April 14, 2010

AC360

Nell Irwin Painter

Author of ‘The History of White People’

Were there "white" people in antiquity? Certainly some assume so, as though
categories we use today could be read backwards over the millennia. People
with light skin certainly existed well before our own times. But did anyone
think they were "white" or that their character related to their color? No,
for neither the idea of race nor the idea of "white" people had been
invented, and people’s skin color did not carry useful meaning. What
mattered was where they lived; were their lands damp or dry; were they
virile or prone to impotence, hard or soft; could they be seduced by the
luxuries of civilized society or were they warriors through and through?
What were their habits of life? Rather than as "white" people, northern
Europeans were known by vague tribal names: Scythians and Celts, then Gauls
and -Germani.
But if one asks, say, who are the Scythians? the question sets us off down a
slippery slope, for, over time and especially in earliest times, any search
for the ancestors of white Americans perforce leads back to nonliterate
peoples who left no documents describing themselves.1 Thus, we must sift
through the intellectual history Americans claim as Westerners, keeping in
mind that long before science dictated the terms of human difference as
"race," long before racial scientists began to measure heads and concoct
racial theory, ancient Greeks and Romans had their own means of describing
the peoples of their world as they knew it more than two millennia ago. And
inevitably, the earliest accounts of our story are told from on high, by
rulers dominant at a particular time. Power affixes the markers of -history.

Furthermore, any attempt to trace biological ancestry quickly turns into
legend, for human beings have multiplied so rapidly: by 1,000 or more times
in some two hundred years, and by more than 32,000 times in three hundred
years. Evolutionary biologists now reckon that the six to seven billion
people now living share the same small number of ancestors living two or
three thousand years ago. These circumstances make nonsense of anybody’s
pretensions to find a pure racial ancestry. Nor are notions of Western
cultural purity any less spurious. Without a doubt, the sophisticated
Egyptian, Phoenician, Minoan, and Persian societies deeply influenced the
classical culture of ancient Greece, which some still imagine as the West’s
pure and unique source. That story is still to come, for the obsession
with -purity–racial and cultural–arose many centuries after the demise of
the ancients. Suffice it to say that our search for the history of white
people must begin in the misty mixture of myth and reality that comprises
ancient Greek -literature.

Early on, most Greek notions about peoples living along their northeastern
border, especially that vaguely known place called the Caucasus, were
mythological.2 Known to Westerners since prehistoric times, the Caucasus is
a geographically and ethnically complex area lying between the Black and
Caspian Seas and flanked north and south by two ranges of the Caucasus
Mountains. The northern Caucasus range forms a natural border with Russia;
the southern, lesser Caucasus physically separates the area from Turkey and
Iran. The Republic of Georgia lies between the disputed region of the
Caucasus, Turkey, Armenia, Iran, and Azerbaijan. (See figure 1.1, Black Sea
Region.)-

According to Greek mythology, Jason and his Argonauts sought the Golden
Fleece in the (Caucasus) land of Colchis (near the present-day Georgian city
of Poti) obtaining it from King Aeetes, thanks to the magical powers of the
king’s daughter, the princess Medea. In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe, the sister
of King Aeetes, transforms half of Odysseus’s men into animals and seduces
Odysseus. Later on, Hesiod and Aeschylus take up the tale of Prometheus, son
of a Titan, punished for having stolen the secret of fire from Zeus, who
chains Prometheus to a mountain in the Caucasus and sends an eagle to peck
at his liver every day for thirty thousand years.3 One can see that to the
Greeks, almost anything goes on in the Caucasus. Furthermore, Greek
mythology accords women of the Caucasus extraordinary powers, whether the
magical of Medea and Circe, or the warlike of the Amazons, variously located
in a number of places, including the Caucasus. Even today, these
myths -reverberate.4

