What race do you think Ancient Egypt was?

My opinion- a melting pot, just like now. Egyptians today have appearences ranging from black, white, middle eastern/north african, somewhere in between black and middle eastern or white. If you look at their artwork from ancient times, they had a variety of appearence. Egypt isnt and never was homogenous racially. Its the crossroads of different lands-middle east, europe, and africa.

I have found no reliable evidence outside biased sources that Ancient Egypt was a predominately black country. Having a few black pharoahs doesnt prove that. Cleopatra was greek, does that prove egypt was a nation of whites? No.

I forgot the studies, but I read studies that showed Egypt's DNA is similar to what it is today-which proves that they racially were similar back then to what they are now.

 

I find your assessment to be compellingly accurate.

 

It depends on what time period you're talking about and who you consider to be authentically Egyptian. The Ptolemies from Cleopatra's time period were Macedonian Greeks and they were Egyptian rulers but they were foreign to the land. Do they count? The same goes for the Hyksos. They came from Southwest Asia, the Near East, but they weren't native Egyptians. If we're talking about the natives rulers and populace from the Early Dynastic, Old Kingdom and New Kingdom time period discounting the Hyksos invasion and foreign settlers then the anthropological evidence indicates that the Ancient Egyptians were an Afroasiatic speaking people with tropical adaptations and relationships. They would have looked like your average Upper Egyptian to Nubian or ethnic groups such as Somali and Oromo, people considered to be Black today. There's plenty of sound evidence for this from unbiased sources.

Here are a few that I have compiled.


[video=youtube;aZssWb4MmGM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZssWb4MmGM[/video]

6 lines of evidence proving the Ancient Egyptians were Black:

1. Craniofacial analysis of Ancient Egyptian skulls groups them with modern East African populations such as the Somali and Oromo.

2. Skeletal analysis of the Ancient Egyptian limb proportions reveal that they have tropical body plans indicating an evolutionary adaptation to a tropical environment of Ancient Egyptian ancestors.

3. DNA studies reveal that Ancient Egyptian remains have African genetic lineages.

4. Histological analysis of Ancient Egyptian skin indicates that the Ancient Egyptians were dark-skinned people.

5. Ancient Egyptians artwork depicts them as brown-skinned with Afros and African style braids. Ethnographic murals show Ancient Egyptians to be much darker than light-skinned neighbors from Libya and Palestine (only jet-black Nubians are darker).

6. The Ancient Egyptian language has an Afroasiatic origin. Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken in the Horn of Africa region and disseminated before the formation of the Ancient Egyptian state. The architects of Ancient Egyptian civilization must have come from the South. This is supported by archeological evidence.

References:

- Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships,S.O.Y. Keita, History in Africa, 20: 129-154 (1993)

- Variation in Ancient Egyptian Stature and Body Proportions Sonia R. Zakrzewski, Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BF, UK,American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 121:219–229 (2003)

- Genetics, Egypt, and History: Interpreting Geographical Patterns of Y Chromosome Variation S.O.Y. Keita & A. J. Boyce, History in Africa, 32 pp. 221-246 (2005)

- The Origins of Afroasiatic, Ehret, Keita and Newman, Science (2004)

- Population Continuity or Population Change: Formation of the Ancient Egyptian State Sonia R. Zakrzewski, Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BF, UK American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 132: 501–509 (2007)

- The Geographical Origins and Population Relationships of Early Ancient Egyptians, Egypt in Africa, (1996), pp. 25–27

- Determination of optimal rehydration, fixation and staining methods for histological and immunohistochemical analysis of mummified soft ttissues Biotechnic & Histochemistry 2005, 80(1): 7_/13

 

I think the earliest Egyptians they know of were Anu or Annu..

 

Yeah, best evidence points towards a northern African people. The skin tones varied, as they do today with Africans. The facial features also vary in the various geographic groups. Just because some of the statues and illustrations don't show large lips and wide noses, doesn't mean they were not African.

 

I have heard them called Paleo Mediterranean ... and of course nobody knows what color the Natufians were.

