This started out as an assignment for an online web design class I took this summer, but then I decided to upload the whole thing onto the Internet for all the world to enjoy! Check it out if you like art and writing with dinosaurs and sexy ladies!
Posts: 7069 | From: Fallbrook, CA | Registered: Mar 2004
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Frank M. Snowden Jr., 95, Historian of Blacks in Antiquity, Dies
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: February 28, 2007
Frank M. Snowden Jr., a historian who was a leading authority on the lives of black people in the ancient world, died on Feb. 18 in Washington. He was 95 and had lived in Washington for many years.
William Philpott/Reuters, 2003
Frank M. Snowden Jr. received the National Humanities Medal.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his son, Frank M. Snowden III, said.
At his death, Dr. Snowden was distinguished professor of history emeritus at Howard University, where he had taught for half a century. He was also a former United States cultural attaché in Rome, the first African-American to hold the post there.
In his work, Dr. Snowden documented Greek and Roman encounters with black Africans over many centuries, contending that racial prejudice, at least as it is defined today, was largely unknown in antiquity. His books include “Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience” (Harvard University, 1970) and “Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks” (Harvard University, 1983).
Dr. Snowden’s scholarship took in a 3,000-year period, from the middle of the third millennium B.C. to the sixth century A.D. Trained as a classicist, he mined Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Assyrian, Hebrew and early Christian texts and also visited museums around the world to examine the depictions of blacks in ancient art.
Though Dr. Snowden was not the first to study blacks in antiquity, his work helped ensure that the subject was more than a scholarly curiosity, Maghan Keita, a professor of history at Villanova University and the author of “Race and the Writing of History” (Oxford University, 2000), said yesterday in a telephone interview.
“He gave the study its body, its heft, its weight,” Dr. Keita said. “And he made that study a body of work that is almost unassailable by people who want to believe that there is no African presence in the classical world.”
Whites in the ancient world rarely equated blackness with subordination, Dr. Snowden argued, because the black people they encountered were rarely slaves. (Most slaves in the Roman Empire, for instance, were white.) Instead, they met blacks who were warriors, statesmen and mercenaries. While some critics accused Dr. Snowden of idealizing the past, he maintained throughout his career that racial bias was a relatively modern phenomenon.
“Nothing comparable to the virulent color prejudice of modern times existed in the ancient world,” Dr. Snowden wrote in “Before Color Prejudice.” He added: “The ancients did not fall into the error of biological racism; black skin color was not a sign of inferiority; Greeks and Romans did not establish color as an obstacle to integration.”
Frank Martin Snowden Jr. was born in rural York County, Va., on July 17, 1911; his father, Frank M. Sr., was an Army colonel. The family moved to Boston when Frank Jr. was a child, and he attended the Boston Latin School, where he was first captivated by the classics. He earned a bachelor’s degree in classics from Harvard in 1932, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in the field, also from Harvard, in 1933 and 1944.
After teaching at Virginia State and Spelman Colleges, Dr. Snowden joined the Howard faculty in 1940, serving over the years as chairman of the classics department and dean of the college of liberal arts. In the 1950s, he lectured in Europe, Africa and elsewhere for the State Department; from 1954 to 1956, he was the cultural attaché at the American Embassy in Rome.
Dr. Snowden’s wife, the former Elaine Hill, whom he married in 1935, died in 2005. Besides his son, Frank M. III, a professor of 20th-century Italian history at Yale, Dr. Snowden is survived by a daughter, Jane Lepscky, a linguist, of Washington; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
His other work includes “The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire” (Morrow, 1976), written with several co-authors. In 2003, President Bush awarded Dr. Snowden the National Humanities Medal.
In a literal sense, Dr. Keita of Villanova said, Dr. Snowden’s scholarship helped change the complexion of antiquity.
“It’s probably one of the most important bodies of work out there in terms of getting people to understand that people of African descent inhabited the entire globe at all periods of historical time,” Dr. Keita said. “And not only that they inhabited the globe, but that they’ve had a profound impact on the way in which the world and its history has been shaped.”
