Could have both Phillip II and Alexander looked like in the film "Alexander ( 2004 )"?

[twgamer20197]

I just wonder if both the father and the son looked like they look ( specially in their face ) in the film "Alexander ( 2004 )". Is it likely?

[enoch]

Unlikely. Do recommend for the layman Adrian Goldsworthy’s new book on Phillip and Alexander. Best bio of Phillip for non academics I have come across.

[athanaric]

I just wonder if both the father and the son looked like they look ( specially in their face ) in the film "Alexander ( 2004 )". Is it likely?

Possible yes (minus the stupid blonde wig Farrell had, no idea why they gave him that. Should've gone with his natural hair). As for likelihood, the best bet is to go for the looks of people with ancestry from that region, so, eh. Could've been worse.
Generally speaking, roles portraying historical or mythological Mediterranean characters most often go to people with obvious Northern European, West African, or even East Asian or Polynesian ancestry for some reason. On the surface, this is odd because there's no shortage of Italian-American and even Greek and Spanish (as in Spanish. Not Central American) actors in Hollywood. I guess it's because producers and script writers feel the need to pander to specific North American demographics, whether the latter want it or not.

[enoch]

Possible yes (minus the stupid blonde wig Farrell had, no idea why they gave him that. Should've gone with his natural hair). As for likelihood, the best bet is to go for the looks of people with ancestry from that region, so, eh. Could've been worse.
Generally speaking, roles portraying historical or mythological Mediterranean characters most often go to people with obvious Northern European, West African, or even East Asian or Polynesian ancestry for some reason. On the surface, this is odd because there's no shortage of Italian-American and even Greek and Spanish (as in Spanish. Not Central American) actors in Hollywood. I guess it's because producers and script writers feel the need to pander to specific North American demographics, whether the latter want it or not.

Phillip is hard to know because so little about him survived and what did was from after Alexander’s ascendency. Plenty of descriptions of Alexander from people who saw him survive and it is clear he was short, stocky and incredibly strong. An ideal wrestler build. Farrell just isn’t that.

[Roma_Victrix]

Possible yes (minus the stupid blonde wig Farrell had, no idea why they gave him that. Should've gone with his natural hair). As for likelihood, the best bet is to go for the looks of people with ancestry from that region, so, eh. Could've been worse.

While Val Kilmer is perhaps a bit too Germanic and Colin Farrell a bit too Celtic looking for average Greek facial features, there's a reason they gave Alexander blonde hair. It's because of literary descriptions plus early Hellenistic mosaics of Macedon's capital city Pella in northern Greece showing Alexander the Great with blondish or reddish hair. Even the famous Alexander Mosaic of Republican era Roman Pompeii shows him with blondish brunet hair, probably more authentic and true to form than the mosaics. There's at least a minority of people in northern Greece and Macedonia who still exhibit these fairer traits, something much rarer among southern Greeks and islanders like Cretans and Cypriots. Not a surprise since their genomes align more closely with Anatolian Bronze Age population groups than with Indo-European steppe invaders whose genes are generally more prevalent in northern Greece (same with northern Italy versus southern Italy).





Various people in the Macedonian region of northern Greece today:



Some other Greeks in general:

[Gromovnik]

Aaaaaaaand, it became one of those​ threads...

[Roma_Victrix]

Aaaaaaaand, it became one of those​ threads...

He started it! Seriously, though, it was that kind of thread from the start.

[Jurand of Cracow]

On the identification of the ancient people and resemblance in family - I think this is the best lecture I've heard. The bottom line: the deptions / identification of the ancient statues (and broader: sources) tell more about our times than about the ancient people.

[Cookiegod]

Roma you can't use the Northern Greeks for reference though since those are very heavily slav related, and not so much the earlier Thracians. Similar goes for Northern Italy, though to a significantly lesser degree. Northern Greece was severely depopulated and then repopulated by the slavs, whereas Northern Italy always maintained a significant "native" population.

So whilst yes, Macedonia might have had a higher proportion of lighter skinned & haired people due to the surrounding barbarians, but those would be completely eviscerated/indistinguishable from the hellenised Slavs of completely different origin today.

