Pre-modern conceptions of whiteness

Pre-modern conceptions of whiteness

The description of populations as

medieval sources, but these societies did not have any notion of a white or pan-European race.^[4] In Graeco-Roman society whiteness was a somatic norm, although this norm could be rejected and it did not coincide with any system of discrimination or colour prejudice.^[5][6][7] Historically, before the late modern period, cultures outside of Europe and North America, such as those in the Middle East and China, employed concepts of whiteness.^[8] Eventually these were progressively marginalised and replaced by the European form of racialised whiteness.^[8] Whiteness has no enduring "true essence", but instead is a social construct that is dependent on differing societal, geographic, and historical meanings.^[9][10] Scholarship on race distinguishes the modern concept from pre-modern descriptions, which focused on skin colour, complexion and other physical traits.^[11]

Background

Beginning with the rise of agricultural economies and the increasing stratification of societies around the world approximately 6000 years ago, light skin came to be increasingly associated with higher social status.^[12] Because lower status individuals were typically required to participate in arduous outdoor toil, dark skin began to be associated with lower social status in agricultural societies around the world. Over time whiteness became associated with happiness, success, freedom from outdoor toil, and even spiritual purity.^[12] In the ancient and medieval societies of Europe, Asia, and North Africa, light skin, especially among women, came to be a sign of living a privileged lifestyle, having noble ancestry, and also became an indicator of beauty.^[12][13]

Fertile Crescent

Mesopotamia

In ancient

anaemia, or a woman's fair complexion.^[17][19] In contrast the Akkadian word ṣalmu ("black") would be used to describe people with dark skin, such as the Nubian pharaoh of Egypt's 25th Dynasty.^[20] Along with brown eyes, blue eyes or namru ("dazzling(-blue)), are also referred to in Mesopotamian writings.^[21]

Ancient Egypt

Further information: Ancient Egyptian race controversy

According to anthropologist Nina Jablonski:

Libyans, a Nubian, an Asiatic, and an Egyptian.^[22]

In ancient Egypt as a whole, people were not designated by color terms [...] Egyptian inscriptions and literature only rarely, for instance, mention the dark skin color of the Kushites of Upper Nubia. We know the Egyptians were not oblivious to skin color, however, because artists paid attention to it in their works of art, to the extent that the pigments at the time permitted.^[23]

A rabbinic text commenting on the skin diseases mentioned in the Bible (Leviticus, chs. 13–14; Deut 24:8), states: "An intensely bright white spot [baheret] appears faint on the very light-skinned [germani], while a faint spot appears bright on the very dark-skinned [kushi]. Rabbi Ishmael said: 'The Jews—may I be like an expiatory sacrifice for them [an expression of love]—are like the boxwood tree [eshkeroae], neither black nor white, but in between.'"2 This statement records a second-century (R. Ishmael) perception that the skin color of Jews is midway between black and white.3 More precisely it is light brown, the color of the boxwood tree.4 This early perception of the intermediate, light-brown shade of the Jewish complexion is corroborated by a number of papyri from the Ptolemaic period in Egypt that describe the complexion of various Jews as "honey-colored."[40]

India

The nature of skin colour and its role in the

Classicist James H. Dee states "the Greeks do not describe themselves as 'White people'—or as anything else because they had no regular word in their colour vocabulary for themselves."^[69] People's skin colour did not carry useful meaning; what mattered is where they lived.^[70]

The 2nd century Anatolian Greek sophist Polemon of Laodicea advocated a view of ancient physiognomy which attributed variations in skin and hair colour to the actions of the Sun. An anonymous 4th century Latin treatise, based on the work of Polemon, describes several stereotypes, including some related to skin colour, such as the claim that light-skinned "Northern" people are "courageous and bold and so forth". The Arabic translations of Polemon similarly includes white skin in a list of several traits held by Greeks of Hellenic or Ionian descent.^[77]

Ancient Rome

The

Caucasian peoples.^[78]

As with the ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans saw whiteness as an important part of feminine beauty.^[67] For example, in Virgil's Aeneid, Dido, the Phoenician queen of Carthage, and lover of Aeneas, is described as candida or "white".^[78] Virgil also refers to the goddess Venus as having "snow white arms".^[87] The Carthaginian poet Luxorius wrote disparagingly of the skin colour of Ethiopian women while praising the colour white as the ideal colour for women.^[87]

The 6th century Byzantine scholar Procopius referred to various invading barbarian tribes as being white, such as the Gothic tribes who he claimed had "white bodies and fair hair" and the Hephthalites or "White Huns" who, according to him, had "white bodies and countenances".^[105][82] Indian scholars also referred to the Hephthalites as Sveta Huna (White Huns).^[106] Hephthalites portrayed in the Sogdian art of the Afrasiab palace are shown as having pale or ruddy faces.^[107]

China

In pre-modern China, the Han Chinese used whiteness as a non-racial social category that included themselves while excluding many non-Chinese peoples.

