Ancient Egyptian race controversy

Controversy over the race of Ancient Egyptians is an anachronistic debate that 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".Yurco. F. (1989). "Were the Ancient Egyptians Black or White?". BAR. 15(5): 24-29. 
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,Arredi, Barbara; Poloni, Estella S.; Paracchini, Silvia; Zerjal, Tatiana; Fathallah, Dahmani M.; Makrelouf, Mohamed; Pascali, Vincenzo L.; Novelletto, Andrea; Tyler-Smith, Chris (2004-8). "A Predominantly Neolithic Origin for Y-Chromosomal DNA Variation in North Africa". American Journal of Human Genetics. 75 (2): 338–345. that lighter-skinned Egyptians are "invaders" with no indigenous tie to the region. 
==Consensus==
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."ibid. Zakrzewski, S. R. (2007). "Population continuity or population change: Formation of the ancient Egyptian state". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 132(4):501-509. 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."Howe, Stephen. (1998). Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. London: Verso. p. 132.
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".Keita, S.O.Y. (Sep 16, 2008). Ancient Egyptian Origins: Biology. National Geographic.
===Population biology===
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". Hiernaux, Jean. (1964). "The Concept of Race and the Taxonomy of Mankind". In: The Origin and Evolution of Man. Montagu, A. (ed.). New York: Crowell. 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.BWh: Köppen climate classification. 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".Bard, K. A. (1996). "Ancient Egyptians and the Issue of Race". In: Lefkowitz, M. R., Rogers, G. M. Black Athena Revisited. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 
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: 
Howe (1998: 132) adds:
Froment (1991, 1992, 1994) in multivariate craniometric studies found that overall: 
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"Bolnick, D. A. (2008). "Individual Ancestry Inference and the Reification of Race as a Biological Phenomenon". In: Koenig, B. A. (ed.). Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. Rutgers University Press. 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,"His cranial analyses indicate diversity, with a range of skull types intermediate between those found in Europe and those in Sub-Saharan Africa, with remains from the Upper Nile showing more frequent ‘African’ features, than those further north, and evidence of increased intermingling overtime (Keita, 1990, 1992)." (Howe, 1998: 134)"Recent multivariate analysis of crania (Keita, 1990) showed a pattern common to both northern Late Dynastic Egypt and the Maghreb (North Africa west of Egypt) in which both tropical African and European phenotypes, as well as intermediate patterns, were present. Early southern Predynastic Egyptian crania showed affinities with tropical African patterns and differed notably from the Maghreb pattern." (Ortiz de Montellano, 1993) 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".Keita, S. O. Y. (2005). "Early Nile Valley Farmers, From El-Badari, Aboriginals or 'European' Agro-Nostratic Immigrants? Craniometric Affinities Considered With Other Data". Journal of Black Studies. 36(2): 191-208. Post-cranial (e.g. lower limb) data was shown to match the same pattern by Raxter (2011)."Among females, Lower Egyptians also possess the smallest crural indices, which is significant from all other groups within the Northeast African region. The smallest indices in both Lower Egyptian males and females is expected since Lower Egyptians occupied the northern most area of the region, closest to the more temperate climate of the Mediterranean Sea. Lower Egyptians were also geographically farther from Sub-Saharan Africa and thus would have had less opportunity for gene flow with Sub-Saharan groups. These results thus support the hypothesis that northern Egyptians possess less tropical body proportions due to their more northern geographical position... Lower Egyptian females are not significantly different from either Northern or Southern Europeans and Lower Egyptian males are only significantly different from Northern Europeans. These results for Lower Egyptians are not wholly unexpected since Lower Egyptians occupied a middle latitude in the northernmost section of Northeast Africa, and inhabited a relatively more temperate climate compared to groups situated farther south." (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:
Klales (2014) summarizes:
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.Kemp, B. (2006). Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. Taylor & Francis Routledge. p. 58.