I agree with you that even though it sounds somewhat racist, it's a fun exercise to look at facial archetypes and try to deduce their country of origin. So as you say it's easy to see that Val Kilmer is very much of Germanic descent.

That said, yes, there's an argument to be had that Alexander MIGHT have had the blonde or red hair, but afaik all the historians giving these claims are about as far from us as we are from the middle ages, the only possible exception being Callisthenes. However, there's a reason why the writer of the relevant text is called Pseudo-Callisthenes - people don't generally believe him to have been him.

To add something new to this conversation, I'd like to point out that Greeks probably had some weird fetish going on with the red and blonde hair, since there's another, even older example of a ruler with red hair: Dionysios. And whilst in his case it's almost 100% made up propaganda (anti him, btw. - he's portrayed as a redhaired revenge spirit released by Zeus to wreak havoc on Sicily), if I were to make a movie, I'd take the creative licence to include some of the probably made up stuff as well. Like the blonde/reddish hair for Alexander/Dionysios, which also is very useful from a creative direction to distinguish them from the supporting cast, whom I'd try to fill with mediterranean looking supporting cast.

If you decide to make a movie about a legend, it'd be foolish not to reference the legends.

[enoch]

The genetic stuff is cool. The identifying people by their facial features is tired (and not cool and not measurable and )

[twgamer20197]

What about sculptors from both Philip II and Alexander's times? Could have a sculptor made their faces?

[enoch]

Could and likely to have done are different parties.

[Cookiegod]

The identifying people by their facial features is tired (and not cool and not measurable and )

What's not cool about it?

[Roma_Victrix]

Roma you can't use the Northern Greeks for reference though since those are very heavily slav related, and not so much the earlier Thracians. Similar goes for Northern Italy, though to a significantly lesser degree. Northern Greece was severely depopulated and then repopulated by the slavs, whereas Northern Italy always maintained a significant "native" population.

So whilst yes, Macedonia might have had a higher proportion of lighter skinned & haired people due to the surrounding barbarians, but those would be completely eviscerated/indistinguishable from the hellenised Slavs of completely different origin today.

LOL. What? Citation needed! Mind you, some Slavs intermarried with Greeks in the Middle Ages, just as some Illyrians and Thracians had done in Antiquity (especially among royalty and nobility due to foreign marriage alliances), but your hypothesis of near total population displacement is not supported by any study that I have ever seen. For instance, this study which explains that the Greek genome overall has changed very little since the Mycenaean Bronze Age shortly after the first Indo-Europeans migrated into the southern Balkans: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...nt-dna-reveals

As the study above suggests, Mycenean Greeks had upwards of 16% Indo-European steppe ancestry that Cretans/Minoans did not share, while modern Greeks overall are incredibly similar to Mycenaean ones but "have inherited a little less DNA from ancient Anatolian farmers and a bit more DNA from later migrations to Greece." So not only did the Ottoman conquest have little impact on the Greek genetic pool, all other invasions seem to have had a marginal effect on the core population group of mainland Greeks. In other words, people of northern Greece today are more or less the descendants of ancient Macedonians, Epirotes, Thessalians, etc.

EDIT: also, as a side note, this is the study I had in mind for northern Italy versus southern Italy, demonstrating that indeed, while all Italians share genetic overlap, the northern Italian genome has a higher concentration of Indo-European steppe ancestry, or SBA (Steppe Bronze Age), while southern Italians possess a higher degree of West Asiatic ancestry, or ABA (Anatolia Bronze Age), which is a possible explanation for why many northern Italians have fairer features than southern ones: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw3492

EDIT #2: funnily enough, in the 6th century AD Procopius, who provides one of the earliest accounts of Slavs, suggests that they were generally redheads but darker skinned than Byzantine Greeks:


Might just be a matter of perception, especially since the 4th century Roman Jewish physician Adamantios was insistent that Greeks were the fairest people of the Eastern Mediterranean, in regards to skin, hair and eye color (most likely more of a Macedonian set of traits than a southern Greek one):

[enoch]

It has more to do with the voyeur than the face. It’s like a foolishness called gaydar from my youth. People think they have a talent for it. But they don’t.

