Race of ancient Egyptians

From left: Libyan, Nubian, Syrian, and Egyptian.

Questions of race and the ancient Egyptians have been a subject of debate and controversy dating back to the 18th century. The ancient Egyptians considered themselves part of a distinct race, separate from their neighbors.

Race is regarded by anthropologists today as a platonic, socially constructed category, with little or no scientific basis. Thus, when mainstream scientists research what ancient Egyptians, or any other ancient people looked like, they tend to focus on the society's genetic and demographic history, rather than "race". However, many researchers still use the language of race to describe what peoples of the past looked like, even if it is not the paradigm of their research.

The dynastic race theory, which argues for a Mesopotamian origin of Egyptian civilization, has fallen out of favor in mainstream Egyptology, as new studies have been published, that conclude Egypt was originally settled by Africans, not Mesopotamians. However, scholars still take pains to note that while the dynastic race theory is probably fallacious, the evidence upon which it was based does still indicate significant predynastic Mesopotamian influence. The nature and extent of Egyptian evolution that resulted from natural selection and migration/war with neighboring Mesopotamia and East Africa between the pre-dynastic and dynastic periods is still debated and researched to this day. Analyses of mummies have come up with a variety of results, some reporting "Caucasoid", others reporting "mixed racial characteristics", and still others reporting "negroid."

Analyses of pre-dynastic Egyptian crania have led to differing results, though the most recent study on the matter concluded that pre-dynastic Egyptians were much more similar in facial structure to sub-Saharan Africans than to Mesopotamians. However, studies that use similar methods of crania analysis have consistently concluded that ancient dynastic Egyptian crania cannot be reasonably grouped with neighboring sub-Saharan or Mesopotamian populations. Among researchers for whom race is a valid construct, dynastic Egypt is referred to as a "mixed-race" society.

There is still debate, for the most part outside the scientific community, over what ancient Egyptians looked like. Consensus amongst Egyptologists is that Egyptian skin color most likely reflected adaptive response to selective forces consistent to their latitude. This view is reflected in ancient Egyptian art, in which Egyptians come in a variety of colors. Skin color was not of significant social or political importance to Egyptians, though. This debate is of only minor importance to scientists, but of high importance to some of those who view it as an important element of the politics concerning race and racism, especially in the United States.

Background

Race

Modern scientific view

Main article: Race

The term race distinguishes one population of an animal species (including human) from another of the same species. The most widely used human racial categories are based on visible traits (especially skin color, facial features and hair texture), genes, and self-identification. Conceptions of race, as well as specific racial groupings, vary by culture and over time, and are often controversial, for scientific reasons as well as because of their impact on social identity and identity politics. Some scientists regard race as a social construct while others maintain it has genetic basis.

Since the 1940s, some evolutionary scientists have rejected the view of race according to which any number of finite lists of essential characteristics could be used to determine a like number of races. For example, the convention of categorizing the human population based on human skin colors has been used, but hair colors, eye colors, nose sizes, lip sizes, and heights have not. Many social scientists think common race definitions, or any race definitions pertaining to humans, lack taxonomic rigour and validity. They argue that race definitions are imprecise, arbitrary, derived from custom, have many exceptions, have many gradations, and that the numbers of races observed vary according to the culture examined. They further maintain that "race" as such is best understood as a social construct, and they prefer to conceptualize and analyze human genotypic and phenotypic variation in terms of populations and clines instead.

Many scientists, however, have argued that this position is motivated more by political than scientific reasons. Others also argue that categories of self-identified race/ethnicity or biogeographic ancestry are both valid and useful, that these categories correspond to clusters inferred from multilocus genetic data, and that this correspondence implies that genetic factors contribute to unexplained phenotypic variation among groups.

Ancient Egyptian view

The Egyptians considered themselves part of a distinct race, separate from their neighbors. Most modern Egyptologists believe the Egyptians thought of themselves as Egyptian people, not African, Mediterranean, White, or Black people. They discovered wall paintings that contrast Egyptian [6], Nubian [7], Berber[8], and Semitic peoples [9].

Although it should be important to note that according to Egyptologist, Frank J. Yurco, the Egyptians did not view race in the same manner in which we see it.

The Ancient Egyptians considered the Land of Punt as being their ancestral homeland. Punt, an ancient land south of Egypt was accessible by way of the Red Sea. Its exact location has not been identified, but it is thought to have been somewhere in eastern Africa and probably included the Somali coast. Temple reliefs at Deir el Bahari in W Thebes depict an Egyptian expedition to Punt in the reign of Hatshepsut.

Racism and colonialism

Science used for racism

In the 19th century, supporters of slavery and colonialism began to use scientific racism to justify the exploitation of Africans. They claimed that people such as sub-Saharan Africans were incapable of living freely in a civilized world and were naturally inclined towards slavery.

