Red/Blonde haired mummies and such.

From: Aquatic DubMonkey (rewindme_at_lunarmagazine.com)
Date: 10/05/04 

Date: 4 Oct 2004 17:14:14 -0700

Hello all. I'm currently doing a little research into the red and
blonde haired mummies that have been found in some very unexpected
places. Right now I'm focusing on Egypt. I have a couple quotes from a
website I would like you guys to take a look at if you have the time,
it mostly regards blond and red-haired pharaohs and royalty in ancient
Egypt. If any of you could, please tell me if any of these claims can
be strongly disputed or are just plain wrong. Any help with this would
be greatly appreciated.

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1.The mummy of the wife of King Tutankhamen has auburn hair.

2.A mummy with red hair, red mustache and red beard was found
by the pyramids at Saqqara.

3.Red-haired mummies were found in the crocodile-caverns of Aboufaida.

4.The book HISTORY OF EGYPTIAN MUMMIES mentions a mummy with
reddish-brown hair.

5.The mummies of Rameses II and Prince Yuaa have fine silky yellow
hair. The
mummy of another pharaoh, Thothmes II, has light chestnut-colored
hair.

6.An article in a leading British anthropological journal states that
many mummies have dark reddish-brownhair. Professor Vacher De Lapouge
described a blond mummy found at Al Amrah, which he says has the face
and skull measurements of a typical Gaul or Saxon.

7.A blond mummy was found at Kawamil along with many
chestnut-colored ones.

8.Chestnut-haired mummies have been found at Silsileh.

9.The mummy of Queen Tiy has "wavy brown hair."

10.Unfortunately, only the mummies of a very few pharaohs have
survived to
the 20th century, but a large proportion of these are blond.

11.The Egyptians have left us many paintings and statues of blondes
and redheads. Amenhotep III's tomb painting shows him as having light
red hair. Also, his features are quite caucasian

12.A farm scene from around 2000 B.C. in the tomb of the nobleman
Meketre shows redheads.

13.An Egyptian scribe named Kay at Sakkarah around 2500 B.C. has blue
eyes.

14.The tomb of Menna (18th Dynasty) at West Thebes shows blond girls.
The god Horus is usually depicted as white. He is very white in the
Papyrus Book of the Dead of Lady Cheritwebeshet (21st Dynasty), found
in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

15.A very striking painting of a yellow-haired man hunting from a
chariot can be found in the tomb of Userhet, Royal Scribe of Amenophis
II. The yellow-haired man is Userhet. The same tomb has paintings of
blond soldiers. The tomb of Menna also has a wall painting showing a
blond man supervising two
dark-haired workers scooping grain.

16.The Funerary stele (inscribed stone slab)of Priest Remi clearly
shows him as having red hair,

17.The eye of Horus, the so-called Wedjat Eye. is always blue.

18.A very attractive painting is found on the wall of a private tomb
in West Thebes from the 18th Dynasty. The two deceased parents are
white people with black hair. Mourning them are two pretty
fair-skinned girls with light blond hair and their red-haired older
brother.

19.Queen Thi is painted as having a rosy complexion, blue eyes and
blond hair. She was co-ruler with her husband Amenhotep III and it
has been said of their rule. "The reign of Amenhotep III was the
culminating point in Egyptian history, for never again, in spite of
the exalted effort of the Ramessides, did Egypt occupy so exalted a
place among the nations of the world as she had in
his time."

20. Amenhotep III looks northern European in his statues.

21. Paintings of people with red hair and blue eyes were found at the
tomb of Bagt in Beni Hassan. Many other tombs at Beni Hassan have
paintings of individuals with blond and red hair as well as blue eyes.

22. Paintings of blonds and redheads have been found among the tombs
at
Thebes.

23. Blond hair and blue eyes were painted at the tomb of
Pharaoh Menphtah in the valley of the Kings.

24. Paintings from the Third Dynasty show native Egyptians with red
hair and blue eyes. They are shepherds, workers and bricklayers.

25. A blond woman was painted at the tomb of Djeser-ka-ra-seneb in
Thebes.

26.A model of a ship from about 2500 B.C. is manned by five blond
sailors.

27.The god Nuit was painted as white and blond.

28.A painting at the tomb of Meresankh III at Giza, from about 2485
B.C., shows white skin and red hair.

29.Two statues from about 2570 B.C., found in the tombs at Medum, show
Prince Rahotep and his wife Nofret. He has light green stones for
eyes. She has
violet-blue stones.

30.A painting from Iteti's tomb at Saqqara shows a very Nordic-looking
man with blond hair.

