Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Belknap Press) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Here's a book to raise the spirits of anyone of African descent who feels that he or she 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 an important chapter in the history of classical antiquity," he writes. Using 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 as well as 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.

Review

This book, by reason of its scrupulous, balanced scholarship and quietly reasoned argument, will be of lasting value not only to scholars but to anyone interested in questions of race and historical and social perceptions of race.
--Michael Thelwell (Boston Globe )

The novelty of this book, the fruit of a lifetime's labor of love by a distinguished black classicist, lies in the exhaustive, impeccable scholarship with which it documents and illustrates its conclusion, that there is no evidence for racism or color prejudice in Greco-Roman antiquity.
--Paul MacKendrick (American Journal of Philology )

Solid, important reading, and a landmark in the writing of history. [Snowden] skips secondary sources for the ancient evidence: writings, coins, epigraphs, papyri, pottery, etc. With data gleaned from these, he draws conclusions about the Ethiopian's (black's) place in the Greek, Roman, and early Christian eras, the white man's attitude toward him. What emerges from Snowden's painstakingly thorough study is that it was not a confrontation--that skin color was no obstacle to harmony in the ancient world. (Publishers Weekly )

Professor Snowden has assembled an impressive amount of evidence of contacts which Greeks and Romans had with black Africans throughout the classical period; this evidence comes from archeological and literary sources, and in considering it, he has also combed much modern scholarship on individual bits of evidence. The result is a handbook which should prove useful to anyone who is at all interested in social or cultural attitudes in antiquity. (Classical Philology )

Snowden has amassed an impressive amount of evidence proving that "Ethiopians" were not regarded mainly as slaves, but were also widely known as warriors, diplomats, athletes, and performers.
--Lorna Hahn (Saturday Review )

One very effective way to expose the irrational in present-day attitudes is to recall the realities of the past. This is precisely what Frank Snowden has done in this book, a thoroughgoing, scholarly and beautifully illustrated study of the recorded contacts in the ancient world between the Greeks and Romans and that mysterious race of dark-skinned Africans whom they called the Ethiopians...The author is to be congratulated on having made manageable such a mass of pertinent information within the covers of one compact, extremely readable and timely book.
--Alan M. G. Little (Washington Star )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 364 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (January 7, 1971)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674076265
• ISBN-13: 978-0674076266
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #551,782 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An outstanding piece of research, September 20, 2000

By	Baltic Books "Vic" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews

Snowden is not an Afro-centric writer, he is a well qualified professor of classics, an accredited expert in his field.

"Blacks in Antiquity" presents a comprehensive history and analysis of ancient Ethiopian "black" culture. In the 18th and 19th centuries, some American anthropologists and theologians have attempted to rewrite Ethiopian history to show this advanced culture as one not truly black. The roots of that go into the very heart of the origin of western racism in Colonial America and can be found to affect our implicit views of race even today.

Snowden shows from historical, textual and archaeological evidence that the Ethiopians were indeed a "black" race. He also establishes their position of respect and complete equal acceptance with other ancient cultures of the time. In essence, it shows, while perhaps not explicitly stating it, that racism is a much more recent invention than many have supposed-- especially those hold to a "Black curse" or "inferiority" theory in physiology or theology.

If you want a volume that presents evidence in a straight foward and empirically supportable manner, this is an excellent choice.

20 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A well-written discussion of Greek-African contact, January 29, 1998

By	[e-mail] (Jim Carson, Michigan State University) - See all my reviews

Snowden seems to really know what he's talking about. To someone as ignorant in the subject as I was, it was a great read to learn all about the contact between the ancient Africans and Greeks. The pictures and explanations of artifacts are especially interesting.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some Rays of Valuable Information Still Shining Through Layers of Dust, April 19, 2007

By	Bonam Pak (Berlin) - See all my reviews

Frank M. Snowden, Jr. draws a thorough picture of the absence of racism in the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. He is analysing ancient texts, archaeological evidence (paintings, sculptures), encounters of war, integration in mythology and the participation in the theater and amphitheater of Blacks from the white Greek and Roman perspective. Closing with theory and practise of living together without prejudice in pre- and early Christian Classic Mediterranean civilisation. He reveals the irony that the Greeks and Romans if at all, then harbored some prejudices not against black skinned, but the even whiter north Europeans beyond their borders. Anybody who is interested in all of the above will find this book rewarding.

However, elapsed time (written in 1969) has caused this work to suffer immensely, not only exemplified by the use of the N-word and also "Ethiopian" not exclusively for the people inhabiting today's country area of that name, but Blacks in general. Which occasionally becomes awkward, when the context does not make it clear, which "king of the Ethiopians" the book is referencing: From Axum (today's Ethiopia), any given black kingdom or especially Nubia (today's Sudan). Most names of peoples and kingdoms are not in use today anymore and Snowden doesn't always reveal, whom he is referring to in general modern terminology. No maps are provided for easy clarification.

Intended as passionately anti-racist, by today's standard, this book unintentionally harbors a lot of racism, not only in the vocabulary:

Snowden avers, only retardet kids would not be afraid of the other skin color. That has been disproven. Kids in kindergarten do not fear kids of other skin colors. (His contrary statements concern with lacking selectiveness fear of adult males, which is no less untrue.) In fact, human toddlers till a certain age are programmed by nature to accept almost any given mammal population as normal companions, being able to differentiate every individual monkey, what older kids/adults can't do anymore.

The book constantly describes paintings and sculptures, with no exception commenting black bodies and faces with vocabulary either sounding like medical conditions or in the tune of "flat-nosed, puffy-lipped" etc. Reading that many hundreds of times, Snowden thereby establishes respective synapse connections in the reader's brain. He never describes white skinned as something like "squeezed-out-nosed, inflated-lipped" etc., in fact, he doesn't describe white folks at all. Which makes white the norm of humanity and blacks the deviation. Whereas in reality it is the other way around (if at all, of course), as white people are nothing else but paled blacks, i.e. black would be the human norm, with all other phenotypes deriving from that.

The perspective is white. Antiquity's norm is Greece and Rome. Not Egypt, Phoenicians, Ethiopia, Sumer, etc. The mingling is not told from the latter's viewpoints.

Even worse, most of the above are not considered to be black. In the meantime we know that all of the above and many more peoples in the ancient vicinity were black peoples. This is a mayor flaw of the book as for one thing, the meeting of black and white(r) cultures leaves out considerable, even the most important portions of the book's potential subject matter. For another, one of the important reasons for the lack of racism is missed: The infant by comparison Greek and Roman civilisations knew Egypt, Sumer and other more ancient cultures as role models, which have been faked/mistaken into white in the meanwhile. (Which explains the prejudice towards the back then "under-developed" northern European cultures.) Moses and other historical personalities still appear to be white in this book.

Also in its style, the book shows signs of ageing. The occasionally integrated ancient Greek vocabulary isn't translated, not even transscribed into the Latin alphabet and thus become unreadable for most readers. This intellectual arrogance has been dropped in the 1990s. I mean, really: 82 notes pages for 150 normal text pages (+ 100 picture pages), but these most essential transscriptions are not provided! Speaking of foot notes: It may happen that a foot note is longer than 2 pages and includes references back to the previous parts, to several pages of both of the two picture sections. As if that wouldn't be enough, the picture references within the normal text may be many dozen pages in advance, without giving the page numbers (but the picture numbers; in combination with foot notes). This is the epitomy of obstacle reading I have had to deal with in my lifetime yet.

Clearly, this book is to be venerated as pushing the envelope once. Now we are in dire need of a completely new book on the subject as even a potential extensive preface and some changes wouldn't be enough to adjust it to the times.