Hacker News Reader

Comment by ummonk | Hacker News Reader

Given the preponderance of blonde emperors, it would be reasonable to assume emperors in general were rather light-skinned.

View on HN

Yet these renderings were not made with that choice.

There are a fair few of them depicted as what I'd consider blonde. Augustus particularly.

Augustus was described as "subflavum" which is often translated as "blonde" but is more likely to mean "light brown".

Sadly this _is_ an area which is indeed full of bias.

Is that not what 'blonde' generally is in adults? An image search for 'blonde man' returns men I'd consider 'blonde' which hair which seems objectively light brown (except those with obviously bleached highlights.)

I wouldn't know.

The color of Augustus here[0] is definitely blonde for me, bordering on platinum, while what I meant is that it might as well have been darker, i.e. [1] which I would call "light chestnut".

[0] https://voshart.com/ROMAN-EMPEROR-PROJECT [1] https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

What is blond, in a two-thousand-year-old context?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg

It doesn't matter. Non-white people without steppe ancestry are pretty much uniformly dark-haired and don't have names akin to "subflavum" for traditional hair colors, because light yellow/gold hair just isn't a thing, regardless of what exactly they conceive of as "yellow/gold".

Aboriginal Australians have blonde hair arising independently.

Pretty sure Augustus wasnt aboriginal Australian, though (I see your point)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com