Najee Olya (University of Virginia)
Just before the middle of the twentieth century, the late Harvard-trained Black classicist Frank M. Snowden, Jr. began what would become five decades of research on Black people in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Over seventy years after the publication of his first article on the subject, “The Negro in Classical Italy” (1947), Snowden continues to cast a long shadow. Although a philologist by training, Snowden asserted expertise over not only textual but also archaeological evidence to argue that ancient Greece and Rome were characterized by a lack of “color prejudice,” that is, racism of the kind directed toward Black people in the modern United States. For Snowden, the highly realistic quality of portrayals of Black people was proof that ancient artists were inspired by a benign interest in physical difference. The artifacts, therefore, constitute “a valuable anthropological gallery” (Snowden 1970).
Through close examination of Snowden’s engagement with artifacts in two books and a major essay (Snowden 1970; Snowden 1976; Snowden 1983) the present paper explores the “anthropological gallery” as an invention of Snowden’s own making and the problems inherent to this formulation. Additionally, it demonstrates that Snowden’s narrow focus on the illusory realism of ancient representations comes at the expense of archaeological questions—of context, production, and function. Snowden’s artifacts become silent stand-ins for Black people, mere curiosities indicative of ancient Greek and Roman interest in foreign others that obscure the real transmission of artistic influence from Egypt. In spite of these and other issues, Snowden’s research has only occasionally been subject to critique—usually for his thesis on the absence of ancient “color prejudice” (Thompson 1989; Keita 2000; McCoskey 2012). Rejoinders from archaeologists in particular (Hoffmann and Metzler 1977; Lissarrague 2002; Tanner 2010) reiterate the same criticisms without suggesting alternative archaeological methods. While acknowledging the importance of Snowden’s scholarship, the present paper argues that classical archaeologists must embrace a holistic approach to effectively understand ancient portrayals of Black people.
To that end, I offer a preliminary attempt at a comprehensive archaeological discussion by re-examining a selection of artifacts investigated by Snowden. Two case studies are presented, consisting of objects influenced by Egyptian artistic traditions: Athenian figure vases, which are vessels in the form of human faces with a variety of functions (Biers 1983; Lissarrague 1995; Rotroff 2014), and Greek vases decorated with mythological episodes involving the hero Herakles set in Libya and Egypt that draw inspiration from Egyptian iconography (McNiven 1995; Miller 2000; McPhee 2006). By contrasting Snowden’s readings with an analysis that accounts for production, use, and context (when known), I show the wealth of information that can be gleaned from the artifacts. While Snowden’s “anthropological gallery” is a central component in the historiography of the study of Black people in antiquity, in order to achieve a more complete understanding of the artifacts in question, archaeologists must lead the way to the exit.