The First Ethiopians

The Image Of Africa And Africans In The Early Mediterranean World

Malvern Wyk Smith

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781868148349
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia africana

The First Ethiopians explores the images of Africa and Africans that evolved in ancient Egypt, in classical Greece and imperial Rome, in the early Mediterranean world, and in the early domains of Christianity. Inspired by curiosity regarding the origins of racism in southern Africa, Malvern van Wyk Smith consulted a wide range of sources: from rock art to classical travel writing; from the pre-Dynastic African beginnings of Egyptian and Nubian civilisations to Greek and Roman perceptions of Africa; from Khoisan cultural expressions to early Christian conceptions of Africa and its people as 'demonic'; from Aristotelian climatology to medieval cartography; and from the geo-linguistic history of Africa to the most recent revelations regarding the genome profile of the continent's peoples. His research led to a startling proposition: Western racism has its roots in Africa itself, notably in late New Kingdom Egypt, as its ruling elites sought to distance Egyptian civilisation from its African origins. Kushite Nubians, founders of Napata and Meroë who, in the eighth century BCE, furnished the black rulers of the twenty-fifth Dynasty in Egypt, adopted and adapted such Dynastic discriminations in order to differentiate their own 'superior' Meroitic civilisation from the world of 'other Ethiopians'. In due course, archaic Greeks, who began to arrive in the Nile Delta in the seventh century BCE, internalised these distinctions in terms of Homer's identification of 'two Ethiopias', an eastern and a western, to create a racialised (and racist) discourse of 'worthy' and 'savage Ethiopians'. Such conceptions would inspire virtually all subsequent Roman and early medieval thinking about Africa and Africans, and become foundational in European thought. The book concludes with a survey of the special place that Aksumite Ethiopia – later Abyssinia – has held in both European and African conceptual worlds as the site of 'worthy Ethiopia', as well as in the wider context of discourses of ethnicity and race.

1

ETHIOPIA, EGYPT AND THE MATTER OF AFRICA

We judge of the ancients improperly when we make our own opinions and customs a standard of comparison.

—Comte de Volney, Travels through Syria and Egypt_, 1787, 1: 275

Ethiopia fits few categories, prejudices or preconceptions. It maintains an ill-defined separateness from the rest of Africa, yet has links with Arabia and the Middle East of which it is not a part.

—David W. Phillipson, ‘Ethiopia’, 2008, 519

In 1681, Hiob Ludolf (or Job Ludolphus, as his title page called him), probably the first European scholar to make a thorough study of the history and culture of the country that came to be known as Abyssinia or Ethiopia, pointed out the pitfalls of his enterprise: ‘Concerning [the Ethiopians] there have been many large, but few true relations…. Besides that the name of “Ethiopians”… is common to so many nations, that it has rendered their history very ambiguous’ (1681, 1). And to make matters worse, complained Ludolf, this protean uncertainty surrounding Ethiopia had over the centuries attracted myth-making on a large scale:

Others there are who, to waste idle hours, and designing some fabulous inventions, or to present the platform of some imaginary commonwealth, have chosen Ethiopia as the subject of their discourse, believing they could not more pleasantly romance, or more safely license themselves to fasten improbabilities upon any other country (1–2).

The following two instances attest to just how bizarrely fanciful late-Renaissance European conceptions of the whereabouts and status of Ethiopia had become. William Cuningham, writing in the mid-sixteenth century, managed to patch together in his description of Meroë (on the Sudanese Nile and, as we shall see, one of the ancient locations of ‘Ethiopia’) a rag-bag of classical, biblical, Aksumite, patristic, Arab and crusader myths:

Meroë is an island of Nilus, sometimes called Saba, and now Elsaba, where St. Matthew did preach the Gospel. From hence came the Queen of Sheba, to hear Solomon’s wisdom. From hence also came Candaces, the queen’s eunuch, which was baptized of Philip the Apostle. But at present it is the seat of the mighty prince that we call Preter [sic] John (1559, fol. 185).

Every statement here is not merely mythic but, even as myth, thoroughly garbled. Yet Pierre d’Avity, writing half a century later, managed to assemble a riot of fantastic claims about Ethiopia that made Cuningham’s look tame:

In our time, [Prester John of Ethiopia] took the king of Mozambique in battle. He put to rout the Queen of Bersaga at the Cape of Good Hope; defeated Termides, prince of the Negroes, towards the West; and vanquished the king of Manicongo, which is right against the Island of St. Thomas, under the Equinoctial line; and afterwards one of his captains put Azamur, Basha to the Great Turk at Suaquem, thrice to rout (1615, 1086).

