was aesop black? this appears to be a recently floated pseudo-scientific idea by these specious afrocentrists, that just spew out bullshit at every opportunity. basically, they think everybody was black, and there's no use in trying to correct them when they're wrong - they don't listen..
the long-held academic consensus on the matter is that aesop was obviously not a historically real person at all. while i'm not particularly critical of the dorian hypothesis, the reality is that greece was a pretty viciously hierarchical class-based society, whether you accept it or not, with a group of unclear composition and origin called "helots" at the bottom of the system, and that were probably at least partly living there before the greek-speaking peoples moved in from the north, dorian hypothesis or not, as per gimbutas, ultimately (you could cite some nineteenth century scholar here instead, but gimbutas is the one that actually proved it). it's probably not a coincidence that you had helots in greece and untouchables in india. if aesop was described as physically unappealing to the dominant greek culture, the description probably relates to a physical appearance that was more mediterranean in phenotype. the greeks of this period would have had less time to mix with the people that previously inhabited the regions they invaded (a mixture of caucasian and earlier indo-european groups), and would have looked and sounded far more like their proto-slavic and proto-iranic ancestors than the greeks of today do. they clearly looked down upon the definitely not indigenous but probably more mediterranean looking helots, who they considered to be their slaves.
that said, something happened in greece starting about 800 years before the common era, as they emerged from a dark age that set in around 1200 years before the common era - all of the writing of the ancient world seems to have been consolidated in greece in the form of a series of texts attributed to a collection of greek names, which we label as philosophers. while the western tradition is that there was a flowering of reason and rationalism in greece during this period that we consider foundational to our later culturally central tradition of empirical science, that traditional perspective has been upended by more modern science, which has provided for example after example of supposed greek innovation that seems to be more encyclopedic in character than originally thought. many of the ancient greek texts seem to be collections of existing texts that were older than classical greece more than they were texts written in the classical greek period, itself. the historicity of socrates has long been questioned, but plato himself may not have existed, either; along with pythagoras, euclid and many of the other greek names we all know from our early education, these names may actually represent the names of schools or cliques or even archivists, or may have even been as fabricated as bourbaki, which was an attempt by leading french mathematicians to essentially fuck with history. we really don't know how old a lot of this writing really is or where it really comes from; what we know is that it emerged from greece at the recovery stage of a very bad destruction horizon, and that, when the dust of the bronze age collapse settles, all of this knowledge survives there, when it was destroyed everywhere else. greece emerges from this dark age as the leading, dominant intellectual culture on the planet.
as my background is in mathematics, i'm most qualified to talk about the way this emerges within the history of mathematics, which demonstrates itself primarily through the cult of personality named pythagoras. pythagoras was more than a mathematician; he was also a cult leader and the originator of a specific type of buddhist-like philosophy that was massively influential on both the platonic tradition and on the mystery religions of the time period, and by extension on christianity. pythagoras was likewise traced backwards to a thracian sect that may have had indo-iranian origins, and may have moved into greece from the steppes rather late. the purpose of this blog post is neither to discuss pythagoras' life nor the school of pythagoreanism.
the issue that i want to draw attention to is the historicity of pythagoras, which is more attested to than aesop but is still tentative, to say the least. what we know is that the pythagorean cult attributed any mathematical advances they developed to their great master, rather than themselves. while this is generally acknowledged as making a history of mathematics during this period somewhat difficult, it also obscures the fact that pythagoras was attributed with the total combined mathematical innovation of the ancients, as well. coming out of late antiquity and into the early european dark ages, after the collapse of roman imperialism in the west, pythagoras becomes this quasi-mystical figure, to which all mathematics in the pythagorean tradition, past and present, is attributed to.
it is thought today that the pythagorean theorem was first derived in egypt and only became attributed to this cult of pythagoras as a process of saving and compiling existing writing in the face of the aforementioned lengthy dark age that set in as a consequence of a period of revolutionary over turn in the region that had something to do with a movement southwards of greek-speaking peoples into the eastern mediterranean basin, which the local cultures referred to as "sea-peoples". this movement is correlated with a massive destruction horizon, but it is not known if the destruction was caused by the greeks themselves or if the repressed peoples of the middle east used the situation as an opportunity to rise up against the tyranny of their ruling class and overthrow their cruel masters. whatever actually happened, the result is that wide swaths of the eastern mediterranean were burned to the ground and then left unpopulated and utterly destroyed, while greece itself eventually managed to prosper in the chaos. when the dust settles, literacy only really remains extant in greece, and the entire region becomes centered in greece as it's intellectual and cultural anchor. in a process we don't fully understand, all of the existing mathematics from many centuries previous become collected and archived in greece in these compendiums, which are given names like euclid and pythagoras; they are simply destroyed, elsewhere. for that reason, these names of euclid and pythagoras (and others) represent the totality of all surviving mathematics up until the bronze age collapse - and greek mathematics as it's own thing develops from that departure point, as the country emerges from the dark age caused by the collapse.
but, it was not just in mathematics that we saw this happen. did socrates, plato and aristotle actually exist or were they merely literary tools to develop the culminated perspectives of the ancient world into a series of discourses to be taught to people alive at the time? it's the latter that seems more likely.
it's when you realize this process of consolidation that was occurring at this time in greece that what aesop is becomes more apparent - not a person, or a collection of people, but a way to compile stories that are intended to teach a moral lesson to the reader. these stories would have had dozens of authors and come from all over the ancient world over a period of time that likely stretched back centuries or millennia before the bronze age collapse. it would not be possible to pinpoint the origin of these stories with much detail, or determine their authors, who would be lost; many would likely even be evolving stories that took on the character of the cultures that adopted them.
while elephants were not unknown to the greeks in antiquity (and the ethiopians were known for being sunburned and having flat noses), and there is really no reason to think a greek wouldn't or couldn't write a story about an elephant, if there are stories about elephants attributed to aesop then it is far more likely that the story came from some distant and unknown african source and was preserved in aesop's compendium of moral stories than it is that there was some person named aesop of african origin. if stories are told about aesop's unsightly opinion, this is likely an ironic insult generated by racist greeks to remember that these were the stories of a slave morality that they only begrudgingly admitted the validity of, at least at first. the greeks would accept the slave morality, in the end.
but, argument with afrocentrics aren't going to get you anywhere. at all.