Was Aesop African? (multipart query to yet another race topic)

Factual Questions
1

Was Aesop black?

Afrocentristic schools of thought, webmasters, writers and African-American oral storytellers are among those who reject the idea that Aesop was a Greek and increasingly claim that Aesop of ‘Aesop’s Fables’ was a real, black African slave living in Greece around 560 BC.

Among the evidence:

– ‘Aesop’ is either a nickname, corruption or semantic drift of the word Aethiop, a description used for some species of monkeys, black butterflies and apparently, some black Africans, i.e, Ethiopians. Is this true?

– That the fable, “The Aethiop”, was a sarcastic jibe coined by Aesop as a rebuke to a former master. Is this likely?

– Use of African animals such as lions in the fables, as well as European animals. Is this relevent?

– I’m paraphrasing something a storyteller told me a few weeks ago, that “The use of the oral tradition of stories to illustrate a moral or ethical point is an Afrocentric characteristic of his fables.”

Now, personally, I always thought of Aesop was sort of a man-myth, like Uther Pendragon. How is it that he is thought of as a real, historical person?

Next Up: The (possible) secret Afrocentric origins of the Pyramids of Egypt, The Olmec Stone heads, Jesus Christ, cartoonist George Herriman and at least three former American presidents. But let’s answer this Aesop thing first.

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Well, I’ll try one of them and voice an opinion on another.

Point #3 - Lions were historically found in Southern Europe, including Greece ( I’ll see if I can look up some dates for you ). Further they were common around the Mediterranean Basin and regardless of their commonality in the Greece of “Aesop’s” day, would have been well-known. Plenty of medieval europeans used lions as heraldic devices, long after the lion had disappeared from Europe.

Point #4 - Use of oral tradition to illustrate a moral or ethical point, is, as far a I ever understood, a universal trait amog humans. However I’m not a folklorist or anthropologist, so I’d wait for confirmation from someone that’s better informed.

  • Tamerlane
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Okay, with the exception of humans, their domestic animals, and their pests ( house mice et al ), the lion attained the greatest geographical ditribution of any terrestrial mammal. About 10,000 years ago they occured in most of Africa, most of Eurasia ( except the southeast ), most of North America, and northern South America. The lion is thought to have disappeared from much of Europe because of the development of dense forests. But it held on in some locales. Their last stronghold in Europe was in the Balkans, where they disappeared about 2,000 years ago. They were in Palestine as late as the Crusades. In North Africa as late as the early twentieth century, I think. There is still a small population in the Gir Forest of India ( the last in Asia ).

So yes, their were probably lions in Greece at the time “Aesop” ( if it was indeed a single individual ) was recounting his stories.

  • Tamerlane
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Well, of course, first you have to establish that Aesop was a person and not the personification of a whole group of people who told tales (such as Mother Goose, or, among some battling scholars, Homer).

I find the Aesop–Aethiop connection intriguing, although neither Herodotus, who first names him, nor Plutarch who wrote a biographical sketch aout him, mentions Africa as the place of origin. The places that are mentioned are Thrace (in the area running North from Istanbul into Bulgaria) and Phrygia (on the Turkish/Asian peninsula) or Samos (an island off the coast of Phrygia). That does not preclude another place of origin, but it does not argue for an African source.

Aesop’s status as a slave is part of the legend, but has no relevance to Ancient Greece which was quite capable of finding slaves within its borders and which had no history of a slave trade with Africa.

The lion of Europe was quite common until hunted to extinction to supply the Roman Circuses during the Empire–600 - 800 years after Aesop might have lived.

There are fabulous tales (i.e., stories using animals to personify traits) in societies as disparate as the Norse, the Chinese, and the North American Indians. Animals also appear as characters in stories from nearly every culture.

None of the early art (vases, etc.) of which I am aware portray Aesop as black and there was no 19th Century American prejudice against recognizing “people of color” in Ancient Greece.

Does anyone know the earliest citation for The Æthiop as one of Aesop’s fables? On the one hand, I find it’s use as a personal rebuke to a slave owner to be a bit forced. (With its claim that the slave “caught a cold” from the incessant scrubbing, it almost seems more likely to have been written in Northern Europe or North America; I can think of no Mediterranean tales in which bathing is associated with catching a cold.) On the other hand, it does not even involve an animal, which would seem to fall outside the method of Aesop’s style. I know of no other tales by “Aesop” that use humans. (This is not a conclusive argument.)
I have no strong argument against Aesop as African (and it would not bother me to discover he was), but the arguments in favor of his African birth would seem to be of the “feel good” variety.

