When Greek was an African Language

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