The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  TO COME THEN to our own species, it is clear that since the human race evolved in Africa, our ancestors were dark-skinned, to say the least. It may be that when our line separated from the chimpanzees we had a light skin covered by hair. But as the hair disappeared we had to darken to survive the African sun. And from something over one million years BCE to less than 100,000 years ago we were as dark-skinned as any people now living in Africa. We began to lighten when we migrated northwards, but it is part of history that we were all black once, and were black for much longer than we have been any other colour.

  The people of those early times have left no artefacts that we can touch, but they did, as they inched their way northwards, make marks on things that we can see. There were coloured clays one can use like chalk, and, once fire was controlled, charcoal and soot were plentiful. Soot, or manganese dioxide, found among the rocks, could be pounded with fat to make an ointment or a war-paint – or a crayon of hardened grease. What is clear is that when the first pictures were made – which we can still see in protected caves – the principal pigment was black. On the rock we see magnificent all-black bulls; black is used for the manes of horses, for the matchstick people who hunt the creatures, and for that momentous invention of visual art – the outline. The use of outlines can be seen in the background to the great, gracefully swaying, delicately footed, all-black cow in the ‘nave’ at Lascaux in southern France (illus. 5).

  The outline was invented more than 30,000 years ago. It is completely artificial, for things and people do not have black lines round their edges. But we use it still, and probably will always use it. And throughout history, outlines have most often been black. Black is good because it is achromatic or neutral, without prejudice to the colour of the object drawn. Also, black is strong, and it is important to know where shapes and edges are. But from the beginning the black line has also been art. Deep in caves, the outlines of the heads of horses and lions can have a wonderful accuracy, economy, rhythm. There were clearly ‘masters’, from the start, who had the ability (which requires much practice) to carry an exact image in the head, since the lion would not have posed for them.

  Doubtless, as in tribal cultures still, pigments were used for body art also, and black pigment perhaps for eye make-up (kohl is very old). The practice of tattooing goes back to at least 5000 BCE. Several colours were available, but it is a fair calculation that societies that left no other trace – beyond the pictures they made on rocks – gave a prominent place to black. From the start, black was strong for decoration. Also black has been and is, both for word and image, the principal colour of representation.

  5 The Panel of the Great Black Cow, in the ‘nave’ at Lascaux; the painting is believed to be at least 17,000 years old.

  AT WHAT POINT and where men first began to think black materials luxurious, there is no knowing. We will never know who first gave to someone else, as a gift, a finely smoothed carving of ebony. Ebony has always had the advantage of being among the most densely solid woods (it sinks in water), as well as being of an intense, pleasing black when polished. In Egypt, in the tomb of Rekhmir, vizier to the fifteenth-century BCE pharaoh Tuthmosis III, there are well-preserved frescoes which show the people of Kush (Nubia) bringing tribute. They are black themselves, and their quality gifts include a hobbled giraffe, ostrich eggs, gold rings and logs of ebony.

  Other black woods from Africa were quality items in the late Bronze Age. The shipwreck discovered off Uluburun in Turkey in 1998 – which was probably en route from Cyprus to Rhodes, and intended to carry gifts from one monarch to another – included in its cargo ivory, faience, gold and logs of African blackwood.6 The use of black African wood was widespread through the ancient world. The carving of the goddess Diana at Ephesus was of ebony, according to Pliny. This is the Diana with many breasts (if they are breasts), which is well known from a Roman copy. We may think it white because the Romans copied it in marble, but originally it was wooden, and black.7

  As to the people who exchanged these black luxuries, whether Nubian or Mediterranean, the part of them that was most often black was of course their hair. Hair that is raven-black may be viewed with suspicion, but there is little doubt that through history raven-black hair has also been thought vital, potent and beautiful. The beauty of Snow White, in the folk tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, consisted of her snow-white skin, her blood-red lips and her hair, as black as ebony. And in the hairstyles of the ancient world, black was beautiful. Both in Babylon and later in Assyria, black dye was regularly used, in addition to oils, curling devices and quantities of false hair, to ensure that the well-to-do of all ages had a gleaming, fragrant head of black hair, with trains of close-curled ringlets – and, for men, a large but tightly curling jet-black beard.

