Images and Interpretation of Africans in Roman Art and Social Practice

Abstract

The representation of foreign cultures with manifest ethnic or “racial” differences, such as unfamiliar physical traits or exotic dress, has been a long-standing and often visceral site for human artistic expression. The visual and material culture of the Roman Empire provides an abundant record of such encounters which render visible complex formulations of ethnicity, social hierarchies, and power. The present chapter focuses on how artists represented the peoples whom Romans referred to as Aethiopians or Nubians (i.e., sub-Saharan or “Black” Africans) in different visual media, and it explores issues related to the social functions, patronage, and viewership of these works. In particular, the chapter discusses the formalized conventions, object types, and display contexts of their representations; examines the two critical axioms of their study (the philological and social historical); and maps out recent approaches to and future directions in their interpretation.

Blacks in the Middle Ages – What About Race and Racism in the Past? Literary and Art-Historical Reflections

“…But it might be only a form of name dropping with no further significance because the entire epic takes place in Nordic countries. We could also extend our research into the history of antiquity when racial issues certainly already existed, but then the pre-Christian, mostly Roman context was still very different (Bell 2021;Bell 2022).…”

Ii. Finds Reported Under the Portable Antiquities Scheme

“…an inhabitant of sub-Saharan Africa, especially regions towards the Red Sea, as well as of regions beyond it to the Indian Ocean. 75 Such images are thus 'figures of appropriation', their range of reference conditioned by the setting of the image or its context of use. In this case, therefore, they might signify the distant origins of the vessel's contents, or perhaps served as proxy images for the enslaved individuals whose labour and looks were likely exploited in the grooming routines in which those contents were used.…”