 

Black
End of Thread/
Goodnight.

 

Ramesses III was found to belong to Haplogroup E, which is the most common haplogroup in Africa, and it's believed that most ancient Egyptians shared the same African haplogroup. But there was a back migration from West Asia to North Africa and King Tut belonged to Haplogroup R1b1a2, which can be found at high frequencies in Western Europe (over 70%), but it's very rare in North Africa (less than 2%). So the Indo-European dynasty ruled Egypt for at least few generations during the New Kingdom period but there is no historical or genetic evidence that this was the norm in ancient Egypt.

 

What is your source for this claim?

 

The alleged Discovery Channel markers put Tut in a genetic profile group, or haplogroup, that also includes more than half of the men in Western Europe. Scholz said the company is now searching for the closest living relatives of Tutankhamen, men who share all 16 genetic markers on the pharaoh's supposed Y chromosome. Exact matches get a refund for their $179 to $399 test and will also get free additional DNA analysis.

The haplogroup R1b1a2, which iGENEA claims includes King Tut, arose 9,500 years ago in the Black Sea region. How Tut's ancestors would have gotten from that region to Egypt is unknown, but Scholz said iGENEA hopes to learn more by collecting more close and exact matches from modern people of Western European descent.

"The better the match, the more recent the common ancestor," Scholz said.

But people hoping to prove that they've got an ancestor in common with the notoriously sickly boy king should take iGENEA's claims with a grain of salt, Pusch said: "It appears that they try to better sell their DNA testing kit by using the media attention connected to King Tut."

http://www.livescience.com/15388-discovery-channel-tutankhamen-dna.html

 

Good question. The truth is no one really knows for certain.
I think they probably had their own unique ethnic appearance, only remotely like what Egyptians look like today.
Their skin color was probably not so different from other native tribes still living in the mountains of other Northwestern countries in Africa.
Ancient Egyptian pictures seem to show a mix of peoples with different skin colors, some tan brownish, others brown, so it may be that Egypt consisted of a mix North African and Nubian Black peoples even in ancient times. How much these people might have interbred is unknown.

 

That "research" is based on stock footage from a video not an actual analysis of King Tut's DNA therefore it is worthless. We shouldn't jump to any conclusions about King Tut's Y-Chromosome Haplogroup unless an actual scientific study has been conducted on his DNA.

 

Besides this, tuts DNA marker was "not common" in North Africa comment failed to acknowledge that it is not Western Europe where it is most common but in west afrika, cameroon

 

Cameroon is nowhere near Egypt.. Look at a map.

 

They were Caucasoid.

 

Were they a different race from what they are today?

 

Does my avatar look like a caucus Asian to you? Does the sphinx also look like a non afrikan?

 

there is no such thing as a "Caucasus Asian".

 

The frequency of Haplogroup R1b1c is as high as 95% in some parts of Cameroon and the African branch of R1b may be closely linked to the Iberian haplogroup R1b1a2. iGENEA found that King Tut belonged to Y-DNA haplogroup R1b1a2, which is slightly different from Haplogroup R1b1c common in central Africa, but King Tut may also be related to central Africans. Some Cameroonians exhibit mixed-race physical features due to their Indo-European ancestry.

 

I dont get what youre implying about the ancient Egyptians. Elaborate.

 

It's likely you have it twisted, afrikans have the most diverse features as everyone descends from them so in all liklehood it is these Iberians who have afrikan ancestry, not the other way round. Still, fascinating that Iberians and west afrikans have a close bond

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What modern ppl does my avatar resemble?

 

Here's a very good article on the subject:

The Geographical Origins and Population Relationships of Early Ancient Egyptians

Professor S.O.Y. Keita
Department of Biological Anthropology
Oxford University

Professor A. J. Boyce
University Reader in Human Population
Oxford University

What was the primary geographical source for the peopling of the Egyptian Nile Valley? Were the creators of the fundamental culture of southern predynastic Egypt—which led to the dynastic culture—migrants and colonists from Europe or the Near East? Or were they predominantly African variant populations?

