Artisans of the Ancient Mediterranean

The image is a detail taken from a Thracian tomb painting at Kazanlak in Bulgaria. The tomb in question is estimated to have been erected at the end of the 4th century BCE. It is a beehive tomb for a former Thracian King and was discovered in 1944 (Boardman 1993 357;www.bulgariatravel.org). The painting on the tomb depicts a scene with men and horses on one side and a couple eating together and being waited upon by servants on the other, with figures riding chariots inset into the smaller circle. The detail being used for this paper is of the couple dining together and being waited upon by servants. There seem to be at least three ethnicities represented. The servant on the left appears to be of North European descent, the servant to the right appears to be of Latin or Greek descent, as is the woman who is seated, while the man who is seated appears to be of African descent. The artist depicted this figure as dark skinned with tightly curled hair. According to both Beardsley (11) and Snowden (1948 32) these two characteristics are the mos

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iopians were often considered exotic, especially if they were from Nubia, which was known as an independent country in its own right, rich in resources that were desired by other countries around it (6). Beardsley (1929), in describing a stucco painting of a black man giving a woman a gold necklace in a wedding ceremony, refers to this as symbolism pointing to the importance of Nubia as the "Eldorado" of its time (10). Indeed, Greeks and Romans were more likely to believe that people from places like Gaul, Briton, and Ierene (Ireland) were subhuman savages and there were, in fact, more white slaves than there were black (Snowden 1987 6). It seems that circumstance had more to do with one being a slave than race did. Snowden (1948) expands on this idea by referring to Menander, a contemporary Greek philosopher, who insisted that "it makes no difference whether one is an Ethiopian or a Scythian; natural bent, not race, determines nobility" (7). So, as far as the Greeks were concerned, Africans, often referred to as Ethiopians because of their "sunburnt" skin (Beardsley 2), were considered to be as civilized as Greek society. In this case, a prosperous and powerful man of African descent would then be a more typical picture tha
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1286
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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