The question of the race of the people of ancient Egypt was raised historically as a product of the early racial concepts of the 18th and 19th centuries, and was linked to models of racial hierarchy primarily based on craniometry and anthropometry. A variety of views circulated about the racial identity of the Egyptians and the source of their culture. Some scholars argued that ancient Egyptian culture was influenced by other Afroasiatic-speaking populations in North Africa, the Horn of Africa, or West Asia, while others pointed to influences from various Nubian groups or populations in Europe. In more recent times, some writers continued to challenge the mainstream view, some focusing on questioning the race of specific notable individuals, such as the pharaoh represented in the Great Sphinx of Giza, the native Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, the Egyptian queen Tiye, and the Greek Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra VII. Mainstream Western scholars reject the notion that Egypt was a "white" or "black" civilization; They maintain that applying modern notions of black or white races to ancient Egypt is anachronistic. In addition, scholars reject the notion—implicit in a black or white Egypt hypothesis—that ancient Egypt was racially homogeneous; instead, skin colour varied between the peoples of Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt, and Nubia, who rose to power in various eras of ancient Egypt. Within Egyptian history, despite multiple foreign invasions, the demographics were not shifted substantially by large migrations. Other scholars have suggested there may have been a gradual period of demographic change from Syria via the eastern Delta region. International scholarship reflected in the General History of Africa, a multi-volume historical project of UNESCO, have expressed a comparable position. A majority of the scholars that contributed to the Volume II edition (1981) considered Egypt an indigenous African civilisation with a mixed population that originated largely in the Sahara and featured a variety of skin colours from north and south of the Saharan region. In the view of Egyptian scholar and featured editor Gamal Mokhtar, Upper Egypt and Nubia held "similar ethnic composition" with comparable material cultures. An updated Volume IX publication launched in 2025 maintained that Egypt had both African and Eurasian populations. The review section which focused on the 1974 "Peopling of Egypt" symposium stated that accumulated research over three decades had confirmed the migration from Southernly African along with Saharan populations into the early Nile Valley. Upper Egypt was now positioned as a origin point of pharaonic unification, with supporting archaeological, anthropological, genetic, and linguistic sources of evidence having identified close affinities between Upper Egypt and other sub-Saharan African populations.
Background
In the 18th century, French philosopher and abolitionist Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, wrote that "the Copts are the proper representatives of the Ancient Egyptians due to their jaundiced and fumed skin, which is neither Greek nor Arab, their full faces, their puffy eyes, their crushed noses, and their thick lips...the ancient Egyptians were true Negroes of the same type as all native born Africans". Volney also said that the Sphinx gave him the key to the riddle as to why all the Egyptians he saw across the country "have a bloated face, puffed-up eyes, flat nose, thick lips – in a word, the true face of the mulatto." He wrote he was tempted to attribute it to the climate, but upon visiting the Sphinx, its appearance gave him the answer; "seeing that head, typically negro in all its features", Volney saw it as the "true solution to the enigma (of how the modern Egyptians came to have their 'mulatto' appearance)". He goes on to postulate, "the Copts were "true negroes" of the same stock as all the autochthonous peoples of Africa" and they "after some centuries of mixing..., must have lost the full blackness of its original color." Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac criticized Volney and called his conclusion "evidently forced and inadmissible". The leading French scientist of the 18th century, Georges Cuvier, considered the Egyptians to be Caucasian, and it was with Cuvier that Augustus Granville sided in the dissection and first scientific autopsy of an ancient Egyptian mummy in 1825. Another early example of the controversy is an article published in The New-England Magazine of October 1833, where the authors dispute a claim that "Herodotus was given as authority for their being negroes." They point out with reference to tomb paintings: "It may be observed that the complexion of the men is invariably red, that of the women yellow; but neither of them can be said to have anything in their physiognomy at all resembling the Negro countenance."
