History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice —William James Durant

Skin color, even when similar, is not proof of common ancestry.

Race in Ancient Egypt is one of the most polarized ongoing historical debates.  However, very few give the discussion a progressive treatment. And any treatment of this contentious discussion must discuss contemporary politics, racism, and sociology. Almost all debates fail to address the historical reality of thousands of years ago without contaminating it with our 21st-century race politics. How do we discuss the ancient world with modern race concepts? So discussing race in antiquity is anachronistic because these concepts did not exist back then. And while some might offer up the position that an African is an African, just note that there is no transhistorical definition of African. Even today it has in variations depending upon which group you study. To use the word “black” or ‘Black African’ is even more ridiculous, so most of the discussion is around sub-Saharan ancestry. For all the positions presented it is shocking that a more realistic possibility is that Ancient Egypt, like modern New York, was a shifting demographic, with admixture and different “races” from the region. So anyone doing a DNA test on one period would not be getting the full picture of that demographic 1000 years before. Which population in history has been static for over 3000 years? ¹ Let alone a part of the world visited by so many different groups. Even today, London of the Windrush and London of 2022 is radically different. So why would ALL Ancient Egyptians be so monolithic over such an extensive time period? And why do people make arguments by showing the pictures that favor their argument, and never the ones that hurt it? It is hardly a historical discussion at this point.

If we studied only Indian media, what conclusions would we get about Indian society?

If a future generation was to study Indian media of this era what would they draw about the racial demographic of India from its light-skinned celebrities?

As people of African descent and others assert their definitions of self in an effort to create a national consciousness, European academia belittles these efforts as juvenile and unnecessary–Marimba Ani

Egyptian depiction of different Ethnic groups²

Everyone wants to claim something great; we all want to connect to the greatness of the ancients. But from a modern historical point of view, there is a problem. For the past 500 years, Europeans have maintained and promoted David Hume’s racist canard that Africa is a place without invention and civilization. So, if Ancient Egyptians were of the African race, it would destroy the myth that Africans were only good for sex, dancing, and manual labor.

“The men of Egypt are mostly BLACK or BROWN with a skinny dessicated look”… -Ammianus Marcellinus, 325-330 A.D. (Book 22)

But if all Africans want to do is claim the Ancients were African and then sit down and live in opposition to everything that made the Ancient Egyptians great then we might as well stop reading this article and not worry about anything. Because if the Egyptians were great builders, and people are content not to build or do anything that the Egyptians do then what are we claiming? Many people are cool with putting an Ancient Egypt Ank on their social media, but then everything they do beyond that is in stark opposition to any of the legacy of the Ancients.

You cannot be the creators of the first civilizations and be sub-human. Europeans on the other hand would do well from claiming Egypt because it would prove their historical superiority beyond civilizations like Greece. It would also help to protect their mythology that Africans were only semi-savages, a people without history and invention, and thus histories workforce.

Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan –JFK ³

Despite the new wave of myths regarding Nubia and Kemet (Ancient Egypt), It is clear that Kemet and Nubia were neighboring African Civilizations just as Aksum and Nubia. The difference doesn’t mean Nubia was a ‘black race’ and Kemet wasn’t. Both groups were ethnic groups of indigenous African origin.⁴ The ethnic differences were even less than Amhara and Gambella people. Yet no one today is suggesting that the skinned people of Gambella are African while the Amhara are not. But just like no one African American ⁵is claiming Zulu or Somali ancestry we cannot claim Ancient Egyptian ancestry just because we decided to classify them as the same sociological construction as ourselves. White artists can reconstruct Tut’s face to look like their fancies. Let me have a go at it and I bet when I am finished he looks like me.

WHAT SCHOLARS SAY

There is no shortage of Eurocentric claims that place Ancient Egyptians outside of indigenous Africa. But here are some that do. Again, this article’s position is best summed up by Keita:

A pale blonde version

SOY Keita has argued, that the real issue is not the Egyptian’s race (an inherently undecidable question based on its own historically varying ideology of the concept, but population affinity—to whom were the Egyptians most closely related (Keita 1993:297) If we insist on pursuing physical rather than cultural traits, we should investigate the biological affinities between different ancient peoples rather than their shade of pigmentation;

The Egyptians of earlier periods, especially in the South, were physically part of what can be called the Sahara-tropical variant range and retained this major affinity even while diversifying. The base population of Egypt included the descendants of earlier populations and some Levantines and Saharan immigrants (Keita 1990)