Underlying the idea that all people originated between the Black and the
Caspian Seas is the text of Genesis 8:1, which has Noah’s ark coming to rest
"on the mountains of Ararat" after the flood. In the thirteenth century
Marco Polo located Mount Ararat in Armenia, just south of Georgia in eastern
Turkey, at the juncture of Armenia, Iraq, and Iran in the country of the
Kurds. At any rate, Mount Ararat, at 5,185 meters, or some 17,000 feet high,
is Turkey’s highest mountain and is still believed by many to mark the site
of postdiluvian human history in western Asia. Nor have recent events
lessened its -importance.
Twentieth- and twenty-first-century wars contest access to oil (South
Ossetia, Azerbaijan, Grozny, Maykop, and the Caspian Sea, especially Baku,
hold rich old deposits); earlier trade brought slaves, wine, fruit, and
other agricultural produce from the valleys along the Black Sea, and a
variety of natural resources (e.g., manganese, coal, copper, molybdenum, and
tungsten). Current iconography of the Caucasus shows bombed-out cities and
oil rigs of Chechnya or bearded nationalists called "terrorists" by the
Russians. Occasional photographs of Caucasians show gnarled old people as
proof of the life-prolonging powers of yogurt. There was a time when the
people of the Caucasus were thought the most beautiful in the world. But
documentary images making this case–in pictures, not just words–have
proven -illusive.

By contrast, vague and savage notions had lodged in the Greek mind
concerning Scythians and Celts, who lived in what is now considered Europe.
Voicing broad ethnic generalities, Greeks had words–Skythai (Scythian) and
Keltoi (Celt)-to designate far distant barbarians. Scythian, for instance,
simply meant little known, northeastern, illiterate, Stone Age peoples, and
Celt denoted hidden people, painted people, strange people, and barbarians
to the west. We cannot know what those people called themselves, for the
Greek names stuck. Nor can we know how many of those situated in northern,
western, and eastern Europe, two or three thousand years ago or earlier,
became the biological ancestors of nineteenth-century German, English, and
Irish people and twentieth-century Italians, Jews, and Slavs.5 We know from
Greek descriptions of their habits that, whether chiefs or slaves, all had
light-colored -skin.

For a sense of this vagueness, recall the naming skills of fifteenth-century
Europeans as they looked west in the Americas. Their backs to the Atlantic
Ocean, Europeans described sparsely settled people they had never seen
before as "Indians." Such precision regarding faraway, unlettered peoples
has been commonplace throughout the ages. Those at a distance became the
Other and, easily conquered, the lesser. But not in antiquity because of
race. Ancient Greeks did not think in terms of race (later translators would
put that word in their mouths); instead, Greeks thought of place. Africa
meant Egypt and Libya. Asia meant Persia as far to the east as India. Europe
meant Greece and neighboring lands as far west as Sicily. Western Turkey
belonged to Europe because Greeks lived there. Indeed, most of the Greek
known world lay to the east and south of what would become recognizable
later as -Europe.

Mostly, Greek scholars focused on climate to explain human difference.
Humors arising from each climate’s relative humidity or aridness explained a
people’s temperament. Where the seasons do not change, people were labeled
placid. Where seasons shift dramatically, their dispositions were said to
display "wildness, unsociability and spirit. For frequent shocks to the mind
impart wildness, destroying tameness and gentleness." Those words come from
Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters, and Places.6

Distance was all, for travel went at the speed of foot and hoof. Scythians
roamed from Georgia in the Caucasus and the lands around the Euxine (Black)
Sea to the steppes of Ukraine and on east to Siberia. Interestingly, the
word "Ukraine" stems from Polish and Russian language roots meaning "edge of
the world."7 Russians and Ukrainians who now claim ancient Scythians as
glorious ancestors look to Yalta in the Crimea as their ancestral home. Some
Russian ancestors surely would have lived there, but the region’s tumultuous
history renders any single origin an invented tradition. Black Sea ancestors
were Scythians, yes, but must also have included invaders and migrants of
Tartar, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Iranian, and Chinese origin–at the
very -least.

Reprinted from The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter. Copyright
(c) 2010 by Nell Irvin Painter. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W.
Norton & Company, Inc.

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