Hamitic Hypothesis

Complications have also cropped up in the use of linguistics as a basis for racial categorization. The demise of the famous "Hamitic Hypothesis", which purported to show that certain African languages around the Nile area could be associated with "Caucasoid" peoples is a typical case. Such schemes fell apart when it was demonstrated that Negro tribes far distant also spoke similar languages, tongues that were supposedly a reserved marker of Caucasoid presence or influence. For work on African languages, see Wiki article Languages of Africa and Joseph Greenberg. Older linguistic classifications are also linked to the notion of a "Hamitic race", a vague grouping thought to exclude Negroes, but accommodating a large variety of dark skinned North and East Africans into a broad-based Caucasoid grouping. This Caucasoid "Hamitic race" is sometimes credited with the introduction of more advanced culture, such as certain plant cultivation and particularly the domestication of cattle. This scheme has also been discredited by the work of post WWII archaeologists such as A. Arkell, who demonstrated that predynastic and Sudanic Negroid elements already possessed cattle and plant domestication, thousands of years before the supposed influx of Caucasoid or Hamitic settlers into the Nile Valley, Nubia and adjoining areas. Modern scholarship has moved away from earlier notions of a "Hamitic" race speaking Hamito-Semitic languages, and places the Egyptian language in a more localized context, centered around its general Saharan and Nilotic roots.(F. Yurco "An Egyptological Review", 1996) Linguistic analysis (Diakanoff 1998) places the origin of the Afro-Asiatic languages in northeast Africa, with older strands south of Egypt, and newer elements straddling the Nile Delta and Sinai.

Black response

Black nationalist and psychoanalyist Frantz Fanon wrote in his book Black Skin, White Masks that the history of white racism, colonialism, and oppression leads blacks, often out of an inferiority complex, to seek out and respond with historical proof of black civilization. He traced this ongoing dialectic and the role it played in his own development:

I rummaged frenetically through all the antiquity of the black man. What I found there took away my breath. In his book L'abolition de l'esclavage Schoelcher presented us with compelling arguments. Since then, Frobenius, Westermann, Delafosse-- all of them white-- had joined the chorus: Segou, Djenne, cities of more than a hundred thousand people; accounts of learned blacks (doctors of theology who went to Mecca to interpret the Koran). All of that, exhumed from the past, spread with its insides out, made it possible for me to find a valid historic place. The white man was wrong, I was not a primitive, not even a half-man, I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago.

However, he later decided that the issue was not essential to the plight of black people:

Let us be clearly understood. I am convinced that it would be of the greatest interest to be able to have contact with a Negro literature or architecture of the third century before Christ. I should be very happy to know that a correspondence had flourished between some Negro philosopher and Plato. But I can absolutely not see how this fact would change anything in the lives of the eight-year-old children who labor in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.

Research

Crania

A 1993 study of ancient Egyptian craniofacial characteristic published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology found that:

The Predynastic of Upper Egypt and the Late Dynastic of Lower Egypt are more closely related to each other than to any other population. As a whole, they show ties with the European Neolithic, North Africa, modern Europe, and, more remotely, India, but not at all with sub-Saharan Africa, eastern Asia, Oceania, or the New World.

A 2005 study of predynastic Egyptian Badari crania in comparison to various European and tropical African crania, found that the Badarian series clusters much closer to the Tropical African series.

The Mahalanobis distances between all of the series were unlikely to be due to chance at the 5% level, with nearly all having even lower probability values (usually p < .001). An examination of the distance hierarchies reveals the Badarian series to be more similar to the Teita in both analyses and always more similar to all of the African series than to the Norse and Berg groups (see Tables 3A & 3B and Figure 2). Essentially equal similarity is found with the Zalavar and Dogon series in the 11-variable analysis and with these and the Bushman in the one using 15 variables. The Badarian series clusters with the tropical African groups no matter which algorithm is employed (see Figures 3 and 4). The clustering with the Bushman can be understood as an artifact of grouping algorithms; it is well known that a series may group into a cluster that does not contain the series to which it is most similar (has the lowest distance value). An additional 20 dendrograms were generated using the minimum evolution algorithm provided by MEGA (not shown). In none of them did the Badarian sample affiliate with the European series. In additional analyses, the Bushman series was left out; the results were the same (not shown).

