course not that by which the people called themselves, but was that applied to them by the Greeks, and meant (αἰθίοψ) sunburned, swarthy. They were described by Homer as a “blameless people, whom the gods themselves visit, and partake of their feasts.” In the Odyssey they are mentioned further as divided into two sections, the most distant of men, some living where the sun sets and some where he rises.
It is evident from this that the Greeks had a dim knowledge that black men were occupying the valley of the Nile above Egypt, but whether the remote ancestors of the Bantu were among them it is utterly impossible even to make a conjecture. There is, however, reference to another race in the upper valley of the Nile, which, if it stood alone, would be regarded with justice as mythical, but as from this time onward for many centuries it was constantly repeated, must be considered as having a foundation in fact. The Greeks had heard vague rumours of pygmies living in the same part of the world as the Ethiopians, and the poet introduced them in his immortal work as veritable tom-thumbs, “men no bigger than your fist,” whose mortal enemies were the cranes.
Probably no Greek of that age had ever seen a black man or a pygmy, and the vague knowledge that they had of the existence of such people must have been derived from Phoenician traders, who brought ivory among other things to them for sale; and who could have told them a great deal about Africa and its people, if they had not chosen to keep their knowledge to themselves and give fabulous accounts of everything beyond the immediate ken of those who listened to them. In this matter of the pygmies, we have the earliest reference by any European to the Bushman race, that must then have occupied wholly or partly all Africa south of the confines of Nubia.
The Homeric poems for many centuries were regarded by the Greeks as the repositories of all knowledge, and it was considered sinful to question the accuracy of Homer in such a matter as the locality of an island or the direction of a river. To so great a length did this reverence extend that even after the true form of the earth was known and its size approximately ascertained
