Talk:Ancient Egyptian race controversy/Archive1

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Not sure

I'm not sure that I understand what the controversy is. The first section tells us that "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", and the second that "there was a gradient of skin color, ranging from a lighter brown among northern coastal and Nile-delta Egyptians in Lower Egypt, to a darker brown in Middle and Upper Egypt". Aside from abandoning such crude terminology as "Negroid" and "Caucasoid", aren't these saying much the same thing? Wéáśéĺóíď^{Methinks it is a Weasel} 03:08, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

The controversy is the race of ancient Egyptians: "black", "white", "Caucasoid", "negroid" etc. Consensus among modern scholars is the Egyptians cannot be pigeon-holed like this and race is not a useful way at looking at human variation, so the controversy only exists among the public and in this sense is anachronistic. And to recognize Lower Egyptians were lighter brown skinned than Upper Egyptians is not saying the former are more Caucasoid, the latter, Negroid. The cline doesn't require gene flow, but if gene flow was involved it would have been minimal and mostly selection anyway: "A cline might result if natural selection favoured a slightly different feature at each point along a geographic gradient. It could also result from gene flow between two groups previously adapted to different environments." (Graves, 2001). It is the first explanation most scholars take in regards to the skin colour cline in Egypt. Krom (talk) 16:13, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

I've added a quote from Brace et al which better explains: "There is the very real possibility, for example, that the darker skin pigmentation visible in the people of the Upper Nile is not caused by the mixing of a population that came from somewhere else. Instead, it could just be the result of selection operating on the people who were already there, as has been suggested by those who have argued for the continuity of human biological form through time in Nubia (Adams, 1979; Batrawi, 1946 [in marked contrast to 1935; Berry et al., 1967; Carlson and Van Gerven, 1977,1979; Greene, 1966,1972; Van Gerven, 1982; Van Gerven et al., 1973)." Krom (talk) 16:13, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

How the Egyptians viewed themselves

• The Meaning of Skin Color in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt This could be expanded in the article, ie. how the Egyptians depicted and described their own pigmentation, contrasting it to their neighbours. Krom (talk) 16:13, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Agreed, are you going to expand it yourself or are you just putting it out there? TheAtheistComrade (talk) 16:24, 17 August 2015 (UTC)