In 1839, Jean-François Champollion suggested that: "In the Copts of Egypt, we do not find any of the characteristic features of the ancient Egyptian population. The Copts are the result of crossbreeding with all the nations that successfully dominated Egypt. It is wrong to seek in them the principal features of the old race." This memoir was made in the context of the first tribes that would have inhabited Egypt, his opinion was noted after his return from Nubia. In 1839, Champollion's and Volney's claims were disputed by Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac, who blamed a misunderstanding of the ancients for spreading a false impression of a "Negro" Egypt, stating "the two physical traits of black skin and woolly hair are not enough to stamp a race as negro" and "the opinion that the ancient population of Egypt belonged to the Negro African race, is an error long accepted as the truth. ... Volney's conclusion as to the Negro origin of the ancient Egyptian civilization is evidently forced and inadmissible." Gaston Maspero, a 19th-century French Egyptologist, stated that "by the almost unanimous testimony of ancient Greek historians, they (Ancient Egyptians) belonged to the African race, which settled in Ethiopia." Heinrich Karl Brusch, a 19th-century German Egyptologist stated that "according to ethnology, the Egyptians appear to form a third branch of the Caucasian race... and this much may be regarded as certain". E.A. 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 debate over the race of the ancient Egyptians intensified during the 19th century movement to abolish slavery in the United States, as arguments relating to the justifications for slavery increasingly asserted the historical, mental and physical inferiority of black people. For example, in 1851, John Campbell directly challenged the claims by Champollion and others regarding the evidence for a black Egypt, asserting "There is one great difficulty, and to my mind an insurmountable one, which is that the advocates of the negro civilization of Egypt do not attempt to account for, how this civilization was lost.... Egypt progressed, and why, because it was Caucasian." The arguments regarding the race of the Egyptians became more explicitly tied to the debate over slavery in the United States, as tensions escalated towards the American Civil War. In 1854, Josiah C. Nott with George Gliddon set out to prove "that the Caucasian or white, and the Negro races were distinct at a very remote date, and that the Egyptians were Caucasians." Samuel George Morton, a physician and professor of anatomy, concluded that "Negroes were numerous in Egypt, but their social position in ancient times was the same that it now is [in the United States], that of servants and slaves."
1974 UNESCO committee
At the UNESCO "Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic script" in Cairo in 1974, the "Black Hypothesis" and the notion of a homogeneous population in Egypt was proposed by Cheikh Anta Diop in his chapter Origins of the Ancient Egyptians. "Numerous objections were made to the ideas propounded by Diop. These objections revealed the extent of a disagreement which remained profound even though it was not voiced explicitly." The disagreement was largely due to methodological issues, 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". The arguments for all sides are recorded in the UNESCO publication General History of Africa, with the "Origin of the Egyptians" chapter being written by Cheikh Anta Diop, a proponent of the "Black Hypothesis". Diop's chapter was credited in the general conclusion of the symposium report by the International Scientific Committee's Rapporteur, Jean Devisse, as a "painstakingly researched contribution", consequently there was a "real lack of balance" in the discussion among participants. At the 1974 UNESCO conference, several participants other than Diop and Obenga concluded that the Neolithic Egyptian population was indigenous to the Sahara, and was made up of people from north and south of the Sahara who had a range of skin colors. The majority of participants in the conference disagreed with Diop's and Obenga's views. Similarly, none of the participants voiced support for an earlier postulation that Egyptians were "white with a dark, even black, pigmentation", although Professor Ghallab stated that "the inhabitants of Egypt in Palaeolithic times were Caucasoids".
Subsequent reviewers of the 1974 symposium debate and the UNESCO publication have presented a range of views on the outcome of the debate. According to Larissa Nordholt, the majority of reviewers at the time saw Diop's chapter as discrediting the publication's scholarly reputation due to the suggested "weight on politics". Larissa Nordholt argued that Diop's chapter was politically motivated, having been published only due to being in line with UNESCO's political imperatives, despite clashing with accepted historical methods and standards of academic rigor. 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". However, Bethwell Allan Ogot, a Kenyan historian and editor of UNESCO General History of Africa Volume 5, stated that “Cheikh Anta Diop wrested Egyptian civilization from the Egyptologists and restored it to the mainstream of African history”. 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. He later outlined that "research conferences and publications on the history and language of Kemet [Egypt] remain dominated, beyond 90%, by those brought up and trained in European, not African societies and languages (which include Arabic)".
2025 UNESCO multidisciplinary review
In 2025, members of the UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of New Volumes IX, X and IX of General History of Africa reviewed the 1974 Symposium with the availability of new sources of data. This volume featured 60 scholars from 28 countries across every continent, with the International Scientific Committee consisting of 16 member specialists appointed by the UNESCO Director-General, Audrey Azoulay. These committee members included Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Paul Lovejoy, Tayeb Chenntouf, Anshan Li, Hilary Beckles and Vanicléia Silva Santos. The international publication featured multidisciplinary views across several chapter sections on the population formation of Egypt.
