Antiquity in the New Millennium Lecture: 'Visualizing Ethnic Diversity in the Roman Empire'

Dr. Sinclair Bell, Professor of Art History at Northern Illinois University, will offer a lecture entitled “Visualizing Ethnic Diversity in the Roman Empire: Between ‘Barbarians’ and Neighbors.”

About the lecture

The wide scatter of small finds, sculpted heads and statues, and mosaics and wall paintings of Aethiopians (Black Africans) indicates that their depictions constituted a popular visual and material commodity over several centuries and across the Roman empire. But how were these works—and more crucially, the people which they sought to depict—understood within the different parts of the vast imperial territories in which they surface, from Britain to Turkey?

We might assume that Romans living in the northwest provinces (e.g., Gaul, Germany), for instance, had a relatively un-nuanced view of a person from the area known as Aethiopia or Nubia, which they may have regarded as the “ends of the earth.” Would the “average” Roman have distinguished between someone from an African province and someone who was Aethiopian? Would those living in a North African province have had a more nuanced understanding of the different ethnic groups and physical types (e.g., skin color) who originated outside the empire but could be encountered within the Roman provinces? Would the “outsiders” encountered in the provinces of Mauretania and Egypt have looked the same or different from each other? And how did Aethiopians understand and articulate their own sense of self (for instance, through portraiture), especially once they were in and part of Rome or its provinces?

This illustrated lecture will investigate these questions not only by looking at the imagery of these works, but also by asking how they functioned in their respective contexts across the far reaches of the empire.