There is a trend in America that is very troubling, and it concerns truth in history. There is a revisionist attitude that has captured many areas of historical thought in general, and the African-American imagination in particular.
One case in point: the growing argument in some ethnic Christian circles of whether or not Jesus was black or white in his ethnicity. This is a very interesting question, for it does deal with one of the human characteristics of a semidivine religious figure that is dear to millions. The argument further continues that the image of Jesus was first depicted as dark-skinned, then later, as Christianity spread throughout Europe, the image was co-opted by the Caucasians and integrated into white societies as being white. Still later, when many human individuals from various African tribes were captured in intertribal warfare and traded/sold to other tribes or Europeans into bondage, bound for Europe and the Americas, the white man used his religion to further aid in the supression of Negros. It is fair to say that there may have been some measure of truth in this thesis, but to what degree is another question altogether.
Nevertheless, the whole idea, if not handled in a more properly scholarly manner, may only serve to further exacerbate already troubled relations between the races. Jesus, if a real historical figure, was a Jew, and Jews in the ancient eastern Mediterranean, long before miscegination during the Diaspora, were neither white nor black, but somewhat bronze-skinned Semitic human beings.
Further arguments: Claim--Blacks raised the Great Pyramids, Cleopatra was Black. Refutatations: Fact--The ancient Egyptians were a Hamito-Semitic group, with a minor mixing of Kushitic and Ethiopic blood in their later centuries (an Ethiopian Dynasty ruled Egypt ca. 751-656 BCE), the latter both of negroid stock. There was, however, a Negroid civilization, the Meroitic Kingdom, to the south of Egypt, while borrowing largely from Egyptian culture, built pyramids of their own, much smaller but in disctinctive Meroitic style. Fact--Cleopatra was the daughter of a Greek family: the Ptolemies.
If some individuals in the African-American community are trying to exalt their cultural and ethnic pride, both respectable and commendable efforts, by way of subscribing to unsubstantiated claims, then they are going about it the wrong way. No mention has been made of the true Negro contributions to world society: science, politics, music, and the arts. There is no mention of Songhai, Benin, Zimbabwe, Kongo, or Kanem-Bornu, just a few of the African kingdoms and chiefdoms which in their day rivaled the Europeans in their power and influence politically, culturally, and economically. How many African-Americans are aware of their true heritage? There is much in African history and culture that is rich and that many African-Americans can draw on if they only knew about it. How much pseudohistory and pseudoculture are indulged in by both unsuspecting Blacks and Whites? It is a growing problem, one which must not go unchallenged.
[The following article is from "The Georgia Skeptic: Newsletter of the Georgia Skeptics" Vol 5, No. 5, September/October 1992]
If man's survivial depended on holding correct beliefs, the species would long since have joined the mammoth and the tyrannosaur. So long as men's beliefs in things that are not so do not lead to such folies as jumping out a window thinking one can fly, people manage.
In history, widely-held t'ain't-so stories include the creations myth of the ancient Hebrews; the legends of Atlantis and Lemuria; tales of the founding of the native Amerind civilizations by shiploads of Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, Sumerians, Nigerians, Celts, Norsemen, or Japanese; and claims that civilization was initiated by little green men from some other planet. Besides these whigmaleeries, several widespread beliefs about well-established historical matters can easily be confuted. But people believe them anyway; Robert Howard [author of the original "Conan" stories] embraced several. He should not be blamed, since he was not in a position to investigate the questions thoroughly. Let me list some of them:
1. That the ancient Egyptians were solemn mystics, given to contemplating Fate and Eternity. This tradition seems to have arisen in the eighteenth century, when savants began to puzzle over Egyptian hieroglyphics; while Giuseppe Balsamo, alias Count Cagliostro, called himself the "Grand Copt' in beguiling suckers. Mme Blavatsky, before she discovered her Tibetan Mahatmas, claimed to be the mouthpiece of a society of Egyptian Adepts. In the early twentieth century, Oswald Spengler, in his Decline of the West, reinforced this picture by portentous remarks about the brave Egyptian soul.Like other peoples, the ancient Egyptians included folk of all temperaments and personalities. But if Egyptian culture had a bias, it was towards the jolly extrovert, fond of beer, games, parties, and picnics, with a keen sense of humor--which any visitor to modern Egypt will find still in force.
2. That the Aryans--meaning the Indo-European speakers who in the second millenium [BCE] conquered vast areas from Portugal to India, and imposed their language and some other culture traits upon the conquered--were tall, blond, blue-eyed Nordics, who won by superior courage and other moral virtues.
As far as the record goes, the original Aryans, semi-nomadic cattle-raising barbarians, spread out from somewhere in Poland or the Ukraine. They owed their success to a terrible new secret weapon: the horse-drawn chariot. Their racial type is not known; but it was probably the Alpine, prevailing in that region today. Anyway, the Aryans soon disappeared as a distinct racial ethnos by intermarriage with the conquered.
3.That Classical or Graeco-Roman war galleys were rowed by slaves. This belief seems to have been floated by Lew Wallace, in his novel Ben-Hur. Now the idea is fixed in the minds of the many who saw a movie version of the novel, either the silent film of the 1920s with Ramon Navarro, or the more recent remake with Charlton Heston.
