I doubt very much that you went to school 2, 000 years ago.
I assume that you are trying to say that High School Latin was used roughly around the time of the Roman Empire, which is almost as incorrect. School Latin is modern version of Classical Latin. Nobody actually spoke Classical Latin on a daily basis during the Roman empire and High School Latin isn’t even Classical Latin. A Latin speaker from the time of the Roman Empire wouldn’t even understand High School Latin without considerable effort.
If your teacher told you this, they were a fool. Roman slaves were taken from all walks of life and included foreign Nobles and Roman criminals. Salves were not uncommonly literate and skilled craftsmen and merchants. Nobody believed they were animals.
If there were more than a handful of Black people or their children who remained in England after the falls of the Roman Empire, then it would be astonishing if it weren’t much higher than 10%. It’s that decreasing ancestor pool again. By the time you get back 2, 000 years any individual alive in England has a reasonable chance of being the ancestor of *all *Englishmen alive today.
The only way I can see it being as low as 10% is if there were only one or two Black people in England at that time, and their ancestors went through repeated extinction events. If they just reproduced at average rates you would expect much higher than 10% Black African ancestry.
Yeah, I realized after posting that that there was a distinct possibility. I think the problem, though, is how you measure it. Going back that far, we have to rely on y-chromosome or mtDNA data. So, we might derive a conclusion from a model about how many Brits have African ancestry, but would we get 10% by y-chromosome or mtDNA analysis?
No. It was a self-deprecating reference to my age.
No, actually she was a fairly educated woman. Perhaps she was referring to the born-and-raised variety, and not the people conquered by the Romans or those convicted of a crime.
The class structure of Rome could easily lend itself to the belief that people born of slaves and destined to be only slaves were a lesser life form.
I would think this ideology would definitely contribute to the foundation of slavery here in the US.
But I’ll go ahead and qualify this as “my opinion” to relieve anyone of the necessity of stomping all over me.
At my advanced age (ha ha), that’s rather painful.
~VOW
Just the opposite. If you don’t believe that the Phoenicians were capable of it, then the implication is that it the Vikings weren’t either.
The Phoenicians would also have sailed clockwise down the west coast of Africa instead of counterclockwise down the eastern coast. This is generally considered to be a much easier voyage, so even if one did occur it wouldn’t say anything about the Vikings.
Clairobscur, that was a great post. I learned a lot, and it makes sense. (Have you read Eric Wolf’s “Europe: The People without History”?).
One little nitpick, though – I wouldn’t go as far as to say that “all white Europeans” belonged to the 19th C techno-advanced world you described. Albanian goatherds? Sami? Etc. But, your point is well taken.
As for crowmanyclouds… I just can’t understand this obsession with privileging some arbitrary geographic area. If I decide to call all the land south of the Ohio River and north of the Amazon “Doohickeystan”, and declare there’s some significance to the preponderance of purple-eyed people with green hair in PART of that area, WHO CARES?
Remember that Shakespeare has at least 2 instances of blacks - a suitor in “Merchant of Venice” and “Othello”, both fairly black. In neither case is there a suggestion that they are treated any different than any other foreigner based solely on skin colour, although all cultures at that time were somewhat pro themselves and anti anyone foreign.
Alexander Dumas was part black.
The concept of blacks as subhuman is a defensive construct of southern USA society. As far as I’ve seen in all my reading, most other cultures and civilizations before modern times treated blacks as just one more type of foreigner, no more or less human than all other foreigners.
If anything, blacks in Roman times would likely be caravan workers, merchants and sailors and such. I would wonder how cost effective it would be to import slaves across the Sahara, when there are better supplies closer to home.
Finally, we do not know the full extent of Roman and other trade along the east coast of Africa. Hapshepsut in her temple has a series of reliefs about her trade mission to Ethiopia or Somalia 3000 years ago. The only evidence we have of trade shipping from Roman Egypt to India is an offhand comment in some writing of the time that “it takes X days to sail to India.” So trade up and down the African coast may have been relatively common, but no so common that we have reams of evidence of any large black migration into Rome.
Sorry, but Ancient Roman history is one of my hobbies and your teacher was, putting it mildly, talking total and utter rubbish, and quite frankly should not have been teaching if she was so uninformed, as to not only believe this utter tripe, but pass it on to her students.
Many Romans of the lower classes freed then married their ex slaves, and we have the loving epitaphs on their funeral monuments to attest to this.
Quick add on, I was a schoolboy who had Latin inflicted on him, totally loathed it and was pretty crap at it .
I came , I saw, I wanted to bugger off out of it !
I suggest you read up on the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, which is an old (~1st Century AD) Greek periplus describing navigation and trade from Roman-Egypt down Eastern Africa (Azania) stretching to the Indian subcontinent. You can even read this 1912 translation; it’s got what you need.
Woulkdn’t the Vikings have sailed the same way (not that I think they did, mind you - even if they didn’t leave any evidence in Africa, I’d at least expect some trace to turn up back in Scandiwegia - traces or tell of all their other far-flung voyages, up to Vinland, did)
Sorry, I ignored the clockwise/counterclockwise stuff, which contradicts the “down the West coast” stuff - this is the route the Phoenecians took, why would the Vikings not be able to take the same one (not that Vikings couldn’t have come from the east coast, they were no strangers to the Med and had no problem with portaging their ships)
Note I’m not saying they did it, I really think we’d know if they had - but it wasn’t because of technical hurdles or lack of ability on their part.
I separate out the earlier eastern voyages, starting with travel through the Red Sea, from the later trips out past Gibraltar when speaking of Phoenicians. It didn’t occur to me that’s what you were referring to. So for me, that’s a map of a supposed route taken by the Carthaginians. I was assuming that the Phoenicians would have sailed using the route described in the link by orsenio or the reconstruction made in 2010. Besides, we were talking about sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, and none of the Carthaginian expeditions are supposed to have done so, so only the eastern - clockwise - routes qualify.
The Vikings may have made it down to the Mediterranean, but my position remains that technical hurdles made it impossible for them to circumnavigate Africa, even aside from the total lack of evidence.
