---
title: "Ancient Egyptian race controversy"
chunk: 8/18
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"
---

== 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 not curl), whereas those in the north are like the Aegyptians".
Secondary interpretation of these historical descriptions have remained a source of academic contention.
 
Professor of African Studies at Temple University, Molefi Kete Asante has referenced other examples from Herodotus's primary account for which he interprets to describe the physical appearance of Egyptians as Africans. This has included the following sourced statements "the flooding of the Nile could not be caused by snow, because the natives of the country (Egypt) are black from the heat" and descriptions of an oracle as Egyptian based on Dodoneans "calling the dove black,[which] they indicated that the woman was Egyptian". 
However, Professor Yaacov Shavit of Tel Aviv University, argued that "[t]he evidence clearly shows that those Greco-Roman authors who refer to the skin color and other physical traits distinguish sharply between Ethiopians (Nubians) and Egyptians, and rarely do they refer to the Egyptians as black, even though they were described as darker than themselves.... [in addition,] Egyptians and Nubians were both clearly distinguished from the black Africans."
Classical author Frank Snowden argued that terms used by ancient Greek and Roman writers to describe the physical characteristics of other ancient peoples differed from contemporary racial terminology in the West.
Keita and Boyce expressed caution on the use and reliability of primary accounts and instead favoured population biology. Nonetheless, they found these descriptions on the origins of early Egyptians aligned with modern sources of anthropological data (cranial, limb proportion studies) which identified greater similarities between early Egyptians and North-East African populations (Somalia, Nubia and Kushites) that were "Ethiopians" in the Greek traditional sense. In a later chapter, Keita observed that some Greeks reported that Egypt was an Ethiopian colony but distinctions were made between Egyptians and Ethiopians in ancient accounts, but it remained unclear whether these distinctions were made on cultural rather on biological grounds.

=== Ta netjer and the location of ancestral homeland ===