Byssus
05-25-2008, 06:54 PM
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Rosim Ababikov, native of Stepanovka, a settlement near Batumi, Georgia. Photo taken in 1913.
Extra-African Old World Negroes
Christian and Muslim slave records position African slaves in the Crimea, the Ukraine, northern Iran, and near Montenegro (see English 1959, Golden-Hanga 1966, Tynes 1973, Blakely 1986, Khanga 1992), both in groups and as individual workers, freed and enslaved (Schneider 1942). Whereas Blakely insists that "among European states, Russia was highly conspicuous for her lack of involvement in the slave trade" (1986, p. 28) because of domestic serfdom, he documents the use of small numbers of young black servants in eighteenth-century Tsarist courts, imported from places as distant as Ethiopia and Holland as slaves "given personal freedom in exchange for a lifetime service obligation" (p. 15). Blakely (1986), English (1959), and Lamont (1946) mention the presence of once-enslaved Africans in Abkhazia, presumably purchased by Abkhazian royalty in Ottoman slave ports in Turkey some time around the eighteenth century.
Imperial Russians called these people arapy, efiopy, and negry (blackamoors, Ethiopians, and Negros), linking their identities not only to African origins but also to Ottoman territories and circuits of influence (see Fisher 1980, Lewis 1990). According to Golden-Hanga (1966, p. 10), Russian statistical data in the nineteenth century categorized them as "Arabs" or "Jews."
An Ancient Presence?
However, not all accounts of African presence in the Caucasus trace it to the slave trade. According to English (1959), African communities in Abkhazia span a period beginning before the fifth century BC. He cites Herodotus (p. 49), who wrote of the inhabitants of Colchis (a Black Sea coastal region north of Georgia's border with Turkey) in 450 BC:
[It] is undoubtedly a fact that the Colchians are of Egyptian descent. I noticed this myself before I heard anyone else mention it ... My own idea on the subject was based first on the fact that they have black skins and woolly hair ... and secondly, and more especially, on the fact that the Colchians, the Egyptians and the Ethiopians are the only races which from ancient times have practiced circumcision. (Herodotus Bk I1/104; see also Du Bois 1970, p. 31).
Herodotus goes on to narrate an Egyptian story about Pharoah Sesostris leading an army northward through Syria and Turkey all the way to Colchis through the southern Balkans to Greece, returning home the same way, leaving colonists behind at the Colchian river Phasis (Poe 1999). Herodotus is not the only one to claim an early African presence: In the fourth century AD, church fathers St. Jerome and Sophronius described Colchis as the "second Ethiopia" for its black population (English 1959), and the nineteenth-century Abkhazian linguist and ethnographer Dmitri Gulia claimed parallels between Abkhazian and Abyssinian toponyms, names, and rituals to prove an ancient African origin (cited in Tynes 1973). Rediscovery
The Black Sea coast of Abkhazia, in Caucasus Georgia bordering Turkey, is the site of several black communities reported in Russian imperial newspapers and periodicals in 1913. As Blakely notes, the presence of these "Negros" in Abkhazia was discovered repeatedly, first just before World War I, then after the Revolution (see Parry 1925), then during World War II (see Schneider 1942), and again in the Brezhnev period (see Golden-Hanga 1966, Tynes 1973), "each time with amazement but often in ignorance of prior such 'discoveries"' (Blakely 1986, p. 5).
Yet each inquiry into the ostensibly mysterious origins of the Africans recycles texts and citations. One such text, a letter to the editor, was first published in 1913 in the Russian-language paper Kavkaz, printed in Tblisi, Georgia. It was sent by one E. Markov and was among a number of responses elicited by an article by Russian naturalist Vradii and another published by rival scholar Elius (cited in Blakely 1986). This letter, along with others, was collected and republished by Vradii in his 1914 volume, Negroes of Batumi Province:
Passing for the first time through the Abkhazian community of Adzyubzha, I was struck by the purely tropical landscape around me: against the background of a bright green primeval jungle there stood huts and sheds built of wood and covered with reeds; curly-headed Negro children played on the ground and a Negro woman passed by carrying a load on her head. Black-skinned people wearing white clothes in the bright sun resembled a typical picture of some African village ... (Markov reprinted in Vradii 1914, pp. 16-17; quoted in Tynes 1973, p. 2 and Blakely 1986, p. 9).
Source: "African Presence in Former Soviet Spaces" by Kesha Fikes and Alaina Lemon (Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 31, (2002), pp. 497-524).
