Amasis – o artesão ático, o faraó saíta e o guerreiro etíope: Um debate sobre etnicidade no mundo grego antigo

Gilberto da Silva Franscisco

doi:10.5007/2175-7976.2024.e100110

Authors

Gilberto da Silva Franscisco UNIFESP - École Française d'Athènes - EFA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7976.2024.e100110

Keywords:

Amasis, Exekias, Attic pottery, Ethnic Identity

Abstract

Amasis was a potter who was active in the region of Attica in the sixth century BC, and who was mentioned by other artisans of his time. His name, explicitly foreign in that context, was also that of an Egyptian pharaoh from the Saite dynasty who was a contemporary of the craftsman Amasis. This ruler of Egypt seems to have developed a range of actions aimed at a certain rapprochement with Greek communities and his name may have become popular in the eastern Mediterranean because of this. These two historical figures, the craftsman and the pharaoh, who expressed foreign attributes in the Greek perspective, may have informed the construction of a discourse of otherness by another Attic craftsman from the same period, Exekias, who discussed who the Greeks and non-Greeks were (in this case, Egyptians or “Ethiopians”) in images on some ceramic vases he produced in which he himself created a third Amasis, a mythical Ethiopian warrior situated in the Trojan cycle. Considering this intricate set of references, this text aims to understand in more detail certain elements linked to the Afro-Eurasian integration of the Eastern Mediterranean from a viewpoint of ethnicity; in other words, to think about who was perceived as Greek and non-Greek from textual and material sources between the Archaic and Classical periods.

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