Scholars of Ancient China also describe Indo-European-speaking peoples of north-western China, such as the Yuezhi, as having "white" or "reddish white" skin.^[111] Similarly, the Wusun tribe are said to have had green eyes and red beards.^[112]

Muslim world

During and after the Middle Ages, the peoples of the Middle East used the term white to distinguish themselves from darker-skinned "others".^[110] "White", "red", and "black" became ethnic identifiers with "black" signifying inferiority.^[110] These colour terms became fixed after the initial Arab Conquests.^[114] Whiteness in this era became a valued physical attribute, with a white complexion being associated with the social elite.^[114]

Middle Easterners noted that Europeans were "excessively white" with "pale blue" eyes.^[114] Muslim scholars of the Islamic Golden Age, such as Avicenna, described the northern tribes bordering the Muslim world as white; Avicenna writes: "The Slavs acquire whiteness / Until their Skins turn soft."^[115] The Arab explorer Ahmad ibn Fadlan during his northern travels detailed the Rus' people of the Viking Age as being "blonde and ruddy" and "big men with white bodies."^[116][117] The medieval Muslim sociologist Ibn Khaldun noted that those north of the Arabic-speaking world typically didn't use the term white:^[118]

The inhabitants of the north are not called by their color, because the people who established the conventional meanings of the words were themselves white. Thus whiteness was something usual and common to them, and they did not see anything sufficiently remarkable in it to cause them to use it as a specific term.

— Ibn Khaldun,

Abrahamic figures, had a "white or ruddy colour".^[125]

The term "white" was also used within

Koranic exegesis as part of the "Curse of Ham". According to the 9th century scholar, Ibn Qutaybah, the religious writer and son of a companion of Muhammad, Wahb ibn Munabbih, related an interpretation of the story of Noah that stated Noah's son Ham had been a white man, but was later cursed by God to have his skin and the skin of his descendants turned black.^[126] As such Ham became the ancestor of all dark skinned people including Ethiopians, Nubians, Copts, and Berbers who were, according to other Islamic traditions related to the "Curse of Cannan", now also cursed to be bondsmen or slaves.^[127]

White slavery

Main article: White slavery

Christian Arab intellectual Ibn Butlan of Baghdad wrote the first slave vade mecum, or handbook, in the 11th century, which recorded and described different ethnic and racial groups, dividing white slaves from black slaves and suggesting different tasks for each group based on their attributes.^[132] Ibn Butlan suggested that white slaves, such as Turks and Slavs, should be used as soldiers while black slaves should be used as labourers, servants, and eunuchs.^[133] Generally in the Arab world, white slaves came to be used to fill administrative and domestic positions while black slaves were used for rough labour.^[134] According to Bernard Lewis, white slaves could also conceivably become "generals, provincial governors, sovereigns and founders of dynasties", while such positions were rarely bestowed upon black slaves.^[134] Likewise, emancipated white slaves were offered more opportunities for social advancement in Arab society than emancipated black slaves.^[135]

In medieval Southern Europe slaves came to be categorised based on colour with Christians using typical labels for Muslim slaves such as sarraceno blanco (white

Iberia and Italy, people were described as white, black, or of intermediate colour.^[138]

Christendom

Medieval Christians seldom used "race" as a human category; the word emerged in 15th century Romance-language texts on animal husbandry, and writers tended instead to use words like gens and natio when classifying human groups. Medieval ideas about skin colour were complex. Dark skin – depicted in art using brown, black, blue, grey and sometimes purple hues – often signified negative moral and spiritual qualities distinct from physical appearance. Thus, the image of Saladin facing Richard I in the 14th century Luttrell Psalter depicts the Saracen with dark blue skin and a monstrous expression, even though the Muslims of the Levant at the time of the Third Crusade were predominantly light-skinned Mamluks. Christian theologians, for whom blackness represented sin and the devil, describe the newly baptised as "whitened" by the washing away of their sins.^[139]

Female beauty

See also: Perceptions of the female body in medieval Europe

By the Late Middle Ages, the idealised, light-skinned features of high status figures in Gothic art signalled their moral purity, social rank, and political authority. The princesses of Chivalric romance and the noble ladies of courtly love literature similarly combined white skin with other positive social markers: slender proportions, graceful bearing, and expensive dress.^[140]

The ideal of feminine beauty was formalised in the 12th century by Matthew of Vendôme in the Ars Versificatoria, which includes two descriptions Helen of Troy as a model. In the first example, her forehead is white as paper, the space between her eyes white and clear (a "milky way"), her colouring white and red (like rose and snow), and her teeth like ivory. In the second portrait, her forehead is like milk, teeth like ivory, neck like snow, legs fleshy (or white).^[141]

Chaucer

According to the medievalist Candace Barrington:

White faces fill

Canterbury Tales. Their ubiquity can be easy to ignore because they are not labeled as white. Aside from the occasional lady with the fair face—which could refer to her skin tone, her beauty, or both—skin color is noteworthy in Chaucer's tales not as a visible, essential bodily quality but as a changeable trait linked to such external factors as climate, work, and habit.^[142]

Lower-class labourers ("churls") and drunkards typically have dark or ruddy faces and skin—for example, Perkyn Revelour ("brown and as berye") and the canon's yeoman (with a "leden hewe"). Dark skin is thus a consequence of "sin, sun, damnation, or putrefying flames", not a natural physical condition of certain groups of people. Chaucer's characters are all "by default, unrelentingly but invisibly white."[142]

