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

orcul 4y ago
Well the Arabs invaded in the 7th century...
AlotOfReading 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
- keenmaster 4y 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.
keenmaster 4y 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 4y ago
  This is wrong. DNA studies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Mesopotamia_relations#2017_DNA_Genome_Study 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.
  - sct202 4y ago
    Your citation states continuity with additional ancestry mixing in from later migrations: >The study stated that "our genetic time transect suggests genetic continuity between the Pre-Ptolemaic, Ptolemaic and Roman populations of Abusir el-Meleq, indicating that foreign rule impacted the [native] population only to a very limited degree at the genetic level."
    - DoItToMe81 4y ago
      Yeah, modern Egyptians are directly related to ancient Egyptians, with the biggest change being that they have significantly more subsaharan DNA than any of the tested ancient Egyptians.
KoftaBob 4y 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.
ashwagary 4y 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 4y 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.
  - ashwagary 4y ago
    If it quacks like a duck... I would be more skeptical of the deception idea if it was isolated and had no precedent. This Euro style global scale racism and forcefed history revision through colonization isn't a component of other major civilizations. My statement is not controversial. I would expect 7 billion people from diverse backgrounds agree and the billion or so beneficiaries in an echo chamber disagree.
    - frostburg 4y ago
      This would be somewhat more convincing if there wasn't a whole rabbit hole of "black Egypt" pseudohistory (with and without ancient aliens) - before you complain, this doesn't mean that people with dark skin weren't involved in the extremely long history of that civilization.
      - ashwagary 4y ago
        The absurd alien narrative is a minor fringe belief at best and has no factual basis. The history of Europeans making false self serving claims across the spectrum of knowledge on the other hands has centuries long established fact and easily proven evidence backing it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
verdenti 4y ago

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

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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
keenmaster 4y 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.

keenmaster 4y 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 4y ago
This is wrong. DNA studies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt%E2%80%93Mesopotamia_relations#2017_DNA_Genome_Study 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.
- sct202 4y ago
  Your citation states continuity with additional ancestry mixing in from later migrations: >The study stated that "our genetic time transect suggests genetic continuity between the Pre-Ptolemaic, Ptolemaic and Roman populations of Abusir el-Meleq, indicating that foreign rule impacted the [native] population only to a very limited degree at the genetic level."
  - DoItToMe81 4y ago
    Yeah, modern Egyptians are directly related to ancient Egyptians, with the biggest change being that they have significantly more subsaharan DNA than any of the tested ancient Egyptians.

KoftaBob 4y 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.

ashwagary 4y 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 4y 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.
- ashwagary 4y ago
  If it quacks like a duck... I would be more skeptical of the deception idea if it was isolated and had no precedent. This Euro style global scale racism and forcefed history revision through colonization isn't a component of other major civilizations. My statement is not controversial. I would expect 7 billion people from diverse backgrounds agree and the billion or so beneficiaries in an echo chamber disagree.
  - frostburg 4y ago
    This would be somewhat more convincing if there wasn't a whole rabbit hole of "black Egypt" pseudohistory (with and without ancient aliens) - before you complain, this doesn't mean that people with dark skin weren't involved in the extremely long history of that civilization.
    - ashwagary 4y ago
      The absurd alien narrative is a minor fringe belief at best and has no factual basis. The history of Europeans making false self serving claims across the spectrum of knowledge on the other hands has centuries long established fact and easily proven evidence backing it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

verdenti 4y ago