[sumskilz]

It has more to do with the voyeur than the face. It’s like a foolishness called gaydar from my youth. People think they have a talent for it. But they don’t.

People can accurately identify the sexuality of 61% of men based on a single photo of their face. AI can accurately identify the sexuality of 81% of men with a single photo of their face, which increases to 91% of men and 84% of women with five photos (source). If only we had a photo of Alexander for this thread.

Not sure how accurate people are at recognizing ethnicity based on phenotype. I assume it depends on how genetically distinct the ethnicity is compared to other possible options and how familiar the person guessing is with the ethnicity. It seems like I can almost always recognize if someone is Ashkenazi if both their parents are. When I've been wrong, the person has usually turned out to be Italian, Sephardi, or Levantine Christian, which actually makes sense. But could I differentiate between a French person and a Belgian with odds better than guessing? Probably not, but maybe depends on which part of France the French person's ancestors came from. I have a Chinese friend who claims to be able to easily differentiate people from different parts of China based on their facial features, but told me she can't usually differentiate between MENA people and Europeans except that she assumes blonde people are European.

[enoch]

So you know a Jew when you see one and Alexander would have looked bisexual. Super cool.

How about the Spartans? Or the Greeks? English public schoolers? This list could go on for some time.

Small aside. A study which can tell hetero from homo one or the other has an obvious flaw.

People can accurately identify the sexuality of 61% of men based on a single photo of their face. AI can accurately identify the sexuality of 81% of men with a single photo of their face, which increases to 91% of men and 84% of women with five photos (source). If only we had a photo of Alexander for this thread.

Not sure how accurate people are at recognizing ethnicity based on phenotype. I assume it depends on how genetically distinct the ethnicity is compared to other possible options and how familiar the person guessing is with the ethnicity. It seems like I can almost always recognize if someone is Ashkenazi if both their parents are. When I've been wrong, the person has usually turned out to be Italian, Sephardi, or Levantine Christian, which actually makes sense. But could I differentiate between a French person and a Belgian with odds better than guessing? Probably not, but maybe depends on which part of France the French person's ancestors came from. I have a Chinese friend who claims to be able to easily differentiate people from different parts of China based on their facial features, but told me she can't usually differentiate between MENA people and Europeans except that she assumes blonde people are European.

[sumskilz]

LOL. What? Citation needed! Mind you, some Slavs intermarried with Greeks in the Middle Ages, just as some Illyrians and Thracians had done in Antiquity (especially among royalty and nobility due to foreign marriage alliances), but your hypothesis of near total population displacement is not supported by any study that I have ever seen. For instance, this study which explains that the Greek genome overall has changed very little since the Mycenaean Bronze Age shortly after the first Indo-Europeans migrated into the southern Balkans: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...nt-dna-reveals

As the study above suggests, Mycenean Greeks had upwards of 16% Indo-European steppe ancestry that Cretans/Minoans did not share, while modern Greeks overall are incredibly similar to Mycenaean ones but "have inherited a little less DNA from ancient Anatolian farmers and a bit more DNA from later migrations to Greece." So not only did the Ottoman conquest have little impact on the Greek genetic pool, all other invasions seem to have had a marginal effect on the core population group of mainland Greeks. In other words, people of northern Greece today are more or less the descendants of ancient Macedonians, Epirotes, Thessalians, etc.

The authors were reluctant to give a specific estimate of the percentage of more recent admixture into modern Greeks, because the issue is confused by the fact that later migrations contained different proportions of the same ancestries which had contributed to the Myceneans. More samples chronologically intermediate between Myceneans and modern Greeks could sort it out, but using a different methodology, Hellenthal et al 2014 estimated that there was an influx of people similar to modern Poles who constitute about 30% of the modern Greek genome. This previous study is less reliable in that it was entirely based on statistical inferences from modern populations, but it used identity by descent (IBD) segments rather than general genetic similarity which is actually better at identifying close relationships. IBD segments are long strands of identical DNA that can only have been inherited from recent common ancestry. IBD segments are what 23andMe uses, in their case with a minimum segment length calibrated to detect common ancestry within the last 500 years. According to average segment length, Hellenthal et al estimate this influx of largely Polish-like people occurred some time between 718 and 1138 CE. Having looked closer at the datasets from both studies and other datasets which contain modern Greeks, I'm inclined to believe the 30% figure is roughly correct, though possibly an overestimate and not the whole story. Furthermore, this ancestry appears to be distributed clinally, being as much 40% in the north decreasing to the south, and being almost non-existent among island Greeks.

