by Gabriel Taylor

Created on: November 18, 2009   Last Updated: November 21, 2009

The Ethnicity of the Ancient Egyptians

Everyone has heard of the achievements of the ancient Egyptians. No civilization in antiquity has in the same breath awed and baffled more historians. Mysteries like how grandiose architectural monuments i.e. The Great Pyramids of Giza were built are the cause raucous debate among scholars to this day. One mystery of the ancient Egyptians causes an even larger uproar among scholars, what race were they? The question of Ancient Egyptian ethnicity would seemingly be easily answered, by looking at how the Egyptians depicted themselves. However if you look at their depictions they show a clear spectrum of skin pigments and hair types. It is my contention that the inhabitants of the Nile valley region were a hodgepodge of different racial groups which melded together.

Reading the works of Chiek Anta Diop an African historian in conjunction with brief forays into the field of Egyptology has helped form this perspective. To understand a people understand where they come from. The Ancient Egyptians hailed form The Nile River Valley and Delta an area with fertile soil rich with an array of wild game animals coupled with areas perfect for animal husbandry. This ancient paradise would clearly be attractive to many peoples and with the Nile River valley geographically at a crossroads between Africa and Asia it is very feasible to for two separate populations of two different racial groups to have converged on the area. If we look at the Stella of Menes the unifier of Upper and Lower Egypt the Egyptians of Lower Egypt being smote by Menes look ethnically different then Menes himself. This is not hard to grasp if you look at the Kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt not as two ethically homogonous domains but rather a collections of peoples that had converged on what seemed like a paradise.

If the argument above is not convincing, an explanation of later irrefutable episodes of miscegenation can easily be seen throughout Ancient Egypt's history. The invasion of the Hyksos a Semitic people that invaded and overran the Delta region of Nile River Valley remained in the region for hundred years. The Ancient Egyptians had long s standing trade relations with Semitic peoples form the Levant. So aside from what intermixing would have occurred due to the Hyksos invasion further mixing would have occurred from these trade relations. The Hyksos remained in The Nile Delta from (1620BCE-1530BCE) and undoubtedly played a role in the genetics of the

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