31. Grafton Smith mentions the distinctly red hair of the 18th Dynasty
mummy Henutmehet.

32. Harvard Professor Carleton Coon, in his book THE RACES OF EUROPE,
tells us that "many of the officials, courtiers, and priests,
representing the upper class of Egyptian society but not the royalty,
looked strikingly like modern Europeans, especially long-headed ones."
(Note: Nordics are long-headed.) Long-headed Europeans are most
common in Britain, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and northern Germany.

33. Time-Life books put out a volume called RAMESES II THE GREAT. It
has a
good picture of the blond mummy of Rameses II. Another picture can be
found in the book X-RAYING THE PHARAOHS, especially the picture on the
jacket cover. It shows his yellow hair.

34. A book called CHRONICLE OF THE PHARAOHS was recently published
showing paintings, sculptures and mummies of 189 pharaohs and leading
personalities of Ancient Egypt. Of these, 102 appear European, 13 look
Black, and the rest are hard to classify. All nine mummies look like
our Europeans.

35. The very first pharaoh, Narmer, also known as Menes, looks very
Caucasion

36. The same can be said for Khufu's cousin Hemon, who designed the
Great Pyramid of Giza, with help from Imhotep. A computer-generated
reconstruction of the face of the Sphinx shows a European-looking
face.
It was once painted sunburned red. The Egyptians often painted
upper class men as red and upper class women as white; this is because
the men became sun-burned or tanned while outside under the burning
Egyptian sun. The women, however, usually stayed inside.

37. In 1902, E. A. Wallis Budge, the renowned Egyptologist, described
the pre-dynastic Egyptians thus:

38. "The predynastic Egyptians, that is to say, that stratum of them
which was indigenous to North Africa, belonged to a white or
light-skinned race with fair hair, who in many particulars resembled
the Libyans, who in later historical times lived very near the western
bank of the Nile." [E. A. W. Budge, Egypt in the Neolithic and Archaic
Periods (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trübner, 1902), p. 49.]

39.Later, in the same book, Budge referred to a pre-dynastic statuette
that: "has eyes inlaid with lapis-lazuli, by which we are probably
intended to understand that the woman here represented had blue eyes."
[Ibid., p. 51.]

40. In 1925, the Oxford don L. H. Dudley Buxton, wrote the following
concerning ancient Egyptian crania:

"Among the ancient crania from the Thebaid in the collection in the
Department of Human Anatomy in Oxford, there are specimens which must
unhesitatingly be considered to be those of Nordic type. [L. H. D.
Buxton, The Peoples of Asia (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trübner,
1925), p. 50.]

41. The Scottish physical anthropologist Robert Gayre has written,
that in his considered opinion:

"Ancient Egypt, for instance, was essentially a penetration of
Caucasoid racial elements into Africa . . . This civilisation grew out
of the settlement of Mediterraneans, Armenoids, even Nordics, and
Atlantics in North Africa . . ." [R. Gayre of Gayre, Miscellaneous
Racial Studies, 1943-1972 (Edinburgh: Armorial, 1972), p. 85.]

42. When English archaeologist Howard Carter excavated the tomb of
Tutankhamen in 1922, he discovered in the Treasury a small wooden
sarcophagus. Within it lay a memento of Tutankhamen's beloved
grandmother, Queen Tiye: "a curl of her auburn hair." [C.
Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutankhamen: Life and Death of a Pharaoh
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 65.] (See mummy picture)

43. Queen Tiye (18th Dynasty), was the daughter of Thuya, a Priestess
of the God Amun. Thuya's mummy, which was found in 1905, has long,
red-blonde hair. Examinations of Tiye's mummy proved that she bore a
striking resemblance to her mother. [B. Adams, Egyptian Mummies
(Aylesbury: Shire Publications, 1988), p. 39.] (See mummy picture)

44. A painting of the mother of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (18th Dynasty),
reveals that she had blonde hair, blue eyes and a rosy complexion. [W.
Sieglin, Die blonden Haare der indogermanischen Völker des Altertums
(Munich: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1935), p. 132.]

45. Princess Ranofri, a daughter of Pharaoh Tuthmosis III (18th
Dynasty), is depicted as a blonde in a wall painting that was recorded
in the 19th century, by the Italian Egyptologist Ippolito Rosellini.
[Ibid., p. 132.]

46. In 1929 archaeologists discovered the mummy of fifty year-old
Queen Meryet-Amun (another daughter of Tuthmosis III); the mummy has
wavy, light-brown hair. [R. B. Partridge, Faces of Pharaohs (London:
Rubicon Press, 1994), p. 91.]

