What's wrong with this picture?
This is a frame from the movie "Exodus: Gods and Kings"
@Pat Mmm, I've tried looking up a few potential issues but they all checked out. So I don't know what's wrong with the picture. Tell us? :)
What issues did you look for?
@Pat Well, when I saw the picture my line of thinking went along like this:
- Did scale mail exist back then? *Searches* Mm, yeah, that's certainly possible. It was mentioned in a reign before this movie was set in.
- Okay, so, did they have those kind of trumpets back then? Yeah, there were even Egyptian drawings depicting that style trumpet. It's just that the ones with valves existed around 1800s. The medieval type trumpets already existed since Egyptian times. They're apparently called buisine.
- Ok fine. So, hairstyle. Is that normal? Yeah, the usual Egyptian style is often bald shaved (against heat and lice), and they often wore wigs. But they did have external influence, in particular from the Romans (almost typed Romulans there, lol), so that isn't really unthinkable either.
Am I overthinking this? :)
@Pat The only one I can still think of is: Too many white people there? Other than that I'm out of ideas. I'm not knowledgeable enough to figure out if the decorations are all period-appropriate.
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The use of the Glaive style weapon would place this in the New Kingdom Era (~1500BC - 1000BC)
Ancient egypt was neither predominately black nor white, they were egyptian, including the slaves. Blacks and whites of course had visited the land but would have been an extreme minority. Therefore most of the characters here, who seem either white or black, would be out of place in any time period.
Spears were not particularly wide spread enough to be the common weapon of a palace guard either. They were used mainly to hunt and rarely (though not absent from) the military.
Historically, science tried to categorize by race, but now that has been rejected. They study specific phenotypes and trace the origins and migration of those genes.
You are right about the variation of skin color. Melinen content varies by latitude (or more precisely by insolation) and takes about 10,000-30,000 years to change in a population (from what I remember). The haplogroup I mentioned originated about 30,000 years ago in west Africa, so likely ancient Egyptian's skin was lighter than in central or west Africa.
But ancient Egyptians (<~1500 BC) definitely were not Welch or any other ethnicity north of Rome, which is the ethnicity of the actors playing those parts.
Entierly agree, and I stated as much in my original comment. The white authority figures in the image are just as invalid historically as the black subservient characters on the outset. Neither are of a race that reflects the egyptian race.
As for your comment on how science has changed with regards to race, thats fairly accurate.In the past race used to be seen as a significant genetic difference to the point that it borderlines on being seen as almost entirely different species. Today race is still a very real scientific construct but as you say it recognizes that genes are far more intermixed. In science race is usually more in line with the idea of subspecies than a species but even then we are more integrated than most subspecies really, but valid all the same.
The main example that I think makes it obvious that race is a legitimate, objective, scientific idea is the fact that if you see someone who has a relatively pure African descent we can identify that via a blood test which will almost always show an overwhelming correlation to genes we expect of Africans. The fact that ones geographical descent can be identified and verified with accuracy through a blood test is pretty solid proof that race is a very real idea.