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Another shinning example of stories that illustrate a moral or ethical point are biblical parables. Now, If Jesus Christ was from sub-saharian Africa, this point is moot.

A really really good book to read is Black Athena Revisited. This is an anthology of scholorly answers to various claims made by Martin Bernal in the first two volumes of his Black Athena*. Bernal seems to be the most scholorly of the Afrocentrists (more scholorly than Asante, certainly) but there are some serious problems with his works, problems which are dealt with very well by the various scholors in this collection. One thing I liked about this collection was that overall the scholors involed treat this as an academic dispute, isolated from the political issues. They refuse to get bogged down and address specific claims made by Bernal. At points thoughm they do get seriously miffed, which is understandable. Bernal makes the claim that every classist in the last century was a deliberite racist or the ignorant dupe of deliberate racists.

The editor of the collection is Mary Lefkowitz, who also wrote Not Out of Africa : How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History, which is a very good, if somewhat simplistic, lay work on the issue.

My biggest recomendation would be to be very leary of anything claimed by Molefi Kete Asante. He is the most outspoken of the whole afrocentrism movement, and out of the whole movement the only person I would actually call intellectually dishonest. For example, I have an essay of his entitled “The Afrocentric Idea in Education,” originally published in 1991 in hte Journal of Negro Education where he claims that Africans discovered and settled in North and South America before Columbus. As a sourse, he uses Van Sertima’s They Came Beofre Columbus, which was 15 yers old when the article was published and which was published by Random house–hardly a scholorly publishing house. But Asante presents this information as a proven fact,and you really have to dig to find out that his source is not widely accepted, even by scholors who would give thier kidneys for definitive proof of pre-columbian contact by anyone. However, by sticking this “fact” in a scholorly article, Asante gives it a pedigree,a nd of course, after that everyone that uses the fact is quoteing Asante.

Anyway, reading Bernal’s books and the collection debating his works is a really good place to start with this stuff.

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The other thing to remember is that “African” is not the same as “Black”. North Africa is completely different ethnically than Sub-Saharan Africa, and has been for millenia. North Africa has been part of Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern culture since the Phoenicians.

Tamerlane is correct, lions used to live in Asia, Europe and North America but are now extinct outside of Africa except one population of lions in the Gir forest in India. I imagine they weren’t common in Greece around the time of Aesop (if such a person existed), but they were present. Many other Greek myths have lions in them, notably Herakles killing the Nemean lion and skinning it. And even if Aesop were a sub-saharan African, and there were no lions in Greece, then how would the Greeks know what he was talking about? He would have used a different animal in his stories.

And even if “Aesop” is derived from “Aethiop” (I’m no expert in ancient greek eytmology) that wouldn’t mean that Aesop was a sub-saharan african. He could have been a greek slave who just had a funny nickname, or he could have been a north african of mediterranean ethnicity.

And the use of animals in moral fables is not an “African” motif, it is a universal motif. Sure, African stories make use of it, but so do Native American stories, European stories, Celtic stories, Australian Aborigine stories, Rudyard Kipling stories, etc.

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Manda JO, I would be equally as leery of people who admit that they are no experts in Africa, such as Lefkowitz, and yet still purport to denigrate Black scholarship in studies about their own direct ancestors. Lefkowitz acts as if Black history started with slaves going to America, typical Eurocentric bias.

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Lefkowitz addresses claims Bernal makes about Greece, not claims he makes about Africa. Now, we are gonna have Manny in here yelling at us if we are not careful and restrain ourselves to giving sources.

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they had slaves back then? Geez, black people have had to put up with a lot of shit.

Anyway, it’s possible. But just because he was from Africa doesn’t mean he was black. Moses was from Africa. Ramses I, II, and III were from Africa, and they weren’t black. Of course, damn near everyone in the Sahara looked the same, since they all lived in the same desert, and hence had about the same tan.