These questions can be addressed using data from studies of biology and culture, and evolutionary interpretive models. Archaeological and linguistic data indicate an origin in Africa. Biological data from living Egyptians and from skeletons of ancient Egyptians may also shed light on these questions. It is important to keep in mind the long presence of humans in Africa, and that there should be a great range of biological variation in indigenous "authentic" Africans.

Scientists have been studying remains from the Egyptian Nile Valley for years. Analysis of crania is the traditional approach to assessing ancient population origins, relationships, and diversity. In studies based on anatomical traits and measurements of crania, similarities have been found between Nile Valley crania from 30,000, 20,000 and 12,000 years ago and various African remains from more recent times (see Thoma 1984; Brauer and Rimbach 1990; Angel and Kelley 1986; Keita 1993). Studies of crania from southern predynastic Egypt, from the formative period (4000-3100 B.C.), show them usually to be more similar to the crania of ancient Nubians, Kushites, Saharans, or modern groups from the Horn of Africa than to those of dynastic northern Egyptians or ancient or modern southern Europeans.

Another source of skeletal data is limb proportions, which generally vary with different climatic belts. In general, the early Nile Valley remains have the proportions of more tropical populations, which is noteworthy since Egypt is not in the tropics. This suggests that the Egyptian Nile Valley was not primarily settled by cold-adapted peoples, such as Europeans.

Art objects are not generally used by biological anthropologists. They are suspect as data and their interpretation highly dependent on stereotyped thinking. However, because art has often been used to comment on the physiognomies of ancient Egyptians, a few remarks are in order. A review of literature and the sculpture indicates characteristics that also can be found in the Horn of (East) Africa (see, e.g., Petrie 1939; Drake 1987; Keita 1993). Old and Middle Kingdom statuary shows a range of characteristics; many, if not most, individuals depicted in the art have variations on the narrow-nosed, narrow-faced morphology also seen in various East Africans. This East African anatomy, once seen as being the result of a mixture of different "races," is better understood as being part of the range of indigenous African variation.

The descriptions and terms of ancient Greek writers have sometimes been used to comment on Egyptian origins. This is problematic since the ancient writers were not doing population biology. However, we can examine one issue. The Greeks called all groups south of Egypt "Ethiopians." Were the Egyptians more related to any of these "Ethiopians" than to the Greeks? As noted, cranial and limb studies have indicated greater similarity to Somalis, Kushites and Nubians, all "Ethiopians" in ancient Greek terms.

There are few studies of ancient DNA from Egyptian remains and none so far of southern predynastic skeletons. A study of 12th Dynasty DNA shows that the remains evaluated had multiple lines of descent, including not surprisingly some from "sub-Saharan" Africa (Paabo and Di Rienzo 1993). The other lineages were not identified, but may be African in origin. More work is needed. In the future, early remains from the Nile Valley and the rest of Africa will have to be studied in this manner in order to establish the early baseline range of genetic variation of all Africa. The data are important to avoid stereotyped ideas about the DNA of African peoples.

The information from the living Egyptian population may not be as useful because historical records indicate substantial immigration into Egypt over the last several millennia, and it seems to have been far greater from the Near East and Europe than from areas far south of Egypt. "Substantial immigration" can actually mean a relatively small number of people in terms of population genetics theory. It has been determined that an average migration rate of one percent per generation into a region could result in a great change of the original gene frequencies in only several thousand years. (This assumes that all migrants marry natives and that all native-migrant offspring remain in the region.) It is obvious then that an ethnic group or nationality can change in average gene frequencies or physiognomy by intermarriage, unless social rules exclude the products of "mixed" unions from membership in the receiving group. More abstractly this means that geographically defined populations can undergo significant genetic change with a small percentage of steady assimilation of "foreign" genes. This is true even if natural selection does not favor the genes (and does not eliminate them).

Examples of regions that have biologically absorbed genetically different immigrants are Sicily, Portugal, and Greece, where the frequencies of various genetic markers (and historical records) indicate sub-Saharan and supra-Saharan African migrants.

