of classical history. Even though evidence indicated that the alien dark- and black-skinned people were of varied tribal and geographic origins, the Greeks and Romans classified many of them as Ethiopians. With the intention to decide the role of black people in ancient civilization, Mr. Snowden examines a broad span of Greco-Roman experience–from the Homeric era to the age of Justinian–focusing his attention on the Ethiopians as they were known to the Greeks and Romans. The writer dispels unwarranted generalizations about the Ethiopians, contending that classical references to them were neither glorifications of a mysterious people nor caricatures of rare creatures.

Mr. Snowden has probed literary, epigraphical, papyrological, numismatic, and archaeological sources and has considered modern anthropological and sociological findings on pertinent racial and intercultural problems. He has drawn directly upon the widely scattered literary evidence of classical and early Christian writers and has synthesized extensive and diverse material. In conjunction with invaluable reference notes, Mr. Snowden has included over 140 illustrations which depict the Negro as the Greeks and Romans conceived of him in mythology and religion and observed him in quite a lot of occupations–as servant, diplomat, warrior, athlete, and performer, among others.

Presenting an exceptionally comprehensive historical description of the first major encounter of Europeans with dark and black Africans, Mr. Snowden found that the black man in a predominantly white society was neither romanticized nor scorned–that the Ethiopian in classical antiquity was considered by pagan and Christian without prejudice.

Here’s a book to raise the spirits of anyone of African descent who feels that she or he has nothing to do with the making of Western civilization. Frank M. Snowden Jr., a world-renowned scholar on ancient Greece and Rome who taught at Howard and Georgetown Universities, details with encyclopedic and painstaking scholarship and research the undeniable presence of Africans in the Greco-Roman world. “The experiences of those Africans who reached the alien shores of Greece and Italy constituted crucial chapter in the history of classical antiquity,” he writes. The usage of evidence from terra cotta figures, paintings, and classical sources like Herodotus and Pliny the Elder, Snowden proves, contrary to our modern assumptions, that Greco-Romans did not view Africans with racial contempt. Many Africans worked in the Roman Empire as musicians, artisans, scholars, and generals in addition to slaves, and they were noted as much for their virtue as for their appearance of having a “burnt face” (from which came the Greek name Ethiopian). –Eugene Holley Jr.

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