EDIT #2: funnily enough, in the 6th century AD Procopius, who provides one of the earliest accounts of Slavs, suggests that they were generally redheads but darker skinned than Byzantine Greeks

There was a time when Anatolian (and other Near Eastern) farmers had a higher frequency of light skin associated alleles than steppe populations and European hunter gatherers did.

Some data relevant to ancient Greek phenotypes from the supplements of the study referenced in the article you linked:

Present-day Europeans are almost fixed for the derived (light pigmentation) allele G at rs1426654, but the ancestral allele occurred in western European hunter-gatherers3,4. We record no copy of the ancestral allele in 9 individuals with at least one sequence. We also examined the rs16891982 SNP in SLC45A2, the second strongest signal of selection in Europeans discovered in a genome-wide scan3. The overall frequency of the C allele could be estimated as 24% (C.I.: 8-47%) in the Aegean Bronze Age. The frequency of the minor C allele in present-day Greeks is 14% (95% C.I.: 11-17%)5. The C allele has decreased in frequency in eastern Europe6 or Europe in general3 due to likely selection since the Bronze Age, but with the available data, the Bronze Age frequency is consistent with its modern prevalence.

The rs12913832 SNP in HERC2 is a major determinant of blue eye color in humans7. The frequency of the A allele could be estimated as 86% (C.I.: 64-98%) in the Bronze Age Aegean. The G allele was present in Anatolia since Neolithic times3 and our results suggest its presence in all studied Bronze Age groups at a low frequency. The “blue-eye” haplotype BEH2 is tagged by the G allele at rs12913832 which occurs at a frequency of ~40% in a sample of present-day Greeks8, near the edge of the confidence interval for the Bronze Age Aegean populations, suggesting a possible increase in frequency to the present.

Classic blond hair has been associated with the C allele in the rs12821256 SNP in KITLG9. We have reads covering this site in 11 individuals and do not detect the C allele.

We also examined the rs1042602 SNP in TYR10, the A allele of which is associated with light skin, eyes, and freckles10-12. The estimated frequency of the C allele is 26% (C.I.: 9-51%) in the Bronze Age Aegean. The C allele occurs at a frequency of 46% in present-day Greeks5, at the high end of the confidence interval for the Bronze Age Aegean populations, suggesting a possible increase in frequency to the present. The A allele has increased in frequency from a very low ~4% in populations of the steppe to a present-day frequency of ~37% in eastern Europe (Ukraine)6.

Also...

These results suggest that ancient Bronze Age individuals from the Aegean and southwestern Anatolia had mostly dark (brown or black) hair and brown eyes. Blue eyes were uncommon as predicted by the lack of homozygotes for the G allele at rs12913832 which is the major predictor of this trait, however, this allele did occur in all studied populations (Table S4.1),thus the phenotype would have been uncommon but not unknown in the region. The browneye phenotype is still the most common in present-day Greeks occurring in ~3/4 of them, with the remainder split between blue and intermediate shades1. Similarly, ~79% of present-day Greeks have light or dark brown hair, with the remainder split between blond and black.

While our inferences on ancient phenotypes are conditional on the availability of samples and their low coverage, they do seem to mirror the phenotypes depicted in visual art from the Aegean Bronze Age14 and to suggest their relative stability in the region, in contrast to other parts of Europe where depigmentation seems to have occurred since the Bronze Age6 or even more recently15.

So you know a Jew when you see one and Alexander would have looked bisexual. Super cool.

How about the Spartans? Or the Greeks? English public schoolers? This list could go on for some time.

