Race, racism, and ethno-racial factors have shaped histories of ancient Greece and Rome from at least the nineteenth century. Historians of the ancient world show the influence of Hegel and race science on their writings. Notable examples include Droysen’s comments on Persian civilisation and Mommsen’s on the Celtic. Historians are troubled by racial mingling in the Roman empire, and some explain the decline and fall of Rome as the result of racial mingling. Racialising attitudes and analyses can be found in the early twentieth century as well and continue into the years of the Second World War. Not all historians are straightforwardly racist, and many show complicated and contradictory attitudes towards race. They make clear that a liberal outlook on life is not incompatible with racist beliefs in some areas. This is the context in which to appreciate Frank Snowden’s writings on Blacks in antiquity and Martin Bernal’s attempt to rewrite the history of Graeco-Roman antiquity and classical scholarship.

What marks out Athens in the Early Iron Age (EIA) is not only clear continuity from the Bronze Age but a steady rise of population through the EIA into the Archaic period. Following a brief topographical overview and a summary of Athens before 1200 BCE, this chapter focuses on the evidence of tombs, including an account of five and a half Athenians: a putative warrior aged 35–45 years at death, an old man aged 70, a young woman in her early 20s accompanied by terracotta model boots, a slightly older woman with her unborn child, and a social outcast. This is followed by what evidence there exists for the settlement of Athens. A major theme is the resilience of the population from the Bronze Age into the EIA and Archaic period. Whether it is cast as a village or town, the urban nucleus of the settlement was the Athenian Acropolis. What played out in the EIA in Athens was the formation of what was to become one of the largest and most successful city-states of the ancient Greek world.

Study of the material remains of Greek and Roman antiquity played a key role in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emergence of the modern disciplinary formation of Classics as the comprehensive study of the ancient Mediterranean world. Over the same period, it was also central to the development of racial thought in the spheres of aesthetics, ethnology, and historical anthropology. After articulating a conception of race that, following Stuart Hall and Noémie Ndiaye, treats it as a ‘sliding signifier’ drawing upon an archive or repertoire of racial tropes, this chapter discusses how, in studying Greek and Roman monuments under the sign of ‘art’, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship attended to material antiquity in a manner that was both formed by and formative of constructions of race emerging between the ‘Age of Discovery’ and the European ‘Enlightenment’. It explores the relation of classical art historiography to other racializing discourses of difference along three key axes: ‘Culture’, ‘Differentiation’, and ‘Beauty’, attending to the role of environmental or climate theory, heredity, and physiognomy in emerging theories that sought to explain the diversity of ancient and modern peoples as evidenced by their visual and material productions.

This chapter reflects on modern and contemporary narratives surrounding the modern ‘racing’ of the inhabitants of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt by focusing on two cases, each of which pertains to a local woman. Both of these women’s bodies have become, two millennia or so after their death, a racial canvas at best, and a battlefield at worst. The first woman is the one portrayed on a funerary portrait on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The second woman needs no introduction: She was Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh of Macedonian-ruled Egypt.

During the Geometric period (ca. 900–700 BCE), the sociopolitical structure of Big Men became collaborative aristocratic rule. Most Geometric buildings had fieldstone foundations, mudbrick walls, and pitched thatch roofs, or, in the Cyclades and Crete, fieldstone walls and flat roofs. Larger dwellings were usually apsidal or rectangular, smaller dwellings often oval. In the eighth century, a large household could include separate buildings and areas inside an enclosure (Oropos, Eretria). By 700, multi-room rectangular houses with a courtyard appear (Zagora). Sanctuaries in settlements were usually open-air. Sanctuaries outside settlements proliferated in Late Geometric as sites of elite display and competition; rituals included animal sacrifice, communal feasting, and votive offerings. Monumental temples were built 725–700 at Eretria, Amarynthos, Naxos, Samos, Kalapodi, and Ano Mazaraki, all extra-urban except Eretria. Geometric burials were generally inhumations, though cremation was common in Athens/Attica. On pottery, angular geometric motifs replaced Protogeometric circular designs. Figured scenes (funerals, battles) appear in the mid-eighth century and possibly mythological scenes in the late eighth century. Greeks, probably Euboeans, borrowed the Phoenician alphabet ca. 800 BCE; early inscriptions were scratched on pottery, some in poetic meter. By ca. 700, many settlements had developed into the politically organized community called a polis.

This chapter foregrounds recent studies on race and religion as analytic categories in the study of the ancient world. Conventional scholarly analysis of the late-antique Mediterranean world often assumes that uses of the terms race and racism are anachronistic in studies of premodern societies. By contrast, religion is often taken for granted as an unproblematic category of analysis across both modern and premodern social contexts. More recently, critical studies of race and religion have illustrated the shortcomings in the basic assumptions that undergird the uses and disuses of terms like race, racism, religion, and ethnicity in studies of premodernity. Drawing on these recent works, this chapter demonstrates the entanglements between religious and racialised conceptions of group identities and hierarchies. Race and religion are conceptually intertwined to the extent that religious ideas have been instrumental in processes of racialisation and religious groups have been targets of racialisation. The chapter concludes with examples of how theories of environmental determinism and anti-Semitism manifest in Christian ideologies and imperial policies in late antiquity.