Genetics and demographics

Noah A. Rosenberg and Jonathan K. Pritchard, geneticists from the laboratory of Marcus W. Feldman of Stanford University, assayed approximately 375 polymorphisms called short tandem repeats in more than 1,000 people from 52 ethnic groups in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. They looked at the varying frequencies of these polymorphisms, and were able to distinguish five different groups of people whose ancestors were typically isolated by oceans, deserts or mountains: sub-Saharan Africans; Europeans and Asians west of the Himalayas; East Asians; inhabitants of New Guinea and Melanesia; and Native Americans. A similar finding was made by Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford University. According to the New York Times:

These five geographically isolated groups, in Dr. Risch's description, are sub-Saharan Africans; Caucasians, including people from Europe, the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East; Asians, including people from China, Japan, the Philippines and Siberia; Pacific Islanders; and Native Americans.

Today's sub-saharan identity of some East African people is compromised by studies showing modern-day Ethiopians in the Horn of Africa to generally cluster as an intermediate between sub-Saharan Africans and Middle-Easterners (Risch, Tang et al. 2002), reflecting the nation's proximity to Asia and the Middle East. A number of matrilineal genetic studies have detected almost equal sub-Saharan and western Eurasian lineages among the populations examined:

Maternal lineages of Semitic- (Amharic, Tigrinya, and Gurage) and Cushitic- (Oromo and Afar) speaking populations studied here reveal that their mtDNA pool is a nearly equal composite of sub-Saharan and western Eurasian lineages. This finding, consistent with classic genetic-marker studies (Cavalli-Sforza 1997) and previous mtDNA results, is also in agreement with a similarly high proportion of western Asian Y chromosomes in Ethiopians (Passarino et al. 1998; Semino et al. 2002), which supports the view (Richards et al. 2003) that the observed admixture between sub-Saharan African and, most probably, western Asian ancestors of the Ethiopian populations applies to their gene pool in general.

A 2004 study of the mtDNA of 58 native inhabitants from upper Egypt found a genetic heritage to East Africa and West Asia.

The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diversity of 58 individuals from Upper Egypt, more than half (34 individuals) from Gurna, whose population has an ancient cultural history, were studied by sequencing the control-region and screening diagnostic RFLP markers. This sedentary population presented similarities to the Ethiopian population by the L1 and L2 macrohaplogroup frequency (20.6%), by the West Eurasian component (defined by haplogroups H to K and T to X) and particularly by a high frequency (17.6%) of haplogroup M1. We statistically and phylogenetically analysed and compared the Gurna population with other Egyptian, Near East and sub-Saharan Africa populations; AMOVA and Minimum Spanning Network analysis showed that the Gurna population was not isolated from neighbouring populations. Our results suggest that the Gurna population has conserved the trace of an ancestral genetic structure from an ancestral East African population, characterized by a high M1 haplogroup frequency. The current structure of the Egyptian population may be the result of further influence of neighbouring populations on this ancestral population.

A 2007 study suggests overall population continuity over the predynastic and early dynastic periods with high levels of heterogeneity and concludes that Egyptian civilization was predominantly indigenous to Africa, with some, but limited migration from elsewhere. This does not indicate as to what the racial characteristics of the Egyptians were, but if true, it would disprove the Dynastic Race Theory:

Genetic diversity was analyzed by studying craniometric variation within a series of six time-successive Egyptian populations in order to investigate the evidence for migration over the period of the development of social hierarchy and the Egyptian state. Craniometric variation, based upon 16 measurements, was assessed through principal components analysis, discriminant function analysis, and Mahalanobis D2 matrix computation. Spatial and temporal relationships were assessed by Mantel and Partial Mantel tests. The results indicate overall population continuity over the Predynastic and early Dynastic, and high levels of genetic heterogeneity, thereby suggesting that state formation occurred as a mainly indigenous process. Nevertheless, significant differences were found in morphology between both geographically-pooled and cemetery-specific temporal groups, indicating that some migration occurred along the Egyptian Nile Valley over the periods studied.

Mummies

Senu

The mummy of Senu, believed to be more than than 3700 years old from South Egypt, was facially reconstructed in 2006 by a team of 10 scientists and artists. The results, in regard to "race" were as follows:

His race can be presumed as a mixture of racial types, including negroid, Mediterranean and European.

King Tut

File:National Geographic - King Tut face.jpg

A controversial rendering of Tutankhamun exhibiting hazel eyes, "mid-range" skin tone, and caucasoid features, as shown on the cover of National Geographic in 2005.

King Tut is the most famous of the pharoahs, and his mummy is estimated to be about 3000 years old. In 2002, preceding the airing of an original program called "The Assassination Of King Tut" by Discovery Channel, a facial reconstruction was made by way of X-Ray and 3D CT scans. The computerized result revealed the image of what seemed to be a young man between the ages of 18-20, with "Nubian type" features. In 2005, King Tut's face was again reconstructed by a team of scientists using 3D CT scans, as well as techniques taken from advanced CSI police forensics. This time, they identified the skull as:

that of a male, 18 to 20 years old, with Caucasoid features. "Caucasoid" describes a major group of peoples of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and India.