“It can be seen that all the pharonic values, including those of ‘Smakhare’, lie much closer to the negro curve than to the white curve. Since stature equations only work satisfactorily in the individuals to whom they have applied have similar proportions to the population group from which they are derived, this provides justification for using negro equations for estimating stature from single bones of the New Kingdom pharoahs, renforcing the previous findings of Robins (1983). Furthermore, the Troller and Gleser white equations for the femur, tibia and humerus yield stature values that have a much wider spread than those from negro equations with mean values that are unacceptably large.”
–Robins and Schute. The Physical Proportions and Stature of New Kingdom Pharaohs,” Journal of Human Evolution 12 (1983), 455-465

“Overall, when the Egyptian crania are evaluated in a Near Eastern (Lachish) versus African (Kerma, Jebel Moya, Ashanti) context) the affinity is with the Africans. The Sudan and Palestine are the most appropriate comparative regions which would have ‘donated’ people, along with the Sahara and Maghreb. Archaeology validates looking to these regions for population flow (see Hassan 1988)… Egyptian groups showed less overall affinity to Palestinian and Byzantine remains than to other African series, especially Sudanese.”
— S. O. Y. Keita, “Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships,” History in Africa 20 (1993) 129-54

DNA EVIDENCE⁷

DNA studies can only provide firm conclusions about the population of ancient Egypt if the sample results are of a significant number of individuals and represent a broad geographical and chronological range.[2] According to historian William Stiebling and archaeologist Susan N. Helft, conflicting DNA analysis on recent genetic samples, such as the Amarna royal mummies (with Sub-Saharan ancestry). The absolute estimates of sub-Saharan African ancestry in these three ancient Egyptian individuals ranged from 6 to 15%, and the absolute estimates of sub-Saharan African ancestry in the 135 modern Egyptian samples ranged from 14 to 21%, which show an 8% increase in African component. The age of the ancient Egyptian samples suggests that this 8% increase in African component occurred predominantly within the last 2000 years.

In 2023, Christopher Ehret argued that the conclusions of the 2017 study were based on insufficiently small sample sizes, and that the authors had a biased interpretation of the genetic data. Ehret also criticised the Schuenemann article for asserting that there was “no sub-Saharan genetic component” in the Egyptian population and cited previous genetic analysis which had identified the Horn of Africa as the origin of the E-M35 paternal haplogroup.

We have left off comments by Hawas as he is a Eurocentric, with a deep history of anti-African attitudes. He is well aware that Egyptians are diverse and have always been, yet denies that even today some Egyptians can pass for East Africans. 

Christopher Ehret, David Schoenbrun, Steven A Brandt and Shomarka Keita (2025) made further commentary on the Amarna results in a multidisciplinary review concerning Ehret’s Afrasian theory that Afroasiatic languages originated in East Africa (as opposed to North Africa or the Near East), noting the R1b M89 haplogroup subtype identified among the three Amarna pharaohs (Tutankhamun, Amenhotep III and Akhenaten) was not further specified.[46] The authors also stated that the R1b haplogroup usually interpreted as indicating a back migration to Africa from or via the Near East could have been attributed to Asian back migration or trans-Saharan connections as the genetic marker is found at relative high frequencies among Chadic populations, although the authors cautioned that the specific R1b-V88 lineage found most commonly in Chadic speaking population was not determined to be present in the Egyptian 18th dynasty pharaohs.[47] Referencing a Short Tandem Report (STR) autosomal background analysis on the Amarna royal mummies, performed by Keita in an earlier publication, the authors considered this analysis could suggest closer trans-Saharan connections.[48] Ehret et al also disclosed through personal communication with the Gad team that “other eighteenth dynasty lineages in the Amarna period were found to be E1b1a (Gad et al 2020)”, making further reference to the 2012 Hawass et al findings and Gad et al’s 2020 reconfirmation that Ramses III and Unknown Man E of the later twentieth Ramesside dynasty carried the haplogroup E1b1a(m2).[49] The authors further postulated that association of the palaeolithic Asian lineage (R1B) and an affiliation that is tropical African (E1b1a) is an example of admixture found in some Nile Valley populations, and that a mixture of lineages could illustrate Egypt being near a crossroads.[50]

In 2025, biochemist Jean-Philippe Gourdine reviewed genetic data on the Ancient Egyptian populations in the international scholarly publication, General History of Africa Volume IX. Expanding on a previous STR analysis performed on the Amarna mummies, Gourdine stated the analysis had found “that they had strong affinities with current sub-Saharan populations: 41 per cent to 93.9 per cent for sub-Saharan Africa, compared to 4.6 per cent to 41 per cent for Eurasia and 0.3 per cent to 16 per cent for Asia (Gourdine, 2018).” He also referenced comparable analysis conducted by DNA Tribes, which specialised in genetic genealogy and had large datasets, with the latter having identified strong affinities between the Amarna royal mummies and Sub-Saharan African populations

SKIN COLOR IRRELEVANT

Manipulating skin color changes racial perception— It is artistic bias. ⁸

While two people might have similar skin tone, it does not mean that skin color was created by the same genetic processes. Skin color evolves by convergent evolution to similar environmental and dietary stimuli.

