“Egyptians delighted in type-casting their subdivisions of foreigners, and did so with deft caricatu
“Egyptians delighted in type-casting their subdivisions of foreigners, and did so with deft caricatures. By means of clear conventions of classification, using facial shape, skin colour and dress, they identified particular groups: Nubians, Asiatics, Libyans, peoples from the Aegean, and from the eastern Sudanese/Eritrean land of Punt. These stereotypes came to life again in the nineteenth century AD as western scholars began to record the ancient monuments and thus to explore the ancient Egyptians’ world through their eyes. It produced, for a while, a mood of over-confidence, in which the Egyptians’ portrayals of foreigners were regarded as almost photographic representations of ‘racial types’, a subject then high on anthropologists’ research agenda.”― Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, by Barry Kemp -- source link
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