When Greek was an African Language

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Frank M. Snowden, Jr. Annual Lectures
Stanley Burstein, Frank M. Snowden, Jr. Lectures, Howard University, When Greek was an African Language, http://chs.harvard.edu/publications.sec/online-print-books.ssp/frank-m.-snowden-jr.. Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC. August, 2006

When Greek was an African Language
Stanley Burstein

Introduction
I would like to thank the department of Classics and Eta Sigma Phi for the invitation to deliver the third annual Snowden Lecture and making possible my visit to Howard University and especially for the opportunity to honor Frank. It seems that I have known Frank for my whole career. I first met him through his books at the beginning of my career in the early 1970s and in person something over a decade later. Since then we have done the usual things scholars do: corresponded, met at conferences, and been on programs together. Throughout those many years I have enjoyed and profited immensely from his work.
When Frank published Blacks in Antiquity in 1970 there was no name for the field of scholarship to which it belonged. It was a pioneering work in a field that didn't yet exist, the ancient history of the African Diaspora. Blacks in Antiquity is a masterful work. After more than three decades it remains unchallenged and Frank in Dante's words is still "the master of those who know." In the time that I have today I could only hope to add a few footnotes to his account of the place of Africans in Mediterranean society. Instead, I will try to tell a different but related story, that of the role of Greek and Greek culture in ancient and medieval Nubia. [1] ? I hope Frank finds it interesting. A point on terminology first, however. I will use Nubia and Nubians in this paper to refer to the Nile valley south of Egypt and its inhabitants, and Kush, Makuria, Alwah, etc. for the various states in the region. Now for my story.
It is a huge story, literally. Spatially it covers southern Egypt and the northern and central Sudan from the first cataract at modern Aswan to south of Khartoum. Chronologically it spans almost a millennium and a half from the Hellenistic period to the end of the middle ages. It is also a story that could not even begin to be told until recently. In part, this was because of the lack of sources that is the bane of all ancient historians. Until recently, native Nubian sources were almost entirely lacking, and only fragments remain of the once extensive Classical and Arabic accounts of the region and its peoples. Lack of sources was not, however, the only problem. The historiography of Nubia is the oldest body of western historical scholarship dealing with the African interior. [2] ? Like any historiography, however, it reflects the biases of the various periods in which historians of Nubia wrote.
Put simply, the surviving ancient and medieval accounts of Nubia are profoundly Egyptocentric. [3] ? Nubia and its peoples and cultures were mentioned only when they were relevant to Egypt; and when they were mentioned, they were discussed from the perspective of Egypt. Not surprisingly, when modern histories of Nubia first began to be written in the 19 &supth; th century, they were largely based on the classical and Arabic sources, supplemented by Egyptian texts; and they, therefore, reflected the biases of their sources. [4] ? The problem was compounded, moreover, by the fact that their authors wrote during the heyday of European imperialism in Africa and, not surprisingly, they shared the then current popular view of Africans as inferior peoples, capable, at best, only of receiving and imitating influences from superior foreign cultures.
As a result of these factors, when the presence of the Greek language and Greek influence in Nubia was recognized, no effort was made to understand how they functioned within ancient and medieval Nubian culture. Greek objects found in Nubia were treated instead as indices of Hellenization, which was conceived as a one-sided process of acculturation involving the deliberate decision by non-Greek individuals—usually elites—to transform themselves and their society by abandoning their own culture in favor of Greek culture. [5] ? The equation was simple. The greater the number of Greek objects and other examples of Greek influence, the greater the degree of Hellenization. One example will have to stand for many. After reviewing the evidence for Greek imports into Nubia, the great Hellenistic and Roman historian M. I. Rostovtzeff concluded that Hellenistic Meroe "with its Hellenistic palaces, its Hellenistic bath, its Ethiopian-Hellenistic statues and decorative frescoes, became a little Nubian Alexandria." [6] ?
This situation has changed dramatically during the last half century. A new historiography of Nubia has emerged that treats Nubian culture as a distinct entity created by the inhabitants of the upper Nile valley and not as a remote outpost of Egyptian civilization doomed to ultimate decline and extinction because of