Face to face with ancient Egyptians

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/09/face-to-face-with-ancient-egyptians/

by diodorus • 4 years ago

54 43 4 years ago

news.harvard.edu

hobbitstan• 4 years ago

It's interesting how pale skinned they are compared to current Egyptians. It's like a whole history was lost.

orcul• 4 years ago

Well the Arabs invaded in the 7th century...

AlotOfReading• 4 years ago

These aren't photographs. Skin color was often used for artistic purposes and to impart symbolic meaning. Egyptians in particular were conventionally depicted with reddish or yellowish skin to indicate life or vitality, with light blue or white highlights to showcase lighting and contours.

wl• 4 years ago

Red skin for men and yellow skin for woman is a convention of tomb paintings. Those are the stylized paintings on walls with the stereotypical technique of combining a side view and a frontal view into a single 2D representation. Mummy portraits belong to a different, later genre that is far less stylized and more realistic. The skin tones, in particular, are more true to life in mummy portraits than tomb paintings.

HideousKojima• 4 years ago

Copts (Egyptian Christians) are often much lighter skinned than Muslim Egyptians. I'm guessing there was less intermarriage with the Arab invaders amongst the populace that didn't convert. You can look at Rami Malek for an example of a Copt that westerners would be familiar with.

saiya-jin• 4 years ago

Another item may be simple sun exposure. Manual workers in any tropical country are much darker-skinned compared to white collar workers. Basically anywhere in subtropics its considered posh to look as white as possible, see massive business ie in India with skin whitening. You won't see many self-tanning creams in shops there but tons of whitening ones.

keenmaster2• 4 years ago

Even with Arab gene flow, Muslim and Christian/Coptic Egyptians are very genetically similar, which shows how small Arab contribution to the Egyptian gene pool was. There is probably a bigger difference between Egyptians in the north vs south, and a much bigger difference between “city” Egyptians and Egyptians in the villages or desert. Across the Middle East, “city” people tend to be lighter, in part due to lifestyle but also often due to genetic differences (e.g. bedouins have genetic distinctions and don’t intermarry much with city folk).

Copts with lighter skin are a small minority among Egyptians with lighter skin in general. Not that it matters much, but this is interesting to me from an anthropological standpoint.

keenmaster2• 4 years ago

A whole history was lost? Not at all. The area surrounding the Mediterranean has always had high variance in skin color even within a particular region. That being said, my guess is that the average “native” Egyptian was tan far before the 7th century when Arabs arrived. The population of the Levant (Syria, Lebanon…) was/is on average lighter than that of Egypt since one of the genes for “whiteness” originated there, but Egypt traded a lot with the Levant and there was some population mixture.

The notion posited by other commenters of a lighter Coptic population being more representative of the skin color of the average ancient Egyptian is dubious, though they obviously mixed less with Arabs - those two statements are not mutually exclusive. It’s also worth noting that the average Egyptian is quite ethnically Egyptian. Arabs did not just come in and massively displace Egyptian DNA. For starters there were many more Egyptians than Arabs. People in the West can say that any non-Muslim minority in the Middle East is more representative of the “real” natives of the land because of less mixture with Arabs (e.g. Assyrians). Isn’t that too convenient and somewhat ridiculous of a narrative, given the common bias against Muslims?

bmikaili• 4 years ago

This is wrong. DNA studies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Mesopotamia_rela...) show that modern day egyptians are not really the closest to ancient egyptians, they just live on the land that was once ancient egyptian.

KoftaBob• 4 years ago

That's more a case of selection bias.

Those who had portraits made of them when they died, like the Fayum Portraits, tended to be wealthier Egyptians who weren't outside working in the sun as much as the poorer ones.

Also, the Fayum area that "Fayum Portraits" gets its name from is not too far from Cairo, which is in the Northern part of Egypt, where peoples skin color tended to be lighter than those in the far south of Egypt, as you got closer to what was Nubia.

ashwagary5• 4 years ago

Whitening the skin and features of important figures in history is a habit of western civilization. Im never surprised when I see the deception continue in western academia.

Those African shaped noses didnt break themselves. The recently discovered Egyptian statues and other art that survived for thousands of years submerged in the Mediterranean Sea with African facial features unscathed prove that there is an agenda that continues.

Avicebron• 4 years ago

Or maybe it's not a deception and your bias is showing? We're stuck with the history, not a made up one we want to believe.

imbnwa• 4 years ago

From the article: "People depicted in the portraits were upper-class, say curators."

They are literally pointing out that these are portraits of aristocrats, whom it is very well-known would likely be of non-Egyptian, if not mixed, origin at the time they were buried. No one is making a claim that this is what the average Egyptian looked like in the article.

Now if you still think its appropriate to argue that modern Egyptians represent a population replacement demographic, well, you're free to I guess, but I'd wager there weren't enough conquerors to replace the entire or even the majority of the population.

