Names are important as an indicator of culture and heritage. The question came up on a Yahoo listserve recently, regarding Hellan, the sister of Clietus "The Black," as to which "races" of people used this name.
As Americans we're fixated on the notion of race and see race as the end all and be all, so to speak, in identifying people. This is a particularly "American" phenomenon that speaks to creation of this country on a foundation of "chattel" slavery. People in other parts of the world commonly use culture, religion and other identifiers in categorizing people more often than race.
In fact, race is a social concept, not a biological concept. As we look at other countries and then wind back the clock a couple of thousand years to the time of Alexander of Macedonia, we have to keep in mind that not only are we dealing with a different place, we're also dealing with a different era. The Egyptians, Nubians, Kushites and Romans were some of the most advanced nations in the art of war, metallurgy, commerce and trade. With this in mind, it would have been more likely that a Vandal or a Visigoth from northern Europe would take on an Egyptian name than the other way around.
There was no such thing as a White name and a Black name, as such, in the era of Clietus and Alexander. There was such a thing as an Egyptian and Roman name, but certainly our perception of "race" did not exist in that era. Clietus was a close companion of Alexander not because of his skin color, but because of his cultural and national identity.
Even now we have this problem when dealing with other cultures from what's a decidedly modern "American" perspective. An example of this is found with the conflict in Darfur where the "Arabs" are culturally distinct from the "African" citizens of the Sudan, even though they are virtually identical in their "racial" makeup. In otherwords if you put them on the corner of 125th and Malcolm X Blvd. in NYC they'd all be "niggers." These lines we draw in the sand mean nothing in the real world.
I'll give you another example. I met a man from Libya the other day, here in Kent, Ohio. I couldn't tell where he was from by looking at him. I could have guessed anywhere in north Africa or Arabia. When I spoke with him I found he was an "Arab," but his hair was curly like Persians I've met who admitted having African ancestors. As an "Arab" I expected that he could have come from a family that herded animals, which was true. However, what surprised me was that his family's main business was agriculture. My understanding of the conflict between the Africans and the Arabs of Sudan was that a large part of the conflict was over water rights for the herders and the farmers and that each group was identified by their occupation. However, in his case, clearly this was not true.
As we continued to speak I asked him to join my Blakfacts network and upload some pictures. That's when he started showing me the hundreds of pictures on his cell phone of weddings, his home in Libya, their farm, the animals they herd, weddings, etc. It was mind-blowing, many of the preconceived notions of what the Sahara looks like, they stay 500 miles from the Mediterranean Sea, had to be thrown out. What he showed me looked more like California than what we see depicted as the Sahara on TV. I did not see even one sand dune. What I did see were mountain goats, snow-capped mountains, 1lb mushrooms and many other gazelle like animals that they hunt for meat. I even saw a well manicured front yard with "American" style grass in their part of the Sahara. In short, we cannot monolithically pigeon-hole entire nation's of people. People have been on the planet too long not to have interacted with each other in every way imaginable.
Certainly, the name Hellan could have been used by people of African descent at that time. If you would like to research the name further I suggest looking at it's linguistic orgins and the meaning assigned to the name by various peoples. Many names in that area were associated with Egyptians or North Africans, such as Pheonix and Egyptus (two Egyptian brothers), Romulus and Remus, Europa, and many of the great men and women of that time, even the gods trace their lineage back to Egypt. You can read any book on Greek and Roman mythology and develop a genealogy that traces all of them back to Egypt. What we have to keep in mind is that Egypt was like 18th century France, it was the place to be from and they were the people to be emulated, so everyone wanted to be affiliated with the Egyptians, in more ways than one.
I suggest reading the books "Black Zeus" and "Profiles in African Heritage" by Dr. Edward Jones for further study.
The bust of Queen Nefertiti housed in a Berlin museum and believed to be 3,400 years old in fact is a copy dating from 1912 that was made to test pigments used by the ancient Egyptians, according to Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin.
