Actually, what I was trying to say was that Egyptian art has too many vagaries and complexities to try and simplify into neat little packages that everyone can take home and feel happy with. There are indeed images from tombs in Egypt where the women are depicted as quite pale, but in a realistic way. This varies from light tan, to pink to almost pure white. Does it mean that all women in Egypt were this complexion? Of course not. The majority? Probably not. Some? Absolutely. Likewise were all men in Egypt the same exact shade of reddish brown? Again, probably not. There are so many subtle variations in complexion and features that most Egyptian art never really intended to address for everything in it to be taken literally. More often than not the art of Egypt used color as a form of visual communications just like the hieroglyphs. Understanding this and the fact that there were color themes and variations used throughout dynastic Egyptian art helps one understand some of what is being said. Greek black and white vases are a variation of a similar theme, yet nobody I know of questions the identity of the Greeks or uses those artworks as literal evidence of the appearance of the Greeks. It was art as much as anything else and this must be taken into account, before trying to take things literally in every case. It is nearly impossible to look at Egyptian art with its cookie cutter images and standardized color schemes and suggest that all of the natural looking colors are 100% true to life because they aren't. Some Egyptians were darker and some were lighter, but looking at the artwork itself cannot give you anything more than a general sense of how they viewed themselves. They generally viewed themselves as brown, whether that was mostly very dark or somewhat dark or medium or mostly lighter brown is anyones guess, but the fact that many of them were within the range of medium to dark brown cannot be denied, as the presence of very light skinned foreigners cannot be denied at various points in time and various places either. But that does not give anyone carte blanche to take ancient Egypt out of Africa because some of them had more foreign ancestry. That simply doesn't make sense. Just as taking ancient Greece out of Europe doesn't make sense because some had foreign ancestry there as well.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/15/2007 08:49PM by Doug M.