The foregoing pages will have shown how wide of the mark Brantlinger's comment is, even though his view represents an almost universal assumption in contemporary African studies. Africa was perceived as home to a fabulous and paradisical ‘worthy Ethiopia’ even as it was persistently seen as the site of the most abject and darkest ‘savage Ethiopia’ that the Mediterranean imagination could devise, some two millennia before the emergence of the fantasies of ‘Victorian invention’; and it is this conundrum which I set out to address in this study. I have tried to show that as early as the late New Kingdom, certainly by about 1200 BCE, the Egyptians had developed not only a fully-fledged ethnographic distinction between themselves and Nubians, but also, and more pertinently, a clear differentiation between a refined, elite Kushitic type and other, almost caricatured, African people, such as the prisoners depicted beneath the feet of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel. These distinctions were given further currency by the black Kushite rulers of Egypt's Twenty-fifth Dynasty in order to distinguish themselves from African Negroid peoples. Subsequently, and almost without fail, the Greek, Ptolemaic, Roman and early Christian cultures of the Mediterranean would articulate the same distinctions, reduce them to stereotypes, and apply them universally to most African people – except for those of Egypt and the Mediterranean African coast, and the denizens of a mythic ‘worthy Ethiopia’ thought to exist somewhere near the headwaters of the Nile.

Throughout this process of image formation and transference, a dialectic paradigm of ‘two Ethiopias’, originally no more than a casual reference in the Homeric epics, would be preserved and sporadically elaborated.