Black People in Ancient Antiquity Art
High-handled kantharos in the form of two heads, Attic black-figure
ceramic, attributed to the London Class, c. 510–480 BCE. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Panagyurishte treasure depicting concentric circles of African Heads, Thracian, late 4th-early 3rd cent. BCE. Modern day Bulgeria. Getty Musuem.
Caricatured Odysseus and Kirke. Kabirion kantharos, Boeotian BF, London, British Museum. 450-375 BC. Photograph Alexandre G. Mitchel
Skyphos depicting Odysseus at sea and with Circe, Boeotian black-figure ceramic, attributed to the Cabirion Group, c. fourth century BCE. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
During the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., the Greeks renewed contacts with the northern periphery of Africa. They established settlements and trading posts along the Nile River and at Cyrene on the northern coast of Africa. Already at Naukratis, the earliest and most important of the trading posts in Africa, Greeks were certainly in contact with Africans.
All black Africans were known as Ethiopians to the ancient Greeks, as the fifth-century B.C. historian Herodotus tells us, and their iconography was narrowly defined by Greek artists in the Archaic (ca. 700–480 B.C.) and Classical (ca. 480–323 B.C.) periods, black skin color being the primary identifying physical characteristic. It is recorded that Ethiopians were among King Xerxes’ troops when Persia invaded Greece in 480 B.C. Thus, the Greeks would have come into contact with large numbers of Africans at this time.
Nonetheless, most ancient Greeks had only a vague understanding of African geography. They believed that the land of the Ethiopians was located south of Egypt. In Greek mythology, the pygmies were the African race that lived furthest south on the fringes of the known world, where they engaged in mythic battles with cranes.
Ethiopians were considered exotic to the ancient Greeks and their features contrasted markedly with the Greeks’ own well-established perception of themselves. The black glaze central to Athenian vase painting was ideally suited for representing black skin, a consistent feature used to describe Ethiopians in ancient Greek literature as well. Ethiopians were featured in the tragic plays of Aeschylus, Sophokles, and Euripides; and preserved comic masks, as well as a number of vase paintings from this period, indicate that Ethiopians were also often cast in Greek comedies.
Well into the fourth century B.C., Ethiopians were regularly featured in Greek vase painting, especially on the highly decorative red-figure vases produced by the Greek colonies in southern Italy.
-Hemingway, S. and Hemingway, C.. (2008). Africans in Ancient Greek Art. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/afrg/hd_afrg.htm. More art examples founded on the website.
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