Ancient Egyptian race controversy



Rameses II was neither black nor white but Egyptian... We cannot say by any means we are black or white. We are Egyptians.

Controversy over the race of Ancient Egyptians is an anachronistic debate which persists among laypersons and the media, when modern biologists regard the concept of race to be an inaccurate method to describe human biological variation and modern historians have confirmed that ancient Egyptians overtly identified as separate from both "white" peoples to their north and "black" peoples to their south. Egyptologist Frank Yurco has stated: "the whole matter of black or white Egyptians is a chimera, cultural baggage from our own society that can only be imposed artificially on ancient society".

DNA evidence suggests that Lower (northern) Egyptians are genetically closer to southern Europeans and Middle Easterners, while Upper (southern) Egyptians are genetically and phenotypically closer to "black" Northeast Africans such as Nubians and Sudanese. Thus, a substantial minority of Egyptians could be classified as "black people." Afrocentrism lacks scholarly support because it erroneously claims that most Ancient Egyptians had a "black" phenotype (as we understand the term). It is also criticized for importing anachronistic racial categories to an era that had no understanding of them. Finally, Afrocentrists are criticized for claiming, contrary to the genetic evidence, that lighter-skinned Egyptians are "invaders" with no indigenous tie to the region.

Consensus
The evidence indicates Egypt to foundationally belong to a northeast African biocultural descendant community.

Early Dynastic Egypt (c. 3100 BCE) was "not the product of mass movement of populations into the Egyptian Nile region, but rather that it was the result of primarily indigenous development combined with prolonged small-scale migration, potentially from trade, military, or other contacts." Simply put, modern Egyptians descend from, and are most closely related to, the neolithic inhabitants of northeastern Africa. While Egypt was invaded during later dynastic periods, these had small to minimal genetic impact; Brace et al. (1993) describe ancient Egypt as having "absorbed its various Assyrian, Persian, and Greek rulers with barely detectable effects on its basically Egyptian identity". Professor Stephen Howe from Bristol University, notes: "The ancient Egyptians were neither 'black' nor 'white'; they were Egyptians, a population of largely indigenous origins and a high degree of continuity across time — including, it seems probable, continuity up to the present."

In 2008, S. O. Y. Keita wrote for National Geographic: "There is no scientific reason to believe that the primary ancestors of the Egyptian population emerged and evolved outside of northeast Africa" and "the Egyptian Nile Valley's indigenous population had a craniofacial pattern that evolved and emerged in northeastern Africa".

Population biology
Neither clines nor clusters alone suffice to deal with the biological nature of a widely distributed population. Both must be used. We conclude that the Egyptians have been in place since back in the Pleistocene and have been largely unaffected by either invasions or migrations. As others have noted, Egyptians are Egyptians, and they were so in the past as well.

The ancient Egyptians are no longer forced into crude and obsolete racial categories by physical anthropologists such as "Black", "Negroid", "White", "Caucasoid". S. O. Y. Keita points out "modern population biology has demonstrated that variation within geographically deﬁned breeding populations, or those more related by ancestry, is the rule for human groups" and that "the local population is the unit of analysis". He refers to the anthropologist Jean Hiernaux who wrote: "the only useful way of grouping individuals for anthropological analysis is to group together the people participating within the same circle of matings". Both Keita and Hiernaux clarify local breeding populations (demes) are not races. Keita (1993) discusses the ancient Egyptians as consisting of local northern Nile Valley populations or peoples, and describes them as a "[Holocene] Saharo-tropical variant" in terms of their phenotype — eco-geographically adapted to the Sahara desert. Archaeologist Kathryn A. Bard, in her article “Ancient Egyptians and the Issue of Race" describes the ancient Egyptians in terms of climatic adapation whose "skin was adapted for life in a subtropical desert environment".

Although a small portion of modern Egypt falls inside the tropics, the ancient southern frontier of Egypt sat right on the border of the Tropic of Cancer at Aswan (today it passes through Lake Nasser); Ancient Egypt therefore was outside the tropics. For this reason one would expect the ancient Egyptians to be lighter brown skinned than the "black" Nubians, and artwork shows this difference. Egyptian men tend to be coloured a reddish-brown, Egyptian women somewhat fairer, while Nubians, black. Non-Egyptians such as Nubians were also frequently depicted with visibly different facial features and different clothing, such as leopard print. The climate of Egypt is a desert climate; extreme dry heat. However, temperatures are more moderate along the Mediterranean coast of the Nile-Delta, where annual precipitation is somewhat higher.

