The African Ancestry of Heracles: Andromeda, Aithiopia and a Forgotten Greek Tradition

What if one of the most familiar heroes of Greek mythology had an African ancestry that later art and retelling quietly left behind?Heracles was the great-grandson of Andromeda - in an ancient Greek tradition, the daughter of the king of the Aithiopians.But where was Aithiopia? Whom did the Greeks call Aithiopians? And what did ancient writers actually say about them?The African Ancestry of Heracles follows an extraordinary thread through Greek mythology and the ancient sources. Beginning with the genealogy that makes Andromeda the great-grandmother of Heracles, Julian Delacroix investigates the geographical and literary evidence behind one deceptively simple question: where did the Greeks place Andromeda's Aithiopia?Drawing on Homer, Xenophanes, Herodotus, Pseudo-Scylax, Diodorus, Ovid and other ancient writers and geographers, the book explores: - the Aithiopians who appear at the very beginning of Greek literature - what Greek and Roman writers meant by Aithiopia - the ancient geographical evidence placing Aithiopian peoples across Africa and south of Egypt - the genealogy linking Andromeda directly to Heracles - the competing localisation of Andromeda's story at Iope - ancient descriptions and artistic representations of Andromeda's appearance - Heracles' own encounters with Africa, Atlas and the Hesperides - how the African geography of these traditions became less visible in later retellingsThe evidence is more complicated - and more fascinating - than either a modern racial claim or a simple rewriting of Greek mythology.This book does not argue that Heracles "was Black", nor does it attempt to impose modern racial categories upon the ancient Mediterranean. Instead, it returns to the literature, geography and art of antiquity and asks what the surviving evidence actually allows us to say.The result is the recovery of a strand of Greek mythology that has been there all along.What did the Greeks themselves say?