Chapter 4 delves into accounts of meetings between the mighty Aithiopians and their distant neighbors. Herodotus’s iteration of Aithiopia (Hdt. 3.17–26) simultaneously looks back to Homer’s utopian Aithiopia and positions Aithiopia as a historical allegory to critique Athenian imperial aggression. Through the Aithiopian king’s comments to Egyptian spies, Herodotus undermines any fixed, negative assumptions of foreigners that may lurk among his readership. Moreover, Herodotus distinguishes Aithiopians by their height, longevity, and skin color, thereby complicating a facile rendering of black people’s “race.” A reciprocal ethnography of Scythians further exposes the instability of race as two Scythian men, Anacharsis and Scyles, wear Greek clothes and maintain their Scythian identity (Hdt. 4.76–80). Their untimely demise reveals the dangers that Hellenocentric Scythians face once they return to their xenophobic homeland.

Chapter 7 concludes by reiterating the invisible ontologies that haunt current assessments of black skin. The fluid construction of black skin in ancient Greek literature and art aims to confront limiting treatment of race in the modern academy. A final glimpse at the poetry of Langston Hughes (1931) and Gwendolyn Brooks (1980) offers a suggestive model for revamping the ancient Greek archive in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 1 situates the reader within the landscape of Blackness in the twenty-first century. In addition to laying out the task at hand (untangling representations of blackness in Greek antiquity), this chapter underlines the dangerous consequences that occur when scholars conflate modern tropes with ancient material.

Animal remains, particularly skulls, have been interpreted as sacrificial ever since the beginnings of Minoan archaeology in the nineteenth century. This chapter argues that these remains can better be understood in terms of butchery and the consumption of animals at commensal feasts. Animal-head rhyta show that heads were used as trophies to commemorate such events.

As a result of its history of discovery, the archaeology of Bronze Age Crete is largely understood through a modernist view of nature and culture. This book provides an alternative framework derived from anthropology and human-animal studies. It introduces the ideas of animal practices, animal things and domestic/palatial collectives which will be used throughout the book.

Depictions of hunting are largely confined to sealstones in Bronze Age Crete and as a result the importance of hunting has been downplayed. This chapter argues that it was instead central to the organisation of territory in palatial Crete and was an animal practice which defined membership of the palatial collective. Large-scale depictions associated elaborately dressed women with hunted animals as a means to bring them into the palatial collective.

Marine-style pottery is emblematic of Bronze Age Crete but its origins in relations with marine animals have been downplayed by art historical approaches. This chapter revives Arthur Evans’s ideas of nature-moulding and nature-printing to broaden the definition of Marine style and link it to fishing and voyaging, and their importance to the palatial collective of Knossos.