Posts: 496 | From: Greenland | Registered: Mar 2011
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This started out as an assignment for an online web design class I took this summer, but then I decided to upload the whole thing onto the Internet for all the world to enjoy! Check it out if you like art and writing with dinosaurs and sexy ladies!
Cool, your own website.
Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
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For someone with such talent as yourself, it is sad to see you misrepresent the people of Ancient Egypt. Your so called Ancient Egyptian does not look like an authentic Egyptian at all. He does not even look like an Ancient Nubian.
TUNNEL VISION
quote:Originally posted by Truthcentric: Let me bump this with a 'toon for the morning:
Nothing could get on an ancient Egyptian citizen's nerves like usurious Babylonians and their "Chariot Insurance Day".
But it could be worse. They could be making impotent spin-off "comedies" about wild men (as in like Enkidu from the old Gilgamesh Epic).
quote:Originally posted by Caveman: For someone with such talent as yourself, it is sad to see you misrepresent the people of Ancient Egypt. Your so called Ancient Egyptian does not look like an authentic Egyptian at all. He does not even look like an Ancient Nubian.
TUNNEL VISION
quote:Originally posted by Truthcentric: Let me bump this with a 'toon for the morning:
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Forty Acres in Antarctica Sometime after 1865, this newly emancipated African-American family is inspecting their new forty-acre property along the coast of Antarctica. With lots of land and no indigenous inhabitants to displace, Antarctica would seem a choice location for all those millions of promised forty-acre plots. It might be a bit nippy, but they could always set up greenhouses to grow their crops when not hunting penguins and seals. Who knows, they might have set up a new democratic republic down there by now.
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^^^ Your cartoon drawings are askew, because you seem to follow a Racist Agenda of deception and unrealistic expectations.
Why would anyone be wearing shortsleeves in Antartica and mules would be useless over there. Also, African Americans would not all be the same dark shade of brown and look at the lips.
Sadly, you claim to be on their side, yet your racist agenda is deeply imbedded within your inner psyche!!
Posts: 496 | From: Greenland | Registered: Mar 2011
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Some more stuff I'd like to show off... Saurogea in 1865 I drew this map up as concept art for a game concept I'll be developing for my Game Design class this fall at Coleman University. It'll take place after the US Civil War in an "alternate timeline", when the emancipated African-Americans finally receive all those forty-acre plots they were promised...on a tropical "lost continent" with dinosaurs and other Mesozoic fauna. And they'll be hunting or herding those dinosaurs while riding their mules. Right now I plan to make the game a city-builder in the tradition of SimCity or Caesar, where you have to build up your African-American colony into a thriving industrial civilization deep within the Saurogean wilds.
The character of Isaiah Freeman, named in the title card in the upper right corner, is an African-American explorer who has had the continent of Saurogea mapped by 1865 (the year when the Civil War ended). As the founder of Freeport, the continent's first human settlement, he could be described as the first Founding Father for the African-American equivalent of Manifest Destiny on Saurogea.
Lady in Waiting
I based this Egyptian chick's hairstyle off a young African-American lady I've seen a few times on the bus to school. She has this Afro which seemed to be pushed up by some kind of headband just above the forehead. I don't know if there's a specific name for that hairstyle, but I really wanted to draw it on one of my Egyptian characters.
Modern Ancients Ever wondered what various ancient civilizations would look like if they lasted to the present day? Here's my speculation on how their leaders might dress in such an alternate history.
I had a lot of fun designing all their costumes, though I think the representative for Egypt has the best pose. The Roman is meant to channel a Latin American junta (the Romans were the original Latins after all), the Babylonian is dressed like the pimp of a Vegas-style desert civilization, and the Egyptian's meant to give off an African-American hip-hop vibe.
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Today they're selling Greeks over at this slave auction in ancient Egypt.