This scenario is different from one in which a different population replaces another via colonization. Native Egyptians were variable. Foreigners added to this variability.

The genetic data on the recent Egyptian population is fairly sparse. There has not been systematic research on large samples from the numerous regions of Egypt. Taken collectively, the results of various analyses suggest that modern Egyptians have ties with various African regions, as well as with Near Easterners and Europeans. Egyptian gene frequencies are between those of Europeans and some sub-Saharan Africans. This is not surprising. The studies have used various kinds of data: standard blood groups and proteins, mitochondrial DNA, and the Y chromosome. The gene frequencies and variants of the "original" population, or of one of early high density, cannot be deduced without a theoretical model based on archaeological and "historical" data, including the aforementioned DNA from ancient skeletons. (It must be noted that it is not yet clear how useful ancient DNA will be in most historical genetic research.) It is not clear to what degree certain genetic systems usually interpreted as non-African may in fact be native to Africa. Much depends on how "African" is defined and the model of interpretation.

The various genetic studies usually suffer from what is called categorical thinking, specifically, racial thinking. Many investigators still think of "African" in a stereotyped, nonscientific (nonevolutionary) fashion, not acknowledging a range of genetic variants or traits as equally African. The definition of "African" that would be most appropriate should encompass variants that arose in Africa. Given that this is not the orientation of many scholars, who work from outmoded racial perspectives, the presence of "stereotypical" African genes so far from the "African heartland" is noteworthy. These genes have always been in the valley in any reasonable interpretation of the data. As a team of Egyptian geneticists stated recently, "During this long history and besides these Asiatic influences, Egypt maintained its African identity . . ." (Mahmoud et al. 1987). This statement is even more true in a wider evolutionary interpretation, since some of the "Asian" genes may be African in origin. Modern data and improved theoretical approaches extend and validate this conclusion.

In summary, various kinds of data and the evolutionary approach indicate that the Nile Valley populations had greater ties with other African populations in the early ancient period. Early Nile Valley populations were primarily coextensive with indigenous African populations. Linguistic and archaeological data provide key supporting evidence for a primarily African origin.


References Cited:

Angel, J. L., and J. O. Kelley, Description and comparison of the skeleton. In The Wadi Kubbaniya Skeleton: A Late Paleolithic
Burial from Southern Egypt. E Wendorf and R. Schild. pp. 53-70. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. 1986

Brauer, G., and K. Rimbach, Late archaic and modern Homo sapiens from Europe, Africa, and Southwest Asia: Craniometric comparisons and phylogenetic implications, Journal of Human Evolution 19:789-807. 1990

Drake, St. C., Black Folk Here and There, vol 1. Los Angeles: University of California. 1987

Keita, S.O.Y., Studies and comments on ancient Egyptian biological relationships. History in Africa 20:129-154. 1993

Mahmoud, L. et. al, Human blood groups in Dakhlaya. Egypt. Annuals of Human Biology. 14(6):487-493. 1987

Paabo, S., and A. Di Rienzo, A molecular approach to the study of Egyptian history. In Biological Anthropology and the Study
of Ancient Egypt. V. Davies and R. Walker, eds. pp. 86-90. London: British Museum Press. 1993

Petrie, W.M., F. The Making of Egypt. London: Sheldon Press. 1984

Thoma, A., Morphology and affinities of the Nazlet Khaterman. Journal of Human Evolution 13:287-296. 1984

 

The Daytona 500.

 

What old arguments? You didn't make any besides saying the Ancient Egyptians were Caucasoids. I refuted that.

 

Egypt, 2,000 years ago and before was made up of the human race. Just as today, parents can conceive children of different skin shades from light tan to dark brown, high cheekbones, thin lips, dark straight hair, pointy nose, etc. Why would this be an issue or difficult to understand?

The only reason to discuss this is to foment hate and division or to substantiate Darwin's theory of dark skin people as less evolved and inferior.