Christopher Stedman Parmenter is an ancient historian specializing in the intertwined histories of race, culture, and long-distance trade in Archaic and Classical Greece. I am an Assistant Professor of Classics at the Ohio State University. Previously I held postdocs at the University of Pennsylvania (2021-22) and New York University (2020-21), where I also received my doctorate in Classics. My book project, entitled Racialized Commodities: Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, c. 700-300 BCE, asks how and why Greeks came to see their Mediterranean neighbors—like the “grey-eyed Thracians” and “dark-skinned Ethiopians” listed by the poet Xenophanes around 550 BCE—as racialized ‘Others’ in the middle of the first millennium. In 2021-22, I was a national lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America. As a side project, I have published on race, migration, and the history of the Armenian American diaspora on Ajam Media Collective. Supervisors: Barbara Kowalzig, Andrew Monson, David Konstan, Joan Breton Connelly, and Clemente Marconi
Today, few ancient historians believe that Greek and Roman slavery had anything to do with race o... more Today, few ancient historians believe that Greek and Roman slavery had anything to do with race or racism. But when histories of ancient slavery were first written in the 1780s, the connection was assumed. This article explores how and why race and racism persisted in Anglophone historiography on ancient slavery into the twentieth century, only disappearing in the 1950s. I argue that it might be time to reopen the book on whether ancient slavery was a racialized institution. Adopting insights from premodern critical race studies (PCRS), I argue that the real differences between ancient and Atlantic-world slaveries should not be seen in terms of discontinuity and rupture. Rather, I see the question through what Margo Hendricks calls a “bidirectional gaze,” by which social arrangements of the past few centuries might bear uncanny resemblance to institutions of the ancient past.
This article discusses the impact of genomic history, a subdiscipline that emerged in the study o... more This article discusses the impact of genomic history, a subdiscipline that emerged in the study of the ancient Mediterranean in the 2010s. In 2014, scientists first published a method for extracting genetic material, which they christened aDNA (ancient DNA), from ancient human remains in hot climates. After a decade of research, genomic history is now poised to transform our understanding of Mediterranean premodernity, centering migration and conflict as the key mechanisms for cultural change. Despite years of critique, aDNA researchers have failed to seriously examine the bioessentialist assumptions implicit in their work-a failure that has led many to deploy language that is strikingly evocative of pre-World War II racialism. Even worse, some genomic historians continue to make troubling overtures toward the ethnonationalist Right, which has been ascendant across Europe and North America since the 2010s. This article traces the intellectual genealogy of genomic history from World War II to the present, examines recent attempts to answer criticism from the humanities and social sciences, and suggests paths for responsible use of aDNA in historical and prehistorical scholarship.
My review of Sally Grainger's "The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the An... more My review of Sally Grainger's "The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World" (Routledge, 2021) published in 2022. https://rheaclassicalreviews.com/2022/02/17/parmenter-on-grainger/
Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, 2023
[Intro paragraph] The story of American classical studies in the last quarter of the twentieth ce... more [Intro paragraph] The story of American classical studies in the last quarter of the twentieth century begins with a boundary catastrophe. In the late 1980s, Martin Bernal, a bumbling, self-taught antiquarian (in another version, an America-hating English communist) stirred up a controversy that tore the study of the ancient Mediterranean apart. It sounds like pretty small stuff, but his premise was simple: ancient Greece owed everything it had to the African civilizations of the Nile Valley (Bernal 1987– 2006). To quite a large number of people the premise was not new—and in fact had once been conventional wisdom. There was good reason to believe that this narrative had been displaced by the rising tide of white supremacy in the nineteenth century (for retrospective see Levine 1998). But the critics (some well-networked in the shad- owy realm of what F. S. Saunders [2013: 344–45] calls “the cultural Cold War”) won: assailing him as an amateur, Maoist, and anti-Semite, they created a professional hazard for junior scholars sympathetic to his ideas (Rankine 2006: 8). Classics earned its reputation as the humanities discipline most hostile toward scholars of color and eroded much of its goodwill among university administrators and other people who make decisions (McCoskey 2018). And so here we are now. Just like his opponents warned at the time—Martin Bernal killed classics!
