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
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 Interpretation’, 1996, 45I thought for some reason even then of Africa, not a particular place, but a shape, a strangeness, a wanting to know.
—Graham Greene, Journey without Maps, 1936This book is a history of the idea of ‘Africa’ in the consciousness of the early Mediterranean and European world. G.M. Young once remarked that ‘the real, central theme of history is not what happened, but what people felt about it when it was happening’ (1952, vi), and the present study has been conceived in these terms.
In 1979 Jean Devisse concluded the second volume of the magisterial The Image of the Black in Western Art, produced for the Menil Foundation by a team of scholars under the general editorship of Ladislas Bugner, with the following thoughts:
Many see the sixteenth century as the starting point of relations between Europe and Black Africa, and in a way this is not inexact, give or take fifty years. This book, however, proves that these relations had a long prehistory. If Africa hardly dreamed of Europe before the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe, on the other hand, had had certain images of the black continent and its peoples for centuries before (1979, 2: 2. 258).
Despite Devisse's optimism that the Bugner enterprise had ‘proven’ the long antecedence of European images of Africa and Africans, these volumes also made it clear that much further work was needed to explain the provenance and import, rather than merely to record the persistence, of such images. In his Preface to the first volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art, the general editor had himself suggested one way forward: ‘What is most urgently needed is an in-depth examination of the literary sources in relation to our theme.’ This sentiment chimed well with my own interests at the time.
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- The First EthiopiansThe image of Africa and Africans in the early Mediterranean world, pp. 1 - 62Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2009