Pre-modern conceptions of whiteness
The description of populations as white in reference to their skin colour predates and is distinct from the race categories constructed from the 17th century onward. Coloured terminology is occasionally found in Graeco-Roman ethnography and other ancient and medieval sources, but these societies did not have any notion of a white or pan-European race. 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. 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. Eventually these were progressively marginalised and replaced by the European form of racialised whiteness. Whiteness has no enduring "true essence", but instead is a social construct that is dependent on differing societal, geographic, and historical meanings. Scholarship on race distinguishes the modern concept from pre-modern descriptions, which focused on skin colour, complexion and other physical traits.
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. 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. 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.Fertile Crescent and North East Africa
Mesopotamia
In ancient Mesopotamia healthy skin colours were described as sāmu or peṣû while ill-health was associated with the skin colour arqu, a reference to jaundice. Peṣû was descended from the Proto-Semitic word f/pṣḥ, which was related to whiteness and brightness. The word sāmu would also be used to refer to red hair, either dyed or natural, with natural red hair being associated with the Eurasian Steppe. For Akkadians, peṣû might also be used to refer to medical conditions such as albinism or severe anaemia, or a woman's fair complexion. In contrast the Akkadian word ṣalmu would be used to describe people with dark skin, such as the Nubian pharaoh of Egypt's 25th Dynasty. Along with brown eyes, blue eyes or namru, are also referred to in Mesopotamian writings.Ancient Egypt
According to anthropologist Nina Jablonski:File:Races2.jpg|thumb|1820 drawing of a Book of Gates fresco of the tomb of Seti I, 1279 BC, depicting four groups of people: four Libyans, a Nubian, an Asiatic, and an Egyptian.
The Ancient Egyptian funerary text known as the Book of Gates distinguishes "four groups" in a procession. These are the "red-brown" Egyptians, the "pale" Levantine and Canaanite peoples or "Asiatics", the "black" "Nubians" and the "fair-skinned Libyans". The Egyptians are depicted as considerably darker-skinned than the Levantines and Libyans, but considerably lighter than the Nubians. Sex differences in skin colour were also depicted in Egyptian art, with women being depicted as noticeably lighter skinned than men. Men would be painted dark reddish-brown, while women could be painted "white, tan, cream, or yellow". Classical archaeologists typically ascribe this divergence to the differing lifestyles of men and women. According to Charles Freeman, depictions of women with light skin suggested a high status, and were a "sign that a woman did not have to work in the sun". As with other Mediterranean cultures, light skin came to be the feminine ideal in Egyptian art.
A number of scholars have argued that Ancient Egyptians shared cultural connections and origins with the Land of Punt. This has been accredited to the Egyptian textual descriptions of Puntland as Ta Nejter which translates into "God's Land", along with temple reliefs which depicted Puntites with reddish-brown skin complexions similar to their Egyptian counterparts.
Mainstream scholarship have situated the ethnicity and the origins of predynastic, southern Egypt as a foundational community primarily in northeast Africa which included the Sudan, tropical Africa and the Sahara whilst recognising the population variability that became characteristic of the pharaonic period. Pharaonic Egypt featured a physical gradation across the regional populations, with Upper Egyptians having shared more biological affinities with Sudanese and southernly African populations, whereas Lower Egyptians had closer genetic links with Levantine and Mediterranean populations.
The Levant
Ancient Greeks labeled the Phoenicians, and Levantines in general, as Phoinike, a word derived from the Greek work Phoinos, meaning "ruddy", possibly in reference to the skin colour of Ancient Levantines. In the Hebrew Bible, figures such as Esau and King David are described as "ruddy". According to scholar David M. Goldenberg, the ancient Israelites and Judean peoples preferred women with a "fair complexion". This preference is established in both biblical and post-biblical literature. For example, The Genesis Apocryphon describes Sarah as being "beautiful" in "her whiteness." A later scenario is written about by one of the Tannaim in which a potential groom refuses to marry a woman who he believes to be "ugly" and "black" until he finds out she is in fact "beautiful" and "white". In the Song of Songs a woman praises her lover for being "white and ruddy" while she is described as "clear as the moon".Goldenberg wrote:
A rabbinic text commenting on the skin diseases mentioned in the Bible, states: "An intensely bright white spot appears faint on the very light-skinned , while a faint spot appears bright on the very dark-skinned . Rabbi Ishmael said: 'The Jewsmay I be like an expiatory sacrifice for them are like the boxwood tree , neither black nor white, but in between.'"2 This statement records a second-century 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. 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."