Post on Society for Classical Studies blog regarding Snake Island incident, Feb. 2022, and impact... more Post on Society for Classical Studies blog regarding Snake Island incident, Feb. 2022, and impact of Ukraine conflict on archaeology.
In Racialized Commodities: Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greec... more In Racialized Commodities: Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, c. 700–300 BCE, I situate the emergence of what I call ancient Greece’s “racial imaginary” against the background of Greece’s remarkable economic growth during the mid-first millennium. As a Greek diaspora fanned out across the Mediterranean for trade, mercenary service, or as an ecological strategy, they constructed a detailed imaginary of human diversity. These images, memorably evoked by the mid-sixth century poet Xenophanes of Colophon (“Ethiopians say that their gods are flat-nosed and dark; Thracians say theirs are gray-eyed and ruddy”), became widespread by the height of the Archaic Period. They traveled as part of a broader body of commercial—and partially ethnographic—knowledge that circulated amongst traders, which encoded information including production cycles, the sailing season, and business in foreign lands. It would be this imaginary that, during the Greek-Achaemenid wars of 494–454 BCE, would coalesce into the idea of the “barbarian.”
Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, 2021
This article publishes an assemblage of forty-two Egyptianizing faience vessels, figurines, and s... more This article publishes an assemblage of forty-two Egyptianizing faience vessels, figurines, and scarabs excavated by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the sanctuary of Apollo Hylates in Kourion, Cyprus, between 1936-1954. Nearly 80% of this material, dating to the first half of the 6th century BCE, were products of Greco-Egyptian workshops rarely encountered on the island. Using archival material held by the Penn Museum, I reconstruct the stratigraphy of an unpublished votive deposit where the bulk of the Egyptianizing faience was excavated.
Between 1947 and 2001, the African American professor, diplomat, and dean Frank M. Snowden, Jr la... more Between 1947 and 2001, the African American professor, diplomat, and dean Frank M. Snowden, Jr laid out an influential thesis about ‘race relations’ in the ancient Mediterranean. According to Snowden, Greeks and Romans were ‘white’; Africans, whom Greeks and Romans called ‘Ethiopians’, were ‘black’; Greek and Roman societies lacked modern ‘color prejudice’. In this article, I contextualize the development of Snowden’s ‘race relations’ thesis in the politics of the early Cold War. Reviewing Snowden’s research notes archived at Howard University, I argue that Snowden — who travelled widely after the Second World War as a US diplomat — purposefully distanced his thesis from the sociology of race during the 1940-50s. Instead, Snowden envisioned American racial categories as permanent fixtures of world history, optimistically looking to Greece and Rome as models for a post-segregation America. Finally, I trace the enduring impact of Snowden’s thesis by unpacking his historiography of Naukratis in the Archaic Period, which he had identified as the west’s first multiracial society.
This article argues that descriptions of the Black Sea found in the Archaic poets, Herodotus, and... more This article argues that descriptions of the Black Sea found in the Archaic poets, Herodotus, and later geographers were influenced by commercial itineraries circulated amongst Greek slave traders in the north. Drawing on an epigraphic corpus of twenty-three merchant letters from the region dating between c. 550 and 450 BCE, I contrast the travels of enslaved persons recorded in the documents with stylized descriptions found in literary accounts. This article finds that slaves took a variety of routes into—and out of—slavery, and that fear of enslavement was widely felt even among Greeks. Law courts might have been as important as “barbarian” warfare in ensnaring captives for export, and even slave traders themselves risked enslavement alongside their victims. Reconstructing the travels of individual slaves allows us to pursue a study in the spirit of what Joseph C. Miller has called the “biographical turn” in the study of slavery, privileging the experiences of the enslaved over the accounts of their masters. Although the lands around the distant Black Sea were never the leading source of slaves for Aegean cities, the wealth of primary testimony from the region puts it at the forefront in the history of slavery in ancient Greece.
