I get what you're saying. I think the problem is that when the mindset is "claiming" King Tut or Cleopatra or some other Egyptian figure as being black or white or whatever will not really create the proper atmosphere for objectivity to flourish. Then of course is the fact that the population of Africa is quite varied. Plus: Do we really know enough about Egypt to talk about its ethnic makeup? People spend way too much time pointing at skin colours on old murals: The Egyptian style of drawing people was very stylised, how are we to know if they tried 100% recreation of reality with skin colour? . And it isn't helped by the fact that the modern population of Egypt is very different in terms of ethnic makeup than Egypt was back in the day. And recreating ethnicity or race through facial measurements and the like is quite imprecise: There was an article about this in Harper's (I think) specifically about bodies that might be Aboriginal or might be European: It pointed out that variation between individuals, or over time, could explain a lot of difference of things like facial measurements.