Romans had many different skin tones ranging from light brown to pale skin.
It is normally impossible for us to associate particular ancients with those modern racial categories. But this absence of evidence has allowed the assumption that most prominent Romans were, in our terms, White.
As in neighbouring city-states, the early Romans were composed mainly of Latin-speaking Italic people, known as the Latins. The Latins were a people with a marked Mediterranean character, related to other neighbouring Italic peoples such as the Falisci.
As with Ancient Egyptians, Mycenaean Greeks and Minoans generally depicted women with pale or white skin and men with dark brown or tanned skin.
If she wasn't naturally blonde—which most Italy-based Romans weren't—her options were to wear a wig, or lighten her hair with a mixture made from ashes of plant and nuts. It wasn't until the Roman conquest of Northern Europe areas that blonde hair became fashionable among the higher classes of Romans.
Early Romans viewed lack of body hair as a symbol of high class citizens. Many paintings and sculptures of ancient Roman women reveal that even pubic hair was removed. Hair removal was done via flint razors, tweezers, creams and stones.
Septimius Severus was the first African-born Roman emperor. This marble statue of the ruler from Alexandria in Egypt would once have been vividly painted, and shows him in military dress. He grew up in Leptis Magna, on the coast of modern-day Libya, and moved to Rome when he was around 18.
Ancient Egyptians Were Likely To Be Ethnically Diverse
Instead, they simply classified themselves by the regions where they lived. Scholarly research suggests there were many different skin colours across Egypt, including what we now call white, brown and black.
Italian skin tone is also commonly referred to as olive skin or Mediterranean skin. It can also be described as having a tannish, or light-moderate brown hue.
Probably the vast majority of the ancient Romans (the core, original Romans of Central Italy, not the much later, expanded notion of “civic Romanness”) were not blonde-haired, but they were white, that is, white in the same range that modern Southern Europeans like, for instance, South Italians or Greek people are.
Romans had a great variety of skin tones within their Mediterranean world. Frescoes, mosaics and painted ceramics from both the Greek and Roman periods reveal a fascination with black Africans and particularly Ethiopians, but did not employ what W.E.B. Du Bois would call a “color prejudice.”
In AD 193, Lucius Septimius Severus was named ruler of the Roman Empire and in doing so became Rome's first African Emperor. After emerging victorious from a period of civil war, Severus expanded the border of the empire to new heights, ushered in a period of imperial transformation and founded a dynasty.
Most people in ancient Greece had dark hair and, as a result of this, the Greeks found blond hair immensely fascinating. In the Homeric epics, Menelaus the king of the Spartans is, together with some other Achaean leaders, portrayed as blond.
More precisely, modern Italians are essentially the descendants of ancient Italians. Since ancient Italians were synonym of Romans from the 1st century BC to 212AD, modern Italians are somehow the descendants of the Romans.
The ancient Greeks were aware of the existence of people with dark skin, but they did not consider these people to be a separate “race.” To them, dark skin was simply a characteristic of a person's appearance; having dark skin was no different from having red hair or having blue eyes.
The Romans are the people who originated from the city of Rome in modern day Italy. Rome was the centre of the Roman Empire – the lands controlled by the Romans, which included parts of Europe (including Gaul (France), Greece and Spain), parts of North Africa and parts of the Middle East.
Greece, Spain, Italy, Turkey and portions of France have olive skin. However, you may not have thought of Russia as a country that does, but reports indicate a presence of this complexion here. Ukraine has a fair share of olive-toned people too.
Southern Italians are closest to the modern Greeks, while the Northern Italians are closest to the Spaniards and Southern French.
But returning to physical stereotypes, the reality in Spain is quite different. There are vast regional differences and variations in hair type and eye colour. Fair skin, blue and green eyes, light brown, blond and even red hair is common in many regions.
In the 8th century BCE, he noted, Kushite rulers were crowned as Kings of Egypt, ruling a combined Nubian and Egyptian kingdom as pharaohs of Egypt's 25th Dynasty. Those Kushite kings are commonly referred to as the “Black Pharaohs” in both scholarly and popular publications.
Publishing its findings in Nature Communications, the study concluded that preserved remains found in Abusir-el Meleq, Middle Egypt, were closest genetic relatives of Neolithic and Bronze Age populations from the Near East, Anatolia and Eastern Mediterranean Europeans.
The modern-day populations of Greece and Italy probably therefore fairly well represent the populations of those places in ancient times. Most Greeks and Italians are considered white today—but they weren't necessarily considered white a century ago.
Between the first century BC and the fourth century AD, several expeditions and explorations to Lake Chad and western Africa were conducted by groups of military and commercial units of Romans who moved across the Sahara and into the interior of Africa and its coast.
As a result of the battle, the Roman army, commanded by Regulus, landed in Africa near Aspis (modern Kelibia) and captured it. Most of the Roman ships returned to Sicily, leaving Regulus with 15,000 infantry and 500 cavalry to continue the war in Africa. Regulus advanced on the city of Adys and besieged it.
The name Africa came into Western use through the Romans, who used the name Africa terra — "land of the Afri" (plural, or "Afer" singular) — for the northern part of the continent, as the province of Africa with its capital Carthage, corresponding to modern-day Tunisia.