Regarding issues of interethnic, and specifically interracial relations, a commonly expressed opinion is that ‘people of different races have always hated each other.’ This view stems from projecting our current mindset into the past. Americans, with our disdain for history, are especially prone to assume that the current state of affairs has always existed. Instead of taking interracial hostility as a given, scholar Frank Snowden examines artistic, folkloric, and textual evidence to ascertain the range of attitudes that ancient peoples held about each other in Before Color Prejudice. Specifically, Snowden’s book is an exploration of ancient Greek, Assyrian, Roman, Egyptian, and Jewish attitudes toward sub-Saharan African people. Like other scholars who have examined ancient evidence (such as St. Clair Drake), he notes that, “nothing comparable to the virulent color prejudice of modern times existed in the ancient world.”

Snowden mentions that ancient authors, such as the poet Vergil, often wrote in detail about the physical characteristics of the people they encountered, Africans being among those they described, as contacts between Africans and Mediterranean peoples were more common than many might suppose. Moreover, he wants to bring to our attention an often overlooked source of information: “The vast evidence of ancient art is an invaluable source of information concerning the black populations of antiquity.” To that end, he marshals an impressive collection of photographic plates of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Assyrian art to support his assertion. The vases, sculpture, and murals which he gathers to make his case make one wonder where all this paraphernalia was hidden (or was it under our noses all along, as many of the articles exist in Western museums). The photographs of the sphinxes and sculptures of the pharaoh Tiharka (mentioned in both Isaiah 37:9 and 2 Kings 19:9) are prime apologetic evidence. [Unwittingly, they serve the purpose that the explorer Livingstone had hoped, as he desired to explore the ancient history and culture of the peoples along the Nile, in part to prove the Bible true.] Concerning standards of physical beauty, Snowden contends that there can be a difference between people holding to a somatic norm image and racism-the former being the narcissistic perceptions of beauty common to any culture, and the latter (and more modern) notion that only one group is beautiful (and that other people confirm that assessment). He thus summarizes ancient attitudes toward the different types of physical beauty:

Thus “white” was for many in the ancient world a basic element in the somatic norm image, as it has usually been in predominantly white societies. The number of implied or expressed preferences in classical literature for white beauty exceeds slightly those for black or dark beauty. About this there is nothing strange. But what is unusual was the number of those in the Greco-Roman world who rejected the norm of whiteness and openly stated their rejection. As far as the Greeks and Romans were concerned, it seems that the matter was basically one of individual preference.

Such attitudes are in striking contrast to those expressed in the not-too-distant past, in which open denigration of African physical features was endemic in American society-a crumbling cultural pillar from which we are still recovering. Notes Thomas F. Gossett in Race: The History of an Idea in America, “It is striking how often one finds among intelligent and sensitive people of the period-North as well as South-crude reflections of racism. One thinks of Henry Adams’ contemptuous references to “n[**]gers” and of John Fiske’s account of a visit in 1877 to Baltimore, where he saw “elegant n[**]gers” promenading on the streets. Rayford W. Logan has studied the files of eminent magazines of the last part of the nineteenth century and found in Harpers, Scribner’s, Century, and to a lesser degree the Atlantic a fairly constant barrage of epithets applied to Negroes…” An example of such denigration was mentioned by James Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me, in which he mentions that when he tries to get people in all-white settings to sing a political song popular in 1864, they usually balk, replete as it is with petty negative references to body parts of black people (“ebony shins and bandy,” “blubber lips,” “bully feet to have the heels extended”).

Snowden raises the question of whether symbolism regarding the color black had any significant influence in shaping Greco-Roman attitudes toward Africans. He concludes that while there were negative references toward the color black in many societies (as well as in some extrabiblical Christian writings), ancient Mediterranean peoples did not extend negative references toward black in the abstract to black people. It took the Atlantic slave trade, many centuries later, to accomplish this dubious feat.

We are reminded by Snowden that initial encounters between Africans and other ethnic groups in ancient times were qualitatively different than those which occurred during the Renaissance era and the age of “Enlightenment,” which, ironically, was the period when the Atlantic trade was at its peak. Often, Africans were soldiers, even mercenaries, in various armies (as in part of Xerxes’ troops). Indeed, their fighting prowess was apparently well recognized; thus, they were often sought out for that ability. Such was apparently the case of Judah during the period of King Hezekiah (as also explained in the article in the August 1998 edition of Bible Review entitled “From the Land of the Bow”), which may be why Snowden declares, on page 45, “Kush appears conspicuously in the Old Testament as one of the great military nations of the time,” before mentioning the episodes in the Old Testament in which Kush and Kushites are mentioned (but does not provide verses in the body of the text).

In addition to the general social context, Snowden notices patterns of interaction and perception between various ethnic groups within various religious contexts. For instance, worship patterns of the goddess Isis were first mentioned, in which it was noted that the cult of Isis, though most prevalent among the Egyptians and Ethiopians, spread throughout the Greco-Roman world.

Interestingly, Snowden mentions that the “strong bond that united blacks and whites in the common worship of Isis was reinforced by Christianity. Like the Isaic cult, Christianity swept racial distinctions aside,” and draws the conclusion that “in the early church blacks found equality in both theory and practice.” What a contrast to the present! More important, such ancient equality is an indictment of the notion that forward motion in time necessarily brings about “progress” in terms of human relations. Professor Snowden has written an important book for people of all religious backgrounds (or none at all), one in which tired, intellectually lazy assumptions about Africans and relations between people of various ethnic groups are put to rest.