https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2020.39.1.57
ERRATUM:
p. 59 -- 'Democracy and Capitalism' should read 'Capitalism and Slavery' (correct in bibliography)
Between 1909-25, the federal government launched several denaturalization lawsuits to determine w... more Between 1909-25, the federal government launched several denaturalization lawsuits to determine whether Armenian immigrants were eligible for US citizenship. With the massacres in Anatolia reaching their height between 1915-23, deportation posed a mortal threat to the Michaelian family of New York, who since arriving in the 1880s had built a successful rug business. In this essay, I use a trove of Armenian-language personal correspondence, business documents, and legal memoranda to reconstruct the Michaelians' attempt to evade the denaturalization sweep. In crafting a strategy to avoid the government's attention, the second generation of Armerican Michaelians veiled their ethnic origins in a silence that would only begin to be pushed back at the end of the twentieth century. https://ajammc.com/2019/11/17/george-kevork-race-law-michaelian-family/
This note compiles a list of nearly 100 Egyptianizing faience scarabs, pendants, figurines, and v... more This note compiles a list of nearly 100 Egyptianizing faience scarabs, pendants, figurines, and vessels excavated from the northern Black Sea coast dating between the late seventh and mid-sixth centuries B.C.E. I argue that the geographical distribution of so-called aegyptiaca offers a useful index testifying to the mobility of region’s early Greek migrants between their Ionian homelands, budding centers such as Istria and Olbia, and short-lived settlements in the countryside. In their circulation of Egyptianizing objects, Greek settlers introduced a taste among their indigenous trade partners for faience ‘trinkets’ as grave goods that flourished long after similar material fell out of favor in Greece. While sixth century imports represent only a tiny fraction of the over 9,000 faience scarabs, beads, and amulets known from the region between the Archaic period and late antiquity, they were an important channel that propagated Egyptianizing devotional practices in the far north.
https://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=article&id=3286608
Between c. 700-300 BCE, the ancient Greeks developed a vivid imaginary of the world's peoples. Ra... more Between c. 700-300 BCE, the ancient Greeks developed a vivid imaginary of the world's peoples. Ranging from the light-skinned, "gray-eyed Thracians" of the distant north to the "dark-skinned Ethiopians" of the far south, as the poet Xenophanes described them around 540 BCE, Greeks envisioned a world populated by human groups with distinct physiognomies. Racialized Commodities traces how Greece's "racial imaginary"--a confluence of thinking about cultural geography, commodity production, and human physiognomy--emerged from cross-cultural trade between Greece and its Mediterranean neighbors during the Archaic and Classical Periods. It adopts the model of a "commodity biography" to investigate how trade led to the entanglement of cultures, bodies, and things in Archaic and Classical Greece. For merchants, the racial imaginary might be used to play up the "exotic" provenance of their goods to consumers. It might also circulate practical information about customs, pricing, navigation, and doing business in foreign ports.
Archaic Greek attempts to explain foreign bodies were rarely pejorative, and Racialized Commodities begins with some of their earliest images of African peoples, described by Greeks as Egyptians or Ethiopians, before seeking to explain what changed in the early Classical Period. As the Persian Empire loomed and Greek cities became increasingly dependent on enslaved labor, negative stereotypes of Thracians and Scythians became widespread and coalesced into the charged idea of the barbaros--the "barbarian."