  In these two empires and more widely, both men and women applied kohl to their eyes. There were various recipes – for instance, the soot of burned sandalwood mixed with clarified butter – and kohl was sometimes tinted with other colours, such as green. With their shining black hair and mostly black eyeliner, men and women, young and old, passed some of their leisure playing board games – the ancestors of our backgammon, draughts and chess – on boards that were often of ebony, or had an ebony veneer, while the pieces they moved were of ebony and ivory. If a portrait bust were made of a valued person, it might be cut in grey-black diorite or black granite. Gleaming black artefacts were treasured, and the apartments of the great might be faced with black marble. The Book of Esther (1:6) records that the bed-chambers of King Ahasuerus of Ethiopia had pavements of red, blue, white and black marble.

  Black was also used externally. A courtyard or city square might have an obelisk of black limestone, recording the victories of an important monarch. The tiered walls of citadels could be black. Herodotus said that in the Medean city of Ecbatana the ranged battlements were, in ascending order, white, black, scarlet, blue and orange. It is not clear that Herodotus visited the eastern cities he described, but there is reason to think that the tiered walls of the ziggurats – the pyramidical temples built by Nebuchadnezzar and others – were faced with diverse colours, colours that had a celestial significance according to ancient Chaldean astronomy.8

  It has been said that in Babylon and elsewhere the city walls were blackened with bitumen, and this is possible, since bitumen was the black glue which held many ancient buildings together. Herodotus claims that the city walls of Babylon were cemented with hot bitumen, and in the home bitumen attached mosaics of ivory, marble and pearl to the ebony chests of the rich.9 Even so, the idea of coating a sun-seared city wall with bitumen sounds hazardous, and the traces of coloured stucco found at another ziggurat, at Khorsabad, allow one to suppose that where walls were coloured, they were plastered before being painted. In sum, the ancient ziggurats were probably not, in their prime, mounds of brown stone, but grand coloured wonders, perhaps stepping up through white, black, red and blue to orange at the summit. The thinking may have been more astrological than aesthetic, but the second, black tier would have been a strong component in their visual impact. Black was the colour of Saturn, known then as the furthest and coldest planet, and identified with the oldest of the gods.

  There is no evidence that the pyramids in Egypt were coloured, but black had been an element in Egyptian visual style from a date at least as early as the rise of Babylon (around 2000 BCE). At the court of the pharaoh both men and women had their heads shaved and wore lush black wigs which again were fragrant, closely curled and gleaming with oil (which might descend from a small vessel at the summit of the hairpiece). One can still see in museums the exquisite small black vases in which both men and women kept the kohl for their eye make-up. Other cosmetics might be ground on palettes of near-black slate and kept in small pots of black steatite.

  By the time of the Egyptians there were well-perfected ways of making black pigment for dyes, inks and paints. The best blacks came from the soot of burned oil – a dense, velvety black known as ‘lamp-black’ – or the
soot of charred bones. Crushed ivory could be roasted until black, yielding the warm, slightly brownish ‘ivory black’. The result is that on vases, on funeral plaques and in illuminated papyrus manuscripts we find hieroglyphs written in densely black ink, people and animals outlined in black, and some animals and the heads of some gods painted solid black.

  If black had style and luxury, still it had its dark side. In ancient Egypt, as in many cultures, black was also the colour of death. Whether the death-god Anubis appears as a whole jackal, or as a man with a jackal’s head, his jackal part is represented in saturated black, though jackals are not black. He may be seen weighing the soul of the scribe Ani in an illustration from the Book of the Dead of around 1250 BCE (illus. 6). We see his black muzzle in profile as he adjusts the plumb line of the balance. The crossbar and stem of his scales may be of ebony, and Ani himself and his wife Tutu, who enter respectfully from the left, have the glossy jet hair (or wigs) of Egyptian fashion. But if Anubis is black it is not for style, but because he is Death in person. The hieroglyphs beside him state that he is ‘in the place of embalming’, and during the embalming of high dignitaries the chief embalmer would wear a black jackal’s-head mask. Both the embalmed body and its wrappings would become black from the chemicals used, while the mummy case would be black from a liberal coating of tar to protect it from damp. In the Book of the Dead, death is night and night is black. A voice from the underworld cries:

  What manner of land is this into which I have come? It hath not water, it hath not air; it is deep, unfathomable, it is black as the blackest night, and men wander helplessly therein.10

  But though Anubis was black and had a jackal’s head – jackals were known to eat the dead – his role, as he stood at the gates of death, was to help the good when they were examined by the gods of the underworld. Like death he is frightening, but may not be our enemy. The god Osiris, who is normally shown with black or green skin and who might be called ‘the dark one’ or ‘the black one’, had himself passed through death, and become the king of the dead. He was dismembered by the jealous god of darkness, Set, but resurrected when the goddess Isis collected his scattered pieces. Death was a passage from which one wakened, and Osiris was associated also with rebirth and with the regeneration of nature each spring in the fertile black mud of the Nile.

  The connection of Osiris with both death and fertility is often mentioned in modern accounts, but was also made in the ancient world. Plutarch in his Moralia said ‘Osiris . . . was dark because water darkens everything’, while ‘the bull kept at Heliopolis . . . which is sacred to Osiris . . . is black . . . Egypt, moreover, which has the blackest of soils, they call by the same name as the black portion of the eye, “Chemia” and compare it to the heart.’11 It is not surprising if blackness and the death-gods should be tied to growing crops in a culture whose understanding of the universe was profoundly cyclical.

  6 Anubis weighing the soul of the scribe Ani, illustration from the Book of the Dead, c. 1250 BCE.

  Not all black and fertility gods were necessarily gods of death. The bull-god Apis governed the abundant herds; he had the form of a black bull marked with white, like Egyptian cattle. The god Min, of sexual reproduction, had black skin and an erect, prodigious penis. The Greeks associated him with their priapic god Pan, who was half a goat (a black goat, in Roman pictures) and went about with the god Dionysus, called ‘Dionysus of the black goat-skin’. Pan is remembered in Christian demonology when Satan takes the form of a monstrous black goat for the purpose of copulating not with maids, nymphs and goddesses – as Pan and Min used to do – but with hags and witches, and with beautiful but demonically possessed young women.

  THE PANTHEONS OF many peoples have included a black god. Such deities may be gods of death and the underworld, as for the Hopi Indians. They may be known for their wrath, as among the Cherokee – in many mythologies gods turn black when enraged. They are seldom, however, malign and nothing else, as the black Devil of Christianity came to be. Black God, the fire god of the Navajo, is also the god of night, and of the stars and their creation. In the ritual dance the chanter who dances him wears a buckskin mask blacked with charcoal, with a white marking on it for the moon. He sprinkles the sky with the Milky Way, positions the constellations and lights them with his fire.

  For black deities may be benign. The Aztecs had a god called Ixtlilton – the name means ‘Little Black One’. He was the god of healing medicines, and also brought peaceful sleep to tired children. Such a figure, from old folklore, may survive in Italy’s La Befana, a kind of female Father Christmas who arrives in January with a bag of children’s presents, and is black because she has come down the chimney.

  More frightening initially, though often also benign, is the ‘great black god’ Mahakala of Tibetan, Chinese and Japanese Buddhism (illus. 7). His name comes from the Sanskrit maha (‘great’) and kala (‘black’), and in commentaries his blackness is said to represent totality, since all colours are absorbed in black. Though accompanied by skeletons and crowned with skulls and with a belt of severed heads, as in the nineteenth-century painting shown here, he is also in Tibet the protector of wisdom. In Japan he has become one of the Seven Lucky Gods who are still mass produced as small, brittle figurines. His blackness has shrunk to a flat black hat; he squats on bales of rice, smiling broadly, and is associated also with wealth and the kitchen.