We believe Ancient Egyptians looked like Ethiopic people to Arab-looking people. That is the ethnic range. That does not mean they were Arab or Ethiopian; they just looked like them as opposed to “Bantu” speakers from Congo or South Africa. They did not look like most contemporary populations of so-called Sub-Saharan Africa. So within African diversity, they were closer to the Ethiopic look, extending to the Palestinian Mediterranean look (at its most extreme). Like populations of Palestine and Turkey, I don’t think they say “race” as we see it today. Nothing they have drawn confirms a parallel with our racial constructions. We have, however, imposed our racialized reality onto their ancient one.

African diversity ⁹

The first nonsense that must be challenged and laid to waste is any focus on skin color. Some YouTube-styled arguments suggest that “Ancient Egyptians were not black, they were brown.” Skin color and race are not interchangeable, hence why the word African is better than the word black (which is a color)–not a race. Being 100% African is not dependent on being pitch black in color–that is a Eurocentric condition imposed at the moment of their conquest of the African mind. And Africa’s diversity of features stands as testimony to this fact.

Color variation in ET

Right now you can find dark-skinned Ethiopians, much darker than South African Zulus and you can find light-skin Ethiopians lighter than most Arabs. You can also find many Xhosa people who have lighter complexions than most Indians. Skin color among African people is and always has been highly varied. So it is ridiculous to enter that into a debate about race in antiquity when everything in reality shows that Africans are not black in color. It has also been suggested, as can be seen from the paintings of Ancient Egypt, that they depicted their colors as black, white, and brown without discrimination. Maybe color for them had another meaning.

Many different types of Native African types

The salient reality is that no one can deny the historical truism that the Greeks (the world’s first Europeans) went to ancient Kemet to study at the Temple of Waset (later called Thebes by the Gree

Nubian Wall Painting

ks and Luxor by the Arabs).In his magnum opus, A Lost Tradition:

African Philosophy in World History, (1995) Dr. Theophile Obenga quotes Aristotle ranking Egypt as “the most ancient archeological reserve in the world” and “that is how the Egyptians, whom we (Greeks) considered as the most ancient of the human race” (p. 45).
Note: Recent DNA testing of the Amarna mummies (King Tutankhamun and his relatives) indicates that they inherited their genetic material overwhelmingly from African populations in the Great Lakes of East Africa, tropical West Africa, and Southern Africa. These regional matches do not necessarily indicate an exclusively African ancestry for the Amarna pharaonic family.

WHAT IS BLACK?

Blackness expands for criminology but contracts for Egyptology.

The ethnicity of Ancient Egyptians was Ancient Egyptian. The ethnicity of ancient Ethiopians was Ethiopian. Ethnic groups are not permanent, especially over 3000 years. The suggested admixture is total nonsense because every ethnic group at some point had to come from somewhere. The people of Southern Africa are an admixture of indigenous Khoi and Bantu-speaking farmers. I am not sure when a black African ethnic group entered the historical record as a scientific fact. But it seems to emerge, perfectly, with the separation of Egypt from Africa: When they discovered Axum it happened again. When they discovered Great Zimbabwe it almost happened again: Arabs built it.

Egyptians were dark brown to light brown in complexion no different to the average African

I guess the lady above is not black. So while Europeans and Asians can have admixture, blacks must be 100%? Not, when they breaking in a house they can be diverse.

Nubians are supposed to be black and Egyptians non black. What is black? By American standards or by South African standards? Clearly by the standards that exclude African natives from greatness.

It has to be one of the stupidest discussions on Earth with pseudo-experts weighing in with certainty. Nothing more frustrating than hearing an ‘Egyptian ‘ expert lean on ‘race’, a social construction as if ‘race’ was a fact beyond subjective assignment.

Is she black? She said she is. She gets treated as such.

And when you can’t pause to be critical of your foundational assumptions you are a damn fool.

In the photo of Rihanna and her man, which one is black? Yet black has expended again. In Ancient Egypt black contracts to the 18th century model below.

