Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- 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
- Plat Section
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- 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
- Plat Section
Summary
In Africa, one dreams about India, just as in Europe one dreams about Africa: the ideal always radiates beyond our actual horizon.
—Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient, 1851/1980, 1: 262The myth of the Dark Continent was largely a Victorian invention.
—Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 1988, 95The foregoing pages will have shown how wide of the mark Brantlinger's comment is, even though his view represents an almost universal assumption in contemporary African studies. Africa was perceived as home to a fabulous and paradisical ‘worthy Ethiopia’ even as it was persistently seen as the site of the most abject and darkest ‘savage Ethiopia’ that the Mediterranean imagination could devise, some two millennia before the emergence of the fantasies of ‘Victorian invention’; and it is this conundrum which I set out to address in this study. I have tried to show that as early as the late New Kingdom, certainly by about 1200 BCE, the Egyptians had developed not only a fully-fledged ethnographic distinction between themselves and Nubians, but also, and more pertinently, a clear differentiation between a refined, elite Kushitic type and other, almost caricatured, African people, such as the prisoners depicted beneath the feet of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel. These distinctions were given further currency by the black Kushite rulers of Egypt's Twenty-fifth Dynasty in order to distinguish themselves from African Negroid peoples. Subsequently, and almost without fail, the Greek, Ptolemaic, Roman and early Christian cultures of the Mediterranean would articulate the same distinctions, reduce them to stereotypes, and apply them universally to most African people – except for those of Egypt and the Mediterranean African coast, and the denizens of a mythic ‘worthy Ethiopia’ thought to exist somewhere near the headwaters of the Nile.
Throughout this process of image formation and transference, a dialectic paradigm of ‘two Ethiopias’, originally no more than a casual reference in the Homeric epics, would be preserved and sporadically elaborated.
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- The First EthiopiansThe image of Africa and Africans in the early Mediterranean world, pp. 443 - 446Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2009