The First Ethiopians explores the images of Africa and Africans that
evolved in ancient Egypt, in classical Greece and imperial Rome, in the
early Mediterranean world, and in the early domains of Christianity.
Inspired by curiosity regarding the origins of racism in southern
Africa, Malvern van Wyk Smith consulted a wide range of sources: from
rock art to classical travel writing; from the pre-Dynastic African
beginnings of Egyptian and Nubian civilisations to Greek and Roman
perceptions of Africa; from Khoisan cultural expressions to early
Christian conceptions of Africa and its people as ?demonic?; from
Aristotelian climatology to medieval cartography; and from the
geo-linguistic history of Africa to the most recent revelations
regarding the genome profile of the continent's peoples. His research
led to a startling proposition: Western racism has its roots in Africa
itself, notably in late New Kingdom Egypt, as its ruling elites sought
to distance Egyptian civilisation from its African origins. Kushite
Nubians, founders of Napata and Meroë who, in the eighth century BCE,
furnished the black rulers of the twenty-fifth Dynasty in Egypt, adopted
and adapted such Dynastic discriminations in order to differentiate
their own ?superior? Meroitic civilisation from the world of ?other
Ethiopians?. In due course, archaic Greeks, who began to arrive in the
Nile Delta in the seventh century BCE, internalised these distinctions
in terms of Homer's identification of ?two Ethiopias?, an eastern and a
western, to create a racialised (and racist) discourse of ?worthy? and
?savage Ethiopians?. Such conceptions would inspire virtually all
subsequent Roman and early medieval thinking about Africa and Africans,
and become foundational in European thought. The book concludes with a
survey of the special place that Aksumite Ethiopia ? later Abyssinia ?
has held in both European and African conceptual worlds as the site of
?worthy Ethiopia?, as well as in the wider context of discourses of
ethnicity and race.
