DID ANCIENT GREEKS COME OUT OF A COOKIE-CUTTER? | 2008-04-04
According to the movies, every ancient Spartan looked exactly alike. Each had very black hair, brown eyes, and so forth. According to the new business of restoring the paint on ancient sculpture and ancient pictorals, the warrior level in Ancient Greece looked a lot like the average white American circa 1800.
Hollywood would like to present ancient Greeks as black, with a racially balanced mix. But we have heard too much abotu Indo-Europpeans for that, so they are as dark as Hollywood can make them. Just as Hollywood's (and PBS') "realistic" portrayal of Classical times includes gray stone statues no Roman would have tolerated and gray stone buildings likewise, the ancient Greeks are now uniformly dark and ancient Palestine and Egypt have a racially balanced upper crust.
In Cleopatra, Richard Burtion, playing Mark Antony, was screaming, "Why do statues have no eyes?!" Even then historians knew that they DID have eyes. Bright blue ones. In the New York Metropolitan Museum I saw an art piece from about 500 BC in an art museum. It consisted of two wires holding up two orbs painted as eyes. It was apparently an abstract from 500 BC, and they titled it "eyes."
The eyes were blue.
Nothing else is quite as fake as Politically Correct "realism."
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