The Mediterranean race (also Mediterranean race) is an obsolete racial classification of human beings based on the now refuted theory of biological race. According to writers of the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, it was a sub-race of the Caucasian race. In various definitions, it was said to be prevalent in the Mediterranean basin and areas close to the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, especially in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, North Africa, most of Western Asia, the Middle East, or the Near East; Western Central Asia, parts of Southern Asia, and parts of the Horn of Africa. To a lesser extent, certain populations of people in Ireland, western parts of Great Britain and southern Germany, despite living far from the Mediterranean, were thought to have some minority Mediterranean elements in their population, such as Bavaria, Wales and Cornwall. Black-haired, dark-skinned Irish people were said to be descendants of Spanish sailors who were shipwrecked during the Spanish Armada of 1588 and were often referred to as black Irish people, especially in the United States.
Afrocentrism is a movement in the field of humanities that seeks to focus on the African continent instead of considering it an object, a respondent or a colonized subject. While this explicitly anti-racist approach was promoted by Drusilla Dunjee Houston in her 1926 book Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, and was carried out by scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop, its implications for ancient studies have become more evident since Martin Bernal published his extremely influential and controversial multi-volume book, Black Athena, in the 1980s. In classical and ancient studies, Afrocentrism has been used primarily as a lens to explore Egypt's relationship with Nubian and sub-Saharan African cultures. The following sources explore Afrocentrism methods and case studies that examine not only Egypt, but also Nubia, Ethiopia, and Pan-Africanism. The Mediterranean race (also Mediterranean) is one of the sub-races in which most anthropologists classified the Caucasian race at the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century.
From the late 1930s until World War II, Italian fascists were divided over their position on the Mediterranean. Mediterraneanism was in stark contrast to the then popular Nordic racial theory, which was common in North America and in northwestern, central, Germanic and northern Europe, and was partly a reaction to it, according to which the inhabitants of the Mediterranean were inferior to the supposed Nordic race. Drawing on a wide range of historical, archaeological and anthropological evidence, Denise Demetriou explores the multifaceted nature of identity formation in the cosmopolitan emporium of the ancient Mediterranean. If the world were divided into fraudulent spheres of “blackness”, considered inferior, and “whiteness”, called superior, the process of decolonization would apply to both white and black Europeans, especially in the Mediterranean world.
Johannes Siapkas ends his overview of the use of ethnic studies in this field by recommending two lines of action for scholars of the ancient Mediterranean. In the 1920s, French historian Fernand Braudel invoked the concept of Mediterraneanism, including statements of Mediterranean universalism, to justify colonialism French in Algeria. Originally, Nordic-type racial theories of the Nazi type were found only among a small number of fringe Italian fascists, mostly Germanophiles, anti-Semites, anti-intellectuals, and Northern Italians who considered themselves to be of Lombard Germanic racial heritage; among most other Italian fascists, Nordicism and “Nazi Arianism” were still at odds with Italian fascist theories about the greatness of the Mediterranean people. At first, Italian fascism promoted a variant of Mediterraneanism that, like Sergi's Mediterranean strain, held that Mediterranean peoples and cultures shared a common historical and cultural bond.
In addition, at the time of Homer, Greek immigrants were traveling to southern Italy and to many other places in the Mediterranean in search of a new life. However, the fall of the Moors in 1492 caused a form of amnesia even among white groups living in the Mediterranean. This defensive form of Mediterraneanism emerged primarily as a response to the then popular theory of Nordicism, a racial theory popular at the time among Germanic and northwestern European racial theorists, as well as among racial theorists of northwestern descent from countries such as the United States, who considered non-Nordic peoples, including some Italians and other Mediterranean peoples, as racially subordinate to Nordic, Aryan, or Germanic peoples. These same Mediterraneans were the same people who attacked Africans to feel closer to a Western power considered pure because it was profoundly white.
Northern European powers exploited both southern and Mediterranean Europeans to assert their dominance. According to Coon, the homeland and cradle of the Mediterranean race were in North Africa and Southwest Asia, in the area from Morocco to Afghanistan. In 1929, Mussolini asserted that Jewish culture was Mediterranean and that Jews were natives of Italy, after living there for a long time.
