years of time, with the ordinaiy class of black slaves still imported
from the upper Nile-basin for sale in the bazaars at Cairo.
Both these monuments belong to the XVHth and XXth dynasties,
which carried the arms of the Pharaohs to the upper Nile and to the
Euphrates. The other artistical nations of antiquity knew: little of
the Negro-raCe. They did not come before Solomon’s epoch into
immediate and constant contact with it. We see soon after, however,
a negro in an Assyrian battle-scene of the time of Sakgon, at
Khorsabad [90],209 He might have been exported from Memphis by
Phoenician slave-dealers to Asia,
where he fell fighting for his
master against the Assyrians; who
did not fail to perpetuate the
memory of such an extraordinary
feature as a black warrior must
have been to them. On that remarkable
relief' of the tomb of
Darius Hystaspes, at Persepolis,
(supra, p. ? fig. 35) we have seen
the negro as a representative of
Africa. The Greeks seldom drew
blacks: still, on beautiful vases of
the British Museum we meet with
the well-known negro features in a
90.
K h o r sa b ad-N e g r o .
battle-scene, [See the annexed plate IX, fig. 1]. Another such
vase, with the representation of Hercules slaying negroes, has been
published by Micali.210 Etruscan potters, who, as already remarked,
liked to draw Oriental types, moulded vases into the shape of a negro
head, and coupled it sometimes with the head- of white males or
females. The British Museum contains several of these very characteristic
utensils. [See Plate IX, figs. 2, 3, 4], These two Etrurian
vases are not older than the 4th century b . c.— probably between
200 and 250 b . c. The medal-room of the British Museum contains,
besides, three silver coins of Delphi, age about 400 b . c.; having on
one face the head of a negro, with the woolly hair admirably indicated
; and on the other a goat’s head seen in front-view, between
two dolphins, the usual type of Delphi. We know likewise several
Roman cameos, which represent negroes with all the refined elegance
of the imperial epoch [91]. Thus we possess effigies of negroes
drawn by six different nations of antiquity: Egyptians, Assyrians,
Persians, Greeks, Etruscans and Romans; from about the 18th cenFig.
209 B o t ta , Monument de Ninive, p i. 8 8 . 210 Monumenti Antichi.