#and roman historians were by and large full of shit anyway

[uncontrolledsubstances]

The Roses of Heliogabalus (detail), Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1888

[max--phillips]

hi :) i am a training historian focusing heavily on art, and i saw your post about ancient rome on my timeline, and i just wanted to say a few things about your “why we don’t have black art.” of course, you did not ask for this, it just sparked some thoughts and i figured i would drop by and say hello! <3

but if you want to learn some more, here are my two cents xx

1. we’ve only excavated roughly 10ish percent of “ancient rome”. there is a LOT left to discover. the issue with archaeology is that it is very expensive and very laborious, and it takes a long while to reap any sort of reward.

2. back in the 19th and 20th centuries, safe excavation practices were pretty nonexistent, we didn’t have the ‘rule book’ that we do now, so to speak. there are stories of archaeologists using dynamite to dig- so, a lot of stuff has been lost to negligence and ignorance to proper ways of excavating. (it still happens today!) for example, a lot of egypt was excavated by random people, too! not trained archaeologists and historians. for a while, richer folks wanted to have hands on experience with history, so in the early 20th century that’s what they did. (i don’t blame them, i probably would too if i had a shit ton of money!)

3. rome was also notorious for flooding- it’s not on a very nice location geographically. even today, many parts of italy have flooded, destroying hundreds of art pieces and artifacts. (such as the great flood in florence, which happened in 1966) a lot of artifacts are lost to natural disasters.

4. a lot of stuff just doesn’t survive. the fall of rome happened in 476 AD, and that’s over 1500 years ago. an issue i have also discovered is that a lot of surviving tablets and letters from the ancient world are just…. receipts and lists. nothing juicy. they were just normal people, you know?

5. a lot of art from rome could also have been lost to religious wars during the middle ages. that is an academic speculation, but culture is typically the first to go during a religious war or crusade.

6. also, roman art was fragile. all art is. we have lost a multitude of great paintings and pottery because it doesn’t last very long. a big example of this is someone a bit more recent than rome- Da Vinci. He experimented a LOT with types of paintings and techniques. his last supper painting began deteriorating just a few years after he painted it, because he tried to do a well fresco using oil paints. (not good lol) art is not forever, unfortunately, so i can imagine a lot of roman pottery not lasting very long with how fragile it is.

also, one last thing. i think we tend to group ancient societies into one large homogenous blog, and i find that very modernist and dangerous. ancient rome was full of different dialects, people, and groups, and to say they were all one thing it very dangerous. same for ancient greece- it was made up of various tribes! sparta was not athens, etc etc.

i believe that that goes for all history, as well. even well up into the 20rh century.

racism, as we know it, is a fairly newer concept in the historical time line. a lot of slavery back in the ancient world was based on status and wealth, or who was better at fighting, and not necessarily skin color. (still absolutely horrible though. obviously!)

for example, ancient egypt was, as new evidence suggests, a thriving society with multiple people from multiple backgrounds. (we’ve discovered tombs with people who all have different types of skin colors, insinuating that the most important people in their society were made up of a rather inclusive bunch.) and the same goes for north africa, today and then- it is a beautiful and diverse part of the map, and not one country is the same, and neither are their people!

the world is not made up of horrible people, and i think it would do us all some good to remember that. there is more love than hate, there always has been, and we can see it in art throughout time <3 ah, but i digress!

anyways, I have put some beautiful ancient art below depicting people of color. the first one is my fave! xxx

Hell yeah, thank you so much for this input!!!

(I have a lot of feelings about the era of the “I have money and no idea what I’m doing, I’m going to go eat a mummy.” Or “I’m going to go find Troy and inadvertently contribute to the Nazi platform.” (On that note, if you find that article interesting, I highly suggest these episodes of Behind the Bastards on the history of the swastika (part 1, part 2). Because at one point it really was just a symbol that like, every civilization on earth used at one point or another. And then a bunch of racist antisemites had to go and ruin it.) But seriously, Europeans loved eating mummies. Or using them in paint. And generally just destroying priceless artifacts for funsies. It infuriates me much the same way the fact the library at Alexandria was burned infuriates me, y’know?)

But I super agree with you vis a vis the fact we tend to paint “Ancient Rome” and similar societies/empires as a monolith. I mean… here hang on

It goes without saying that today, Spanish culture is different from French is different from British, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Algerian, Egyptian, Palestinian, etc etc etc. And that still would’ve been the case at this point. Sure there was influence (and later, it’s hard to escape the influence of the Catholic Church) but it’s not like Roman soldiers showed up one day in all these different places and replaced the whole local culture with marble columns and olive oil. (I mean, there was probably a lot of olive oil, but that’s besides the point)

I would still argue that there is probably a reason that we don’t see as much Roman-era art of Black people as we probably could, and whose fault that is I don’t know—it could be modern curators, it could be those 19th/20th century “archaeologists,” it could be neither and just pure chance—but I am here right now begging people that if you’re writing in this era, think for a few seconds before you pull all of your inspiration from rows of Roman statues portraying white people. (Also, if I’m remembering correctly, those statues were painted some pretty wild colors at their height, which is neat)

ANYWAY, thank you for the extra info !! I appreciate your expertise on the matter :0 thank you very much for sharing!!