Much has been written about the arrival of the Greeks in Egypt, the Ptolemaic period that followed Alexander's conquest of Egypt, and subsequent Greek-Egyptian and Roman-Egyptian relationships, which culminated, before the arrival of Islam, in the pre-eminence of Alexandria in the early Christian world (Fraser, 1972; Bowman, 1986; Ray, 1995; Malkin, 1998; Dougherty, 2001; Vasunia, 2001; Tanner, 2003). It is not my intention to traverse these scholarly retellings of the history of Mediterranean civilisation and the foundations of the Western world. My concern here is how the image of ‘Ethiopians’, or by now more generally, black Africans – as well as the image of Africa itself – continued to be transmitted and modified in the classical world, and how these images became paradigmatic in the early modern world's conceptions of Africa and its peoples.

In the Ptolemaic period (304–30 BCE), relationships between Egypt and Meroitic Ethiopia continued to oscillate between the hostile and the cordial. As we have seen, Meroitic nobility and crown princes such as Arkakamani, or Ergamenes I (ca 270–260 BCE), were guests, sometimes even educated in Greek, at the Alexandrian court. But quite apart from such diplomatic courtesies, two other developments brought about both improved relationships between Ptolemaic and Meroitic rulers, and a dramatically increased knowledge of sub-Egyptian Africa in the Mediterranean world. One was the emergence of what we can now recognise as the inception of the international trade in exotic animals, a two-thousand-year-old history of depredation that would in time almost wipe out Africa's richest non-human legacy. The Ptolemies began this trade by procuring war elephants, and the Romans would perfect it as a source for exotic circus animals and for deadly gladiatorial spectacles.

The other, more respectable, inspiration for increased contact with and understanding of greater north-east Africa would be early Greek geographic and ethnographic curiosity, evidently a wholly new impulse (if extant texts may be judged by) in the early Mediterranean world's discourse of Africa: ‘The remote land of the Upper Nile …