Was Abraham Gannibal Really A Black African?
Was Abraham Gannibal Really A Black African? Left: 1888 drawing of Abraham Gannibal speaking with Alexander Suvorov; Right: signature of 'Ganibal' in letter from the Tallinn City Archive in Estonia (Source: Wikipedia Commons ) It was long believed that the ancestor of Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, was a "Caucasian" man from North Africa. After the death of Abraham Gannibal in 1781, a portrait of General Ivan Muller-Sakomelsky (1725-1790), commonly mistaken for an image of Gannibal, further advanced this theory. Portrait of Alexey Wolfe 1830s (Source: Wikipedia Commons ) Even Pushkin's close friend, Alexei Nikolaevich Wulf (1805-1881), hinted in his diary that Pushkin himself believed his great grand-father came to Russia from Abyssinia (a kingdom in modern-day Ethiopia). This knowledge of Gannibal's birthplace was based on the earliest biography of Gannibal, written by his son-in-law, Adam Karpovich Rotkirkh, around the 1780s. Yet, in his b...