---
title: "Ancient Egyptian race controversy"
chunk: 1/18
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_race_controversy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:54:30.828998+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

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."