Perceptions of Blackness in the Ancient World

(Same as African American Studies M25.) Exploration of depictions of people of African descent in antiquity beginning with the ancient Greeks and Romans who referred to African peoples as Aithiops. Extensive connections through trade, politics, warfare, and religious practices made the people of northeast Africa a source of fascination in Greco-Roman histories and geographies, as they represented the exotic, distant other. When Greeks and later Romans adopted and modified Egyptian temple rites for Isis and Serapis, they chose to feature black people as priests and worshippers to lend a sense of authenticity to their rites. Depictions of African peoples were both positive and negative. Blackness came to have symbolic resonance in Christianity adopted partially from earlier writings about African people in the Hebrew Bible and from the larger Greco-Roman cultural sphere. Elsewhere in the ancient world Persians, Indians, Japanese, and Chinese people created their own portrayals of blacks.

P/NP or letter grading.