HOW THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND ROMANS DESCRIBED ETHIOPIANS AND EGYPTIANS

Zeus made a journey to the shores of the Ocean to feast among the blameless Ethiopians (for 12 days).
- Homer, The Iliad, Book 1, lines 423-424.

...when they saw her (Iris), all the winds rose up with invitations....But she refused and said: I'm bound onward, across the streams of Ocean, to the country of the Ethiopians; hekatombs they'll make for the gods; I must attend the feast. - Homer, The Iliad, Book 23, lines 205-207.

But now that god (Poseidon) had gone far off among the Ethiopians, most remote of men...in sunset lands and the lands of the rising sun, to be regaled by smoke of thighbones burning, haunches of rams and bulls, a hundred fold. He lingered delighted at the banquet table.
- Homer, the Odyssey, Book 1, lines 25-31.

[the Ethiopians] were the first to be taught to honor the gods and to hold sacrifices and festivals and processions and festivals and the other rites by which men honor the deity...
-Diodorus

Aelian does not overlook the fact that Ethiopia is the place where the gods bathe.
- Snowden, Blacks in Antquity, p. 147.

They also told me that the Egyptians first brought into use the names of the twelve gods, which the Greeks took over from them.
- Herodotus, Book 2

...it was not the Egyptians who took the name Heracles from the Greeks. The opposite is true: it was the Greeks who took it from the Egyptians...
- Herodotus.

Melampus ("black-footed")...brought into Greece a number of things that he had learned in Egypt, and amongst them was the worship of Dionysus (Osiris). I will never admit that the similar ceremonies performed in Greece and Egypt are the result of mere coincidence--had that been so, our rites would have been more Greek in character and less recent in origin.
- Herodotus.

The names of nearly all the gods came to Greece from Egypt. I know from the inquiries I have made that they came from abroad, and it seems likely that it was from Egypt.

- Herodotus.

And Eos bare to Tithonus brazen-crested Memnon, king of the Ethiopians....And to Cephalus she bare a splendid son, strong Phaeton...
- Hesoid, Theogony, lines 985-7.

...an image of pious, just Ethiopians became so imbedded in Greco-Roman tradition that echoes are heard throughout classical literature.
- Frank Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity, p. 144.

The fifty sons of Aegyptus were described as black....The Danaids described themselves as "black and smitten by the sun"....To King Pelasgus they have the appearance of Libyans, or inhabitants of the Nile.
- Snowden, p. 157.

Satyrs (sileni after Silenus) often resemble Negroes with respect to thickness of the lips and snubness of nose. - Snowden, p. 160.

Two of these [kabeiric] vases depict Odysseus and a Negro Circe...
- Snowden, p. 161.

Figures with Negroid traits appearing in other Kabeiric vases include Aphrodite, Hera, Cephalus...
- Snowden, p. 161.

The castration of Uranus is not necessarily metaphorical if some of the victors had originated in East Africa where, to this day, the Galla warriors carry a miniature sickle into battle to castrate their enemies.
- Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, vol.1, p. 38.

According to the Pelasgians, the goddess Athene was born beside Lake Tritonis in Libya...
- Graves, quoting Apollonius Rhodius, p. 44.

Plato identified Athene, patroness of Athens, with the Libyan goddess Neith...
- Graves, citing Timaeus.

Pottery finds suggest a Libyan immigration into Crete as early as 4,000 B.C.; and a large number of goddess-worshipping Libyan refugees from the Western Delta seem to have arrived there when Upper and Lower Egypt were forcibly united under the first dynasty...
- Graves, p. 45.

...elsewhere [Aphrodite] was called Melaenis ("black one")...[and]Scotia ("dark one")...
- Graves, p. 72.

Demeter is said to have reached Greece by way of Crete...But Demeter's origin is to be looked for in Libya.
- Graves, pp.95-96.

..the three Gorgons, dwellers in Libya...
- Graves, p. 127

When [Typhon] came rushing toward Olympus, the gods fled in terror to Egypt where they disguised themselves as animals: Zeus becoming a ram; Apollo a crow; Dionysus, a goat; Hera, a white cow; Artemis, a cat; Aphrodite, a fish; Ares, a boar; Hermes, an ibis, and so on.
- Graves, p. 134.

At Dodona...the priestesses who deliver the oracles have a different version of the story: two black doves, they say flew away from Thebes in Egypt, and one of them alighted at Dodona, and the other in Libya.
- Herodotus, p. 151

As to the bird being black [at Dodona], they merely signify by this that the woman was an Egyptian.
- Herodotus, p. 152

The Telchines (Rhodes) were Children of the Sea....They were...worshipped by an early matriarchal people of Greece...whom the patriarchal Hellenes persecuted...Their origin may have been East African.
- Graves, p. 189.

King Belus, who ruled Chemmis in Thebaid, was the son of Libya by Poseidon, and twin-brother of Agenor. His wife...daughter of Nilus, bore him the twins Aegyptus and Danaus and a third son Cepheus.
- Graves, citing Herodotus, Apollodorus, p. 200.

Danaus...had fifty daughters called the Danaids (born of Egyptian and Ethiopian mothers)....he built a ship for himself and his daughters...and sailed toward Greece together, by way of Rhodes....[He] became so powerful a ruler that all the Pelasgians of Greece called themselves Danaans.
- Graves, citing Hyginus, Apollodorus, Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus, Pausanias, and Plutarch, p. 201-2.

The myth [of the Danaids] records the early arrival in greece of Helladic colonists from Palestine, by way of Rhodes, and their introduction of agriculture into the Peloponnese. It is claimed that they included emigrants from Libya and Ethiopia, which seems probable.
- Graves, p. 203.

Melampus, ("black foot") the Minyan, Cretheus's grandson...was the first mortal to be granted prophetic powers, the first to practice as a physician, the first to build temples to Dionysus in Greece, and the first to temper wine with water.
- Graves, citing Apollodorus and Athenaeus, p. 233.

Melampodes ("black feet") is a common Classical name for the Egyptians; and these stories of how Melampus understood what birds...were saying are likely to be of African origin...
- Graves.

Perseus paused for refreshments at Chemmis in Egypt...and then flew on. As he rounded the coast of Philistia...he caught sight of a naked woman chained to a sea-cliff, and instantly fell in love with her. This was Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus, the Ethiopian King of Joppa, and Cassiopeia....Perseus (who married Andromeda) founded Mycenae.
- Graves, citing Herodotus, Tzetzes, Strabo, Pliny, and Apollodorus.

[Minos] laid siege to Nisa, ruled by Nisus the Egyptian, who had a daughter named Scylla.
- Graves, p. 308.