Professor Frank Martin Snowden Jr.

Here's two books published by Harvard University Press to raise the spirits of anyone of African descent who feels that he or she has nothing to do with the making of Western civilization. A must for your personal library. These books are highly recommended. Buy new or used to fit your budget.

According to Professor Emeritus Frank M. Snowden Jr., (AB, AM, Ph.D., ) Howard University Classicist Department --- reading of the sources, the Ethiopians "pioneered" religion, and were key to the origin and propagation of many of the customs which existed in Egypt. The Egyptians, it was argued, were descendants of the Ethiopians. Snowden states that the term Kushites, Nubians, or Ethiopians is to used in much the same way as the modern term "colored", "black, or Negro". "The experiences of Africans who reached the alien shores of Greece and Italy constituted an important chapter in the history of classical antiquity," he writes. "Using evidence from terra cotta figures, paintings, and classical sources like Herodotus and Pliny the Elder, Snowden proves, contrary to our modern assumptions, that Greco-Romans did not view Africans with racial contempt. Many Africans worked in the Roman Empire as musicians, artisans, scholars, and generals as well as slaves, and they were noted as much for their virtue as for their appearance of having a "burnt face" (from which came the Greek name Ethiopian)."

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume One: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire

by Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, Jean Vercoutter, Jean Leclant, Frank M. Snowden,

Jehan Desanges, Ladislas Bugner

During the fifteenth century BC, the pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty established an empire extending from the Euphrates to the Fourth Cataract (Nubia). The southern conquests brought Egyptians into direct contact with black populations who continued to resist and counterattack. In the previous millennium black warriors and captives had occasionally appeared in the art of Egypt, Crete, and Cyprus. The Image of the Black in Western Art shows us, from the mid-fifteenth century to Tutankhamun's painted box depicting blacks in Egyptian art increasingly portrayed realistic and unmistakable Negroes.

Professor Frank Martin Snowden Jr. (July 17, 1911- February 18, 2007)

Frank M. Snowden Jr., was a Howard University classicist for almost 50 years whose research into blacks in ancient Greece and Rome opened a new field of study,.

2003 Side Note: President Bush announced one of the 2003 Humanities medal to Frank M. Snowden Jr. (Washington, D.C.), one of the foremost scholars on blacks in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Italy, is Professor Emeritus of Classics at Howard University in Washington, D.C. A graduate of Harvard, Snowden has served as a member of the U.S. delegation to UNESCO in Paris and as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Rome. As a U.S. specialist lecturer for the Department of State, Snowden delivered lectures in Africa, Egypt, Italy, Austria, Greece, India, and Brazil. His many books on blacks in the ancient Mediterranean world include Blacks in Antiquity (1970), The Image of the Black in Western Art I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire, which he co-authored (1976), and Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (1983). Snowden’s nominator writes, “Howard students will remember him for his dramatic classroom recitations in ancient Greek and Latin from memory and his plea for the beauty and universality of great literature.”