Aquiline nose

Chief Henry Roman Nose

The aquiline nose was deemed a distinctive feature of some Native American tribes, members of which often took their names after their own characteristic physical attributes (i.e. The Hook Nose, or Chief Henry Roman Nose).[4] In the depiction of Native Americans, for instance, an aquiline nose is one of the standard traits of the "noble warrior" type.[11] It is so important as a cultural marker, Renee Ann Cramer argued in Cash, Color, and Colonialism (2005), that tribes without such characteristics have found it difficult to receive "federal recognition" or "acknowledgement" from the US government, which is necessary to have a continuous government-to-government relationship with the United States.[12]

The flat, broad nose is ubiquitous among most populations in Sub-Saharan Africa,[13] and is noted by nineteenth-century writers and travelers (such as Colin Mackenzie) as a mark of "Negroid" ancestry.[14] It stands in opposition to the narrow aquiline, straight or convex noses (lepthorrine), which are instead deemed "Caucasian".[13]

In the 1930s, an aquiline nose was reported to be regarded as a characteristic of beauty for girls among the Tswana and Xhosa people. However, a recent scholar could not discern from the original study "whether such preferences were rooted in precolonial conceptions of beauty, a product of colonial racial hierarchies, or some entanglement of the two".[15] A well-known example of the aquiline nose as a marker in Africa contrasting the bearer with his/her contemporaries is the protagonist of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688). Although an African prince, he speaks French, has straightened hair, thin lips, and a "nose that was rising and Roman instead of African and flat".[16] These features set him apart from most of his peers, and marked him instead as noble and on par with Europeans.[17][18][19]

According to craniometric analysis by Carleton Coon (1939), aquiline noses in Africa are largely restricted to populations from North Africa and the Horn of Africa (in contrast to those of Sub-Saharan Africa), which is more generally peopled by those of Semitic, Arab, and other non-"Negroid" descent. However, they are generally less common in these areas than are narrow, straight noses, which instead constitute the majority of nasal profiles. It has been reported however, that aquiline noses are more prevalent among Algerian, Egyptian, Tunisian, Moroccan, Eritrean, Ethiopian and Somali people, than among Southern Europeans.[20][21] Among the Copts and Fellahin of Egypt, three nasal types reportedly exist: one with a narrow, aquiline nose accompanied by a slim face, slender jaw and thin lips; secondly a slightly lower rooted, straight-to-concave nose, accompanied by a wider and lower face, a strong jaw, prominent chin, moderately wide; thirdly a wide nose on either including those with high and low cheekbones.[22]

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  Mummy of the Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II exposing a prominent aquiline "hook nose". His son, Merneptah, inherited the same shape of the nose.
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  The son of Merneptah, Pharaoh Seti II of Egypt. His mummified body exposes an aquiline nose among other features.

For Western racial anthropologists such as Madison Grant (in The Passing of the Great Race (1911) and other works) and William Z. Ripley, the aquiline nose is characteristic of the peoples they variously identify as Nordic, Teutonic, Celtic, Norman, Frankish, and Anglo-Saxon.[23] Grant, after defining the Nordics as having aquiline noses, went back through history and found such a nose and other characteristics he called "Nordic" in many historically prominent men. Among these were Dante Alighieri, "all the chief men of the Renaissance", as well as King David. Grant identified Jesus Christ as having had those "physical and moral attributes" (emphasis added).[24]

Among specific ethnic groups, the aquiline nose type is most common among the peoples of Afghanistan, Dardistan, Pakistan and Kashmir,[25][26] as well as a prominent feature in the Greco-Buddhist statuary of Gandhara (a region spanning the upper Indus and Kabul river valleys throughout northern Pakistan and Kashmir).[27] The ethnographer George Campbell, in his Ethnology of India, states that:

The high nose, slightly aquiline, is a common type [among Kashmiri Brahmins]. Raise a little the brow of a Greek statue and give the nose a small turn at the bony point in front of the bridge, so as to break the straightness of the line, you have the model type of this part of India, to be found both in living men and in the statues of the Peshawar Valley.[28]

The traveller (and personal physician at the Mughal court) François Bernier, one of the first Europeans to visit Kashmir, posited that Kashmiris were descended from Jews on account of their prominent noses and fair skin.[29]