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Who Were the Ancient Egyptians?
The Afrocentrist movement is not only claiming that the Israelites were black but that the ancient Egytians, and some other non-African cultures, were too. Typically, they misquote and twist the sayings of historians and archaelogists. They commonly claim, for example, that Herodotus said that the 'Egyptians had black skin and wooolly/kinky hair'. In reality he said:
"For the fact is, as I first came to realise myself, and heard from others later, that the Colchians are obviously Egyptian. Some Egyptians said they thought the Colchians originated with Sesostris' army, but I myself guessed their Egyptian origin not only because the Colchians are dark-skinned and curly-haired (which does not count for much by itself, because these features are common to others too)."
There is a difference between 'black skin and wooolly/kinky hair' and "dark-skinned and curly-haired". So who were the Colchians that Herodotus said looked like Egyptians? They lived in the Caucausus mountains, in the borderland between Europe and Asia Minor at the eastern end of the Black Sea, in what is modern-day Georgia, which is obviously nowhere near Africa (see map below). They were largely Ionian-Greeks.
As you can see from modern pictures (below), today's Georgian women (top row) and modern Egyptian women (bottom row) still look very similar:
What Herodotus actually said was that the Egyptians looked a lot like the tribes of the Georgia area, not like black Africans, as is often claimed. Moreover, Herodotus was quite clear that Egyptians were not 'Ethiopians', the Greek and Roman word for black Africans, as the following examples prove:
"After this man the priests enumerate to me from a papyrus roll the names of other kings, three hundred and thirty in number; and in all these generations of men eighteen were Ethiopians, one was a woman, a native Egyptian, and the rest were men and of the Egyptian race."
The following narration shows where black African territory began and ended:
"South of Elephantine, the country is inhabited by Ethiopians who also possess half of Tachompso, the other half being occupied by Egyptians."
If you draw a west-to-east line just south of Elephantine you have the approximate boundary between the Egyptian race and the Black African race ('Ethiopians') which is cluse to the modern Egyptian-Sudanese border:
Ancient Greeks like Xenophanes (500 BC), writing in Hesiod (527-8) wrote:
"Black people resided not in the Nile Valley but in a far land, by the fountain of the sun."
Hippocrates (400 BC) wrote that the Egyptians looked like the Sythians (Iranians/Persians) with the same ruddy complexion, the Synthians because of the cold, the Egyptians because of the burning sun.
Descriptions from the Roman era are even more explicit:
"The Ethiopians stain the world and depict a race of men steeped in darkness; less sun-burnt are the natives of India. The land of Egypt, flooded by the Nile, darkens bodies more mildly owing to the inundation of its fields: it is a country nearer to us and its moderate climate imparts a medium tone" (Manilius, Astronomica 4.724).
Ammianus Marcellinus writes:
By "brown" is meant a tanned lighter skin. The black Egyptians would have been about a third of the Egyptian population who resided in the upper (southern) part of Egypt.
"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 snub-nosed or woolly-haired as the Ethiopians; the northern Indians are most like the Egyptians physically" (Arrian, Indica 6.9).
"As for the people of India, those in the south are like the Æthiopians 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 Egyptians" (Stabo, Gepgraphy 15.1.13).
It is pretty clear from the historical records that the ancient Egytians were brown skinned Aryans/Caucasians like the northern Indians and were nothing like black Africans, with one writer explicitly saying that in his time there were no black people in Egypt at all. The Romans said the Egyptians looked like north Indians with the south Indians looking like Ethiopians. There is no evidence, as is claimed by Afrocentrists, that the ancient Greeks and Romans described the Egyptians as black. They looked like today's Georgians, Iranians and northern Indians/Pakistanis.
This is not, of course, to say that there wasn't subsequent intermixing of Egytpian and African blood, which there absolutely was, as happens in all Empires, or such was bad (which it wasn't). In the same way the Ethiopians mixed with Arabs to give the distinctive modern Ethiopian, Eritrian and Somali look today. Ancient Egyptian murals show brown-, black- and white-skinned people in the mix, all of whom came eventually to be known as 'Egyptians'. The mix has changed even more with the massive influx of Arab blood in consequence of the Moslem invasions. Nevertheless, the original Egyptians were not African blacks, any more than the original Hebrews were.
(3 May 2018)
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