I know slavery is a grisly and touchy subject in the study of history, especially from an American vantage point (for obvious reasons). But alas, those were different times with different values taken for granted. At least the Egyptians didn't pretend to run the Land of the Free, which is more than could be said for 19th century Americans.
And this one I am very proud of: Posts: 7069 | From: Fallbrook, CA | Registered: Mar 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Truthcentric: Today they're selling Greeks over at this slave auction in ancient Egypt.
I know slavery is a grisly and touchy subject in the study of history, especially from an American vantage point (for obvious reasons). But alas, those were different times with different values taken for granted. At least the Egyptians didn't pretend to run the Land of the Free, which is more than could be said for 19th century Americans.
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Roman Auxilia Not all soldiers fighting for the Roman Empire were legionaries. As much as three-fifths of them belonged to a secondary class known the auxilia (or auxiliaries), whose ranks dominated the Roman cavalry and archery forces. Whereas only Roman citizens could be legionaries, auxiliaries on the other hand were mainly drawn from their various conquered subjects. Only after twenty-five years of service could auxiliaries earn citizenship (this changed after 212 AD, when all free-born people in the Empire automatically became citizens). In contrast to the legionaries' trademark lorica segmentata (iron band armor), the auxiliaries' armor would have come in the form of iron mail shirts.
These two auxiliaries, one Celtic and the other Egyptian, are obviously from very different parts of the Empire. Though the mail shirts would be standard issue for their ranks, I chose to given them some culturally distinctive clothing articles and equipment to reflect their non-Roman heritages. What I find most fascinating about the Roman Empire is how multicultural and multiracial it would have become given its transcontinental territory.
(As for their being women, that's just artistic license on my part. Though I'll be glad to be informed if there actually were female soldiers fighting in the Roman Empire.)
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Truthcentric, you are getting better with your art skills.
Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
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(I wonder if this thread would work better in the Egyptology forum? They've both been off-topic of late.)
Two more Roman auxilia, or non-citizen soldiers, are patrolling the Italian countryside on horseback. The lady to your left comes from one of the Empire's western African provinces (e.g. the area around Carthage) whereas the one to the right is a Hun from the eastern steppes.
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This one I really like: Regality The Queen of Egypt has decided to go without her crown today so she can show off her natural hair. But then a 'fro is sort of a crown in its own right.
I'm really happy with how the Queen's strutting pose came out. It looks so regal and prideful.
(And yes, I know Egyptians didn't have high heels around.)
Diplomacy While Egyptian If you're an Egyptian princess on a diplomatic errand in Mesopotamia, beware of their councilors trying to molest your hair.
Come to think of it, maybe that's why so many Egyptians shaved their heads and wore wigs. It might have been a preventative measure against all those foreign hands harassing their hair.
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Widow of Jesus Mary Magdalene, the Biblical character who may have been Jesus of Nazareth's wife, visits her husband's body on the night of his execution. The bread and fish she's holding in that bowl are offerings to his spirit.
I sketched this up after reading a recent Livescience article on the so-called "Gospel of Jesus", which may identify Mary Magdalene as his wife. For a while the text was considered a modern-day forgery, but a recent re-analysis could possibly vindicate its authenticity. As for my vision of Mary being African, some scholars like Lynn Picknett have suggested she was of aristocratic Egyptian heritage rather than the prostitute of popular belief. Though even if she were a prostitute, I'm sure the ancient Hebrews would have imported sex slaves from all around as did many other nations at that time.
I should add that I am an atheist, not a Christian. But I still find that part of the ancient Mediterranean basin fascinating enough to draw, especially since it was a crossroads between the African and Middle Eastern continents.
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Cleopatra Got Back Julius Caesar can't get enough of Cleopatra VII's anatomy. The Queen of Ptolemaic Egypt's intelligence and charming personality might have facilitated her seduction of powerful men, but I like to think she had her physical assets as well.
This is actually the third time I've drawn this exact scene, but I feel dissatisfied with the previous ones. I still love the image of Caesar as an ass man though.
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