Coordinating reviewer, historian and archaeologist Doulaye Konate stated the volume featured a general review of the archaeology of sub-Saharan Africa and “one of the strengths of the work is an emphasis on the African roots of the Egyptian civilization”. He later stated the Volume II of General History of Africa had integrated the Pharaonic civilization into a ‘Negro-African bosom’. In a chapter review of Volume II (which featured the conclusions of the 1974 symposium) by a single Egyptologist and anthropologist, Alain Anselin, he stated that the traditional historical view of a “wave of civilizing peoples” from the north to the south had been displaced in favour of a unifying movement from south to north. He also alluded to recent research accumulated over three decades which had confirmed the migration of peoples from the Sahara and regions south of Egypt to the Nile Valley. Anselin argued that this aligned with the position of the late Cheikh Anta Diop, who had attempted to "restore Egypt to its southern African hinterland". Anselin referenced a range of specialist studies (anthropology, linguistics, population genetics and archaeology) presented at a triennial conference in 2005 which he stated was a continuation of the 1974 recommendations. This included a genetic study which quantified the "key impact" of Sub-Saharan populations and showed that the early pre-dynastic population of the Berber people of the Siwa Oasis in north-western Egypt had close demographic links with people of North-East Africa. He further described the value of other studies such as a Crubezy study which "traced the boundaries of the ancient Khoisan settlement to Upper Egypt, where its faint traces remain identifiable and Keita’s work, as the most groundbreaking", and that Cerny's team had identified close genetic and linguistic links between the peoples of Upper Egypt, North Cameroon (some of whom spoke Chadic languages) and Ethiopia (some of whom spoke Kushitic languages).
Biological anthropologist S.O.Y. Keita stated that the ancient population of Egypt emerged primarily from interactions from local ancient Nilotic and Saharan populations with some groups such as the Beja in Sudan and Egypt having long assimilated peoples from local Arab pastoral groups. He also stated the presence of the E haplogroup, based on the indications from current evidence (sourced from a number of genetic studies) likely originated and experienced most genetic mutations in tropical East Africa, had widespread distribution across Africa including Egypt. Keita further stated this had implications for older conceptions of ‘race’ and African populations. He also argued that the P2 lineage ancestral to the E1b1b haplogroup showed a primary connection between males from all over Africa including sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt. British archaeologist David Wengrow noted that the legacy of racial studies had led to a shift towards repositioning of Egypt in an African context with greater reliance on historical linguistics, physical anthropology and analysis of genetic diversity.
Egyptian historian and archaeological inspector at the Ministry of Antiquities, H. A. A. Ibrahim, examined the megalithic complex of Nabta Playa, Upper Egypt to understand the cultural and population influences of the Holocene on pre-dynastic Egypt. She cited an anthropological study confirming the appearance of a Sub-Saharan high status child in a ceremonial centre and concluded that the megalithic structures had close resemblance to comparable structures in the Sahelian and Sub-Saharan regions of Africa. In another chapter on the population genetics of pharaonic Egypt, geneticist Jean Phillipe Gourdine adduced correlative sources of linguistic, anthropological, paleontological and genetic evidence which demonstrated African affinities with specific Neolithic and predynastic remains at the Naqada, Badari and Adaima sites in Upper Egypt. He referenced a number of studies performed by Eric Crubézy, this included genetic analysis on the modern Upper Egyptian population in Adaima which identified genetic markers common across Africa, with 71% of the Adaima samples carrying E1b1 haplogroup and 3% carrying the L0f mitochondrial haplogroup. This was supported by an anthropological study by Cruzeby in the pre-dynastic cemetery at Adaima (3700 BCE) which found the notable presence of dental markers, characteristic of Khoisan people, (25%) among several children’s teeth." Gourdine also stated the geological African context of Egypt along with the migratory movements of Homo Sapiens from the Green Sahara, drying of Lake Chad and back Asia to Africa migration, must be taken into consideration to develop an understanding of the Pharaonic Egyptian population.
