The First Ethiopians

Malvern Wyk Smith

Description

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.

Sujets

• Christianisme
• Africa
• History
• General
• Anthropology
• History of Africa
• Cultural studies
• General officer
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 10
• EAN13: 9781868148349
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

T HE F IRST E THIOPIANS
T HE F IRST E THIOPIANS
The Image of Africa and Africans in the Early Mediterranean World
Malvern van Wyk Smith
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg 2001
http://witspress.wits.ac.za
Copyright Malvern van Wyk Smith 2009
First published 2009
ISBN (print) 978 1 86814 499-0
ISBN (EPUB - IPG) 978-1-86814-834-9
ISBN (EPUB - ROW) 978-1-86814-835-6
ISBN (PDF) 978-1-86814-634-5
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder and the publisher.
All photographs taken by the author unless otherwise indicated. All images remain the property of the copyright holders. The author and Wits University Press gratefully acknowledge the publishers, institutions and individuals referenced in the illustrated section for the use of the images therein. Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of the images reproduced here; please contact the Press at the above address in case of any omissions.
Edited by Helen Moffett and Rustum Kozain
Design and typesetting by Electric Book Works (electricbookworks.com)
Index by Adrienne Pretorius
Cover photograph by Malvern van Wyk Smith
Major headings and some text set in Fontin Sans and Fontin
(by Jos Buivenga, www.exljbris.nl)
Body text and minor headings set in Warnock Light 10/14
Printed and bound by Creda Communications, Cape Town
From South and East, and from my West
( The sandy desert holds the North)
We look across a vast continent
And blindly call it ours .
You are not a country, Africa ,
You are a concept ,
Fashioned in our minds, each to each ,
To hide our separate fears ,
To dream our separate dreams .
-Abioseh Nicol, The Meaning of Africa
C ONTENTS
Preface
Map
Timeline
Introduction
1
Ethiopia, Egypt and the Matter of Africa
2
Who were the Egyptians?
3
The Egypt of Africa
African Resonances in Predynastic Egypt
4
The Egypt of the Rock Artists
5
Africa in Egypt
Proto- and Early-Dynastic Manifestations
6
Africa in Egypt
Dynastic Responses
7
Africa in Egypt
Later Dynastic Encounters
8
The First Ethiopians
9
Ethiopians in the Greek and Ptolemaic World
10
Ethiopians in the Roman World
11
The Ethiopia of the Early Christian World
12
The Real Ethiopians
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
P REFACE
This book has been some thirty years in the making, although its effective composition could only begin once I had retired from Rhodes University in 2002. Over the previous decades the project had, however, grown substantially from what would have been little more than another identification and dismantlement of reprehensible Eurocolonial prejudices about Africa and Africans from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. What has emerged instead is the more ambitious quest, in Egyptian, classical and early Christian traditions, for the origins and earliest manifestations of the Mediterranean world s founding conceptions of - and prejudices about - the subcontinent to the south of the Sahara.
During the years that I pondered this theme and amassed the evidence, many debates have risen and sunk in the (at times) superheated polemics of postcolonial and postmodernist debate. In the Introduction, I chart my own way through these minefields of cultural history in order to explain why the main study that follows has taken the shape and directions it has. Readers not interested in the convolutions and clashes of postcolonialist and cultural discourse should feel free to skip the Introduction and to enter the argument with Homer and the ancient Ethiopians in Chapter 1 .
Over three decades, I have incurred many debts, to friends and colleagues, as well as to funders and institutions, and I must here attempt to pay tribute to them. Two of my former mentors and colleagues, the late Guy Butler (Rhodes University) and the late Aldon D. Bell (University of Washington) in the 1970s planted the first ideas that have now come to fruition. They would be surprised by the outcome, but not, I hope, disappointed. At Cambridge in the 1980s, I had the pleasure of meeting W.H.C. Frend, doyen of authorities on early Christian North Africa, and to him I am indebted for setting my mind in the directions pursued in Chapter 11 . Since the 1970s, several colleagues at Rhodes have continued to contribute to my contemplations of the images of Africa, among them Gareth Cornwell, Dan Wylie, Paul Walters, Warren Snowball, and the late Don Maclennan, and I thank them here.
However, the major endeavour in the research, preparation and composition of a study such as this is largely a solo affair, and I owe large debts to an array of institutions that provided the funds and opportunities for hundreds of hours of reading, thinking and shaping of ideas. In South Africa, I am indebted to Rhodes University and the former Human Sciences Research Council s Centre for Scientific Development (now the National Research Foundation) for several research and travel grants over the years. I also wish to thank Rhodes for the Vice-Chancellor s Distinguished Senior Researcher s Award in 1999, and the Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust for a substantial travel scholarship in 2002.
I owe much appreciation and thanks to the Principal and Fellows of Wolfson College, Cambridge, who in 1984 and again in 1993 elected me to a Visiting Scholarship, as well as to Girton College, Cambridge, whose Mistress and Fellows in 1985 awarded me the Helen Cam Fellowship. I must also thank the British Council for the award of a travel grant in 1984, and Erhard Reckwitz and the University of Essen for a travel and residence grant to attend the Essen Symposium in 1998. Some of the central ideas developed in this study were first aired in seminars and discussions in London, Oxford, Cambridge and Essen, and I am grateful for many helpful suggestions and clarifications that came out of these conversations.
Research libraries are the quarries from which any study of this kind must draw its ore, and I am beholden to several. To the directors and librarians of the following institutions, I extend my deepest thanks for their assistance and many kindnesses over the years: the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Cambridge University Library, the Royal Commonwealth Society Library (whose holdings are now in Cambridge), the Strange Africana Collection (Johannesburg Public Library), the South African Library and the Library of Parliament (Cape Town), Rhodes University Library (and here especially Viv Botha and Sue Rionda), the Grahamstown Public Library, and the Africana Collection of the Port Elizabeth Public Library.
I am deeply grateful to Wits University Press, notably Veronica Klipp, Estelle Jobson and Julia Wright, as well as to Electric Book Works, particularly Arthur Attwell and Silma Parker, for easing this book into the world in a competent and ever-helpful manner. I also wish to thank the editors, Helen Moffett and Rustum Kozain, for their meticulous attention to the text, and Ethn Clarke for proofreading. To the three anonymous readers whom the Press originally commissioned to consider the manuscript, I am indebted for wise suggestions and timely corrections. Over the years several secretaries in the Rhodes Department of English (Jennifer Holmes and Carol Booth), as well as secretarial assistants (Pat Papenfus and Virginia David-Engelbrecht), have worked small miracles with word processors, and I remain very grateful to them.
While acknowledging all the assistance that I have received from funders, institutions and many individuals over the years, and as I thank them for their guidance and generosity, I nevertheless accept full responsibility for all conclusions drawn and opinions expressed (including any remaining errors and obscurities) in the following study.
Without the love, enthusiasm, and support of my wife over many years, particularly at times when the project seemed to be adrift in the shallows, this book would not now be before the reader. So it is with much relief, joy, and gratitude that I dedicate it to her - Rosemary Ann.
M. van Wyk Smith, Grahamstown, September 2009