This chapter surveys how contemporary White nationalist publications use ancient evidence to promote pseudoscientific theories of race that justify violence and oppression. Such interpretations do not distort ancient sources; challenging them requires challenging the modern assumption of the biological and genetic reality of race. In fact, the ancient evidence that White nationalist intellectuals cite reveals the pervasiveness in antiquity of attitudes towards human difference that can productively be understood as racial even after the pseudoscientific assumptions these interpreters impose on that evidence have been rejected. Furthermore, they prompt us to recognise the persistence of pseudoscientific understandings of race in many popular translations of ancient works and standard reference lexica, understandings that remain unchallenged and even unrecognised as long as the relevance of the categories of race and racism to the study of antiquity is denied.

The end of the Mycenaean palatial system around 1200 BC marked a turning point in the history of the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age, which brought about a fundamental transformation of the economic and social structures. The twelfth and the first half of the eleventh centuries BCE, i.e., the postpalatial period of LH IIIC and the Submycenaean period, were characterized by continuity and change. Life during this epoch was determined by rivalry and interaction between small-scale social groups, sometimes across long distances. The specialized arts and crafts controlled by the palaces had died out, while other sectors of the craft industry such as bronze-working and shipbuilding survived at a remarkably high level. Burial rites and ritual practices also continued in the tradition of the palatial era for three to four generations, while new trends emerged in other areas. The developments on the Greek mainland are illustrated by a regional survey. It shows that this transformative era also marks the transition to the Early Iron Age when Greek identities began to emerge.

The twelfth–eleventh centuries BCE mark the transition between the Late Bronze Age (LBA) of Cyprus and the very different social world of the Early Iron Age. The end of the LBA is marked by violent destructions, the abandonment of urban centers and rural communities, and a subsequent dramatic shift in settlement pattern. There is a clear break in material production on the island – especially in pottery production – and significant changes in funerary and ritual practice. Within the wider East Mediterranean, international maritime trade broke down, major palace economies and overarching empire states disappeared, and populations relocated. The direct effect on Cyprus is debated, particularly the presence of Mycenaean colonizing communities. The island’s copper trade apparently persisted, at a reduced scale from the LBA, and cultural and trading links continued with Crete and Philistine communities of the southern Levant. Using settlement and cemetery archaeology, this chapter explores the establishment of new communities on Cyprus ancestral to the Iron Age city kingdoms, the changing material world of the new settlements, contacts beyond the island, the earliest Phoenician activity on Cyprus, and the degree to which the island was a part of the emerging world of Iron Age Greece.

Did classical antiquity connect ethnicity, moral worth, and skin colour? The conventional answer is ‘no’, but then conventional Classics tends to stop, chronologically, before things get interesting. This chapter explores a set of texts from the Roman period and late antiquity that point towards an emergent if elusive epidermal racism. The drivers of this seem to be both empire, with its systematically reductive approach towards human diversity, and Christianity, with its theologisation of white light and black darkness. Late antique texts are, however, inconsistent: Some (e.g. Heliodorus) portray Blackness as noble and idealised, but others (e.g. Nonnus) certainly connect it with defilement and the infernal. Even in late antiquity, then, there is no coherent, thoroughgoing epidermal racism; but we undoubtedly find what Cord Whittaker has called a ‘shimmer’.

Ancient theories of human diversity and identity strongly influenced most modern forms of scientific racism, including eugenics, tropicalism, craniometry, environmental theories of human development, social evolutionary theories, and theories connecting ‘race’ and intelligence. This chapter explores three of these areas of influence: (1) environmental determinism; (2) models of evolution and the ‘progress’ of civilisations; and (3) population management schemes linked to eugenic thinking. These ideas spread throughout Europe as part of the Enlightenment project to classify everything and throughout much of the globe under the influence of European imperialism and colonialism culminating in the Nazi eugenics program. But this chapter focuses on developments in the United States, the country that pioneered the colour-based bioracism that still dominates contemporary racist thinking between 1870 and 1930, the years when the ‘science of man’ became academic and political dogma.

The chapter is concerned with non-archaeological evidence pertaining to the Early Iron Age in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean. Since this was the only period in Greek history that completely lacked literacy, we are left with oral tradition as the only means of transmitting information between ca. 1200 and ca. 750 BCE. However, numerous anachronisms found in the Homeric poems show that not everything Homer says about the past should be taken at face value. Much more reliable is the evidence of the dialects, another kind of nonarchaeological evidence that throws light on this period. The regional distribution of the historical Greek dialects fits in well with the destruction levels and depopulation attested at many Mycenaean sites, in that both suggest a sharp break in cultural continuity at the end of the Bronze Age. Nothing of this can be found in Homer. Instead, the epics convey an impressive demonstration of cultural continuity and of religious, social, and military uniformity in polities sharing a common identity. It was this picture of an imagined past that became canonical, and the memory of the collapse of Mycenaean Greece and of the period that immediately followed it was effectively wiped out.