This Prester John is a veritable Tamburlain. Even if one accepts that as late as the seventeenth century, the whereabouts and nature of many parts of the world were for Western observers still dim and speculative, these extracts suggest that Ethiopia (or the concept ‘Ethiopia’) was at the time not only startlingly mythotropic, but had been so for a very long time. It would seem that in the notion of ‘Ethiopia’ we have to deal with a place or a space that for complex geo-historical reasons had, over many centuries, acquired rich and densely emblematic associations in European (or, initially, Mediterranean) worldviews – associations that were only very loosely connected with the actual sites or realities of the various cultures known as ‘Ethiopian’ in ancient and early modern history. My first chapters will attempt to give to some of these earliest iconic ‘Ethiopias’ a local habitation and a name.

Some confusions about the ancient identity of ‘Ethiopia’ are readily clarified; others are more elusive and will be constantly returned to in this study. In the broadest classical sense, ‘Ethiopia’ was simply a term for all of sub-Egyptian and sub-northern-littoral Africa. Greek authors from Herodotus to Diodorus Siculus increasingly confined the term to Meroitic Nubia, but would also speak vaguely of ‘other Ethiopians’ from elsewhere in Africa. By late-classical and early-Christian times, the term ‘Ethiopia’ had become more specifically attached to Aksumite and then Abyssinian Ethiopia. But mythographically, ‘Ethiopia’ alternately expanded and shrank amoeba-like in the Mediterranean and European imagination, from the time of Herodotus up to the seventeenth century, construed as anything from a small and mysterious polity at the undiscovered headwaters of the Nile to a vast landmass including almost all of sub-Saharan eastern and central Africa.

The tendency to elide distinctions among different ‘Ethiopian’ cultures of ancient north-eastern Africa that would eventually be known as Nubia, Sudan, Ethiopia and/ or Abyssinia has lasted till relatively recently. Thus Wallis Budge’s seminal work of 1928, A History of Ethiopia, Nubia and Abyssinia, while explicitly setting out to unpick the confusions surrounding the identity of ‘Ethiopia’, promptly resurrects all the ancient elisions by treating the history of Kushite Nubia on the Upper Nile and that of Aksumite and Solomonic Abyssinia as a seamless narrative. On the other hand, Budge rightly recognised another ambivalence about the ancient identity of ‘Ethiopia’ that lies at the heart of the present study; namely that where the ‘Ethiopians’ of Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny and other classical writers were not clearly the proto-Abyssinians, the term was readily stretched to include peoples as sharply divergent as those of the ancient civilisations of Kush, Napata and Meroë on the Upper Nile, as well as ‘the Negroes and Negroid peoples who inhabit the hot, moist lands which extend from Southern Abyssinia to the Equator’ (1928, viii). As we shall see, such fictions of assimilation would reverberate down the centuries to our own.

Whatever the ancient Mediterranean world might have understood under the rubric ‘Ethiopia’, as well as other terms for what we now know as ‘Africa’, must initially have been mediated through Egypt. While ancient Egyptians may have had no concept of a continent we know as ‘Africa,’ they nevertheless fostered a host of different and often conflicting notions of the lands and peoples to their south, notions in turn inherited by later Mediterranean cultures. One might say of Ethiopia and Egypt what Ladislas Bugner, introducing the first volume of the mammoth survey The Image of the Black in Western Art (1976), says about the origin of European images of black people: ‘From the beginning to the end of the classical period Egypt continued to disseminate the image of the black’ (6). My first chapters will therefore be concerned with such conceptions the ancient Egyptians might have had of the lands and peoples to the south of their natural border with Nubia, the First Cataract. I shall also explore several related and still contentious issues, such as arguments for the African origins and character of ancient Egypt itself; and, more pertinently, the extent to which Dynastic Egyptians acknowledged these, and, if they did, how they configured such putative connections.

Of course, to speak of Egypt, Ethiopia and Africa in the above terms is to invoke a series of anachronisms. The question whether ancient Egyptians thought of themselves as ‘white’ or ‘black’ or ‘African’, and of Nubian and other ‘Ethiopians’ as more ‘black’ or ‘African’ than themselves, presupposes ethnocultural distinctions that may have had little meaning between two and five thousand years ago. As far as human time goes, the continent itself has always been there, but the concept of ‘Africa’ itself has always been a construct. Ran Greenstein reminds us that any investigation into the ancient historical identity of the continent and the relation among any of its parts must always be a contentious operation:

Africa did not exist prior to its discursive constructions in political and geographical terms by Europeans and indigenous people alike. This is not to deny that the landmass we now know as Africa exists independently of our conceptions of it. Rather, it is to argue that it derives its meaning as a coherent unit from such conceptual operations (1993, 22).