T IMELINE
All dates are BCE .
PRE-DYNASTIC (PREHISTORIC) ERA (CA 5500-3100)
Nubia ca 3800-3100 A-Group 3100-2680 Terminal A-Group
Upper Egypt ca 5500-4500 Badarian ca 4500-3800 Naqada I ca 3800-3300 Naqada II 3300-3100 Naqada III
Lower Egypt ca 5500-4000 Merimde ca 4000-3500 El-Omari 3500-3100 Maadi
DYNASTIC EGYPT (3100-30)
Archaic Period-Old Kingdom (3100-2134) 3100-2650 Dynasties I-II 2650-2134 Old Kingdom, Dynasties III-VIII
First Intermediate Period (2234-2040) 2134-2040 Dynasties IX-X (Heracleopolis) 2134-1991 Dynasty XI (Thebes)
Middle Kingdom (2040-1674) 2040-1991 Dynasty XI (all Egypt) 1991-1786 Dynasty XII 1786-1674 Dynasty XIII
Second Intermediate Period (1674-1566) 1674-1566 Hyksos Dominion 1674-1566 Dynasties XIV-XVII (minor Hyksos and Theban rulers)
New Kingdom (1550-1080) 1550-1293 Dynasty XVIII 1293-1184 Dynasty XIX 1184-1080 Dynasty XX
Third Intermediate Period (1070-663) 1070-945 Dynasty XXI 945-712 Dynasty XXII (Tanis) 805-712 Dynasty XXIII (Leontopolis) 718-712 Dynasty XXIV (Memphis) 712-663 Kushite Dynasty XXV 671-663 Assyrian invasion
Late Period (663-30) 663-525 Dynasty XXVI (Sa te) 525-405 Persian occupation, Dynasty XXVII
Egyptian Independence (405-343) 405-399 Dynasty XXVIII 399-380 Dynasty XXIX 380-343 Dynasty XXX 343-332 Persian reconquest 332-323 Alexander the Great 323-30 Ptolemaic rulers
I NTRODUCTION
To us in the West, Africa is that part of the world which remains most deeply endowed with the two central facets of the other; that is, the mysterious and the exotic .
-Patrick Chabal, The African Crisis: Context and Inter