India
The nature of skin colour and its role in the Indian caste system is strongly contested. According to the Indian sociologist G. S. Ghurye the groups mentioned in the Vedas, the Arya and Dasa, were distinguished by their skin colour or "varna" with the Arya being associated with a fair complexions and the Dasa being associated with dark complexions. Anthropologist Arthur Helweg states that the initial basis for the varna system was skin colour. Bengali scholar Jayantanuja Bandyopadhyaya records that in the Rigveda, the god Indra distributed the lands of the conquered Dasa to the "white-coloured" Arya. As such, Bandyopadhyaya characterises the conflict between the "white-skinned" Arya and "black-skinned" Anarya, or non-Aryans, as having racial overtones. The Indian Marxist historian D. D. Kosambi, wrote that the darker skin of the Dasyu "contrasted with the lighter skin-colour of the newcomers ." The Mahabhashya, Ṛgveda, and Gopatha Brahmana contain, according to Kenneth A.R. Kennedy, references to Brahmins with "white skins and red or yellow hair." Per David Lorenzen, there are some references in later Vedic literature that suggest the Brahmin and Vaishya castes are referred to as "white or fair".The Indian scholars Varsha Ayyar and Lalit Khandare assert that colourism, or discrimination based on skin pigmentation, has existed in India since pre-colonial times, predating any Eurocentric concepts of whiteness. Similarly, the scholar Nina Kullrich asserts that references to colour in Indian culture predate European colonialism and she also asserts that although racism and colourism are linked, they are not equivalent, because a desire for whiteness is a part of Indian culture that is different from European concepts of whiteness.
Others, such as Michael Witzel, state that the Rigveda uses krsna tvac "black skin" as a metaphor for irreligiosity. The Indian historian Romila Thapar states that skin colour differences are more likely to be symbolic descriptors. Kadira Pethiyagoda also states that while varna does literally mean colour, and was used to classify groups of people and express differences, recent scholarship suggests these terms were symbolic.
Ancient Greece
As with Ancient Egyptians, Mycenaean Greeks and Minoans generally depicted women with pale or white skin and men with tanned skin. Men with pale or light skin, leukochrōs could be considered weak and effeminate by Ancient Greek writers such as Plato and Aristotle. According to Aristotle, "Those whose skin is too dark are cowardly: witness Egyptians and the Ethiopians. Those whose skin is too light are equally cowardly: witness women. The skin colour typical of the courageous should be halfway between the two." Similarly, Xenophon of Athens describes Persian prisoners of war as "white-skinned because they were never without their clothing, and soft and unused to toil because they always rode in carriages" and states that Greek soldiers as a result believed "that the war would be in no way different from having to fight with women." In the Republic, Plato writes: "the swarthy are of manly aspect, the white are children of the gods, divinely fair".In Greek literature women including goddesses such as Hera and Aphrodite and mortals such as Penelope, Andromache, and Nausicaa can be described as leukōlenos. Athena is described as having blondish or brownish hair and blue, green, or grey eyes. Contrarily male warriors like Odysseus were usually described as having brown or bronzed skin, unless attention was being brought to skin that was vulnerable to injury in battle. Greek visual art usually showed women as white, much lighter than the typical male. As a goddess of beauty, Aphrodite was usually given very white skin in both graphic and textual art. Whiteness was generally seen as a desirable part of femininity in Ancient Greek culture.
The anonymous ancient Greek text the 'Alexander Romance' describes an exchange of letters between Alexander the Great and Queen Candace of Meroe, in which the queen writes: "Do not despise us for the colour of our skin. In our souls we are brighter than the whitest of your people."
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." According to the historian Nell Irvin Painter, people's skin colour did not carry useful meaning; what mattered is where they lived.
Herodotus described the Scythian Budini as having deep blue eyes and bright red hair and the Egyptians – quite like the Colchians – as melánchroes and curly-haired. He also gives the possibly first reference to the common Greek name of the tribes living south of Egypt, otherwise known as Nubians, which was Aithíopes. Later Xenophanes of Colophon described the Aethiopians as black and snub-nosed and the Thracians as having red hair and blue eyes. In his description of the Scythians, Hippocrates states that the cold weather "burns their white skin and turns it ruddy."
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. In the Physiognomy Polemon describes ancient Greeks as follows:
"The pure Greek is of medium stature, between tall and short, broad and weak. He is of erect posture, beautiful in face and appearance, white in colour, mixed with red, medium in flesh, with medium palms and elbows, alert, quick to learn, neither small nor large of head, in his neck thickness and strength. His hair is soft and red, with some curliness and some waviness on account of its lankness. In his face there is squareness, in his lip slimness, and his nose is pointed and evenly proportioned. His eyes are moist, bluish-black, very mobile, and very luminous. This is the description of the pure Greek."
A 4th century text by the physician Adamantius, which is largely based on Polemon's work, includes a similar description of the Greeks.