Rosim Ababikov, native of Stepanovka, a settlement near Batumi, Georgia. Photo taken in 1913.
Extra-African Old World Negroes
Christian and Muslim slave records position African slaves in the Crimea, the Ukraine, northern Iran, and near Montenegro (see English 1959, Golden-Hanga 1966, Tynes 1973, Blakely 1986, Khanga 1992), both in groups and as individual workers, freed and enslaved (Schneider 1942). Whereas Blakely insists that "among European states, Russia was highly conspicuous for her lack of involvement in the slave trade" (1986, p. 28) because of domestic serfdom, he documents the use of small numbers of young black servants in eighteenth-century Tsarist courts, imported from places as distant as Ethiopia and Holland as slaves "given personal freedom in exchange for a lifetime service obligation" (p. 15). Blakely (1986), English (1959), and Lamont (1946) mention the presence of once-enslaved Africans in Abkhazia, presumably purchased by Abkhazian royalty in Ottoman slave ports in Turkey some time around the eighteenth century.
Imperial Russians called these people arapy, efiopy, and negry (blackamoors, Ethiopians, and Negros), linking their identities not only to African origins but also to Ottoman territories and circuits of influence (see Fisher 1980, Lewis 1990). According to Golden-Hanga (1966, p. 10), Russian statistical data in the nineteenth century categorized them as "Arabs" or "Jews."
An Ancient Presence?
However, not all accounts of African presence in the Caucasus trace it to the slave trade. According to English (1959), African communities in Abkhazia span a period beginning before the fifth century BC. He cites Herodotus (p. 49), who wrote of the inhabitants of Colchis (a Black Sea coastal region north of Georgia's border with Turkey) in 450 BC:
[It] is undoubtedly a fact that the Colchians are of Egyptian descent. I noticed this myself before I heard anyone else mention it ... My own idea on the subject was based first on the fact that they have black skins and woolly hair ... and secondly, and more especially, on the fact that the Colchians, the Egyptians and the Ethiopians are the only races which from ancient times have practiced circumcision. (Herodotus Bk I1/104; see also Du Bois 1970, p. 31).
Herodotus goes on to narrate an Egyptian story about Pharoah Sesostris leading an army northward through Syria and Turkey all the way to Colchis through the southern Balkans to Greece, returning home the same way, leaving colonists behind at the Colchian river Phasis (Poe 1999). Herodotus is not the only one to claim an early African presence: In the fourth century AD, church fathers St. Jerome and Sophronius described Colchis as the "second Ethiopia" for its black population (English 1959), and the nineteenth-century Abkhazian linguist and ethnographer Dmitri Gulia claimed parallels between Abkhazian and Abyssinian toponyms, names, and rituals to prove an ancient African origin (cited in Tynes 1973). Rediscovery
The Black Sea coast of Abkhazia, in Caucasus Georgia bordering Turkey, is the site of several black communities reported in Russian imperial newspapers and periodicals in 1913. As Blakely notes, the presence of these "Negros" in Abkhazia was discovered repeatedly, first just before World War I, then after the Revolution (see Parry 1925), then during World War II (see Schneider 1942), and again in the Brezhnev period (see Golden-Hanga 1966, Tynes 1973), "each time with amazement but often in ignorance of prior such 'discoveries"' (Blakely 1986, p. 5).
Yet each inquiry into the ostensibly mysterious origins of the Africans recycles texts and citations. One such text, a letter to the editor, was first published in 1913 in the Russian-language paper Kavkaz, printed in Tblisi, Georgia. It was sent by one E. Markov and was among a number of responses elicited by an article by Russian naturalist Vradii and another published by rival scholar Elius (cited in Blakely 1986). This letter, along with others, was collected and republished by Vradii in his 1914 volume, Negroes of Batumi Province:
Passing for the first time through the Abkhazian community of Adzyubzha, I was struck by the purely tropical landscape around me: against the background of a bright green primeval jungle there stood huts and sheds built of wood and covered with reeds; curly-headed Negro children played on the ground and a Negro woman passed by carrying a load on her head. Black-skinned people wearing white clothes in the bright sun resembled a typical picture of some African village ... (Markov reprinted in Vradii 1914, pp. 16-17; quoted in Tynes 1973, p. 2 and Blakely 1986, p. 9).
Source: "African Presence in Former Soviet Spaces" by Kesha Fikes and Alaina Lemon (Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 31, (2002), pp. 497-524).