Today, few ancient historians believe that Greek and Roman slavery had anything to do with race o... more Today, few ancient historians believe that Greek and Roman slavery had anything to do with race or racism. But when histories of ancient slavery were first written in the 1780s, the connection was assumed. This article explores how and why race and racism persisted in Anglophone historiography on ancient slavery into the twentieth century, only disappearing in the 1950s. I argue that it might be time to reopen the book on whether ancient slavery was a racialized institution. Adopting insights from premodern critical race studies (PCRS), I argue that the real differences between ancient and Atlantic-world slaveries should not be seen in terms of discontinuity and rupture. Rather, I see the question through what Margo Hendricks calls a “bidirectional gaze,” by which social arrangements of the past few centuries might bear uncanny resemblance to institutions of the ancient past.
This article discusses the impact of genomic history, a subdiscipline that emerged in the study o... more This article discusses the impact of genomic history, a subdiscipline that emerged in the study of the ancient Mediterranean in the 2010s. In 2014, scientists first published a method for extracting genetic material, which they christened aDNA (ancient DNA), from ancient human remains in hot climates. After a decade of research, genomic history is now poised to transform our understanding of Mediterranean premodernity, centering migration and conflict as the key mechanisms for cultural change. Despite years of critique, aDNA researchers have failed to seriously examine the bioessentialist assumptions implicit in their work-a failure that has led many to deploy language that is strikingly evocative of pre-World War II racialism. Even worse, some genomic historians continue to make troubling overtures toward the ethnonationalist Right, which has been ascendant across Europe and North America since the 2010s. This article traces the intellectual genealogy of genomic history from World War II to the present, examines recent attempts to answer criticism from the humanities and social sciences, and suggests paths for responsible use of aDNA in historical and prehistorical scholarship.
My review of Sally Grainger's "The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the An... more My review of Sally Grainger's "The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World" (Routledge, 2021) published in 2022. https://rheaclassicalreviews.com/2022/02/17/parmenter-on-grainger/
Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, 2023
[Intro paragraph] The story of American classical studies in the last quarter of the twentieth ce... more [Intro paragraph] The story of American classical studies in the last quarter of the twentieth century begins with a boundary catastrophe. In the late 1980s, Martin Bernal, a bumbling, self-taught antiquarian (in another version, an America-hating English communist) stirred up a controversy that tore the study of the ancient Mediterranean apart. It sounds like pretty small stuff, but his premise was simple: ancient Greece owed everything it had to the African civilizations of the Nile Valley (Bernal 1987– 2006). To quite a large number of people the premise was not new—and in fact had once been conventional wisdom. There was good reason to believe that this narrative had been displaced by the rising tide of white supremacy in the nineteenth century (for retrospective see Levine 1998). But the critics (some well-networked in the shad- owy realm of what F. S. Saunders [2013: 344–45] calls “the cultural Cold War”) won: assailing him as an amateur, Maoist, and anti-Semite, they created a professional hazard for junior scholars sympathetic to his ideas (Rankine 2006: 8). Classics earned its reputation as the humanities discipline most hostile toward scholars of color and eroded much of its goodwill among university administrators and other people who make decisions (McCoskey 2018). And so here we are now. Just like his opponents warned at the time—Martin Bernal killed classics!
Post on Society for Classical Studies blog regarding Snake Island incident, Feb. 2022, and impact... more Post on Society for Classical Studies blog regarding Snake Island incident, Feb. 2022, and impact of Ukraine conflict on archaeology.
In Racialized Commodities: Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greec... more In Racialized Commodities: Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, c. 700–300 BCE, I situate the emergence of what I call ancient Greece’s “racial imaginary” against the background of Greece’s remarkable economic growth during the mid-first millennium. As a Greek diaspora fanned out across the Mediterranean for trade, mercenary service, or as an ecological strategy, they constructed a detailed imaginary of human diversity. These images, memorably evoked by the mid-sixth century poet Xenophanes of Colophon (“Ethiopians say that their gods are flat-nosed and dark; Thracians say theirs are gray-eyed and ruddy”), became widespread by the height of the Archaic Period. They traveled as part of a broader body of commercial—and partially ethnographic—knowledge that circulated amongst traders, which encoded information including production cycles, the sailing season, and business in foreign lands. It would be this imaginary that, during the Greek-Achaemenid wars of 494–454 BCE, would coalesce into the idea of the “barbarian.”
Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, 2021
This article publishes an assemblage of forty-two Egyptianizing faience vessels, figurines, and s... more This article publishes an assemblage of forty-two Egyptianizing faience vessels, figurines, and scarabs excavated by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the sanctuary of Apollo Hylates in Kourion, Cyprus, between 1936-1954. Nearly 80% of this material, dating to the first half of the 6th century BCE, were products of Greco-Egyptian workshops rarely encountered on the island. Using archival material held by the Penn Museum, I reconstruct the stratigraphy of an unpublished votive deposit where the bulk of the Egyptianizing faience was excavated.
Between 1947 and 2001, the African American professor, diplomat, and dean Frank M. Snowden, Jr la... more Between 1947 and 2001, the African American professor, diplomat, and dean Frank M. Snowden, Jr laid out an influential thesis about ‘race relations’ in the ancient Mediterranean. According to Snowden, Greeks and Romans were ‘white’; Africans, whom Greeks and Romans called ‘Ethiopians’, were ‘black’; Greek and Roman societies lacked modern ‘color prejudice’. In this article, I contextualize the development of Snowden’s ‘race relations’ thesis in the politics of the early Cold War. Reviewing Snowden’s research notes archived at Howard University, I argue that Snowden — who travelled widely after the Second World War as a US diplomat — purposefully distanced his thesis from the sociology of race during the 1940-50s. Instead, Snowden envisioned American racial categories as permanent fixtures of world history, optimistically looking to Greece and Rome as models for a post-segregation America. Finally, I trace the enduring impact of Snowden’s thesis by unpacking his historiography of Naukratis in the Archaic Period, which he had identified as the west’s first multiracial society.
This article argues that descriptions of the Black Sea found in the Archaic poets, Herodotus, and... more This article argues that descriptions of the Black Sea found in the Archaic poets, Herodotus, and later geographers were influenced by commercial itineraries circulated amongst Greek slave traders in the north. Drawing on an epigraphic corpus of twenty-three merchant letters from the region dating between c. 550 and 450 BCE, I contrast the travels of enslaved persons recorded in the documents with stylized descriptions found in literary accounts. This article finds that slaves took a variety of routes into—and out of—slavery, and that fear of enslavement was widely felt even among Greeks. Law courts might have been as important as “barbarian” warfare in ensnaring captives for export, and even slave traders themselves risked enslavement alongside their victims. Reconstructing the travels of individual slaves allows us to pursue a study in the spirit of what Joseph C. Miller has called the “biographical turn” in the study of slavery, privileging the experiences of the enslaved over the accounts of their masters. Although the lands around the distant Black Sea were never the leading source of slaves for Aegean cities, the wealth of primary testimony from the region puts it at the forefront in the history of slavery in ancient Greece.
https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2020.39.1.57
ERRATUM:
p. 59 -- 'Democracy and Capitalism' should read 'Capitalism and Slavery' (correct in bibliography)
Between 1909-25, the federal government launched several denaturalization lawsuits to determine w... more Between 1909-25, the federal government launched several denaturalization lawsuits to determine whether Armenian immigrants were eligible for US citizenship. With the massacres in Anatolia reaching their height between 1915-23, deportation posed a mortal threat to the Michaelian family of New York, who since arriving in the 1880s had built a successful rug business. In this essay, I use a trove of Armenian-language personal correspondence, business documents, and legal memoranda to reconstruct the Michaelians' attempt to evade the denaturalization sweep. In crafting a strategy to avoid the government's attention, the second generation of Armerican Michaelians veiled their ethnic origins in a silence that would only begin to be pushed back at the end of the twentieth century. https://ajammc.com/2019/11/17/george-kevork-race-law-michaelian-family/
This note compiles a list of nearly 100 Egyptianizing faience scarabs, pendants, figurines, and v... more This note compiles a list of nearly 100 Egyptianizing faience scarabs, pendants, figurines, and vessels excavated from the northern Black Sea coast dating between the late seventh and mid-sixth centuries B.C.E. I argue that the geographical distribution of so-called aegyptiaca offers a useful index testifying to the mobility of region’s early Greek migrants between their Ionian homelands, budding centers such as Istria and Olbia, and short-lived settlements in the countryside. In their circulation of Egyptianizing objects, Greek settlers introduced a taste among their indigenous trade partners for faience ‘trinkets’ as grave goods that flourished long after similar material fell out of favor in Greece. While sixth century imports represent only a tiny fraction of the over 9,000 faience scarabs, beads, and amulets known from the region between the Archaic period and late antiquity, they were an important channel that propagated Egyptianizing devotional practices in the far north.
