[Sca-cooks] lands

[Volker Bach]

Philip & Susan Troy schrieb:
>
> Lord Boroghul Khara wrote:
>
> > Reminds me of my year in Holland (1977-1978)
> > While the family was on a road trip from our Village of Nieukoop touring
> > Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Germany, I found myself face to face with
> > a couple of things that struck me as just plain wierd as a kid, but had me
> > laughing when I saw them touched upon by Whoopie Goldberg in later years.
> > The first:   "These people haven't seen a black person since Hannibal came
> > through"
>
> Not to change the subject or anything, but have I missed some of the
> research, and is there actually evidence suggesting Hannibal was black?
> (I mean, apart from the fact that he was African?) I understood the
> Carthaginians to be a largely Hellenized empire of caucasian ancestry.
> But I see your point, especially in a part of Europe (and there are
> several of them) where somebody with pale skin and brown hair and eyes
> is apt to be nicknamed "Blackie".

None whatsoever, Neither does any exist to suggest
Moses, Cleopatra, Septimius Severus or Theodosius
I were, and yet that claim has been made. I have
found repeatedly that people (including those who
should know better) used the terms 'African' and
'black' interchangeably, leading to the widespread
assumption that everyone from Africa was black
(including Egyptians, Libyans, Berbers and
Kabyles). We do not know whether Hannibal himself
was of colonist ancestry (in fact we know this of
none of the Carthaginian families we have evidence
of), but if he was not (it is not unlikely, given
the tenacity with which comparable family groups
in Greek cities held together the 'colonist'
heritage - we know that Dionysius of Syracuse
could trace back his heritage to Corinthian
emigrants) he was far more likely a Punicised
local than a sub-Saharan black African. (The
argument from his portrait bust is flawed on two
counts: 1) that's hardly 'pronouncedly negroid' as
a 50s textbook has it and 2) we don't even know
whether the bust is really meant to depict him,
let alone if it was made from life.) That said, he
probably was considerably darker than his
Alpine-Celtic mercenaries. As to the Carthaginians
in general, they clearly distinguished 'white' and
'black' in their later, heavily hellenized art,
but we do not know how far this reflected a real
social bias rather than copying Greek originals.
Most contemporary Mediterranean cultures, as far
as we can tell, felt 'not black' in that they
thought of blacks as 'outsiders', so it is at
least likely they would have noted it if the
Carthaginians had been predominatly black.

As an aside, the 'Moors' of much modern literature
on the period are 'Mauri', Maghrebin tribal groups
most likely not black. I don't know when the
equation Moor=black was first made, but the
Ancients did not make it.

BTW it's interesting that few afrocentrics are
prepared to claim Septimius Severus while most
white supremacists are happy to grant him, quite
the opposite being true of Moses :-)

rambling now

Giano