Also, Copts and Amazighe are also African, so "African shaped noses" is sorta weird to say, never mind the prominence of similarly shaped noses to Copts and Amazighe in Ethiopians and adjacent populations in the Horn of Africa. I know "what you mean" but what I mean is that we sorta eliminate a whole lotta physical and cultural differences when we talk about some essential unity of Africa lying in looking some particular way.

ROTMetro2• 4 years ago

The first female pharaoh was described in contemporary texts as being blonde. There are blonde mummies and archeologists tried to pass them off as having had their hair 'lightened' but that has recently been shown to be completely made up and that they are natural blondes. What bias does it show that a false narrative of 'lightening hair' was wholly made up? Not the one you are trying to push.

linksnapzz• 4 years ago

There's a reason they look like the label on a bottle of Thessaloniki olive oil...

jbattle• 4 years ago

To be pedantic, these aren't really the "ancient Egyptians" people usually imagine. King Ramses and Tut and that lot. When these people were buried, Egypt had already been ruled by Greeks and Romans for 300 years (longer than the USA has been a country).

Beautiful art nonetheless. It is mind-blowing how old Egyptian culture is, my mind has never been able to wrap around it. And then the centuries or millennia of settled prehistory before that!

dotancohen2• 4 years ago

For context, during the time that Constantine's mother was converting Rome to Christianity, Tutankhamun was as ancient as Constantine is today. During the time that Gengis Khan was conquering the Slavs, Constantine was as ancient as Gengis Khan is today. During the time that apples were falling on Newton's head, Gengis Khan was as old as Newton is today. During the time that Beethoven was going deaf, Newton was as old as Beethoven is today. During the time that the Red Baron was nicking off checkmarks on the cowl of his Fokker, Beethoven was as old as the Red Baron is today. When Gene Cernan last lifted his boot out of the regolith, the Red Baron was as old as Cernan's footprint is today.

It's the only way I can comprehend these timescales.

triyambakam• 4 years ago

Well written!

petesergeant• 4 years ago

I'd be interested to see something like this[0] but with all of written history

https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html

singularity2001• 4 years ago

Yes these were "Roman Egyptians". However even before that the genes of red haired pharaohs were very Mediterranean / Anatolian :

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694

ROTMetro2• 4 years ago

Egypts first female pharaoh was described in contemporary texts as being blonde.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

The Egyptians in the article are closer in time to us, than they were to the building of the Great Pyramid.

pilaf• 4 years ago

There's something about this style of portraits that makes the people in them feel so much closer and more real to me than, say, a Greek statue.

I also appreciate all the extra detail that can be seen in these and not so much in other mediums, like hairstyles, jewelry, etc.

I'm particularly impressed by the last picture in the article, the technique and detail on that one are outstanding.

alehlopeh• 4 years ago

Greek statues were adorned in vivid colors and clothing back in their day.

college_physics2• 4 years ago

the Fayum portraits help illustrate (pun) very vividly how the very incomplete archeological record and its segmented presentation in history books fills our brains with a fake, imaginary past that has little resembalance with how people actually were.

case in point: these paintings have such striking similarities with (later) Byzantine icons (frontal representation, oversized eyes, stylistic choices for representing hair etc) there is no doubt they are part of a common cultural space that lasted for millenia and in some limited forms is still alive today.

Pressumably the origins of this style predate Greco-Roman Egypt but who knows when and where it got perfect first.

akiselev• 4 years ago

case in point: these paintings have such striking similarities with (later) Byzantine icons (frontal representation, oversized eyes, stylistic choices for representing hair etc) there is no doubt they are part of a common cultural space that lasted for millenia and in some limited forms is still alive today.

Historians have long suspected that the authors of Christian holy books were inspired by several other religions. The parallels are so numerous it's hard to ignore (this wikipedia page [1] is a starting point but it's woefully incomplete, especially with respect to Ancient Egpytian religion and Osiris/Horus)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_comparative_mythology...

college_physics2• 4 years ago

Egypt has long been a central node in culture creation and diffusion across the "old world". One of the most striking (and not widely known) facets is its dabbling with monotheism [1].

[1] https://www.thecollector.com/akhenaten-monotheism/

Mikeb85• 4 years ago

Historians have long suspected that the authors of Christian holy books were inspired by several other religions

I mean, Judaism is basically a mashup of Egyptian and Mesopotamian religion while Christianity is that + Buddhism...

Kukumber2• 4 years ago

Harvard Art Museums, “Funerary Portraits from Roman Egypt: Facing Forward,” breaks down what scientific investigations of these portraits reveal about life and death in Egypt 2,000 years ago.

What the hell, that's not "Ancient Egypt"

theandrewbailey• 4 years ago

Anything before the fall of the western Roman empire (~500 AD) is widely considered to be "ancient".

Kukumber2• 4 years ago

"face to face with ancient Egyptians"

-> proceed to show the face of Greeks who lived there for just few decades only right after the Ancient Egyptian civilization collapsed

That's some form of "let's rewrite history a little bit to fit our narrative"

Very disingenuous

rgrieselhuber• 4 years ago

The presence of lower Sanpaku in many of these makes me wonder if there was some sort of residual or widely present trauma.

Face to face with ancient Egyptians

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