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So the skin color of the Egyptians in art is symbolic
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Tyrannohotep: [QB] Something I dug up today: [URL=http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/2527#.WZ8qsih96Uk]Tan Men/Pale Women: Color and Gender in Archaic Greece and Egypt, a Comparative Approach[/URL] [QUOTE]Chapter 1, “Egypt: Establishing the Norm—Old Kingdom Precedents,” introduces basic principles of ancient Egyptian art from the late Predynastic Period (ca. 3500–3000 BCE) through the New Kingdom (ca. 1550–1070 BCE), focusing primarily on the most well-known examples of elite funerary statues from the Old Kingdom, by which time, the author states, color conventions were firmly established (28–29). Eaverly rejects the interpretation that the gender-differential skin color convention realistically depicts sun exposure. Instead, she argues that the differentiation is meant to express duality, or “oppositional pairs” (40), which mirrors concepts of Egyptian ideology, such as the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, or order and chaos, where “unions of opposites symbolized completion” (40). Eaverly further suggests that binary skin color in tomb paintings was a way to demarcate the dual, complementary roles of men and women in the perpetuation of the creation myth, as well as the role of women to act as a stimulus for reproduction, thus guaranteeing the afterlife of the tomb owner (41). Such completion, she argues, was imperative to maintain order in the cosmos, and male and female colors, which she believes are opposites, are just one method of portraying this duality.[/QUOTE]Another review of the same book: [QUOTE]An introduction sets out the issues to be tackled. Two chapters on Egyptian art follow. The first argues that the establishment of color differentiation (the binary system of pale skin for women and dark skin for men) was contemporary with the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, and thus the establishment of the Egyptian nation-state, ca. 3100 B.C.E. The convention clearly distinguished men and women as opposites and so visually supported the maat, the concept of a balanced cosmos fundamental to Egyptian belief. At the same time, the convention supported the new dominant role of the male in Egyptian culture: [qb]society, Eaverly argues, had been more egalitarian in the Predynastic period, where color differentiation is not much in evidence (47–8).[/qb] In the end, the opposition between the pale and the tan in Dynastic art is not realistic but symbolic of the new order—of a new view of the world. On the whole the case is made, though conventions have to begin somewhere, and I wonder if this one might not have been “realistic” at least in origin: after all, if color differentiation were purely symbolic, men might be pale and women tan and the expression of “complementary opposition” (55) would be just as clear. Along the same lines, Eaverly concedes that color can at times signify ethnicity or “race.” Nubians can be painted black and Asiatics yellow, so “realism” plays a role in color choice after all (35, 49).[/QUOTE] [/QB][/QUOTE]
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