47. American Egyptologist Donald P. Ryan excavated tomb KV 60, in the
Valley of the Kings, during the course of 1989. Inside, he found the
mummy of a royal female, which he believes to be the long-lost remains
of the great Queen Hatshepsut (18th Dynasty). Ryan describes the mummy
as follows:

"The mummy was mostly unwrapped and on its back. Strands of
reddish-blond hair lay on the floor beneath the bald head." [Ibid., p.
87.]

48. Manetho, a Graeco-Egyptian priest who flourished in the 3rd
century BC, wrote in his Egyptian History, that the last ruler of the
6th Dynasty was a woman by the name of Queen Nitocris. He has this to
say about her:

"There was a queen Nitocris, braver than all the men of her time, the
most beautiful of all the women, blonde-haired with rosy cheeks. By
her, it is said, the third pyramid was reared, with the aspect of a
mountain." [W. G. Waddell, Manetho (London: William Heinemann, 1980),
p. 57.]

49. According to the Graeco-Roman authors Pliny the Elder, Strabo and
Diodorus Siculus, the Third Pyramid was built by a woman named
Rhodopis. When translated from the original Greek, her name means
"rosy-cheeked". [G. A. Wainwright, The Sky-Religion in Egypt
(Cambridge: University Press, 1938), p. 42.]

50. We may also note that a tomb painting recorded by the German
Egyptologist C. R. Lepsius in the 1840s, depicts a blonde woman by the
name of Hetepheres (circa 5th Dynasty). The German scholar Alexander
Scharff, observed that she was described as being a Priestess of the
Goddess Neith, a deity who was sacred to the blond-haired Libyans of
the Delta region. He goes on to state that her name is precisely the
same as that of Queen Hetepheres II, who is also shown as fair-haired,
in a painting on the wall of Queen Meresankh III's tomb. He deduced
from all of this, that the two women may well have been related, and
he suggested that Egypt during the Age of the Pyramids, was dominated
by an elite of blonde women. [A. Scharff, "Ein Beitrag zur Chronologie
der 4. ägyptischen Dynastie." Orientalistische Literaturzeitung XXXI
(1928) pp. 73-81.]

51. The twentieth prayer of the 141st chapter of the ancient Egyptian
Book of the Dead, is dedicated "to the Goddess greatly beloved, with
red hair." [E. A. W. Budge, The Book of the Dead (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench & Trübner, 1901), p. 430.] In the tomb of Pharaoh Merenptah
(19th Dynasty), there are depictions of red-haired goddesses. [N.
Reeves & R. H. Wilkinson, The Complete Valley of the Kings (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1997), p. 149.]

52. In the Book of the Dead, the eyes of the god Horus are described
as "shining," or "brilliant," whilst another passage refers more
explicitly to "Horus of the blue eyes". [Budge, op. cit., pp. 421 &
602.] The rubric to the 140th chapter of said book, states that the
amulet known as the "Eye of Horus," (used to ward-off the "Evil Eye"),
must always be made from lapis-lazuli, a mineral which is blue in
colour. [Ibid., p. 427.] It should be noted that the Goddess Wadjet,
who symbolised the Divine Eye of Horus, was represented by a snake (a
hooded cobra to be precise), and her name, when translated from the
original Egyptian, means "blue-green". [A. F. Alford, The Phoenix
Solution (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998), pp. 266-268.]
Interestingly, the ancient Scandanavians claimed that anyone who was
blue-eyed (and therefore possessed the power of the Evil Eye), had "a
snake in the eye," and blue eyes were frequently compared to the eyes
of a serpent. [F. B. Gummere, Germanic Origins (London: David Nutt,
1892), pp. 58, 62.]

53. In the ancient Pyramid Texts, the Gods are said to have blue and
green eyes. [Alford, op. cit., p. 232.] The Graeco-Roman author
Diodorus Siculus (I, 12), says that the Egyptians thought the goddess
Neith had blue eyes. [C. H. Oldfather, Diodorus of Sicily (London:
William Heinemann, 1968), p. 45.]

54. A text from the mammisi of Isis at Denderah, declares that the
goddess was given birth to in the form of a "ruddy woman". [J. G.
Griffiths, De Iside et Osiride (Cardiff: University of Wales Press,
1970), p. 451.] Finally, the Greek author Plutarch, in the 22nd
chapter of his De Iside et Osiride, states that the Egyptians thought
Horus to be fair-skinned, and the god Seth to be of a ruddy
complexion. [Ibid., p. 151.]

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