Linguistic studies has situated the Egyptian language in the Afro-Asiatic family phylum which included the Berber, Chadic, Kushitic, Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic languages. There is no agreement on the exact origin of the proto-language but most linguists are supportive of an African origin of the proto-language spoken between 13,000 to 15,000 years whereas others support a Near Eastern origin dated to 10,000 years ago. A featured linguist, Roger Blench, in the publication had argued this remained an area of controversy due to archaeological evidence and textual sources which have suggested a origin of dispersal in the Near East. Nevertheless, he also stated that all the diversity of the Afro-Asiatic language family is concentrated in Sub Saharan Africa, especially in Ethiopia (including Omotic and Cushitic languages). Blench himself has argued that lexicon in the Chadic language is suggestive of migration westwards into waterways joining the Nile Basin with Lake Chad. He further added that it was possible that early Afro-Asiatic speakers had domesticated wild cattle in the Egyptian-Sudanese border 10,000 years ago. Other African scholars in the recent volume including Augustin Holl, Olabiyi B.J. Yai, Yoporeka Somet and Martial Ze Belinga made favourable references to the intellectual influence of Cheikh Anta Diop in explicating bias in Western scholarship and serving as an early figure in constructing a multidisciplinary approach, with a particular emphasis on a scientific methodology, towards African history. Somet also observed the value of Diop's prescient writings in recognizing the African origin of humanity and early Egyptian civilization by "the middle of the century".
Position of modern scholarship
Modern scholars who have studied ancient Egyptian culture and population history have responded to the controversy over the race of the ancient Egyptians in various ways. Since the late 20th century, as the science of human population genetics has advanced, most biological anthropologists have come to reject the notion of race as having any validity in the study of human biology. Mainstream scholarship have situated the ethnicity and the origins of predynastic, southern Egypt as a foundational community primarily in northeast Africa which included the Sudan, tropical Africa and the Sahara whilst recognising the population variability that became characteristic of the pharaonic period. Pharaonic Egypt featured a physical gradation across the regional populations, with Upper Egyptians having shared more biological affinities with Sudanese and southernly African populations, whereas Lower Egyptians had closer genetic links with Levantine and Mediterranean populations.
Views from Egyptologists and African historians Frank J. Yurco outlined in a 1989 article that "In short, ancient Egypt, like modern Egypt, consisted of a very heterogeneous population". He also wrote in 1990: "When you talk about Egypt, it's just not right to talk about black or white .... To take the terminology here in the United States and graft it onto Africa is anthropologically inaccurate". Yurco added that "We are applying a racial divisiveness to Egypt that they would never have accepted, They would have considered this argument absurd, and that is something we could really learn from." 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)". British Africanist, Basil Davidson, summarised in 1990, that "It follows that the Ancient Egyptians were Africans even if immigrants also trickled in from Asia and southern Europe. Where the ancient Egyptians were black or as brown in skin colour as other Africans may remain an issue of emotive dispute; probably they were both". 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". Mokhtar further added that Upper Egypt and Nubia held "similar ethnic composition" with comparable material culture. Egyptologist Miriam Lichtheim, in 1990, wrote that "The Egyptians were not Nubians, and the original Nubians were not black. Nubia gradually became black because black peoples migrated northward out of Central Africa". Christopher Ehret wrote in 1996: "Ancient Egyptian civilization was, in ways and to an extent usually not recognized, fundamentally African. The evidence of both language and culture reveals these African roots. The origins of Egyptian ethnicity lay in the areas south of Egypt". Donald B. Redford wrote in 2004 that: "The old notion of waves of "races" flowing up the Nile Valley, effecting cultural change and improvement, is now known to be as erroneous as it was simplistic. New ideas need not come by means of invasion: occasionally they are indigenous and may parallel similar discoveries elsewhere which are wholly unrelated." 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. It also ignores the fact that Africa is inhabited by many other populations besides Bantu related ("Negroid") groups. He wrote that in reconstructions of life in ancient Egypt, modern Egyptians would therefore be the most logical and closest approximation to the ancient Egyptians. Kemp also wrote that "sample populations available from northern Egypt from before the 1st Dynasty (Merimda, Maadi and Wadi Digla) turn out to be significantly different from sample populations from early Palestine and Byblos, suggesting a lack of common ancestors over a long time" and the anthropological measurements of ancient Egyptians male limb length proportions had grouped "them with Africans rather than with Europeans". Barbara Mertz wrote in 2011: "Egyptian civilization was not Mediterranean or African, Semitic or Hamitic, black or white, but all of them. It was, in short, Egyptian." Kathryn Bard wrote in 2014: "Egyptians were the indigenous farmers of the lower Nile valley, neither black nor white as races are conceived of today". Federico Puigdevall and Albert Cañagueral wrote in 2017: "There are defenders of the theory that the pharaohs were black, and there are those who maintain they had Caucasian origins. Neither theory is provable". Nicky Nielsen wrote in 2020: "Ancient Egypt was neither black nor white, and the repeated attempt by advocates of either ideology to seize the ownership of ancient Egypt simply perpetuates an old tradition: one of removing agency and control of their heritage from the modern population living along the banks of the Nile." 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". He concluded that ancient Egypt's "location at the edge of northeast Africa and its geography as a corridor between that continent and Asia opened it up to influences from all directions, in terms of both culture and of demography."