According to biological anthropologists:

Egyptians... especially in the south, were physically a part of what can be called the Saharo-tropical variant range... Nile valley variation... in the main was probably due to micro-differentiation from a common African (tropically adapted) ancestral population, and not the panmictic mixture of two or more distinct 'racial' groups.

Howe (1998: 132) adds:

"In other words — as the evidence of self-depiction would lead us to expect — this was a people predominantly of indigenous African origin whose skin hues may have exhibited just, or almost, as wide a range as do those of peoples across the contemporary 'Saharo-tropical' region, from Algerian Berbers to southern Sudanese.

Froment (1991, 1992, 1994) in multivariate craniometric studies found that overall:

Egyptians were distinct from Melano-Africans [tropical Africans] and Europeans alike, and are situated in an intermediate position... a gradient between these diverse populations precludes the establishment of 'racial barriers'. This is consistent with geography and the isolation-by-distance structure of variation between populations (a strong linear relationship or correlation exists between geographical space and neutral genetic/craniometric distance: "populations are most genetically similar to others that are found nearby, and genetic similarity is inversely correlated with geographic distance" i.e. geographically closer populations tend to mate more and exchange more genes than with more distant ones). What this means is that since most of Egypt falls outside of the tropics, and is intermediate at subtropical latitude between tropical Africa and Europe - ancient (and modern) Egyptians are going to plot between these two extremes. However Froment also discovered as part of this gradient, Lower Egyptians in the north "are very close to those of the Maghreb", and in the south, "those of Upper Egypt like those of Nubia", also pointing to similarities to modern Somalis. Keita agrees, and finds Egyptian skeletons in Upper Egypt to show closer biological affinities to certain tropical African populations, despite cautioning: "morphometric patterns of Egyptian crania in general, although highly variable, exhibit a position intermediate to stereotypical tropical Africans and Europeans in multivariate analyses". Post-cranial (e.g. lower limb) data was shown to match the same pattern by Raxter (2011).

Nancy C. Lovell (1999) has noted: "that race is not a useful biological concept when applied to humans", and also recognizes the clinal variation of ancient Egyptians given their geographical position:

There is now a sufficient body of evidence from modern studies of skeletal remains to indicate that the ancient Egyptians, especially southern Egyptians, exhibited physical characteristics that are within the range of variation for ancient and modern indigenous peoples of the Sahara and tropical Africa. The distribution of population characteristics seems to follow a clinal pattern from south to north, which may be explained by natural selection as well as gene flow between neighboring populations. In general, the inhabitants of Upper Egypt and Nubia had the greatest biological affinity to people of the Sahara and more southerly areas.

Klales (2014) summarizes:

Lower Egyptian groups have tended to pool more with European and Mediterranean groups, while Upper Egyptians are biologically more similar to southern African groups. The geographic proximity of Lower Egyptians to the Mediterranean Sea and of Upper Egyptians to Nubia likely explains the phenotypic and genotypic differences between the two areas.

Egyptologist Barry Kemp (2006) has further criticized racial terms such as "Black" or "White" as being over-simplified categories when discussing ancient Egyptian population biology.

Caucasoid-Negroid
The most commonly held view up to the 1970s was the ancient Egyptians were a hybrid race, with more "Negroid" mixture in Upper Egypt and "Caucasoid" in Lower Egypt:

By the 1980s, most biologists and anthropologists had abandoned the concept of race and adopted a clinal approach to studying ancient Egyptian population biology. The old typological idea the presence of certain cranial traits in Egypt were strictly the product of "race mixture" (gene flow) was dropped as "genetical developmental processes (e.g. selective adaptation, random genetic drift, etc...)" were better understood. An example is the narrow nasal aperture of some Egyptian skulls (e.g. the mummified head of Ramesses II, has a fairly narrow hooked nose), once erroneously thought by physical anthropologists to indicate Southern European or Near Eastern ("Caucasoid") migration into ancient Egypt: ...narrow faces and noses (versus broad “Negro” ones) do not usually indicate European or Near Eastern migration or “Europoid“ (Caucasian) genes, called Hamitic as once taught, but represent indigenous variation either connoting a hot-dry climatic adaptation or resulting from drift (Hiernaux, 1975).

