Ancient Egyptian race controversy

Wallis Budge, a 19th-century British Egyptologist, argued that "There are many things in the manners and customs and religions of the historic Egyptians that suggest that the original home of their ancestors was in a country in the neighbourhood of Uganda and Land of Punt".

The disagreement was largely due to methodological issues,[29] for example, the insufficient data "to enable provisional conclusions to be drawn with regard to the peopling of ancient Egypt and the successive phases through which it may have passed".

[32] Diop's chapter was credited in the general conclusion of the symposium report by the International Scientific Committee's Rapporteur, Jean Devisse,[33] as a "painstakingly researched contribution", consequently there was a "real lack of balance" in the discussion among participants.

[38] Similarly, none of the participants voiced support for an earlier postulation that Egyptians were "white with a dark, even black, pigmentation",[16]: 43  although Professor Ghallab stated that "the inhabitants of Egypt in Palaeolithic times were Caucasoids".

[44] Peter Shinnie reviewing the GHA volume, wrote that "It seems that UNESCO and [the editor] Mokhtar were embarrassed by the unscholarly and preposterous nature of Diop's views but were unable to reject his contribution".

[46] Stephen Quirke argued that the UNESCO-sponsored conference on the General History of Africa in 1974 "did not change the Eurocentric climate of research" and of the need to incorporate both African-centred studies and White European, academic perspectives.

"[54] Yurco wrote in 1996 that "the peoples of Egypt, the Sudan, and much of North-East Africa are generally regarded as a Nilotic continuity, with widely ranging physical features (complexions light to dark, various hair and craniofacial types)".

[55] Gamal Mokthar, editor of the UNESCO General History of Africa, wrote in 1990 that "It is more than probable that the African strain, black or light, is preponderant in the Ancient Egyptian, but in the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to say more".

She also wrote that the archaeological and inscriptional evidence for contact between Egypt and Syro-Palestine "suggests that gene flow between these areas was very likely", and that the early Nile Valley populations were "part of an African lineage, but exhibiting local variation".

Zakrzewski concluded that the "results must remain provisional due to the relatively small sample sizes and the lack of skeletal material that cross-cuts all social and economic groups within each time period.

"[65] Barry J. Kemp wrote in 2007 that the black/white argument, though politically understandable, is an oversimplification that hinders an appropriate evaluation of the scientific data on the ancient Egyptians since it does not take into consideration the difficulty in ascertaining complexion from skeletal remains.

"[70] Marc Van De Mieroop wrote in 2021: "Some scholars have tried to determine what Egyptians could have looked like by comparing their skeletal remains with those of recent populations, but the samples are so limited and the interpretations so fraught with uncertainties that this is an unreliable approach".

[82] Andrea Manzo wrote in 2022 that early Egyptologists had situated the origins of dynastic Egypt within a "broad Hamitic horizon that characterised several regions of Africa" and that these views had continued to dominate in the second half of the twentieth century.

Although modern technology can reconstruct Tutankhamun's facial structure with a high degree of accuracy, based on CT data from his mummy,[100][101] determining his skin tone and eye color is impossible.

[106][107] Stuart Tyson Smith, Egyptologist and professor of anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2008 expressed criticism of the forensic reconstruction in a journal review, noting that "Tutankhamun's face" was "very light-skinned" which reflected a "bias" among media outlets.

[113] The race and skin color of Cleopatra VII, the last active Hellenistic ruler of the Macedonian Greek Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, established in 323 BC, has also caused some debate,[114] although generally not in scholarly sources.

This was based largely on the claims of Hilke Thür of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, who in the 1990s had examined a headless skeleton of a female child in a 20 BC tomb in Ephesus (modern Turkey), together with the old notes and photographs of the now-missing skull.

American geologist Robert M. Schoch has written that the "Sphinx has a distinctive African, Nubian, or Negroid aspect which is lacking in the face of Khafre",[175][176] but he was described by others such as Ronald H. Fritze and Mark Lehner of being a "pseudoscientific writer".

[177][178] David S. Anderson writes in Lost City, Found Pyramid: Understanding Alternative Archaeologies and Pseudoscientific Practices that Van Sertima's claim that "the sphinx was a portrait statue of the black pharaoh Khafre" is a form of "pseudoarchaeology" not supported by evidence.

"[192] Regarding an expedition by King Sesostris, Cherubini states the following concerning captured southern Africans, "except for the panther skin about their loins, are distinguished by their color, some entirely black, others dark brown.

[196] Stuart Tyson Smith, Egyptologist and professor of anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote in 2001 that "The scene of an expedition to Punt from Queen Hatshepsuis mortuary complex at Deir el-Bahri shows Puntites with red skin and facial features similar to Egyptians, long or bobbed hair, goatee beards, and kilts".

Ampim has declared that plate 48 is a true reflection of the original painting, and that it "proves" that the ancient Egyptians were identical in appearance to the Nubians, even though he admits no other examples of the "Table of Nations" show this similarity.

[208] Ampim nonetheless continues to argue that plate 48 shows accurately the images that stand on the walls of KV11, and he categorically accuses both Yurco and Hornung of perpetrating a deliberate deception for the purposes of misleading the public about the true race of the ancient Egyptians.

"[221] In 2003, Betsy Bryan wrote in The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt that "the factors linking Amenhotep I and his mother with the necropolis region, with deified rulers, and with rejuvenation generally was visually transmitted by representations of the pair with black or blue skin – both colours of resurrection.

"[238] The majority of the objections "raised were of methodological nature" which ranged from the need for reliable statistical data to further research projects in several fields such as archaeology and physical anthropology before final conclusions on the peopling of Egypt could be made.

Nordholdt argued that Diop's views aligned with the decolonization efforts of the General History of Africa (GHA) but that he premised his arguments on outdated, racialism which classified humanity into distinct groups with a biological essence.

[43]: 268–279  Peter Shinnie reviewing the General History of Africa volume, wrote that "It seems that UNESCO and [the editor] Mokhtar were embarrassed by the unscholarly and preposterous nature of Diop's views but were unable to reject his contribution".

[317] Grafton Elliot Smith modified the theory in 1911,[318] stating that the ancient Egyptians were a dark haired "brown race",[319] most closely "linked by the closest bonds of racial affinity to the Early Neolithic populations of the North African littoral and South Europe",[320] and not Negroid.

[230][231][55][331][232][234] Frank Yurco stated that depictions of pharonic iconography such as the royal crowns, Horus falcons and victory scenes were concentrated in the Upper Egyptian Naqada culture and A-Group Nubia.

He further elaborated that "Egyptian writing arose in Naqadan Upper Egypt and A-Group Nubia, and not in the Delta cultures, where the direct Western Asian contact was made, [which] further vititates the Mesopotamian-influence argument".