See also

• Caucasian race
• Colour psychology
• Colour terminology for race
• Historical race concepts
• Light skin
• White people

References

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16. ^ Thavapalan 2019, p. 139: in the urine scale, at least two shades of white are described: peṣû meaning "cloudy" and kīma šizbi "milky"...The example of a woman giving birth to an infant that is "as white as alabaster" quoted above probably refers to a case of albinism. Fair skin caused by severe anemia is described in Akkadian omens as "disfigured with white" (peṣû + nakāru). Aside from these cases, peṣû seems to refer to the normal, healthy coloration of a person's skin.
17. ^ ^{a b} Thavapalan 2019, p. 139.
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25. ^ Thavapalan 2019, p. 155-156: As a point of correlation to visual culture, one can observe that in Egyptian art too, Nubians from the south are painted black. Egyptian natives were portrayed with a red-brown complexion, Syrians or Asiatic peoples from the north and east were shown in pale tones and Libyans from the west were represented in white.
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79. ^ Alleyne 2002, p. 43:For white, there is in Latin on the one hand, albus, which, in the classical period, tended to refer to the physical phenomenon of whiteness.
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81. ^ Alleyne 2002, p. 44: Vitruvius's description of the Nordic peoples: sub septentrionibus nutriuntur gentes, immanibus corporibus, candidus coloribus ("there are people living in the northern regions who have huge bodies and are white in colour")
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84. ^ Smith 2009, p. 66:In the Natural History, the corresponding section opens with an excursus on the "interior circuit of Africa," incorporating in its geographical catalogue "the Egyptian Libyans, and then the people called in Greek the White Ethiopians
85. ^ Alleyne 2002, p. 45:after the Germanic invasions of Italy from the north (beginning circa the 3rd century AD), that candidus and albus disappeared from spoken usage in favour of the Germanic word blancus (French blanc, Spanish blanco, Portuguese branco, Italian bianco). This neutral term came to be used in reference to Caucasian peoples
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89. ^ Juvenal (2004). Juvenal and Persius (in Latin and English). Loeb. Satire II line 23 'ego te ceventem, Sexte, verebor?' infamis Varillus ait, 'quo deterior te?' loripedem rectus derideat, Aethiopem albus' . . . 'Shall I be in awe of you, Sextus, when I see you wiggling your arse?' says the notorious Varillus. 'How am I worse than you? It should be the man who walks upright who mocks the man who limps, the white man who mocks the black.'
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     . Other Chinese sources characterized the "Greater Yuezhi" as having "white" or "reddish white skin, another typically Caucasoid feature.
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125. ^ Lewis 1992, p. 36. The same association of light with good is shown in the Muslim hagiographic literature, which depicts the Prophet himself as of white or ruddy color. Similar descriptions are given of his wife `A'isha, his son-in-law `Ali and his descendants, and even his predecessors, the prophets Abraham, Moses, and Jesus..
126. ^ Lewis 1992, p. 123-125: Wahb ibn Munabbih said: Ham the son of Noah was a white man, with a handsome face and a fine figure, and Almighty God changed his color and the color of his descendants in response to his father's curse....because Shem covered his father's nakedness, his descendants would be prophets and nobles (sharif), while those of Ham would be bondsmen and bondswomen until the Day of Judgment..
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132. ^ Lewis 1992, p. 48: Ibn Butlan, an eleventh-century Christian physician in Baghdad, wrote a sort of slave trader's vade mecum, which is the first of a series of such works.26 He reviews the range of slaves available in the markets of the Middle East, and considers the different kinds, black and white, male and female, classifying them according to their racial, ethnic, and regional origins and indicating which groups are best suited to which tasks. Similar advice on these matters is offered by a number of later writers.
133. ^ Lewis 1992, p. 56: Ibn Butlan, in his handbook, suggests a proper ethnic division of labor for both male and female slaves. As guards of persons and property, he recommends Indians and Nubians; as laborers, servants, and eunuchs, Zanj; as soldiers, Turks and Slavs.
134. ^ ^{a b} Lewis 1992, pp. 56–59.
135. ^ Lewis 1992, p. 60: The same limitation of opportunity applies to the emancipated slave. The emancipated white slave was free from any kind of restriction; the emancipated black slave was at most times and places rarely able to rise above the lowest levels..
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138. ^ Forbes 1993, p. 66: the late medieval period in Italy and the Iberian peninsula saw people being variously classified as albo, alvi, bianco, branco (white), new, nigri, negri, negro, negre, preto (black), and as of intermediate colors: lauro, loro, llor, berretini, rufo, pardo, olivastre, etc.
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142. ^ ^{a b} Barrington, Candace (2012). "Dark Whiteness: Benjamin Brawley and Chaucer". In Eileen Joy, Myra Seaman; Masciandaro, Nicola (eds.). Dark Chaucer: An Assortment (PDF). Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books. p. 3.

Further reading

• Graves, Robert (1948). The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. United Kingdom: Faber & Faber.

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