Racialized Commodities

In the mid-sixth century BCE, the Greek mystic Aristeas of Proconessus composed a hexameter poem recounting a journey deep into Eurasia. According to Herodotus, Aristeas set off from his island home in the Sea of Marmara to visit the “one-eyed Arimaspians, and beyond them the griffins which guard the gold, and beyond the griffins the Hyperboreans, whose land comes down to the sea.” Very little is known about Aristeas’ poem, which was already considered obscure in Herodotus’ time. At one time, some critics thought that Aristeas must have been initiated into a shamanic cult. At the very least, we can say that Aristeas’ poem was suffuse with insights about nomadism on the steppe.

One haunting fragment appears to report the first time a steppe nomad laid eyes on a Greek ship:

Now this is a great wonder in our hearts. Men dwell in the water, away from land, in the sea; they are wretched, for they have harsh toils; eyes on the stars, they have a heart in the sea. Often stretching their hands up to the gods, they pray for their turbulent hearts.

Around 700 BCE, Greek speakers fanned out across the Mediterranean in search of work, new land, and trade. In the densely settled eastern Mediterranean, Greek speakers slotted themselves into preexisting political and economic structures, as they would in Late Period Egypt. Greeks practically introduced the art of navigation into the Black Sea, instigating a long period of social upheaval as indigenous populations vied for the opportunity of trade.

Through a wide range of encounters—some exploitative, and others not—Greek newcomers transmitted a disorganized catalog of observations and reflections on foreign peoples into what I call a “racial imaginary.” Up until around 500 BCE, this imaginary was basically unstructured. But in the wake of Persia’s fifth century interventions in the Aegean, the “racial imaginary” would coalesce into the menacing barbarian “Other”—a cultural construct that would be mobilized to endorse conquest, enslavement, and unequal treatment all over Greece. It is in this sense that the otherwise-neutral physiognomic descriptions found in a sixth century author like Xenophanes, who speaks of “dark-skinned Ethiopians and gray-eyed Thracians” would later be repurposed into the buffoonish stereotype of enslaved Thracians that people Attic comedy.

“Race” is a controversial word in the study of premodernity. For most of the last eighty years, premodernists avoided it. The decades prior to World War II represented the highwater mark of racialism, a historiographic school that interpreted the competition between races as the main act of world history. (Aside from a general sense that northern Europeans were innately superior, there was substantial disagreement as to how these races should be defined). During the war, a generation of anti-racist historians including Eric Williams (1911-81) and Frank M. Snowden, Jr. (1911-2007) debunked the racialist thesis by turning to the social sciences, where revulsion towards Nazi atrocities had discredited previously-ascendent racial theories. According to these scholars, racism (which they tended to assimilate into anti-Blackness) is a discrete, historical development linked to efforts to legitimate the transatlantic slave trade using the language of human biology. To argue that it existed prior to the eighteenth century would be anachronistic.

This perspective on race and racism has dominated the premodern humanities ever since. Open any book and learn that ancient slavery was colorblind; even scholars who recognized the ubiquity of ancestry-based discrimination in Greece or Rome shied away from the language of race and racism, for instance offering circumlocutions like “proto-racism” when pressed. In the 2000-10s, pioneering scholars including Denise McCoskey, Susan Lape, and Geraldine Heng gravitated toward a school of American legal thought known as Critical Race Theory (CRT) in an effort to identify race as a social phenomenon across premodernity. The midcentury anti-racists had approached race from the perspective of science: the concept of race could not exist in societies that lacked a science of biology. But CRT defines race as a practice: to be a racist is to (in Heng’s words) enact “a hierarchy of peoples for differential treatment,” regardless whether one has a coherent ideology to justify such treatment or not. Simply put, the practice of racecraft long preceded the emergence of racial pseudo-science in late eighteenth century Europe. In any period of history, people who mistreated other classes of people based on perceived notions of ancestry, physiognomy, or both—even deeply confused ones—can be called racists.

When Aristeas arrived in what is now Ukraine or Russia in the early sixth century BCE, he did not bring the baggage of racism with him. People in Archaic Greece had a fluid vision of humanity, believing in hybridized beasts, gods in human form, and heroes among one’s ancestors. Some Greeks even believed they descended from Egyptian pharaohs. As Aristeas and his comrades unleashed forces of social transformation on the steppe, they brought with them a jumble of new visions of the human body. In the very first generation of Greek colonization, settlers were depositing Egyptian-style faience seals molded into the shape of human heads into graves. Greeks were learning to catalog, inspect, and curate images of the human body long before human diversity became an index of oppression. (FIGURE)

And an index of oppression it would become. When Classical Athenians imagined the snowy lands to the north of the Black Sea, they saw a forbidding territory inhabited by wild ‘Scythians’ and ‘Thracians,’ names insisted upon despite the region’s multiplicity of cultures. To Athenians, the people of the north were archetypical slaves: light-skinned, prone to flush, dim-witted, and sexually available: evidence for their lives can be found everywhere from the literary sphere to auction records to the funerary markers inscribed not with names, but an expression like “Useful Scythian.” They were subject to ethnographic and medical speculation; they were subject to Athenian laws, but rarely protected by them. Rendered commodities by the slave trade, they were racialized in their everyday experience of Athenian life.

^{Featured image by Gary Todd via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.}