Racialized Commodities presents an erudite analysis of long-distance trade and inter-regional attitudes from a range of new perspectives. In contrast with the goals of John Boardman’s The Greeks Overseas, in important ways an antecedent, the book advances an argument on the development of racism in Greece. The question as to whether racism in the sense now understood existed in Archaic and Classical Greece has been discussed for some decades, especially since Frank Snowden’s publications, one tellingly titled Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (1983). Christopher Stedman Parmenter’s study creatively weaves disparate data (material, epigraphic, and textual) into a holistic account that challenges the principle of “no racial prejudice” in classical antiquity. The success of this project derives from a thorough collection of the pertinent material evidence on which the study rests, presented in a number of detailed appendices. The raw data for the work is handled judiciously and clearly, presenting a deep dive into the practicalities of commercial exchange. An extensive bibliography bears witness to the thoroughness of the research.
The work is organized in two major parts, each focused on a region of the wider ancient Mediterranean world: Egypt and the Black Sea. For each, a distinctive commodity specifically associated with the region is discussed. From Egypt the mineral natron was exported for its role in the production of faience. Slaves were the special “commodity” exported from the Black Sea. In exchange, Greek merchants could offer olive oil and wine. Athen’s wealth in silver (and lead) came to play an important role in long-distance trade.
In a well-constructed thematic introduction, Parmenter pulls together literary sources to argue that Greeks associated somatic types with geographical regions and even social class. Most exemplary is the well-known comment by the pre-Socratic Xenophanes that “Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black; Thracians that theirs are gray-eyed and fair-haired”.[1] Parmenter utilizes the Fields’ definition of race as the application of “a social, civic, or legal double standard based on ancestry.”[2] He adopts the concept of “commodity biography” as a useful approach through which to consider Greek relations with non-Greeks and Greek thinking about what were to Greeks the edges of the world.
Part I (“The World of the Elephantine Document”) comprises three chapters. A papyrus customs document of ca. 475 BCE in “A Short History of Natron” launches discussion of the harvest and export of the Egyptian mineral evaporate. A range of Near Eastern as well as Classical sources informs natron’s commodity biography from its extraction at the edge of the desert through its manufacture into items of faience. To the Egyptians, natron was essential for mummification, but other functions are attested; for Greeks, the most important function was its role in faience production. Appendix 1 lists the evidence for the trade in natron from a number of Egyptian customs documents. The detail that one Ionian ship, that of “Prokles,” carried 15 tons of natron clearly conveys the scale of the export and its role in the economy of Saite Egypt. The foundation of Naucratis in the western Nile delta facilitated collection of Egyptian export duties. Over time there developed a significant population of Greek Egyptians, who assisted in negotiations between producers and merchants. Others served in Egyptian cults and so were fully familiar with the process and expense of embalming as well as the other ritual uses of natron.
Chapter 2 (“Egypt in your Hand”) stresses the role of a “clique of privileged merchants who traded with Egypt” (p. 56) in exporting Egyptian goods and knowledge of the country. An overview of the mechanics of faience production from the third millennium BCE and a brief summary of its appearance in Bronze Age Greece precedes discussion of its role, especially in jewelry, in the transition to the Greek Iron Age. In the seventh and sixth centuries Egyptianizing items (mostly of faience) are recovered in Greece from sanctuaries rather than from elite burials. This is the period when production of faience also began in East Greece. Egypt exported both the technical knowledge of manufacture and the raw material. Faience production in Rhodes actually preceded the factory famously excavated by Petrie at Naucratis.
Collection of all available data in the appendices allows Parmenter to state categorically that “Faience constitutes 95 per cent of the Egyptianizing offerings at the twelve [Greek] Archaic sanctuaries with the largest published findings” (p. 61). He suggests that offering Egyptianizing items to local sanctuaries eased the way of merchants trying to sell their commodities at their target ports. Many of the faience items in Greek sanctuaries have hieroglyphic inscriptions naming Egyptian pharaohs, even some long dead, but the inscriptions were not intelligible to their Greek donors. According to traditions reported by Hecataeus and Herodotus, Greeks ascribed Egyptian and Phoenician ancestors to a number of Greek heroes. Parmenter suggests that the very large volume of inscribed faience scarabs dedicated at Perachora bears witness to a Corinthian tyrant’s (Periander) claim to Egyptian ancestry.
In an effort to contextualize the modern scholarship, Chapter 3 (“From Ancestor to ‘Other’”) begins with a history of racial tensions in the USA. In the Late Bronze Age and early first millennium Greece, small items such as sets of weights and stone head amulets characteristic of Cyprus clearly distinguish different racial / cultural types in the early period, but it is not until the naked bodies of Egyptianizing Rhodian faience from the late seventh century that figurines with somatic differences appear in volume at Greek sanctuaries. Some molds for faience head scarabs produced at Naucratis early in the sixth century conveyed black physiognomy. This is presumably the background to Parmenter’s curious claim at the end of the first chapter: “It is no coincidence that the earliest images of black bodies in the repertoire of Greek art should be produced using this African commodity [natron]” (p. 52). Later in the sixth century, Athenian vase painters characterized the hero Memnon as Ethiopian by giving him black companions, and potters created janiform head kantharoi, one of whose sides is a black head. Yet, despite Parmenter, it ought to be observed that Greek interest in and observation of black physiognomy do not necessarily equate to racism.