Now, on Jesus being black:
Jesus was a Hebrew. I don’t know of that many black Hebrews or Jews. The bible says he had hair like wool. That doesn’t mean he’s black either. I’d have rough and tangled hair too if I was wandering around the middle east, back when hair-washing was few and far between. I’d imagine that everyone had dreads anyway. Anyway, Jesus was not black. It’s a nice notion, and would certainly help fuel pride, but I really think Jesus was a tan Hebrew, as everyone else was(tan, I mean).

And now for something some will probably deem in poor form:

What about Uncle Remus? Those were a nice collection of fables, and I much prefer those to Aesop’s fables. So let’s just leave Aesop like he is and extol the virtues of the Uncle Remus stories, a man(or fictional man) who WAS black, and had better stories. A mouse saving a lion? Bah, it pales in comparison to a fox and a bear trapping a rabbit through a mannequin made out of tar.

UNCLE REMUS RULES!

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Actually, AFAIK the only place in the Bible which refers to Jesus’ hair is this passage from Revelation:

This is not a description of the “historical Jesus”, this is an apocalyptic description of the glorified and apotheosized Christ. Furthermore, the reference to hair “like wool” isn’t a reference to the texture, but to the color of the hair. In fact, the passage actually says not only his hair but his whole head is “white as snow”, which could be taken to mean he’s a platinum blond white guy. But of course it doesn’t mean that, either. The passage is a direct echo of similar language in the Book of Daniel:

The image is, I suppose, of something like the conventional view of God as an old man–“the Ancient of Days”–with white hair and beard, seated on his throne. Note also the pecular reference to Christ’s feet in the Revelation passage, “his feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace”–a deliberate contrast to the famous image from Daniel 2:31-43, the statue with the now proverbial “feet of clay”. By contrast, the author of Revelation is stressing that the Christian God has no “feet of clay”, no hidden weakness or flaw.

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There are wonderful stories that have been recorded of black folklore that uses stories about animals to make their points. For some reason, you don’t hear about them and yet they used to be so familiar that Disney made a movie about them. For some reason, maybe because of the dialect they have been like Little Black Sambo thought to be racist. They are not! They’re called The Tales of Uncle Remus. Possibly the best known is about the rabbit that begged not to be thrown in the brier patch.

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The Uncle Remus stories were (irreparably?) damaged by Disney’s Song of the South in which Uncle Remus is told that he “must” leave the plantation because that is the new law, but then he eventually returns to the plantation that he “loved” to bring warmth and healing to the little white boy who lives there. In the course of the story, the blacks on the plantation willingly ignore the needs of the black child Toby to meet the needs of the (former) master’s son Johnny.

It should not have really had any effect on the Uncle Remus tales, themselves, but their association with that movie has tended to drag them down.

Interestingly, on the Cherokee Myths and Legends web site, the author claims that the stories were “really” Cherokee stories, not African. (That should be good for a donnybrook.)

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The Mick: Oh, God. Just what I need. A Joel Chandler Harrisite.

MEBuckner That’s the common explanation of that passage I hear. The black artists who have chosen to depict Jesus as a black African often just take that Revelation passage quite literally, depicting Jesus with woolly, whitened hair and skin as dark as burnt bronze. And carrying a lamb. Overkill.

Tamerlane: Thanks for the exhaustive researches about the terrestrial distribution of lions and the oral tradition. Much appreciated.

capacitator Calm yourself, man.

Manda JO: Y’know, I may catch flack for saying this aloud, but a hell of whole lot of Afrocentrism seems to be of what tomndebb called the “feelgood” variety. I try and verify some claims with facts and dates and names and times, only to find out how flawed some of them they are in the first place. In a sense, I suspect it’s symptomatic of how starved a lot of African-Americans are for a sense of a proud culture and an unenslaved past, and why the Africa of our imaginations – particularly dynastic Egypt, or Nubia – is as gilded as the kingdoms in fairy tales of Europe.

tomndebb: I’m curious about the authenticity of ‘The Aethiop’, too, now that you mention it. According to the website, the following were used for preparing the fables:

Babrii Fabulae Aesopeae, George Cornewall Lewis, Oxford, 1846.; Babrii Fabulae Aesopeae, E codice manuscripto partem secundam Edidit, George Cornewall Lewis, London: Parker, 1857.; Mythologica Aesopica, Opera et studia Isaaci Nicholai Neveleti, Frankfort, 1610.; Fabulae Aesopiacae, quales ante Planudem ferebantur cura et studio Francisci de Furia, Lipsiae, 1810.; Ex recognitione Caroli Halmii, Lipsiae, Phaedri Fabulae (no date); Esopiae, Delphin Classics, 1822.; Aesop’s Fables by George Fyler Townsend, 1877

Most of these seem to be 17th, 18th and 19th century collections. Also, I fired off an e-mail to the webmaster inquiring on the antiquity of “The Aethiop”, so hopefully there will be a response forthcoming if someone else around here hasn’t already commented/debunked on it.