I assume people who are particularly familiar with a population who share ancestry can identify people of that ancestry with odds better than just random guessing. As I said, I likewise assume the degree of that accuracy depends on the distinctiveness of the particular ethnicity. For me, being able to identify Ashkenazi Jews with a high degree of accuracy (as far as I can tell) is a matter of both factors being in play, since they are both familiar to me in all senses of the word, and we are a genetically distinctive subset of West Eurasians. Although, there are usually subtle social cues as well, and being half non-Ashkenazi (as I am) suddenly makes it much more difficult. My suggestion that people's subjective assessments may be more accurate than random guesses isn't meant as an argument that such assessments approach anywhere near the accuracy of genetic analysis. I doubt anyone who has participated in this thread believes otherwise.

[Cookiegod]

LOL. What? Citation needed! Mind you, some Slavs intermarried with Greeks in the Middle Ages, just as some Illyrians and Thracians had done in Antiquity (especially among royalty and nobility due to foreign marriage alliances), but your hypothesis of near total population displacement is not supported by any study that I have ever seen. For instance, this study which explains that the Greek genome overall has changed very little since the Mycenaean Bronze Age shortly after the first Indo-Europeans migrated into the southern Balkans: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...nt-dna-reveals

As the study above suggests, Mycenean Greeks had upwards of 16% Indo-European steppe ancestry that Cretans/Minoans did not share, while modern Greeks overall are incredibly similar to Mycenaean ones but "have inherited a little less DNA from ancient Anatolian farmers and a bit more DNA from later migrations to Greece." So not only did the Ottoman conquest have little impact on the Greek genetic pool, all other invasions seem to have had a marginal effect on the core population group of mainland Greeks. In other words, people of northern Greece today are more or less the descendants of ancient Macedonians, Epirotes, Thessalians, etc.

Torture the numbers enough and they'll confess to anything. Sorry Roma but that's some horrid abuse of statistics you've going there, whilst the numbers themselves are likely correct.

I'm well aware that the majority of the Greeks have had their genome change very little since the Bronze age, but our conversation right now was confided to a much narrower demographic:

Various people in the Macedonian region of northern Greece today

Macedonia (the Greek part of it) and the light haired subset of said demographic. Given that this area was the heartland of the Bulgarian empire (the last area to be conquered by Basileios II for example), and continued to have a Slav majority, as you can see visualised on this map from early 20th century:

...you can see where I'm going with this. Just because of the rest of Greece kept its demographic largely unchanged, just because even most darkhaired people in the north may have stayed largely the same, does not mean that the other parts there did as well. Northern Greece was depopulated severely repeatedly.

Nota bene that I was not challenging your general point. In this specific instance I'm quite confident that if you look at the light haired/skinned people in Northern Greece, you're much, much, much more likely seeing Slavic origins at work than that of ancient tribes.

So you know a Jew when you see one and Alexander would have looked bisexual. Super cool.

How about the Spartans? Or the Greeks? English public schoolers? This list could go on for some time.

Small aside. A study which can tell hetero from homo one or the other has an obvious flaw.

Sorry, I know that you're trolling and all that and that any appeal to reason here will likely be completely in vain. So have a personal anecdote instead. I'm from a multicultural, multilingual and multiethnic family. As such, I had a lot of exposure since growing up, and like kids do, I saw connections between faces and the language they spoke. So for example we'd go to some Roman ruins as a family, I'd spot a different family that dressed the same like anyone else and didn't particularly distinguish themselves from others, nor had said anything in my presence up to that point, and I'd run off to my Russian mother and say to her: "Mommy, mommy, there are Russians!" A bit later they'd talk, and whaddaya know? They were Russians.

That does not mean I can identify any and all ethnicities. I can do those I have had a prolonged exposure to. And I know plenty of others who can do the same. I could walk down a street with a Chinese friend of mine and she'd constantly point at Asian people and say: "Chinese!" "Japanese!" "Korean!" etc. You had a different example by sumskilz as well.

People who can do those distinctions are usually able to do so based on their personal exposure and experience.
It's not the demographic that's into Nazi ideology or phrenology. So simmer down please and stop projecting the worst into people where it quite frankly isn't warranted.

