Here are Amazon Book reviews of those Frank M. Snowden books that I mentioned in my last post. I'm sharing these reviews as they provide more information on these books. I was going to type excerpts from those books on to this thread so people could get a sense of what these books are about. But it's much easier to copy and paste these reviews.

Blacks In Antiquity by Frank M. Snowden; Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (January 7, 1971)

"Here's a book 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. Frank M. Snowden Jr., a world-renowned scholar on ancient Greece and Rome who taught at Howard and Georgetown Universities, details with encyclopedic and painstaking scholarship and research the undeniable presence of Africans in the Greco-Roman world. "The experiences of those 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).
-Eugene Holley Jr.

http://www.amazon.com/Blacks-Antiquity-Ethiopians-Greco-Roman-Experience/dp/0674076265/ref=pd_bxgy_


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Amazon.com Review: Before Color Prejudice by Frank M, Snowden; Harvard University Press (March 1, 1991)

"Further developing the themes he so eloquently outlines in Blacks in Antiquity, Frank M. Snowden Jr. continues his investigations into attitudes towards Africans in the classical civilizations of Rome and Greece. Snowden identifies the African blacks from Egypt, Nubia (the modern Sudan), Ethiopia, and Carthage (Tunisia), discussing their interactions--including intermarriage--with the Greco-Romans. (He also notes that many of the artistic representations of these people resemble present-day African Americans.) From the trade missions of the Egyptian dynasties to their conquest of the Mediterranean and ultimate downfall at the hands of the Romans, Snowden unravels a complex history of cultural exchanges that went on for several millennia in which racial prejudice was not a factor. "There was a clear-cut respect among the Mediterranean peoples for Ethiopians and their way of life," he writes, "and above all, the ancients did not stereotype blacks as primitives defective in religion and culture."
-Eugene Holley Jr.

http://www.amazon.com/Before-Color-Prejudice-Ancient-Blacks/dp/0674063813