Part II shifts focus from Egypt to the Black Sea, and from natron to slaves as a commodity. Here the fortunate survival of lead tablets and other media with documents such as sales receipts ground the discussion (summarized in Appendix 6). A range of sources support the extent of the slave trade from the Black Sea and the wide dispersal of slave markets; in Chapter 4 (“Journeys into Slavery”) Parmenter aims to get some insight into the experiences of individual slaves. The known challenges of sailing in the Black Sea (winds, currents, inclement weather) dictated the direction of ship travel and the preferred places of Greek colonization. Such geographical knowledge together with the preserved documents makes it possible to track slave journeys. Slaving ships could be taken captive by hostile folk, and the slavers themselves might also become the enslaved. Traditions that the people of the shores of the Black Sea hated ships support the fact of sea-transport of captured slaves from far away in the inland. Parmenter reasonably observes that the Greek slave-transport activity in the Black Sea contributed to the development of Greek distinction between Greeks and “barbarians”.
A discussion of how slave trade figured in the financial calculations by merchant shippers in Chapter 5 (“Slavery and the Balance Trade”) points to the ample evidence for imports from Greece (olive oil, wine, ceramic) into the wider region of Scythia and Thrace. Planned Black Sea exports back to Athens were grain, hides and salted fish. Documents and court cases illustrate how enslaved local populations often filled out the cargo to pay for the commercial loans in Athens that sponsored voyages: Thracian slaves were “supplementary” rather than “primary” cargo.
In Chapter 6 (“Inventing Whiteness”) Parmenter presents a somewhat stronger argument for the development of racism in Athens with regard to the population of enslaved Thracians and Scythians there. Certainly, the preponderance of people of Thracian or Scythian origin in Athens went there as slaves. The published lists of the sale of the goods of the Hermokopidai offer interesting statistics. The slaves of the metic Kephisodoros included five Thracians, three Syrians, three Carians (two of them children), two Illyrians, a Lydian, a Scythian and a Colchian (pp. 174–175). Parmenter observes that the practice of holding public slave auctions and the admission of the slave testimony in court only under torture satisfy the condition of a “legal double standard” (the Fields’ definition of race). More importantly, the distinctive non-Greek appearance of Thracians and Scythians, with paler skin and light-colored or red hair, like the Leading Slave mask of New Comedy, distinguished them, introducing a significant somatic distinction from the free Athenian population. As Parmenter put it, the significant number of Thracians and Scythians yielded a phenomenon of servile “whiteness”, that is seen as a “kind of stumbling towards race” (p. 174). This expresses what Benjamen Isaac termed “proto-racism” visible from fourth-century BCE Greece.[3]
The study presumes the existence of racism in antiquity instead of arguing on the basis of evidence. Parmenter opens his discussion with an anecdote about Sokrates’ appearance, as ugly, specifically with “a flat nose and bulging eyes” (p. 2) (οὐκ ἔστι καλός, προσέοικε δὲ σοὶ τήν τε σιμότητα καὶ τὸ ἔξω τῶν ὀμμάτων: Plato Theaetetus 143e9, and 209c).[4] The context suggests that these are servile (black?) traits, and one of the images cited by Parmenter is of a black girl on a lekythos attending her Greek mistress at a funerary stele (the other is of a comic slave mask). In fact, no such suggestion exists in the Theaetetus. The Greeks had no word for race and indeed never spoke of whites or blacks in general, but always of ethne, ‘nations’, not ‘races’, and no argument Parmenter offers really challenges Snowden’s conclusion that racism, as such, did not exist in antiquity. Recognition of “somatic distinction” is not equivalent to racism.
This creative piece of scholarship employs a wide range of evidence from shipwrecks to miraculously preserved merchants’ letters, to contribute to understanding of social and economic history.
Technically the work is very well produced, with few errors. Throughout maps provide valuable information about trade routes and trade goods. Unfortunately, the maps in the print edition are not as useful as might be owing to the faintness of their details and the thinness of the paper, in the text on the back of the pages with maps being visible in the maps. This impedes the clarity and utility of the maps’ otherwise valuable presentation of information.[5]
Notes
[1] Αἰθίοπές τε <θεοὺς σφετέρους> σιμοὺς μέλανάς τε Θρῆικες τε γλαυκοὺς καὶ πυρρούς <φασι πελέσθαι> (Diehls/Kranz I, fr. 16). Parmenter curiously cites this as fr. 13–14 Diehl (p. 11).
[2] Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York 2012, Verso), p. 17
[3] Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton 2004), p. 515
[4] Elsewhere, an analogy is made between Socrates and satyrs (a different species), but the point is not explicitly somatic (Plato, Symp. 215a–216e).
[5] This is especially the case in Figure 5.2, a useful map of the fourth-century Athenian trade with the Black Sea.