==Outdated and discredited views==
===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."Current scientific thinking on these matters is along the lines that there is no such thing as 'race' and that it is unlikely that we shall ever be able to make ethnic distinctions between the people who live along the Nile valley." (Nibbi, Alessandra. [1981]. Ancient Egypt and Some Eastern Neighbours. Noyes Press. p. 152.) 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.Strouhal, E. (1981). Current state of anthropological studies on ancient Egypt and Nubia. Bull, et Mem. de la Soc. d'Anthrop. de Paris. 8(XIII): 231-249.Greene, D. L. (1981). A critique of methods used to reconstruct racial and population affinity in the Nile Valley. Bull, et Mem. de la Soc. d'Anthrop. de Paris. 8(XIII): 357-365. 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:
 
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".Hiernaux, Jean. (1975). The People of Africa. p. 83. On the previous page Hiernaux notes: "In a dry climate, it is therefore advantageous to have a high and narrow nose, a shape which maximizes the contact of the inspired air with the nasal mucosa. Nose shape being determined by heredity, natural selection will be at work until this characteristic reaches its adaptive equilibrium." Similar craniofacial research by Van Gerven (1982) in Lower Nubia, bordering Upper Egypt found that:
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."Keita, S. O. Y., Kittles, R. (1997). "The Persistence of Racial Thinking and the Myth of Racial Divergence". American Anthropologist. 99(3):534-544. 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."On the average, between the Delta in northern Egypt and the Sudan of the Upper Nile, skin color tends to darken from light brown to what appears to the eye as bluish black." (Trigger, B. [1978]. “Nubian, Negro, Black, Nilotic?”. Wenig, Steffen (ed.). In: Africa in Antiquity: The Arts of Ancient Nubia and the Sudan. Brooklyn Museum, New York.)"[T]housands of portrayals of individual Egyptians show that the population as a whole ranged across a wide spectrum of complexions, from light to dark brown and black." (Shaw, Ian. [2004]. Ancient Egypt: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. p. 105.)"Ancient Egyptians, like their modern descendants, varied in complexion from a light Mediterranean type, to a light brown in Middle Egypt, to a darker brown in southern Egypt." (Snowden, 1997) Middle Egyptians would have on average fallen intermediate between these extremes. The term black obscures and does not capture well this cline:
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"Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt: a report on the discussions". (1978). In: The peopling of ancient Egypt and the deciphering of Meroitic script (Proceedings of the Symposium Held in Cairo from 28 January to 3 February 1974.) Paris: UNESCO. (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.Ibid., p. 97.
Regarding Greco-Roman descriptions of ancient Egyptians from classical texts, the classicist Frank M. Snowden noted how Afrocentrists commonly distort them:
Historian Yaacov Shavit (2001) points out that with few exceptions, the ancient Greeks and Romans described the Egyptians as not black:
Ann Macy Roth Visiting Assistant Professor of Egyptology at Howard University, Washington penned an essay to refute Afrocentric claims.The Flight from Science and Reason. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 775: 313-326. 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:
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.Schuenemann, Verena J.; Peltzer, Alexander; Welte, Beatrix; van Pelt, W. Paul; Molak, Martyna; Wang, Chuan-Chao; Furtwängler, Anja; Urban, Christian; Reiter, Ella; Nieselt, Kay; Teßmann, Barbara (May 30, 2017)."Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods". Nature Communications. 8: 15694. 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.Yurco, Frank (1996). "Two Tomb-Wall Painted Reliefs of Ramesses III and Sety I and Ancient Nile Valley Population Diversity". In Celenko, Theodore (ed.). Egypt in Africa.
===Other obscure claims===
Less prominent (though still erroneous) proposals include the belief that the ancient Egyptians were really Mesopotamians,Egypt's making: the origins of ancient Egypt, 5000-2000 BC, by Michael RiceEgyptian Civilization Its Sumerian Origin and Real Chronology, by L. A. Waddell European Caucasians,Gliddon, George Robins (1844). Ancient Egypt: Her monuments, hieroglyphics, history and archaeology. p.46. or even ancient Aryans.Glazov, Ramon. Ancient Astronaut Aryans: On the Far Right Obsession with Indo-Europeans. April 28, 2017 Needless to say, none of these theories hold much water.
==External links==
* 
* No, Egyptians Aren't White... But They Aren't Black Either
* Excerpt on the race of the ancient Egyptian people from Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization by Barry Kemp
*Maternal and paternal lineages in King Tutankhamun’s family.
==References==
Category:Race
Category:Ancient Egypt
Category:Pseudohistory