By Kyra Landry
Like most people, my introduction to Egypt was through pop culture. It was through analysis of the pyramids on television shows like Discovery TV’s Ancient Aliens and exotic and over sexualized depictions of Cleopatra portrayed by Elizabeth Taylor, but for the most part, Egypt and Africa were removed from each other. I, as a black woman, never felt much of a connection to Egypt and didn’t feel as if I could claim it as my history in the same way that my white peers claimed Ancient Greece as theirs. This distinction and removal of Egypt from blackness and black identity is one that is deliberate, and an anti-black aspect of the study of classics that remains to this day. Scholars and respected classicists have tried tirelessly to separate Egypt from any form of black identity. But, as much as they have tried, there is still room for conversations of race in the classical world. As much as classicists have tried to make discussions about race obsolete, and as much as people have insisted that there is no place for modern understandings of race within the study of the ancient Mediterranean, still scholars such as Shelley Hailey and Denise Eileen McCoskey persist and continue to involve race in classics. There are many ways to involve race into classics, but throughout this piece, I am going to encourage understanding race in the ancient Mediterranean through unlikely means, such as through American author Toni Morrison and medieval historian and writer Geraldine Heng, as both offer unique and creative perspectives that will help contextualize evidence and documents from the ancient Mediterranean to help us further understand the role that race played during this period.
Race is a concept that has defined the modern era and how we think about and perceive the world for the last several centuries. This concept of race, however, is malleable and unstable, constantly changing as identities and cultures emerge and define and redefine themselves. For many years, historians have tried to separate and ignore the effect that modern understandings of race play in how we view identities of the past, but the implication of race in the ancient world as far-reaching, especially in the department of classics. Race in the classical world, for most of the history of the field, has been whitewashed due to anti-blackness and an insistence from white classicists to remove blackness and black identity from the ancient civilization that western society greatly identifies with, such as Ancient Greece and, by extension, Ancient Egypt. Egypt, especially, has been removed and disassociated with black history for decades. Even modern classicists like Duane W. Roller contributed to this in articles dated as recently as 2010, arguing for the removal of race and blackness from the ancient Egyptian identity and, specifically from the iconic and oversexualized Cleopatra. Roller’s argument that race should not play a role in the classical world highlights just exactly why discussions of race and exploration of race, even race as a modern concept, in the ancient Mediterranean is so crucial. Because, although Roller wishes to escape conversation of race within classics, his entire argument is so incredibly steeped in it. In his article entitled Cleopatra’s true racial background (and does it really matter?), Roller explores the racial identity of Cleopatra and describes identifying her with blackness as “racial profiling and manipulation have” (Roller). Roller asserts that, “…it is probable that she had some Egyptian blood, although the amount is uncertain. Certainly it was no more than half, and probably less. The best evidence is that she was three-quarters Macedonian Greek and one-quarter Egyptian. There is no room for anything else, certainly not for any black African blood” Roller. In his article, like many other classicists, Roller works extensively to try and prove that there is no place for blackness within Cleopatra’s identity, only to arrive at the conclusion that she may have had some Egyptian blood, but it could not have been black Egyptian blood, specifically. Roller may believe that his argument is objective, and overcomes the confines of race, but in reality his essay is steeped in it, and a more nuanced understanding of race (in both Ancient Egypt and in the modern sense) might have helped him come to a different conclusion in his article. The truth is that race as both a modern and historical concept are inescapable because not only does it shape our understanding of our current world, but it also influences our understanding of the ancient world— a pattern that Roller seems to have fallen victim to. A more nuanced understanding of race, perhaps, may have made Roller question why he finds it so necessary to separate Egyptian identity from other African identity and why he specifically chose to silence allegations that Cleopatra, a woman often portrayed as an object of male desire, could be black. A critical understanding of race within the ancient Mediterranean may have illuminated the fact that the line between ancient Egyptian and ancient African identity was quite blurry and often arbitrarily reinforced by racist historians who want to remove blackness from Egyptian identity, and a better understanding of modern conventions of race may have helped Roller realize that his argument surrounding Cleopatra’s racial identity may have more to do with her sexualization and the strong hold that anti-black beauty standards have on Western society. Why is it so hard for Roller to imagine Cleopatra any part black, and why are historians and classicists so pressed to imagine Egypt as a white civilization? And how can we, as historians, classicists and as a society, free ourselves from modern racism in order to better understand race in the ancient Mediterranean? Writer Geraldine Heng gives one very helpful perspective as to how to make sense of race in a time before blackness, whiteness and modern white supremacy.
