African Americans and the Classics: Antiquity, Abolition and Activism by Margaret Malamud

Author:Margaret Malamud [Malamud, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, African American & Black, Social Science, Black Studies (Global), Social History, Literary Criticism, Ancient & Classical
ISBN: 9781784534950
Google: 2ZbQjwEACAAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2016-10-16T20:41:27+00:00

Nickens then pointed to the Egyptian pyramids as testimony to the greatness of these ancestors. From the late eighteenth century, free African Americans in America faced two pressing tasks: to refute charges that they were racially inferior, and to insert themselves into the historical record. This chapter investigates how abolitionists used Classics to address these needs. Arguments from biblical history and Scripture were, of course, important in creating a genealogy that featured African Americans as significant contributors to Western civilization. My focus, however, is the deep interest that African Americans had in the authority of the classical world, and the ways in which they deployed their knowledge of it in the twinned tasks of creating a history of their own and combating arguments of racial inferiority.

In Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987), Martin Bernal famously argued that the origins of Greek culture were found in Africa and that Greece was civilized by Egypt.3 This thesis would not have aroused controversy amongst educated whites and African Americans in the early American Republic. Such ideas were proclaimed in the standard histories of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Charles Rollin’s widely used and respected Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Grecians and Macedonians:

Egypt was considered, by all the ancients, as the most renowned school for wisdom and from whence most arts and sciences were derived. The kingdom bestowed its noblest labours and finest arts on the improvement of mankind; and Greece was so sensible of this that its most illustrious men, such as Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, even its great legislators, Lycurgus and Solon, with many more whom it is needless to mention, travelled to Egypt, to complete their studies, and draw from that fountain whatever was rare and valuable in every kind of learning. God himself has given this kingdom as glorious testimony; when praising Moses, he says of him, that he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.4

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.