He also points out that in the ancient Mediterranean world ‘southern Europe, north-eastern Africa, and western Asia [might] have comprised a single “continent”’ (22) in ways that would have seemed much more coherent than the geographically determined identity of Africa that we now recognise. In similar vein, Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen (1997) propose a North Africa aligned to the ancient Middle East in such a way that it is hardly part of the sub-Saharan continent at all. The difficulties posed by such ‘conceptual operations’, and by any attempt to retrieve from antiquity those that might have shaped and expressed Egyptian and hence later classical notions of ‘Ethiopia’ and the larger domain that would come to be known as ‘Africa’, are manifold.

Not only is information on the distant past of any of the territories that would over time come to be known as ‘Ethiopia’ often extremely thin, but the various ‘Ethiopias’ with which this study is concerned seem always to have been mythic constructs in the symbolic discourse of another culture. The term was unknown to the ancient Egyptians; it was in fact coined by the Greeks.

When Homer invokes the land of the Ethiopians early in the Iliad – ‘Zeus left for Ocean Stream to join the worthy Ethiopians at a banquet, and all the gods went with him’ (1: 423–424) – and again in the Odyssey – ‘Poseidon had gone among the far-off Ethiopians – the Ethiopians who dwell sundered in twain, the farthermost of men, some where Hyperion sets and some where he rises’ (1: 22–24) – he was as likely to have been referring to some dimly understood, even actual, geographical entity as he was to have been employing a formulaic trope for legendary space. Classicists usually point out that Homer’s ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ Ethiopians are inspired by myth-enshrouded conceptions of the identities of dark-skinned peoples on either side of the ‘Erythraean Sea’ or the north-west Indian Ocean – they are Indians and sub-Egyptian Africans (Heubeck et al., 1988; Mayerson, 1993).

I shall return to these identifications. For the moment it is sufficient to note that even if Homer’s ‘Ethiopia’ was a literary trope as much as a locality, somewhere it must have had its origins in the cultural exchanges of archaic Mediterranean peoples, just as its identity must have been shaped first by the cosmologies of ancient Egypt, and then by those of archaic Greece. Frescoes at Knossos and Thera depict Negroid Africans, so Mycenaeans must have had a word for ‘Negro’, which was likely to have been the original of the Greek άίθίοψ (Heubeck et al., 1988, 1: 75–6).

Further problems arise when one considers the immense time spans involved, and the inevitable conceptual and epistemological distortions involved in a modern assessment of what Homer and his sources could have understood by the term ‘Ethiopia’. It is now generally agreed that the Homeric epics had taken their present shape by about the mid-eighth century BCE (Heubeck, 1988; Coleman, 1996), but by then Dynastic Egyptians must have had concepts of the area Homer calls ‘Ethiopia’ that would have been at least two millennia older. As we shall see, the seventh and eighth centuries BCE constituted a crucial period of transformation in Egyptian-African relations. Furthermore, Egyptians did not use the terms ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘Ethiopians’, but spoke more generally of ‘nehessy’, meaning something like ‘southern foreigners’, to indicate more or less the same people.

We cannot presume a straight transference of such concepts from one culture to another, just as we cannot assume that cross-cultural perceptions and transactions would have happened in any framework we might now recognise, let alone share. We cannot really tell through what symbolic schemas, by what complex mythic transactions, the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean world saw themselves and others. We had best assume that all perceptions of people, space and time might have been predominantly emblematic rather than naturalistic, and not necessarily expressions of the geo-historical knowledge of the time; but rather metaphysical explanations: part-realistic, part-mythic understandings of how the world and its people had come to have the identities that they were thought to have (Finley, 1978; Hartog, 1996; Dougherty, 2001).

In his intriguing investigation of the complex semiotic code whereby Australian aborigines believed that they ‘sang’ their world into existence, Bruce Chatwin suggests that other pre-modern cultures may have had similar symbolic ways of encoding their physical world: ‘the whole of Classical mythology might represent the relics of a gigantic “song-map”…. [Classical legends] could all be interpreted in terms of totemic geography’ (1987, 130). To ask, then, what the Homeric poet(s) might have understood by the term ‘Ethiopia’, and how such an understanding might have come about, is not merely to invite enquiry into ancient geographic knowledge (although it is that, too), but rather to embark on mythography – a quest for the emblematic configurations of ancient worldviews. Various ancient Mediterranean peoples must have had diverse and extensive contacts with various parts of North Africa (to which we shall come), but the conceptual contexts in which such contact developed, and how it was understood, must first be examined.