Though it should be important to note that many "non-caucasoids" posses Caucasoid type features, especially with in the variation of Africa and at the individual level.

Diop's Melanin tests

Melanin tests developed by Cheikh Anta Diop concluded that Egyptians were dark-skinned and part of the "Negro race". Criticism of these results argue that the skin of most Egyptian mummies, tainted by the embalming material, is no longer susceptible of any analysis. However, Diop contended the position that although the epidermis is the main site of the melanin, the melanocytes penetrating the derm at the boundary between it and the epidermis, even where the latter has mostly been destroyed by the embalming materials, show a melanin level which is non-existent in the "white-skinned races".

Language

One of the many names for Egypt in ancient Egyptian is km.t (read "Kemet"), meaning "black land". More literally, the word means "something black". The use of km.t "black land" in terms of a place was generally in contrast to the "desert" or "red land": the desert beyond the Nile valley. When used to mean people, km.t "people of Kemet", "people of the black land" is usually translated "remetch en Kermet". This word that the Egyptians used to describe themselves was never used to describe other peoples of the ancient world.

Beja

Many scholars believe the Beja people to be derived from early Egyptians because of their language and physical features. They are the indigenous people of this area who are generally found mostly in Sudan, but also in parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Egypt, and we first know of them in historical references in the Sixth Dynasty of ancient Egypt.

The Beja people are an ancient Cushitic people closely kin to the ancient Egyptians, who have lived in the desert between the Nile river and the Red Sea since at least 25000 BC.

Culture

Predynastic-Egyptian culture

Whatever the exact mix of peoples on the ground, the work of mainstream research therefore demonstrates that from early pre-dynastic times, Egypt was essentially settled by indigenous elements closely associated with groups from the Saharan and Sudanic region moving up into the Nile Valley, and excluded any significant influx from Mediterraneans, Mesopotamians or others not indigenous to the area. Mass migration theories sometimes rely on the introduction of cattle herding, but archealogical data (Wendorf 2001, Wettstrom 1999) suggests that the peoples of the Sahara had already independently domesticated cattle in the early Holocene eastern Sahara, earlier than in the Near East, followed by the gradual adoption of grain cultivation.As another mainstream scholar puts it:

"Some have argued that various early Egyptians like the Badarians probably migrated northward from Nubia, while others see a wide-ranging movement of peoples across the breadth of the Sahara before the onset of desiccation. Whatever may be the origins of any particular people or civilization, however, it seems reasonably certain that the predynastic communities of the Nile valley were essentially indigenous in culture, drawing little inspiration from sources outside the continent during the several centuries directly preceding the onset of historical times... (Robert July, Pre-Colonial Africa, 1975, p. 60-61)

The archealogy of the Predynastic and early Dynastic periods show relatively little large-scale movement of peoples from the Levant- the zone bordering the Eastern Mediterranean that includes parts of Turkey, and Syria, Lebanon, and Israel- and the Maghreb which includes modern day countries in North Africa like Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. However this does not mean that there was not small-scale migration. The fertility of the Nile Valley and comparatively easy food collection opportunities would facilitate such movement. There is clear evidence of trade contacts and material culture, reflected in the increasing weight of trade material such as lapis lazulli, copper and silver.

Art

Horus and four Egyptians as one of the "four races of mankind." in the Book of Gates in the Valley of the Kings.

Egyptian art is not always a reliable source for what Egyptians looked like, because Egyptians are often portrayed in impossible shapes and colors. Sometimes they are portrayed in impossible skin colors, such as green, so serious scholars rarely leverage arguments about what Egyptians looked like based on artistic portrayals.

Bibliography

• Noguera, Anthony (1976). How African Was Egypt?: A Comparative Study of Ancient Egyptian and Black African Cultures. Illustrations by Joelle Noguera. New York: Vantage Press.
• Raymond Faulkner. "Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian". Griffith Institute; Rep edition (January 1, 1970) ISBN 0900416327
• James P. Allen. "Middle Egyptian : An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs". Cambridge University Press (November 4, 1999). ISBN 0521774837
• Lam, Aboubacry Moussa, Les chemins du Nil. Les relations entre l’Egypte ancienne et l’Afrique Noire, Paris : Présence Africaine / Khepera, 1997

External links

• "The evolution of human skin coloration",Department of Anthropology, California Academy of Sciences
• American Anthropological Association Statement on "Race"

See also

• Race of Jesus
• List of DNA tested mummies
• Races of Craniofacial Anthropology
• Who Built Great Zimbabwe?