Doug M Wrote:
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> I understood what you said, but I am making the
> point that saying the Egyptians were between the
> darkest black Sudanese and the lightest Asiatics
> is not any sort of precise anthropological
> description of Egyptian features. So many
> features could fit into that space that it is a
> totally useless way of describing how the
> Egyptians may have looked.

Then let's try Manilius' contemporaneous description of this issue from the first century CE:

"The Ethiopian stain the world and depict a race of men steeped in darkness; less sun-burnt are the natives of India; the land of Egypt, flooded by the Nile, darkens bodies more mildly owing to the inundation of its fields: it is a country nearer to us and its moderate climate imparts a medium tone..." Manilius, Astronomica 4.724

You have to recall that comparative imagery on disctinguishing features comes from the Egyptians themselves, as Roxana describes, as well as textual comparative terms such as Manilius, who lived outside Egypt. These are the only descriptions we have of ancient Egyptiansm from contemporaneous sources.

If archaeologically we find that the ancient Egyptians were mixed (which would be expected in a land which had considerable trade and travel routes for nomadic and pastoral peoples, as well as a cosmopolitan 'melting pot' policy after the empire period), then I don't think anyone can do much better in describing the way the ancient Egyptians looked.

So, we'll have to take the word of a) the ancient Egyptians, via imagery and texts, and b) ancient visitors, such as Manilius, et al., in describing the Egyptians as they viewed them.

HTH.

Katherine Griffis-Greenberg

Doctoral Candidate
Oriental Institute
Doctoral Programme in Oriental Studies [Egyptology]
Oxford University
Oxford, United Kingdom