https://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=article&id=3286608
Between c. 700-300 BCE, the ancient Greeks developed a vivid imaginary of the world's peoples. Ra... more Between c. 700-300 BCE, the ancient Greeks developed a vivid imaginary of the world's peoples. Ranging from the light-skinned, "gray-eyed Thracians" of the distant north to the "dark-skinned Ethiopians" of the far south, as the poet Xenophanes described them around 540 BCE, Greeks envisioned a world populated by human groups with distinct physiognomies. Racialized Commodities traces how Greece's "racial imaginary"--a confluence of thinking about cultural geography, commodity production, and human physiognomy--emerged from cross-cultural trade between Greece and its Mediterranean neighbors during the Archaic and Classical Periods. It adopts the model of a "commodity biography" to investigate how trade led to the entanglement of cultures, bodies, and things in Archaic and Classical Greece. For merchants, the racial imaginary might be used to play up the "exotic" provenance of their goods to consumers. It might also circulate practical information about customs, pricing, navigation, and doing business in foreign ports.
Archaic Greek attempts to explain foreign bodies were rarely pejorative, and Racialized Commodities begins with some of their earliest images of African peoples, described by Greeks as Egyptians or Ethiopians, before seeking to explain what changed in the early Classical Period. As the Persian Empire loomed and Greek cities became increasingly dependent on enslaved labor, negative stereotypes of Thracians and Scythians became widespread and coalesced into the charged idea of the barbaros--the "barbarian."
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Email me for the .pdf if you don't have access!
https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2020.39.1.57
ERRATUM:
p. 59 -- 'Democracy and Capitalism' should read 'Capitalism and Slavery' (correct in bibliography)
https://ajammc.com/2019/11/17/george-kevork-race-law-michaelian-family/
https://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=article&id=3286608
Archaic Greek attempts to explain foreign bodies were rarely pejorative, and Racialized Commodities begins with some of their earliest images of African peoples, described by Greeks as Egyptians or Ethiopians, before seeking to explain what changed in the early Classical Period. As the Persian Empire loomed and Greek cities became increasingly dependent on enslaved labor, negative stereotypes of Thracians and Scythians became widespread and coalesced into the charged idea of the barbaros--the "barbarian."
Email me for the .pdf if you don't have access!
https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2020.39.1.57
ERRATUM:
p. 59 -- 'Democracy and Capitalism' should read 'Capitalism and Slavery' (correct in bibliography)
https://ajammc.com/2019/11/17/george-kevork-race-law-michaelian-family/
https://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=article&id=3286608
Archaic Greek attempts to explain foreign bodies were rarely pejorative, and Racialized Commodities begins with some of their earliest images of African peoples, described by Greeks as Egyptians or Ethiopians, before seeking to explain what changed in the early Classical Period. As the Persian Empire loomed and Greek cities became increasingly dependent on enslaved labor, negative stereotypes of Thracians and Scythians became widespread and coalesced into the charged idea of the barbaros--the "barbarian."