  Our best access now to the gods, and black gods, of ancient belief is through the major instance of a primordially ancient, polytheistic religion that thrives still in our contemporary world. It is celebrated by hundreds of millions of people all over the world – that is, Hinduism.12

  In Hindu India a dark skin is not well regarded, since it suggests hours of toil exposed to the sun, and is found especially in the lower castes and in the aboriginal tribes. Nonetheless numerous gods have dark or black skin, either permanently or in many of their embodiments. Yama, the god of death, is black, and rides a black buffalo. When the demigod Virabhadra becomes enraged, he is terrible as death and his skin turns black. Agni the god of fire is often red, but may also be black; and Kama, the god of love and desire, is called ‘the dark youth’ and often shown with black skin. Of the greater gods, Vishnu is said to have as many colours as the ages of the world (which are white, then red, then yellow, then black), but he is normally depicted as black or dark blue (he is also said to have the colour of rain-filled clouds). His principal avatar is the beautiful, mischievous boy-god Krishna, whose name means ‘black’ and who again, in miniatures, is depicted as black, dark brown or dark blue. The name of Rama – the hero of the epic Ramayana – again means black.

  In Hindu commentary different values are set on black – as the colour of death and disintegation, but also as the colour beyond all colours, and as the colour of the contradictions and the mystery of divinity. As the colour of divine energy, black can take harsh forms. The goddess Kali haunts cremation grounds, and is garlanded with skulls or severed heads (illus. 8). She is nearly naked and her skin is black (her name means ‘black’). Her hair is wild from frenzied dancing, her eyes are red, her face and breasts are smeared with blood. But also she is full-breasted, and suckles babies tenderly. She is creator and destroyer: her two right hands offer blessings and gifts; her two left hands hold a bloodied sword and a severed head. When the skulls in her garland number 51, they allude to the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, and if this seems a gruesome way to recommend literacy we may remember that worship of her flourishes especially among the disadvantaged castes in India’s severely stacked society. She wears a skirt of severed hands, which may allude to souls freed from the pain of being. Like a nightmare wife she stands with both feet on her husband, the god Shiva – who is her partner when they dance, so wildly that they endanger the universe. And if she is tough, so too are her devotees. They have a freedom not available to Christians, Muslims or Buddhists. If their prayers are betrayed, they will visit Kali’s temples not to give incense or flowery garlands, but to hurl
at the goddess obscenities and excrement.13

  Her husband Shiva is white, partly from the ashes of the cremation ground, though his whiteness may also be beautiful, as in the love hymns addressed to him by the great twelfth-century poet Akka Mahadevi:

  Cut through, O lord,

  my heart’s greed,

  and show me

  your way out,

  O lord white as jasmine.14

  Like Kali, he is a god of death – he will destroy the universe – but he is also the most erotic of the Hindu deities. He wanders the world as a ravishingly attractive young man, so all women rush to adore him. In one legend the jealous men of the village seize him and cut off his penis, which then grows to a gigantic size, revealing his – and its – divinity. Though he can appear in many forms, for instance with ten arms and five faces, it is primarily in the form of his lingam, or penis, carved in black stone, that he is worshipped in the temples. For when embodied in his lingam, Shiva too is often black. In an eighteenth-century miniature the god himself, in the form of a garlanded jet-black member, rests happily erect in the white yoni, or female dish (illus. 9). The image is almost jaunty, with a fallen parasol resting at an angle. The emphatically phallic reading of the lingam is sometimes disputed, but the older carvings of his idol, in the form of a short black column, are often marked at the top to resemble a glans. Such carvings date back to at least the ninth century CE, and the phallic worship of Shiva is thought to be among the oldest of Hindu, or even pre-Hindu, practices.

  The Shiva Purana records that at the beginning of time Brahma and Vishnu came upon the gigantic lingam of Shiva, and resolved to find its beginning and end. Brahma, as a swan, flew upwards, and Vishnu, as a boar, burrowed downwards. But though they continued for 4,000 years, they found no beginning and no end. Then Shiva appeared, in more personal form (with five faces and ten arms), and taught Brahma and Vishnu that the three of them were part of a single deity. It may be that this short, round-headed black stone column, which is adored and garlanded in many temples, and which normally stands in a basin or yoni of feminine shape, carries us back to the sense of fundamentals, and the reverence that they enjoyed, in the forgotten tens of millennia of the emergent human race.