[Roma_Victrix]

The authors were reluctant to give a specific estimate of the percentage of more recent admixture into modern Greeks, because the issue is confused by the fact that later migrations contained different proportions of the same ancestries which had contributed to the Myceneans. More samples chronologically intermediate between Myceneans and modern Greeks could sort it out, but using a different methodology, Hellenthal et al 2014 estimated that there was an influx of people similar to modern Poles who constitute about 30% of the modern Greek genome. This previous study is less reliable in that it was entirely based on statistical inferences from modern populations, but it used identity by descent (IBD) segments rather than general genetic similarity which is actually better at identifying close relationships. IBD segments are long strands of identical DNA that can only have been inherited from recent common ancestry. IBD segments are what 23andMe uses, in their case with a minimum segment length calibrated to detect common ancestry within the last 500 years. According to average segment length, Hellenthal et al estimate this influx of largely Polish-like people occurred some time between 718 and 1138 CE. Having looked closer at the datasets from both studies and other datasets which contain modern Greeks, I'm inclined to believe the 30% figure is roughly correct, though possibly an overestimate and not the whole story. Furthermore, this ancestry appears to be distributed clinally, being as much 40% in the north decreasing to the south, and being almost non-existent among island Greeks.

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing and +1 rep to you as always. Cookiegod keeps referencing the depopulation of northern Greece, which would make some sense for the chaotic middle of Byzantine history, before the Komnenian restoration. A third of the genome would have been significant if true, but would this have merely increased the Bronze Age Indo-European steppe ancestry that already existed with the migratory proto-Greeks who became Mycenaeans? I suppose this wouldn't have affected Aegean islander Greeks at all, especially Cretans. Not sure about all Greek islanders, though, considering anecdotal observation. For instance, these are fair featured Greek women from the isle of Chios closer to Turkey versus significantly darker featured boys from Crete (although even a couple of these kids seem to have blondish hair, while the others look Anatolian/Levantine):

There was a time when Anatolian (and other Near Eastern) farmers had a higher frequency of light skin associated alleles than steppe populations and European hunter gatherers did.

Some data relevant to ancient Greek phenotypes from the supplements of the study referenced in the article you linked:

Very interesting, thanks for sharing! Procopius was writing in the transitional period between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, long after the Bronze Age, so it is strange to think these phenotypes for Slavs versus Greeks were still relevant in his day.

As for Lazaridis et al 2017, that sounds about right, with ~20% of modern Greeks having fair hair and ~25% having lighter colored eyes, and their reference to ancient artwork seems spot on as well. It seems like very little has actually changed, with a large minority of the population having lighter features and most people looking more Mediterranean or West Asiatic like the Neolithic farmers that predated the chariot-riding Indo-European invaders. On close inspection you even see it in Greek mosaic artworks, the relatively few pieces that have survived before the Roman conquests. For instance, Berenice II of Ptolemaic Egypt with green eyes, same with Dionysios in a mosaic from Delos:

Nota bene that I was not challenging your general point. In this specific instance I'm quite confident that if you look at the light haired/skinned people in Northern Greece, you're much, much, much more likely seeing Slavic origins at work than that of ancient tribes.

Why make that assumption at all when the ancient Greeks under Macedonian rulers from Philip II onwards repeatedly conquered Thrace and intermarried with Thracians who populated ancient Bulgaria, as well as Illyrians who inhabited what is now FYROM and Albania? For that matter thousands of Thracians even lived in the city of Classical Athens, their presence littering the plays, poems and histories composed by Greek authors. Those same Greek authors frequently mentioned how the Thracians were a bunch of blonds and redheads for that matter.

For instance, Xenophon who stated that the Thracians viewed all their gods the same way they viewed themselves, with red hair, while Kushites of Nubia (Sudan, or Ethiopians, the Aethiopioi) viewed their gods as black skinned with broad, flat noses. This wasn't applied exclusively to Thracians, though, but also generically to northern Greeks. For instance, the poet Bacchylides described Theseus as being a redhead to distinguish him as a northerner.