The dry-desert climate of Egypt would have selected thin noses and so "there is no need to postulate an extra-African 'Caucasoid' element in their gene pool for explaining such a characteristic as the narrow nose". Similar craniofacial research by Van Gerven (1982) in Lower Nubia, bordering Upper Egypt found that:

While the history of Lower Nubia has traditionally been explained in terms of racial migrations and mixture, recent studies of craniofacial variation have emphasized the biological continuity in Lower Nubia over the past 12,000 years. Carlson and Van Gerven for example have demonstrated a trend among the populations for changes in craniofacial form that are best explained by changing masticatory function and in situ evolution independent of major racial migrations.

The skin color cline and melanin variation in Egypt need not also be explained by "race mixture" models involving substantial gene flow, but in situ climatic selection (Brace et al. 1993):

Keita & Kittles (1997) conclude: "Northern Africans are more accurately conceptualized as primarily the products of differentiation than of hybridization." The hybrid-hypothesis being false should not be confused with the very real historical phenomena of geographically proximate populations like the Nubians and Egyptians mixing.

Black
The black Egyptian hypothesis is largely derived from subjective interpretations of racially ambiguous figures in Egyptian artwork and historically dubious information such as that of Herodotus and not genetics or physical anthropology. Afrocentrists are wrong to describe the ancient Egyptians as black people (even if "black" is only describing dark brown skin/black pigmentation) just because there are images of dark skinned ancient Egyptians. This is because there was a recognized gradient of skin color, ranging from a light brown among northern coastal and Nile-Delta Egyptians in Lower Egypt, to a dark brown in Upper Egypt and Nubia. Middle Egyptians would have on average fallen intermediate between these extremes. The term black obscures and does not capture well this cline:

Afrocentrists claim that Egyptian civilization was a "black" civilization and this is not accurate [...] Most scholars believe that ancient Egyptians looked pretty much like today’s Egyptians - that is, they were brown, becoming darker as they approached the Sudan (Snowden 1970, 1992; Smedley 1993).

The "Black Egyptian hypothesis" was criticized and rejected at UNESCO's Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script in Cairo in 1974 (published 1978). Afrocentrist C. A. Diop attended this symposium and when asked "what proportion of melanin was sufficient for a man to be classified as belonging to the black race" failed to provide an answer.

Regarding Greco-Roman descriptions of ancient Egyptians from classical texts, the classicist Frank M. Snowden noted how Afrocentrists commonly distort them:

Diop not only distorts his classical sources but also omits references to Greek and Latin authors who specifically call attention to the physical differences between Egyptians and Ethiopians.

Historian Yaacov Shavit (2001) points out that with few exceptions, the ancient Greeks and Romans described the Egyptians as not black:

The evidence clearly shows that those Greco-Roman authors who refer to skin color and other physical traits distinguish sharply between Ethiopians (Nubians) and Egyptians, and rarely do they refer to the Egyptians, even though they were described as darker than themselves. No Greek doubted that the Egyptians were darker than the Greeks, but not as dark as black Africans.

Ann Macy Roth Visiting Assistant Professor of Egyptology at Howard University, Washington penned an essay to refute Afrocentric claims. According to Roth, a typical Afrocentric claim is that the modern peoples in Egypt are much lighter skinned than the ancient inhabitants, an argument she rejects:

I have encountered arguments that the ancient Egyptians were much 'blacker' than their modern counterparts, owing to the influx of Arabs at the time of the conquest, Caucasian slaves under the Mamlukes, or Turks and French soldiers during the Ottoman period. However, given the size of the Egyptian population against these comparatively minor waves of northern immigrants, as well as the fact that there was continuous immigration and occasional forced deportation of both northern and southern populations into Egypt throughout the pharaonic period, I doubt that the modern population is significantly darker or lighter, or more or less 'African' than their ancient counterparts.

Genetic research actually indicates that post-Roman Egypt saw an increase in the Sub-Saharan African ancestry of Egyptians, likley a function of the medieval Islamic slave trade. More extreme claims such as those in Modern Fraud: The Forged Ancient Egyptian Statues of Ra-Hotep and Nofret by Manu Ampin border on the conspiratorial, alleging many pieces of Egyptian art and statue are recent forgeries and that the real ones have been selectively destroyed or glossed over as part of a Eurocentric agenda to deceive the public about the true (black) racial background of the Egyptians.

Other obscure claims
Less prominent (though still erroneous) proposals include the belief that the ancient Egyptians were really Mesopotamians, European Caucasians, or even ancient Aryans. Needless to say, none of these theories hold much water.