Hi all, some time ago, I head that some people describe that ancient greeks would look more middle eastern or share the same colour skin and facial features as modern Iranians. I was quite skeptical but sometime back(again), on TV on discovery channel, on one of the greek island don't remember its name, there are some stone art work with color intact dipicting the greeks with darker skin tone and black hair. So this makes me wonder if the above statment is true. What do you think?

Below are picture/paintings/sculpture of Plato, one of the most famous ancient Greeks.





I wonder if he looked like today's Iranians.

Iranians, before heavy admixture with Arabs (also there were many black slaves brought there, as well as Indian subcontinent peoples and then also Asiatic people with the Turks and Mongols)...

Iranian (Persian) is an Indo-European language...based on location I think they don't look much different from Greeks. Iranians were changed somewhat by mixture with Gulf Arabs , Mongoloids (Turks and Mongolians who intermixed and never left), as well as the thousands of black East African and Indian Subcontinent slaves brought there over the last 2500 years. I would say that it is likely Greeks and Iranians looked fairly similar, just as Greeks and Armenians often do (Armenians not being nearly as mixed in ancestry as Persians)...Greeks mainly mixed with other Meditterean peoples and Slavs in the North of their country...but I think their features would be altered less than Persians.

I will post a composite image of ancient Greek faces and modern ones as well as pictures of modern and ancient Persians, I know where to find them.

The Ancient Egyptians showed Persians as looking "European" with light hair and eyes.

Greeks today often have light hair and eyes but at a much lesser frequency than people in Northern Europe...there skin also tends to be more tan, but it is not much different from people in Southern Italy, Spain, or Portugal...it is obvious that people along the Mediterranean on both sides have some shared ancestry that goes back thousands of years. It is often thought that Indo-European speakers came from Southern Ukraine or modern Turkey...some moved East into Asia/Middle East and some moved West (most seemed to move West). So the split between Greeks and Persians are likely quite ancient...but then again the split between Armenians and most Europeans is also ancient, but Armenians (most of them) can easily walk around Southern Europe and look like locals.

General_Zhaoyun, the first painting, was not draw in the time of Plato. Greeks did not make paintings like that at the time, I'm guessing that was drawn in the MIddle Ages, in Western Europe.


Here is a composite of the average modern Greek Face and the Ancient Greek Face.

The guy who did this is a greek nationalist, so "take it with a grain of salt".



http://dienekes.110mb.com/pictures/composites/parallels.jpg

If the link does not work, check out the image URL here.

As you can see, even the average modern Greek could be an Arab, Persian, Armenian, Southern Italian, Spaniard, etc.
The ancient Greek image matches up pretty well...but this tells us nothing of the skin color or eye color, but as I said, if you look at who these people intermixed with over time, I doubt the skin and eye color changed much.

Pictures of modern Greeks.

http://www.aueb.gr/deos/EIBA2002.files/PHOTOS/photos.htm





Pictures of Modern Persians

http://www.nipoc.org/events_past.htm#jul06







Also The Greek Historian Herodotus said that when the ancient Persians attacked Greece:



Persia was already clearly a mixed ethnic and even racial society with Egyptian, Ethiopian, Arab. At that time Ethiopian could be generic for "black" or anyone from Africa outside of Lybia and Egypt...


2 things are obvious.

In modern times, there is much overlap in the appearance of Greeks and Persians.

It is also true that historically Persians (due to location and reach of empire) was far more mixed in population.

I would say it is not an issue of if Ancient Greeks looked more like Persians, but the other way around, as Ancient Persians were already quite mixed even in ancient times.

As LongMa had inferred from its style,this was actually drawn during the High Renaissance period by Raphael Sanzio,therefore the depiction might not be representive of how Ancient Greeks really looked like.

Here's a Greek woman painted on a vase. The description of it at Wikimedia Commons reads:



Piraeus, for anyone unfamiliar with Greek history, was the main fortified seaport controlled by the city-state of Athens, the chief polis of the Greek city-states besides Sparta.

Here's another Greek vase:



The Wikimedia caption reads:



Eric

Persians and Greeks being of Indo European stock look much like other Southern Europeans. But there is local variation as in most other peoples. Some Persians have other Asiatic, Turkic, Semetic or other central Asian Indo European features from the east such as Kurd, Afghans, Indian etc and a few even look like Northern European. Greeks can have Turkic, Semetic or Northern European features.

Thanks for the info guys, I suppose that, like longma said, modern Persians/Iranians looks likes ancient greeks since ancient Persia was supposed to be like modern America which is more racially diverse.

Come to think of it, to make a historical accurate movie about ancient greeks, hollywood might want to consider employing Iranians actors and actresses for the roles. That can be an quite interesting if they actually bordered to do so.