If something is bad black is expanded

If something is good black contracts

DNA

Due to a lack of knowledge on this subject, we have previously left this discussion to specialists who are referenced. But the popular mainstream opinion is summed up as:

Schuenemann et al.1 seemingly suggest, based largely on the results of an ancient DNA study of later period remains from northern Egypt, that the ‘ancient Egyptians’ (AE) as an entity came from Asia (the Near East, NE), and that modern Egyptians “received additional sub-Saharan African (SSA) admixtures in recent times” after the latest period of the pharaonic era due to the “trans-Saharan slave trade and Islamic expansion.¹⁰

So according to this research, the more recent populations of modern Egypt have 8% sub-Saharan DNA, which is way more than Ancient Egyptians. ¹¹ What will the Afrocentric world do with itself now? There is so much investment in race and Egypt and so much “black” pride is perched on the outcome being 100% black! You see the thing about DNA it is not as subjective as skin color or facial features or hair texture. As one detractor of African history stated, many groups fit the description of “Dark skin with woolly hair.’ S. O. Y. Keita and some others bring a challenge to this research, The alternative interpretations involve three major considerations:
1) sampling and methodology, 2) historiography and 3) definitions as they relate to populations, origins and evolution

We will only, for brevity focus on the most notable objections:¹⁰

• The timeline is not representative of AE history ~ 3,000 years is missing (e.g.
  Predynastic, Early Dynastic, Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom
• The whole genome sample size is too small (n=3) to accurately permit a discussion of
  all Egyptian population history from north to south
• The authors do not consider explanations based on historical narrative, although they
  present historical information. NE input in AE could also be explained by old
  mercantile relationships with Lower Egypt (e.g. Maadi-Buto complex ~4,000 BC3
  ), Egyptianized Asiatic rulers and migrants (e.g. Hyksos ~1,650 BC), NE prisoners of war
  (e.g. from Thutmose III’s military campaign in NE ~ 1,490 BC), from diplomatic
  marriages2 (e.g. Amenhotep III and Mitanni princess, Gilukhipa ~ 1,380 BC), etc.
• Schuenemann et al.1 seem to implicitly suggest that only SSA equals Africa and that there
  are no interconnections between the various regions of Africa not rooted in the slave trade,
  a favorite trope. It has to be noted too that that in the Islamic armies that entered Egypt that
  there were a notable number of eastern Africans. It is not clear why there is an emphasis on
  ‘sub-Saharan’ when no Saharan or supra-Saharan population samples–empirical or
  modeled are considered; furthermore, there is no one way to be “sub-Saharan.”

The last point deals with “What does it mean to be African” but I think this point is problematic if I understand what the author is saying. And it is problematic because we will have to fix a definition and live or die by it. I doubt, in all seriousness, you can be “African” without including Sub-Saharan DNA as a large component of that definition. Because we open a door that seems to favor bending definitions which way to keep a hold of Ancient Egypt in the face of research we do not like. No one here likes what that research is trying to say. It is just like a court case when after all the evidence (eye witness, forensic, virtual recreations, blood splatter evidence, oral testimony, microbiology)  they test the DNA and the rape kit screams your name–it means game over mate. It would be disingenuous to claim to be progressive and trained critical thinkers and then not present the current debate as it stands.

EUROCENTRIC REVISIONIST

Some of us are taken in by the new “Eurocentric” lies. When Nat Geo released the Black Pharaohs some of us went crazy with joy screaming FINALLY they are telling the TRUTH. No! They are just telling better lies. First things

and we’ve been telling you but not everyone gets it, there are no BLACK Pharaohs or BLACK anything in Africa. They are only African people! (aka you and me). So when Nat Geo is telling you about some Black Pharaohs you have to ask, So what color are the other ones? Exactly.  Ancient Egypt is an African civilization full stop. Maybe as time progressed it became less homologous as Hyksos, Persians, Romans, Greeks and later Arabs settled, but it is at heart an African civilization. This black thing is another lie to remove Ancient Egypt from Africa .and ask yourself have you ever heard of white kings of Greece?

The person doing the cover art for National Geographic is probably a white person who drew the cover art.

Same Ethnic group (Zulu) yet look different

Because people in that region do not look like that and they do wear those clothes– That may be Southern Africa or something. So it is a game. The people of Upper Egypt (lower for us today) and what is now Sudan looked like Ethiopians, they were the same African people. Just like Ethiopians and Somalis are the same — yet different. And sameness is not so subjective that we can say “Oh no one knows what race the Ancient Egyptians are”, because we know they were not Aryan or Chinese, do the discussion of Egyptian race is confined between dark-skinned races/groups?