Jan Ott & Siobhán Higgins-Welter - Ancient European Prehistory: The Frisian Oera Linda Book

This is the first ancient text I have found distinctly concerned with race from a white European perspective. According to the translator the ancient Frisians despised the slave peoples who were slaves and owned slaves and were darker-skinned people from the world of the Middle Sea and were aware of black folk who had been valued for their physical strength.

Hence, it may be that the vast propensity of classical authors to essentially ignore macro-racial categories and focus on races as tribes and nations, might be that they were scholars from slave societies who wished to expand those societies which only expanded based on enslavement of such specific people, who were used as skill-set packages [Greeks as teachers, Gauls as bodyguards, etc.] and that this manuscript from ancient Holland reflected the distaste these folk felt for “the slave races,” who ordered the world in such a way.

At the very least, this script indicates that a “white” people on the margins of Europe had developed a great distaste for the darker-complexioned people of the Middle Sea and beyond, based predominantly on their distaste for slavery. Interestingly, after moving to Greece and Indian to escape a flood, they then moved back from those areas soon after the conquests of Alexander.

Due to the lack of surviving literature from northern and western Europeans of the Ancient world, we don’t know if this was an idiosyncratic view of a single people or represents a Northern European tendency to avoid intermarriage as indicated by Tacitus’ description of the Germans, although medieval Viking behavior and the harem of the German Emperor “Stupor Munde” Frederick the Apostate, argue for propensities shifting through the ages and or varying from tribe to tribe.