Views from Archaeologists David Wengrow, Michael Dee, Sarah Foster, Alice Stevenson and Christopher Bronk Ramsey wrote in 2015: "The African origins of Egyptian civilisation lie in an important cultural horizon, the ‘primary pastoral community’, which emerged in both the Egyptian and Sudanese parts of the Nile Valley in the fifth millennium BC."
Robert Morkot wrote in 2005: The ancient Egyptians were not 'white' in any European sense, nor were they 'Caucasian'... we can say that the earliest population of ancient Egypt included African people from the upper Nile, African people from the regions of the Sahara and modern Libya, and smaller numbers of people who had come from south-western Asia and perhaps the Arabian peninsula. Felix Chami wrote in 2006 that Egyptian iconography had shown "that their physical type, like most of the people of the African communities, was both black and brown." Fekri Hassan wrote in 2021 in regards to the origins of Egypt that "the original African populations of the Nile Valley, who showed a local gradual change in physical traits from south to north due to distance, hosted peoples who drifted from southwest Asia". William Stiebling and Susan Helft wrote in 2023 on the historical debate concerning the race and ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians in light of recent evidence. They argued that the physical appearances would have varied along a continuum from the Delta to the Nile’s source regions in the south. The authors specified that “some ancient Egyptians looked more Middle Eastern and others looked more Sudanese or Ethiopians of today, and some may even have looked like other groups in Africa”. The authors reached the view that "Egypt was a unique civilization with genetic and cultural ties linking it to other African cultures to its south and west and to Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures to its north".
Views from Biological anthropologists Anthropologist Bernard R. Ortiz De Montellano wrote in 1993: "The claim that all Egyptians, or even all the pharaohs, were black, is not valid. Most scholars believe that Egyptians in antiquity looked pretty much as they look today, with a gradation of darker shades toward the Sudan". Nancy Lovell wrote in 1999 that studies of skeletal remains indicate that the physical characteristics of ancient southern Egyptians and Nubians were "within the range of variation" for both ancient and modern indigenous peoples of the Sahara and tropical Africa, and that the distribution of population characteristics "seems to follow a clinal pattern from south to north", which may be explained by natural selection as well as gene flow between neighboring populations. Lovell outlined that "In general, the inhabitants of Upper Egypt and Nubia had the greatest biological affinity to people of the Sahara and more southerly areas". 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". Stuart Tyson Smith wrote in 2001: "Any characterization of race of the ancient Egyptians depends on modern cultural definitions, not on scientific study. Thus, by modern American standards it is reasonable to characterize the Egyptians as 'black', while acknowledging the scientific evidence for the physical diversity of Africans." He continues: "Ancient Egyptian practices show strong similarities to modern African cultures including divine kingship, the use of headrests, body art, circumcision, and male coming of-age rituals, all suggesting an African substratum or foundation for Egyptian civilisation". Smith also wrote in 2004: "Egyptian art depicts Nubians with stereotypical dark skin, facial features, hairstyles, and dress, all very different from Egyptians and the other two ethnic groups, Asiatics and Libyans". He adds that "no single material correlate, no matter how abundantly represented, unambiguously reflects ethnic group affiliation". Sonia Zakrzewski who wrote in 2003 studied skeletal samples from the Badarian period to the Middle Kingdom in Upper Egypt. The raw data suggested that the Ancient Egyptians in general had "tropical body plans" but that their proportions were actually "super-negroid", i.e. the limb indices are relatively longer than in many "African" populations. She proposed that the apparent development of an increasingly African body plan over time may also be due to Nubian mercenaries being included in the Middle Kingdom sample. Although, she noted that in spite of the differences in tibiae lengths among the Badarian and Early Dynastic samples, that "all samples lie relatively clustered together as compared to the other populations". 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." S.O.Y. Keita wrote in 2022 on the origins and the identity of the Ancient Egyptians. He examined various forms of evidence which included archaeology, historical linguistics and biological data to determine the population affinities. He concluded that "various disciplines indicate the groundings of Egypt within Northeastern Africa" and the ancient Egyptians "were a people and society that emerged in the Saharo-Nilotic region of Northeast Africa". Keita also reviewed studies on the biological affinities of the Ancient Egyptian population and wrote in 1993 that the original inhabitants of the Nile Valley were primarily a variety of indigenous Northeast Africans from the areas of the desiccating Sahara and more southerly areas. He also added that whilst Egyptian society became more socially complex and biologically varied, the "ethnicity of the Niloto-Saharo-Sudanese origins did not change".
