Race is a complicated term to unpack in relation to the ancient world,” she says. “It is irresponsible to use the same word that white intellectuals and slaveowners from Western Europe manipulated without qualification.”

Because our modern conceptions of race are inextricably bound up with the legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Derbew notes, today’s racial categories – and the politics that undergird them – often do not map cleanly onto antiquity. “For example, the use of ‘white’ to describe ancient Greeks is sloppy and misinforms a wide audience; ancient Greeks were not white,” she says. Instead of a purely phenotypical understanding of race, Derbew explains, identity in the ancient world was pluralistic, marked by interlocking and overlapping. The more nuanced understanding of race in the ancient world described by Derbew pushes back against the vision of the past espoused by many aligned with the far right, who see themselves as the defenders of a classical tradition to which they are the heirs.


Derbew’s research focuses on the presence of black Africans in Greek art and literature. She traces the origins of her interest to reading the Aeneid as a child: the principal female character, Dido, is the powerful queen of Carthage. Surveying ancient art, she says, shows black people depicted as “stalwart soldiers, excellent archers, semi-divine people, and enslaved servants, to name a few”. But while black people held a variety of occupations and social positions in the ancient world, Derbew says, museums’ presentation of material that testifies to this is frequently hamstrung by contemporary prejudice. “It is important for [curators and scholars] to be constantly vigilant and actively fight against these negative assumptions in their quest to create responsible exhibits and scholarship,” she says. “Museum galleries have an important role in the task of contextualizing antiquity; they can shift people’s misconceptions of what antiquity looked like.”