While the Graeco-Roman world saw slavery perhaps more prevalent than anywhere else in history, galley-rowing was one job that was not entrusted to slaves. The rowers were not only free men but also fairly well-paid ones. The only exception to the rule was that a hard-pressed city-state might offer its slaves freedom if they would serve as rowers and the city-state won the war.
Galley slavery seems to have been a Renaissance invention. It began in the fifteenth century, when the Christian and Muslim powers were raiding one another across the Mediterranean and capturing more prisoners than they knew what to do with. See Lionel Casson: The Ancient Mariners and Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World.
4. That the Picts were small, dark people, conquered by big, blond Celts. Howard talks about this in his letters to Lovecraft.
The idea of small Picts probably originated in a medieval history of Norway, which described them as pygmies who lived in underground shelters, in which they hid when, at midday, they lost their strength. Kipling exploited the ideas in his stories "A Centurion of the Twentieth," "On the Great Wall," and "The Winged Hats." Howard paraphrased Kipling's poem A Pict Song, printed with these stories, in his own Song of a Mad Minstrel. Early British archaeologists, finding the remains of the Celt's underground storage chambers, took these as confirmation of Norse legend.
Present evidence indicates that, so far from Britain's having seen the conquest of small brunets by blond giants, the fact was probably the other way round. The swarthy shrimps beat the blond giants at least twice: first when the Beaker Folk came, probably from Spain around 1700 [BCE]; next when the Romans conquered England in [CE] 43. As far as we can tell, the Picts were racially much the same as modern Scots, who are largely descended from them. It is not settled wheter the Picts spoke a Celtic tongue, or another tongue of the Indo-European family, or a pre-Indo-European language of another family, as is the case with Basque and Etruscan. See F.T. Wainwright: The Problem of the Picts.
5. That Rome fell because her people became decadent and indulged in orgies. A movie, The Fall of the Roman Empire, played on this theme, tying the fall of the Empire to the breakdown after Marcus Aurelius. But the Empire kept going quite vigorously for two centuries after Marcus.
If by "decadent" you mean "doing things that the person using the word disapproves of or considers immoral," then when the Romans were most decadent, in the first centuries [BCE] and [CE], they conquered the Mediterranean world. When they reformed their ways, recovered some of their earlier dignity, adopted Christianity, and abolished gladiatorialism, then the barbarians overcame them.
6. That Saxons conquered England because the native Britons had become soft and unwarlike under Roman rule. But compare the comparative speed and ease with which the barbarians--Teutons from Germany and Sweden, Alans from Russia, and Huns from Mongolia--overran Gaul, Italy, Spain, and North Africa in the fifth century, with the long time it took the Saxons to push the Britons into Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland. Also, consider the greater degree of replacement, in Britain, of the original population by the invaders than on the Continent. It is plain that, whereas the Continental provinces of the West Roman Empire accepted their new rulers with little fuss, the Britons put up a terrific fight.
7. That the Vikings wore horns or wings on their helmets. Somewhere in Dark Age Literature is an allusion to the Scandinavian raiders as "Winghats," which seems to have given rise to the whole fantasy. My late friend Fletcher Pratt said that Paul de Chaillu, in his two-volume treatise The Viking Age (1889) explained the horned helmets.
Actually, du Chaillu alludes only briefly to horned helmets. He bases his argument on two lines of evidence. One is a series of prehistoric rock carvings at Bohuslan, Sweden, which show crudely scratched humanoid figures with what look like horns. These pictographs could represent some sort of horned demons or satyrs. The other evidence is two horned bronze helmets in the British Museum. (Most old iron helmets have rusted away to nothing.) But one, dredged out of the Thames at London, is considered Celtic, of the first century [BCE]. The other, from the Italian heel, looks like and probably is a Greek helmet of the closed Corinthian type. Neither has aught to do with Vikings.
I suspect Richard Wagner promoted this tradition, assuming that he clad Wotan and other characters in his Ring operas in winged headpieces, as is done nowadays. A precise tracking of this tradition of horned and winged helms through the nineteenth century is a possible subject for a Ph.D. thesis.
To judge from the few Viking carvings and reliefs showing helmets, the Vikings were one of the few pre-gunpowder peoples who did not wear such things on their helmets.l These headpieces were simple steel caps, sometimes with nose, eye, or neck guards. In practice, such projections would be more a hindrance than a help. A blow, if it did not carry away the ormament, might knock the helmet down over one eye. In the days of armor, a king or noble often had two suits: a plain one for serious fighting, and a suit of "parade armor," with fancy decorations and crests, for putting on a show to impress the impressible.
The movie The Vikings, with Kirk Douglas, recently rerun on TV, put helmets of the right kind on the actors, but it will be long before artists and writers stop giving Vikings helmets like that of Hagar the Horrible. Likewise they still show Amerinds greeting Columbus in the Bahamas wearing Plains Indians war bonnets. This is as realistic as giving them top hats and tailcoats.
Of course, all this is no reason why Conan should not wear a horned helmet, as he does in several stories. Since the Catastrophe destroyed all the records of the Hyborian Age, wo can prove he didn't?
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