Customer Reviews

Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks

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This text is a wonderful antidote to the present-mindedness which marks much of our current discussion of race and race relations. Snowden examined the ancient Mediterranean world--a highly pluralistic, interracial world--to learn how significant the concept of race was at that time. His compelling and creative use of human representations in art, and of the stories that ancient people told about eachother show that race--while seemingly all-important today--was insignificant to them. He identifies (among others) Egyptian, Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman art in which "black" and "white" people stand side-by-side as soldiers, military officers, political rulers, spouses, athletes, guests at feasts, mythic figures, etc. While ancients recognized the physical differences which we use as racial identifiers, they did not seem to draw the same invidious distinctions or make the same social uses of race which Europeans around the world have made over the past 500 years. I regularly refer to his findings in 2-3 of my college courses to raise questions about the naturalness and inevitability of our current racial assumptions. The many photographs included in the text make it even more valuable, by allowing us to draw our own conclusions from his graphic evidence. I highly recommend this book.

Let's get it straight. Dr. Frank Snowden knows what he is talking about.

Snowden offers solid evidence from antiquity that does show "racism" based on skin color was in fact not a major issue of ancient times. While it is true that slavery did exist from antiquity, it was based on conquest, and not skin color or race from a biological superiority/inferiority perspective.

Dr. Snowden is not writing a piece of revisionist history or unsupported political Afro-centrism, he is presenting findings of honest and credible research.

This is an excellent book that any intelligent person who has serious questions about race and racism in history should read.

One possible conclusion you may arrive at is that racism is evidently a much more recent social (and possibly even theological) construction in history and definitely not one that originated in antiquity.

I highly recommend "Before Color Prejudice".

While the detailingly sought quotes are presented, there are mass amounts of contradictions, historical and personal coming from Mr. Snowden himself acknowledging the "absence" of ancient racism, while engaging in questionable personal views and terminology. Rather than aggress his respective scholarship, I will simply quote as follows...

p.88 1st paragraph
"Nubians who left their country for EGYPT or elsewhere in Mediterranean lands were obviously conspicuous because of their color: they were blacks in predominantly WHITE societies."
(one may question this quote in constrast to a quote from Herodotus "The Father of History" stating that Colchians were an Egyptian race because like them they have black skins and wooly hair, which amounts to little since many other colonies do as well, Lucien also described an Egyptian boy as not just merely black, but with thick lips, thin legs and plaited hair. Ammanianus Marcellinus, Aristotle, Achilles, and even The Bible follow suit.)...

p.83 2nd paragraph
"It was obviously because of a deeply rooted tradition linking blackness with death and the Underworld that some writers of the early Roman Empire put dark-skinned peoples-Ethiopian, EGYPTIAN, Garamantian - in ill-omened contexts."

p.73 4th paragraph
"Piye, for example, in his triumphal stele made no reference to color: he apparently did not regard himself as a champion of black peoples who had overturned their former masters."
(remember when I stated that there were HUGE inconsistencies?)

p 103 2nd paragraph
"Blacks could have a soul as pure as the whitest of whites"
(that's HIS own quote...heavens)

p 100 3rd paragraph
"Ethiopians, Indians, and other dark peoples."

p106 3rd paragraph
"Menas, sometimes portrayed as a negro, was a national saint of Egypt."

p72 3rd paragraph
"To many Egyptians, Napatans appeared "Egyptian", not foreign."

p73 1st paragraph
"Nubians "among civilization's pioneers" renowed for their wisdom and their fame in astrology"

p72 3rd paragraph (one page before)
"Meroites, though heavily indebted to the Egyptians throughout their history in language, religion, and art, gradually developed their own distinctive writing, worship their own gods, and create their own style of architecture, sculpture, and pottery"
(This stubbornly ignores the findings of the A-Group culture in the Northern Sudan region of Qustul in the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in a cover of the New York Times from March 1, 1979 stating "Archeological Evidence Yield's World's Oldest Monarchy", which implies Egyptian iconography and symbolism, Pharaonic tombs, and even Monarchies PERIOD, not just divine kingship, take root there archaeologically.)

... nice pictures though!

This book investigates the relationships of blacks and whites in the Mediterranean world before color prejudice. Much of the Snowden's book focuses on the relationship between Ethiopia and Egypt. Ethiopians and Egyptians did not always get along, indeed wars were fought between the two, but their struggles were not based on racial differences. Snowden claims that the skin color of northeast Africans gradually lightened as one moved down the Nile.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Snowden's brief book was his description of Nubian culture. Snowden presents a vibrant society with its own distinct civilization that affected the Egyptians as much as the Egyptians affected it. Indeed, Snowden indicates that the civilization south of the first cataract was politically stable in comparison to the turmoils that faced other areas in the Mediterranean.

The main idea of the book is that whites and blacks got along in the Greco-roman world. Of course the Greeks and other "white" peoples were interested in the "black" peoples and their customs, but the racial difference did not cause the whites to look down on the blacks. Snowden discusses the many ways in which blacks and whites worked together, especially in fighting along side each other. He also claims that mixed marriages were common, even in Greece, and that mulattoes did not hold an inferior social place. Even in the beginning of the Christian era, there did not exist racial tensions; blacks had access to the same salvation that the whites had. If anything, Snowden argues that blackness was viewed as "highly positive" (58).

The title says it in a nutshell. It tells of a time that I, and am sure many others, are unaware of. Centering mainly around the centuries before and after Christ it shows that racism was not an inherited trait of whites but something that evolved over time. It describes the ageless meaning behind racism and how it is a way for one to hold one group of people down in order to uplift you and whatever group you belong to. This book does not paint the broad brush of generalizing all whites as prejudice, but that a substantial number of whites became prejudice over time so that such things as: black slavery lasting over 500 years while no other ethnic group was so wholley enslaved. Or how the world had designated at one time that regardless of where the black man was at he was a slave until proven otherwise. And how the system of Jim Crow and its brother Apartheid existed for such a lengthy period of time before their was finally enough public resentment to have these systems overturned. The book also mention the role of Africans in the Bible.

The book was dissapointing because the author cant seem to accept the fact that prejudice is natural so he tries to convince us that since there was a time when there was no prejudice, we can get rid of it. The evidence he presents for this view is weak since the illustrations he used only shows caricatures of blacks.Another thing is,he falls into the same old racist definition of the egytians as white when it seems even to a moron that they appear more mulatto than anything else.the only good thing about the book is what i learned about n.african blacks in antiquity.Racism has always been here and will always be here.The aauthor has not convinced me that the ancient greeks or romans had no color prejudice,in fact he has convinced me of just the opposite.

the book was dissapointing because the author cant seem to accept the fact that prejudice is natural so he tries to convince us that since there was a time when there was no prejudice, then we can get rid of it. The evidence he presents for this view is weak since the illustrations he used only shows caricatures of blacks.Another thing is,he falls into the same old racist definition of the egytians as white when it seems even to a moron that they appear to be mulatto than anything else.the only good thing about the book is what i learned about n.african blacks in antiquity.Racism has always been here and will always be here.The aauthor has not convinced me that the ancient greeks or romans had no clor prejudice,in fact he has convinced me of just the opposite.