• zout@fedia.io
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    1 day ago

    There probably are records, but I would be very suspicious if they mentioned skin colour.

    • floo@retrolemmy.com
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      1 day ago

      Oh, no, the Romans were quite prolific in their criticism of anyone who wasn’t also Roman. Especially when it came to both their language and their physical characteristics. The shit they said about the Gauls was absurd.

      And from pretty much every area they conquered, they took a gigantic amount of slaves.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
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        19 hours ago

        Everybody took slaves from prisoners of war in any conflict, not just the Romans. Slavery was ius commune, it had nothing to do with ethnicity and it fit in very different social and anthropological functions across all societies of the period. Everybody stop it with the application of modern, anglocentric concepts to ancient Mediterranean cultures. It was cute when you were just building a whole bunch of anachronistic white marble columns, but that’s as much as I can tolerate.

    • Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      Idk about the Romans, but pretty sure the Portuguese did report with surprise the existence of dark brown people in sub Saharan Africa during the age of discovery