Identifying human races in terms of skin colour, at least as one among several physiological characteristics, has been common since antiquity.
Such divisions appeared in early modern scholarship, with the conventional but now obsolete categorization dividing mankind into five colored races: "Aethiopian or Black", "Caucasian or White", "Mongolian or Yellow", "American or Red", and "Malayan or Brown" subgroups. This framework was coined by members of the Göttingen School of History in the late 18th century, in parallel with the Biblical terminology for race (Semitic, Hamitic and Japhetic).