If, for the ancient Mediterranean world, ‘Ethiopia’ was a floating signifier, a notional configuration of parts of the world to the south of Egypt, whatever initial definitions the term had were likely to have originated in Egypt itself. Ancient Egyptians must themselves have had an image of Africa – or of what they understood that landmass to be – and thus of ‘Ethiopia’. Such conceptions of Africa must have varied substantially over the three millennia of Dynastic Egyptian experience, given that Egyptian notions of cultural and political affiliations with the lands beyond Upper Egypt fluctuated constantly between hostility and alliance, between recognition of affinity and insistence on difference.

Deeply implicated in this process of image formation would have been the perceptions Egyptians might have had of themselves as belonging to and deriving from the same world as their southern neighbours – or not, as the case may be. This is a contentious issue – witness the fierce controversies that have surrounded Martin Bernal’s claims for the Afro-Asiatic origins of not only Egyptian but also Greek civilisation (1987; Lefkowitz and Rogers, 1996), and to which I shall return. The evidence suggests that a substantial homogeneity of culture between the pre-Dynastic peoples of Upper Egypt and the populations of Nubia and lands further south was gradually eroded (or increasingly less readily acknowledged) as the Dynasties unfolded, until by the time of the late New Kingdom, about 1200 BCE, the pharaonic elite saw themselves – and had themselves depicted on tomb and temple architecture – as markedly different from their southern neighbours. It is from this period (the late New Kingdom) that one of the most startling confirmations of Dynastic Egypt’s proto-racism dates, namely the ‘Hymn to Aten’, ascribed to the apostate pharaoh Akhenaten:

You made the earth as you wished…

You set every man in his place…

Their tongues differ in speech,

Their characters likewise;

Their skins are distinct,

For you distinguish the peoples (Lichtheim, 1976, 2: 131–2).

In other words, people from south of the First Cataract – Kushites, Nubians, Ethiopians (as they would variously come to be called) – with whom pre-Dynastic Egyptians may have had a great deal of affinity, were increasingly cast as tropes of difference in the developing Egyptian narrative of self-realisation over three millennia. It would be largely as such iconic ‘others’ in an evolving Egyptian symbology that Ethiopians would first have entered the cosmology and ethnography of Mediterranean peoples.

Modern visitors to the great rock-cut main temple at Abu Simbel, constructed early in the reign of Ramesses II (1290–1224 BCE; Baines and Málek, 1980, 184), are usually so overawed by the three surviving colossal external statues of its handsome patron that they tend to hurry on to see the images of the pharaoh repeated on every wall and column inside. Thus, they often miss the life-sized figures engraved on the base walls of the colossi that flank the entrance – two long lines of bound prisoners, Africans on the south side, Asians on the north. The features of the African prisoners could not be more startlingly different from those of the pharaoh above them – emaciated figures, exaggerated lips, bulbous noses, sloping foreheads and closely curled hair make up what to the modern viewer can only be a gross caricature of Negroid physiognomy, deliberately set up in contrast to the image that the Egyptian ruler and his elite wished to project of themselves.

Confronted with such a spectacle, a contemporary observer must have great difficulty agreeing with David O’Connor’s verdict that ‘Egyptians, like other ancient peoples, seem to have been free of racial prejudice as we understand it today’ (2003, 159). At what point, one must ask, does racial caricature become ‘racial prejudice as we understand it today’? The verdict of Edwin M. Yamauchi seems closer to the mark: ‘Egyptians were among the most ethnocentric of all peoples, and generally regarded black Africans of Nubia, as well as all other non-Egyptians, with contempt’ (2001, 1). This is a point to which I shall return.

When the temple was first cleared of sand in the early nineteenth century, the distinctions between pharaoh and captives were even more obvious. Charles Leonard Irby and James Mangles, who visited the temple in 1817, soon after Belzoni had re-opened it, exclaimed on the ethnographic diversity they at once discerned. They saw:

painted in glowing colours, the costumes of the various tribes of the interior of Africa, at a date so remote, that one knows nowhere else to look for any description either of their manners or their custom…. Some of the captives are perfectly black, and have all the characteristics of the tribes of the interior of Africa – such as woolly hair, thick lips, long sleek limbs, etc; others are of a lighter hue, not unlike the present race of Nubians (1823, 83).

Belzoni himself had been struck by these attempts at ethnographic naturalism when he had first seen the murals, and had read their fresh tints to indicate ‘the Egyptians to have been of the same hue as their successors, the Copts, some of whom are nearly as fair ...