Seeing race is as old as the ages. This much is clear from the recently published multi-volume Image of the Black in Western Art, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr. In the introduction to the first volume, covering Pharaonic Egypt and the Graeco-Roman Period, classicist, art historian and sociologist Jeremy Tanner disputes the argument that racial prejudice is a modern invention that was unknown to the ancients. His argument is primarily a critique of the Afrocentrists, who arugue that black people were well integrated into these early societies, and of the argument that racism owes its origins to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's racial classification at the end of the eighteenth century. He criticises those who, like Martin Bernal, argue that ancient racism pales in comparison with ‘the tidal wave of ethnicity and racialism’ of the eighteenth century, even though he also admits that in the early period racial ‘boundaries were not policed in the systematic manner characteristic of the southern United States before the Civil Rights Act or the apartheid era in South Africa’.

Without entering into the intricacies of the debate about who was more or less racist between the ancients and the moderns – although the inventions of the latter would seem hard to match – there seems to be sufficient consensus in the literature that ‘neither ancient Egypt, nor Greece and Rome were before “color prejudice”’. Even more important for the purposes of this book is to point out that racialisation of black people in terms of body parts – dark skin, thick lips, woolly hair, exaggerated penis size – and their representation in art was a reflection of their geopolitical power or lack thereof at any given point in time.