User:Ficaia/Pre-modern conceptions of blackness

Description of populations as "Black" in reference to their skin colour predates and is distinct from the race categories constructed from the 17th century onward. Coloured terminology is occasionally found in Greco-Roman ethnography and other ancient and medieval sources, but these societies did not have any notion of a Black or pan-African race. Scholarship on race distinguishes the modern concept from pre-modern descriptions, which focused on skin colour, complexion and other physical traits.

Mesopotamia
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Ancient Egypt
According to anthropologist Nina Jablonski: "In ancient Egypt as a whole, people were not designated by color terms [...] Egyptian inscriptions and literature only rarely, for instance, mention the dark skin color of the Kushites of Upper Nubia. We know the Egyptians were not oblivious to skin color, however, because artists paid attention to it in their works of art, to the extent that the pigments at the time permitted."The Ancient Egyptian (New Kingdom) funerary text known as the Book of Gates distinguishes "four groups" in a procession. These are the "red-brown" Egyptians, the "pale" Levantine and Canaanite peoples or "Asiatics", the "black" "Nubians" and the "fair-skinned Libyans". The Egyptians are depicted as considerably darker-skinned than the Levantines (persons from what is now Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan) and Libyans, but considerably lighter than the Nubians (modern Sudan).

Kingdom of Kush
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India
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Ancient Greece
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Ancient Rome
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Late antiquity
In the 8th century, the English monk, The Venerable Bede, generally associated the black skin of Ethiopians with "spiritual darkness" but at the same time rejected any idea that the colour differences between, as he termed it, "a black Ethiopian and a white Saxon" would affect their fates during the Last Judgement.

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China
In pre-modern China, some non-Chinese ethnic groups, such as Indonesians, and Malaysians, were referred to as "black".

Muslim world
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Slavery
Different labels were used to categorise slaves in Islamic society, with black slaves referred to as abd ("slave") and white slaves being referred to as mamlūk ("owned") and black eunuchs referred to as ghurābiyya ("ravens") and white eunuchs referred to as jarādiyya ("locusts"). The Christian Arab intellectual Ibn Butlan of Baghdad wrote the first slave vade mecum, or handbook, in the 11th century, which recorded and described different ethnic and racial groups, dividing black slaves from white slaves and suggesting different tasks for each group based on their attributes. Ibn Butlan suggested that black slaves should be used as labourers, servants, and eunuchs, whereas white slaves, such as Turks and Slavs, should be used as soldiers. Generally in the Arab world, black slaves were used for rough labour and other labouring tasks, whereas white slaves came to be used to fill administrative and domestic positions. According to Bernard Lewis, white slaves could also conceivably become "generals, provincial governors, sovereigns and founders of dynasties", while such positions were rarely bestowed upon black slaves. Likewise, emancipated white slaves were offered more opportunities for social advancement in Arab society than emancipated black slaves.

In medieval Southern Europe slaves came to be categorised based on colour with Christians using typical labels for Muslim slaves such as sarraceno blanco (white Saracen), sarracenno nigrium (black Saracen), and sarraceno lauram (Saracen of intermediate colour). In 13th century Genoa slaves classified as black made up just over half of the total recorded slave population. Records show Provencal France would also distinguish between noir (black) and blanc (white) slaves. In Islamic controlled Iberia (Al-Andalus) Muslims could own other Muslims as slaves, a practice usually banned within Islam, if the enslaved Muslims were either black or loro (of intermediate colour) but not if they were classified as white. Generally, in medieval Iberia and Italy, people were described as white, black, or of intermediate colour.

Christendom
Medieval Christians seldom used "race" as a human category; the word emerged in 15th century Romance-language texts on animal husbandry, and writers tended instead to use words like gens and natio when classifying human groups. Medieval ideas about skin colour were complex. Dark skin – depicted in art using brown, black, blue, grey and sometimes purple hues – often signified negative moral and spiritual qualities distinct from physical appearance. Thus, the image of Saladin facing Richard I in the 14th century Luttrell Psalter depicts the Saracen with dark blue skin and a monstrous expression, even though the Muslims of the Levant at the time of the Third Crusade were predominantly light-skinned Mamluks.

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nubians_in_ancient_Egypt

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-42637998

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/the-fallacy-of-the-fairness-concept/article7074825.ece

https://aeon.co/essays/when-homer-envisioned-achilles-did-he-see-a-black-man