The First Ethiopians. Malvern van Wyk Smith

      Of course, to speak of Egypt, Ethiopia and Africa in the above terms is to invoke a series of anachronisms. The question whether ancient Egyptians thought of themselves as ‘white’ or ‘black’ or ‘African’, and of Nubian and other ‘Ethiopians’ as more ‘black’ or ‘African’ than themselves, presupposes ethnocultural distinctions that may have had little meaning between two and five thousand years ago. As far as human time goes, the continent itself has always been there, but the concept of ‘Africa’ itself has always been a construct. Ran Greenstein reminds us that any investigation into the ancient historical identity of the continent and the relation among any of its parts must always be a contentious operation:

      Africa did not exist prior to its discursive constructions in political and geographical terms by Europeans and indigenous people alike. This is not to deny that the landmass we now know as Africa exists independently of our conceptions of it. Rather, it is to argue that it derives its meaning as a coherent unit from such conceptual operations (1993, 22).

      He also points out that in the ancient Mediterranean world ‘southern Europe, north-eastern Africa, and western Asia [might] have comprised a single “continent”’ (22) in ways that would have seemed much more coherent than the geographically determined identity of Africa that we now recognise. In similar vein, Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen (1997) propose a North Africa aligned to the ancient Middle East in such a way that it is hardly part of the sub-Saharan continent at all. The difficulties posed by such ‘conceptual operations’, and by any attempt to retrieve from antiquity those that might have shaped and expressed Egyptian and hence later classical notions of ‘Ethiopia’ and the larger domain that would come to be known as ‘Africa’, are manifold.

      Not only is information on the distant past of any of the territories that would over time come to be known as ‘Ethiopia’ often extremely thin, but the various ‘Ethiopias’ with which this study is concerned seem always to have been mythic constructs in the symbolic discourse of another culture. The term was unknown to the ancient Egyptians; it was in fact coined by the Greeks.

      When Homer invokes the land of the Ethiopians early in the Iliad – ‘Zeus left for Ocean Stream to join the worthy Ethiopians at a banquet, and all the gods went with him’ (1: 423–424) – and again in the Odyssey – ‘Poseidon had gone among the far-off Ethiopians – the Ethiopians who dwell sundered in twain, the farthermost of men, some where Hyperion sets and some where he rises’ (1: 22–24) – he was as likely to have been referring to some dimly understood, even actual, geographical entity as he was to have been employing a formulaic trope for legendary space. Classicists usually point out that Homer’s ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ Ethiopians are inspired by myth-enshrouded conceptions of the identities of dark-skinned peoples on either side of the ‘Erythraean Sea’ or the north-west Indian Ocean – they are Indians and sub-Egyptian Africans (Heubeck et al., 1988; Mayerson, 1993).

      I shall return to these identifications. For the moment it is sufficient to note that even if Homer’s ‘Ethiopia’ was a literary trope as much as a locality, somewhere it must have had its origins in the cultural exchanges of archaic Mediterranean peoples, just as its identity must have been shaped first by the cosmologies of ancient Egypt, and then by those of archaic Greece. Frescoes at Knossos and Thera depict Negroid Africans, so Mycenaeans must have had a word for ‘Negro’, which was likely to have been the original of the Greek άίθίοψ (Heubeck et al., 1988, 1: 75–6).

      Further problems arise when one considers the immense time spans involved, and the inevitable conceptual and epistemological distortions involved in a modern assessment of what Homer and his sources could have understood by the term ‘Ethiopia’. It is now generally agreed that the Homeric epics had taken their present shape by about the mid-eighth century BCE (Heubeck, 1988; Coleman, 1996), but by then Dynastic Egyptians must have had concepts of the area Homer calls ‘Ethiopia’ that would have been at least two millennia older. As we shall see, the seventh and eighth centuries BCE constituted a crucial period of transformation in Egyptian-African relations. Furthermore, Egyptians did not use the terms ‘Ethiopia’ and ‘Ethiopians’, but spoke more generally of ‘nehessy’, meaning something like ‘southern foreigners’, to indicate more or less the same people.

      We cannot presume a straight transference of such concepts from one culture to another, just as we cannot assume that cross-cultural perceptions and transactions would have happened in any framework we might now recognise, let alone share. We cannot really tell through what symbolic schemas, by what complex mythic transactions, the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean world saw themselves and others. We had best assume that all perceptions of people, space and time might have been predominantly emblematic rather than naturalistic, and not necessarily expressions of the geo-historical knowledge of the time; but rather metaphysical explanations: part-realistic, part-mythic understandings of how the world and its people had come to have the identities that they were thought to have (Finley, 1978; Hartog, 1996; Dougherty, 2001).

      In his intriguing investigation of the complex semiotic code whereby Australian aborigines believed that they ‘sang’ their world into existence, Bruce Chatwin suggests that other pre-modern cultures may have had similar symbolic ways of encoding their physical world: ‘the whole of Classical mythology might represent the relics of a gigantic “song-map”…. [Classical legends] could all be interpreted in terms of totemic geography’ (1987, 130). To ask, then, what the Homeric poet(s) might have understood by the term ‘Ethiopia’, and how such an understanding might have come about, is not merely to invite enquiry into ancient geographic knowledge (although it is that, too), but rather to embark on mythography – a quest for the emblematic configurations of ancient worldviews. Various ancient Mediterranean peoples must have had diverse and extensive contacts with various parts of North Africa (to which we shall come), but the conceptual contexts in which such contact developed, and how it was understood, must first be examined.