Scholarly views on bias Various scholars have highlighted the role of colonial racism in shaping the attitudes of early Egyptologists, and criticised the continued over-representation of North American and European perspectives in the field. Diop in his work, The African Origin of Civilization argued that the prevailing views in Egyptology were driven by biased scholarship and colonial attitudes. Similarly, Bruce Trigger wrote that early modern scholarship on the Nile Valley populations had been "marred by a confusion of race, language, and culture and by an accompanying racism". Criticism has also been levelled at modern anthropological studies of Nile valley populations. This has related to interpretations of biological Africans. These past approaches have been viewed to subscribe to a narrow craniometric paradigm which classifies certain African populations as “True Negroes”, whilst categorising Egyptians, Nubians, Somalians as non-Africans despite having a shared biocultural evolutionary climate. Smith wrote in 2018 that a common practice among Egyptologists was to "divorce Egypt from its proper northeast African context, instead framing it as fundamentally part of a Near Eastern or "Mediterranean" economic, social and political sphere, hardly African at all or at best a crossroad between the Near East, the eastern Mediterranean and Africa, which carries with it the implication that it is ultimately not really part of Africa". He explicitly criticises Van De Mieroop's comments that ancient Egypt was clearly 'in Africa' it was not so clearly 'of Africa' as reflecting "long-standing Egyptological biases". He concluded that the interrelated cultural features shared between northeast African dynamic and Pharaonic Egypt are not "survivals" or coincidence, but shared traditions with common origins in the deep past". 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. Manzo stated more recent studies had "pointed out the relevance of African elements to the rise of Egyptian culture, following earlier suggestions on Egyptian kingship and religion by Henri Frankfort" which countered the traditional view that considered Egypt "more closely linked to the Near East than to the rest of Africa". Ehret recounted in 2023 that the previous two centuries of Western scholarship had presented Egypt as an "offshoot of earlier Middle Eastern developments". He continued to argue that these old ideas had influenced the attitudes of scholars in other disciplines such as genetics and their approaches. Ehret was especially critical of the sampling methods and wider conclusions of a 2017 genetic study which conflicted with existing archaeological, linguistic, genetic and biological anthropological evidence. According to Ehret, these sources of evidence had already determined the founding populations of Ancient Egypt in areas such as Naqada and El-Badari to be the descendants of longtime inhabitants in Northeastern Africa which included Nubia and the northern Horn of Africa. Genetic studies have been criticised by several scholars for a range of methodological problems and providing misleading racial classifications. Boyce and Keita argued that certain studies have adopted a selective approach in sampling, such as using samples drawn mostly from northern (Lower) Egypt, which has historically had the presence of more foreigners from the Mediterranean and the Near East, and using those samples as representing the rest of Egypt. Thus, excluding the 'darker' south or Upper Egypt which presents a false impression of Egyptian variability. The authors also note that chromosomal patterns have featured inconsistent labelling such as Haplotype V as seen the with use of misleading terms like "Arabic" to describe it, implying this haplotype is of 'Middle Eastern' origins. However, when the haplotype V variant is looked at in context, it does have a very high prevalence in African countries above the Sahara and in Ethiopia. In 2022, Danielle Candelora criticised how modern DNA studies are misused for political and racist agendas. As an example she cites the media echo about the Schuenemann genome study published in 2017, which was "sensationalized in the media as proof that Egyptians were not black Africans" in spite of its methodological limits, and taken by white supremacists as "scientific evidence" to justify their view on the achievements of the Ancient Egyptian civilisation. Candelora also noted that the media overlooked methodological limitations with the study such as the "untested sampling methods, small sample size, and problematic comparative data". However an unpublished, follow-up study in 2022 sampled six different excavation sites along the entire length of the Nile Valley, spanning 4,000 years of Egyptian history, and the 