Geraldine Heng is a medieval historian who specializes in understanding race throughout history. She has written several pieces, including her book “The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages”. Although she doesn’t discuss the ancient Mediterranean, her lens for understanding race throughout history is still very applicable to the classical world. In a lecture that she gave at the Folger Institute, Heng introduces her concept of “race-making”, or “Race-making operates as historical occasions in which strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices and pressures to constitute a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment. Race is thus a structural relationship for the management of human differences—a mechanism of sorting—rather than a substantive content” (Heng). She then goes on to talk about the First Crusade, and how those killed during the crusade were identified, demonized and vilified through their differences. This is a historical example of race-making. She states, “We see from this simple example the importance of defining the meaning of historical phenomena accurately, as instantiations from one era are ported over to another era and repeated, but never repeated identically as before, and always with difference. The allegory of naming and difference here helps us to think about race in transhistorical terms” (Heng). “Naming and difference” as Heng calls it, is something that was very prevalent within the ancient Mediterranean. Denise Eileen McCoskey attempts to show this in her essay “Race Before ‘Whiteness’: Studying Identity in Ptolemaic Egypt”. Here, she discusses the ways that Greeks formed their identity through a hierarchical relationship with Egyptians. She argues that “…the concept of race should be added to current models to allow historians of this period to situate certain performances within a larger colonial structure that continued to treat the categories of ‘Greek’ and ‘Egyptian’ as conceptually distinct and indeed representative of inverse positions of social power” (McCoskey 1). McCoskey, similarly to Heng, argues for the existence of race within the ancient world. She then provides several examples of what Heng would consider race-making. She cites an excerpt from Greek poet Theocritus, who describes Egyptians as “bent on mischief,” “scoundrels,” and a “pack of rogues” (Theocritus lines 48-50). Within this text, she states “Greek poet Theocritus, in the passage quoted above, gives us a rare and provocative literary allusion to the ways in which Egypt and its new capital, Alexandria, remained infused with a hostile, perpetually unsettled colonial contest” (McCoskey 2). The language and the clear hierarchy portrayed within this poem is a clear example of what Heng would consider to be race-making within the ancient world. Although the modern understanding of race may not have existed, this form of race making was incredibly prevalent and did have an impact on ancient Greek and Egyptian society. This becomes clear when she cites papyric evidence that depict government documents from Ptolemaic Egypt. “As invaluable as the papyri are, however, it is at the same time already in the papyrological record that we can discern a bias toward the colonizing Greeks…” she explains. “…the majority of papyrological texts that survive are written in Greek and indeed many pointedly fall within the Greek administrative apparatus” (McCoskey 4). Through Heng’s lens, historians and classicists may be able to make sense of race within the ancient world. While the modern idea of race may not have existed, identity through race making and othering was clearly prevalent at the time. Race may not have been exclusive to a modern understanding of blackness and whiteness, but racial identity and hierarchy was still clearly prevalent during the time. Scholars such as Roller may want to assert that race and blackness should play no part in classics, however, things such as essentializing differences, exclusion, othering and hierarchy were all aspects of race-making that were prevalent in the ancient Mediterranean, making conversations about race and white supremacy within the ancient world necessary.
Postcolonial thought has in many ways allowed for a new view of the relationship between civilizations in the ancient Mediterranean, and Afrocentrist movements allowed for a more critical analysis of Ancient Egypt outside its relationship to Greece. This is difficult, as much of the reason that identity in the Mediterranean is so controversial is because there isn’t much straightforward evidence about race and racial identity. This, however, does not mean it didn’t exist. Postcolonial scholars such as American author Toni Morrison can help us make sense of Egypt and the crucial role it played in the formation of identity in the Mediterranean . Although Morrison is specifically speaking about the American history in her essay Playing in the Dark, her ideas about race and identity are applicable to race and race-making within the ancient world. Morrison asserts that although history has tried to erase the presence of blackness within American history, its presence is crucial to the identity and formation of American culture. She states, “Through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, through the way writers peopled their work with the signs and bodies of this presence — one can see that a real or fabricated Africanist presence was crucial to their sense of Americanness” (Morrison 6). Although Morrison is specifically speaking about American history, the idea that erased identities throughout history still play a crucial role in the development of more documented and prominent identities. Egyptian identity in the Mediterranean was defined, especially in examples of Greek literature, in its differences from Greeks as a way to differentiate the two identities. This form of race-making has the effect of not only shaping Egyptian identity, but also shaping Greek identity as well, through its relationship with Egypt. Just as modern white identity is often defined in its opposition to black identity, an important aspect of Greek identity was the way that it distinguished itself from other cultures and identities in the Mediterranean.
Bibliography
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Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
McCoskey, Denise Eileen. “Race before ‘Whiteness’: Studying Identity in Ptolemaic Egypt.” Critical Sociology, vol. 28, no. 1, 2002, pp. 13–39., https://doi.org/10.1163/156916302320277583.
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Roller, Duane W. “Cleopatra’s True Racial Background (and Does It Really Matter?).” OUPblog, 20 Jan. 2016, https://blog.oup.com/2010/12/cleopatra-2/.
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