Lemur866: I somewhat agree. However, if Aethiop = Ethiopian is accurate translation, and if is a likely description of a place of origin for either Aesop or his people – it’s probably the strongest (admittedly tenuous) indication yet of a sub-Sarahan origin of the slave we know as Aesop. Such a people would have had to grow up enslaved in Thrace, and later, the island of Samos on the Aegean Sea. I guess a better question could be, “How common a name was ‘Aesop’ for a Greek male back then?” The only other ‘Aesop’ I’ve heard of was described as Aesop the tragedian. If seven out of twenty Greek males walked around with that name, then I guess it had nothing to do with Ethiopia. Even I can’t be convinced there were that many Negroes kicking back, eating moussaka, watching the gladiators. (Oh, wait. That’s Rome.)

Now here’s my wag: Herodotus is the earliest, most respected Aesop biographer, and assures us Aesop was one man, put to death by the Delphi. But 76 years stills separates the dates between Aesop’s birth and death (620 BC and 560 BC) and the birthdate of Herodotus (c. 484) (neither are definitive dates, BTW, only estimates) Herodotus is not an eyewitness, because he never saw Aesop alive. By the time he was old enough to begin his own inquiries, there may not have been ANYONE alive who had firsthand knowledge of Aesop’s appearance he could talk to.

tomndebb mentions vases with Aesop’s likeness as a clue to his ethnicity, but to pass muster, these vases would have to be made before 500 BC. In any event I’d love to hear a book or website where I can look at these.

Herodotus may have seen Lysippus’ statue commemorating Aesop that was raised in Athens sometime in the 4th century. I cannot find any reference to this statue’s location or appearance via the internet. It may have disappeared in antiquity. Perhaps some art lover could help me out?

Moreover, I’m not aware of any physical descriptions Herodotus gives of any historical figure in – he was more concerned with questioning the accuracy of history as he knew it: names, dates and places, as opposed to descriptions of individuals.

Plutarch was born 600 years after Aesop’s purported death (in 40 AD) and was well aware of the paucity of his materials he used as historical reference, both in number and accuracy. He wrote himself, “It is so hard to find out the truth of anything by looking at the record of the past. The process of time obscures the truth of former times, and even contemporaneous writers disguise and twist the truth out of malice or flattery.” While I cannot find anything specific on Plutarch’s writings on Aesop, it’s important to remember Plutarch had little faith in the historical truth of his own works, and indeed, the works of his peers.

Basically, it’s down to the Aesop = Aethiop = Ethiopian = black African thing with me, and whether “The Aethiop” is part of the original collection of ‘authentic’ Aesop fables.

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Another interesting thing about lions is that they are fairly young compared to genus homo…is it a coincedence that the faster spreading species are the more recent ones?

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It may be coincidence. It’s definitely off-topic. Shoo! Scat! Get your own thread, Badtz Maru! I’m wasting my AOL free minutes here!

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Well, the University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center does include “The Aethiop” in its collection of Aesop’s Fables. Reading it, though, it seems a bit of a stretch to conclude that Aesop was himself necessarily a black African based on the one fable.

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MEBuckner: Thanks for the link to UV Aesop archives. Their version of ‘The Aethiop’ is word-for-word the same one I linked from The Aesop’s Fables website two days ago.

Aside to tomndebb: The titles of a few of those fables – ‘The Astronomer’, ‘The Miser’, ‘The Father and His Sons’, ‘The Boasting Traveler’ – would seem to indicate Aesop did indeed use humans instead of anthropomorphic animals in his fables, albeit sparingly.

Query: So is the Greek name “Aesop” derived from “Aethiop” – and does it denote Ethiopia as the place of origin of a person so named? How common a name was ‘Aesop’ in ancient Greece, circa 600 BC?

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One famous author/genius Afrocentrics could lay claim to is Alexander Pushkin. He was of Ethiopian descent. He’s pretty much THE literary giant in Russia.