Race in Antiquity
The Ancients
History Hit
4.7 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 9 October 2022
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
History is littered with devastating accounts of prejudice that shines a harsh light on the atrocities humans have inflicted on each other for centuries.
But has racism always plagued our society?
From the African son of Peter the Great of Russia, to the one-eyed black leader of the Kushite army - Warrior Queen Amanirenas, it seems skin colour presented no barriers for a person of African decent to amount to greatness in antiquity.
In this episode, Tristan is joined by Luke Pepera who is a writer, broadcaster, anthropologist, and historian to talk about the attitudes towards race in the ancient world.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's the Entrance on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's |
| 0:21.9 | podcast I'm recording this intro on my travels in my car as I venture down to the South |
| 0:27.6 | Coast this lovely day in early October. But enough of that because on to today's episode |
| 0:33.7 | I'm delighted because we've got back on the podcast finally Luke Pepperer. Luke he's |
| 0:39.2 | been on the podcast before but it's been a while since we chatted to Luke. The last time |
| 0:43.8 | he came on was to talk all about the Kingdom of Kush almost two years ago. It was about |
| 0:48.7 | time we got on the podcast. He was keen to come back on. He is writing a book at the |
| 0:53.2 | moment a massive book all about the history of Africa and of course there's quite a lot |
| 0:58.3 | of ancient history in that too. So we've recorded a couple of podcasts with Luke on ancient |
| 1:04.0 | African history. But this one it's a really interesting one and it's a really important |
| 1:09.0 | one too. We explore ancient Mediterranean Greco-Roman and Egyptian attitudes towards race |
| 1:18.2 | 2000 3000 years ago and it was a fascinating discussion where the color of your skin didn't |
| 1:26.4 | affect how people viewed you, how people treated you. It didn't negatively affect you |
| 1:31.7 | in any way. It was great to get Luke to talk about this important topic and I do hope |
| 1:36.2 | you enjoy. So that further ado to talk all about race and antiquity here's Luke. |
| 1:48.2 | Luke, good to have you back on the podcast and it's good to be doing it in person this time. |
| 1:58.0 | Yes, great to be here, Tristan. Thank you for inviting me. It's a long time, no, |
| 2:00.8 | to say. I mean last time was that the Kingdom of Kush wasn't it? It was more than a year, |
| 2:04.8 | almost two years ago. Yeah, yeah, it was. That was really fun to do talking about the |
| 2:08.5 | Kushites and their culture, their politics and their achievements. So yeah, no, it's really |
| 2:12.2 | great to be back. But Luke, this is such an interesting, very important topic isn't it? |
| 2:16.2 | But looking at ancient Mediterranean, ancient European astuse towards sub-Saharan Africans, |
... |
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