18 high quality mitochondrial genomes that were reconstructed which the authors argued supported the results from the 2017 Schuenemann genome study. UNESCO scholars Augustin Holl and Jean Gourdine both presented similar forms of criticisms, in the General History of Africa Volume IX, of the 2017 Scheunemann study in terms of its geographical coverage, general conclusions on the population of Egypt and methodological approach. Gourdine argued there are a number of biases in the interpretation which conflicted with other analysis such as the Amarna STR analysis and evidence of identifiable African haplogroups such as E1b1b1, JK2955 (haplogroup L3) and JK2963 (haplogroup M1a1i), which preceded the trans-Saharan slave trade in Egypt. Canadian historian Elise K Burton (2025) argued that recent aDNA research are deeply influenced by racial debates over the ethnicity of ancient Egyptians. She advanced the view that the perspectives of Western, West African and Egyptian scientific researchers have shaped the interpretation of genetic research and this has triggered conflict over access to the mummified remains of ancient Egyptians. She criticised early attempts of Cheikh Anta Diop to leverage paleoserology as reflecting racialist standards defined by European scholarship. Burton also expressed criticism for nationalist sentiments exhibited among Egyptian scholars such as Zahi Hawass and restricting foreign access to Egyptian royal mummies to maintain “genetic sovereignty”. She further highlighted that anti-black racism endured in Egyptian society and nationalist genetics presented its own variant of racialist genetics, as discussed in reference to the national genome project in Egypt. Lastly, Burton believed that Euro-American researchers benefited from the historical colonialism in facilitating a widely available source of Egyptian mummies in European museums. She also mentioned that recent studies such as the 2017 DNA study have been interpreted under racialised lens.
Present-day controversies Today the issues regarding the race of the ancient Egyptians are "troubled waters which most people who write about ancient Egypt from within the mainstream of scholarship avoid." The debate, therefore, takes place mainly in the public sphere and tends to focus on a small number of specific issues.
Greco-Roman accounts of Ancient Egypt
A range of scholars have cited the classical observations of prominent Greeks and Romans as forms of primary evidence to denote the physical appearance of the early Egyptians. Some historical accounts have drawn close physical and cultural resemblances between Egyptians and Ethiopians whereas others have associated them more closely with northern Indians. In the fifth century BCE, Greek historian, Herodotus, described the Egyptians as having “melanchrones skin and wooly hair and secondly, and more reliably for the reason that alone among mankind the Egyptians and the Ethiopians have practiced circumcision since time immemorial.” Herodotus also wrote that the Ammonians of Siwa Oasis are "colonists from Egypt and Aethiopia and speak a language compounded of the tongues of both countries".
In the first century BCE, Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, in his work Bibliotheca Historica, reported that the Ethiopians claimed that Egypt was an early colony, and that the Ethiopians also cited evidence that they were more ancient than the Egyptians as he wrote: "The Ethiopians say that the Egyptians are one of their colonies which was brought into Egypt by Osiris". Diodorus Siculus also discussed the similar cultural practices between the Ethiopians and Egyptians such as the writing systems as he states "We must now speak about the Ethiopian writing which is called hieroglyphic among the Egyptians, in order that we may omit nothing in our discussion of their antiquities". Ammianus Marcellinus, (325/330-after 391) served as a Greco-Roman historian in 4th century CE, He described “the men of Egypt are mostly brown and black with a skinny and desiccated look.” Arrian, Greek historian, wrote in the 1st-century AD that "The appearance of the inhabitants is also not very different in India and Ethiopia: the southern Indians are rather more like Ethiopians as they are black to look on, and their hair is black; only they are not so snub-nosed or woolly-haired as the Ethiopians; the northern Indians are most like the Egyptians physically". According to a passage sourced from Strabo, Greek geographer, 1st-century AD, northern Indians held similar physical characteristics as the Egyptians: "As for the people of India, those in the south are like the Aethiopians in colour, although they are like the rest in respect to countenance and hair (for on account of the humidity of the air their hair does