---
title: "Ancient Egyptian race controversy"
chunk: 12/18
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_race_controversy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:17:30.372855+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The identity of the model for the Great Sphinx of Giza is unknown. Most experts believe that the face of the Sphinx represents the likeness of the Pharaoh Khafra, although a few Egyptologists and interested amateurs have proposed different hypotheses.
An early description of the Sphinx, "typically negro in all its features", is recorded in the travel notes of a French scholar, Volney, who visited Egypt between 1783 and 1785 along with French novelist Gustave Flaubert. A similar description was given in the "well-known book" by Vivant Denon, where he described the sphinx as "the character is African; but the mouth, the lips of which are thick." Following Volney, Denon, and other early writers, numerous Afrocentric scholars, such as Du Bois, Diop and Asante have characterized the face of the Sphinx as Black, or "Negroid".
American geologist Robert M. Schoch has written that the "Sphinx has a distinctive African, Nubian, or Negroid aspect which is lacking in the face of Khafre", but he was described by others such as Ronald H. Fritze and Mark Lehner of being a "pseudoscientific writer". David S. Anderson writes in Lost City, Found Pyramid: Understanding Alternative Archaeologies and Pseudoscientific Practices that Van Sertima's claim that "the sphinx was a portrait statue of the black pharaoh Khafre" is a form of "pseudoarchaeology" not supported by evidence. He compares it to the claim that Olmec colossal heads had "African origins", which is not taken seriously by Mesoamerican scholars such as Richard Diehl and Ann Cyphers.

=== Kemet (km.t) (Egypt) ===

The hieroglyph km in ancient Egyptian means the color black and in some cases "completion" or "conclusion". In Gardiner's Sign List, it is categorized as I6 and its phonetic representation is "km." The Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache ("Dictionary of the Egyptian Language") identifies at least 24 compound forms of km, often describing black objects such as stone, metal, wood, hair, eyes, animals, and occasionally even being linked to personal names as well as descriptions of  'coming to an end', terminating, or "an item of completion". Why the km hieroglyph looks the way it does is unknown. Gardiner's Sign List describes it as resembling "a piece of crocodile-skin with spines." It falls under section I, which includes symbols representing "amphibious animals, reptiles, etc." This section also contains other hieroglyphs, such as I5, which is the symbol for a crocodile. Another common theory is that the km hieroglyph depicts a piece of charcoal.
Most scholars hold that kmt means "the black land" or "the black place", and that this is a reference to the fertile black soil that was washed down from Central Africa by the annual Nile inundation. By contrast the barren desert outside the narrow confines of the Nile watercourse was called dšrt (conventionally pronounced deshret) or "the red land". Raymond Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian translates kmt into "Egyptians", Gardiner translates it as "the Black Land, Egypt".' At the UNESCO Symposium in 1974, French Egyptologist Serge Sauneron stated that in Egyptian km meant 'black', the masculine plural was Kmu (Kemou) and the feminine plural Kmnt and that the form Kmtyw could mean 'those of Kmt', 'the inhabitants of Kmt' ('the black country'). It was a derived adjective (nisba) derived from a geographical term which had become a proper name; it was not necessarily 'felt' in its original meaning (cf. Frank, France, French). To indicate 'black people', the Egyptians would have said Kmt or Kmu, not Kmtyw, they never used this adjective to designate the black people of the African hinterland whom they knew about from the time of the New Kingdom onwards and, in general, nor did they use names of colours to categorize people.
In the 11th-12th dynasty Ancient Egypt came to be called by the Egyptians Kemet ( 'km.t' ) (kemet) a derivative of km and also Ta-meri (“The Beloved Land”) (tꜣ-mrj). km.t is a feminine derivative of km in the ancient Egyptian language.
Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese scholar and author, argued that the ancient Egyptians referred to themselves using a term that, when translated literally, meant "the negroes".
Diop also said km, the etymological root of other words such as Kam or Ham refer to Black people in Hebrew tradition.
A review of David Goldenberg's The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam states that Goldenberg "argues persuasively that the biblical name Ham bears no relationship at all to the notion of blackness and as of now is of unknown etymology". Diop, William Leo Hansberry, and Aboubacry Moussa Lam have argued that kmt was derived from the skin color of the Nile valley people, which Diop claimed was black. The claim that the ancient Egyptians had black skin has become a cornerstone of Afrocentric historiography..
At the UNESCO Symposium in 1974, Diop and Egyptologist/ linguist Théophile Obenga maintained that ancient Egypt was a Black African civilization to an international audience of scholars and experts. stating ""Egyptian can not be isolated from its African context and Semitic did not account for its birth; it was therefore legitimate to find relatives or cousins for it in Africa"

=== Ancient Egyptian art ===