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The Ancient
Egyptians` race represents a controversial subject for the
broader society and for the mainstream academia. The
Egyptians of the ancient period used to describe themselves
as having another race than their neighbors. According to
the actual opinion, the Egypt race is a mixed one, the
ancient Egypt civilization being a classical African one,
neither white nor black, if we speak in the modern terms.
There are
scholars who are not agreed with these theories, making
numerous contrary hypotheses from linguistic, cultural and
biological data. And, of course there are many questions
about the ancient Egyptians` color. |
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As they were on the
African continent, the Egyptian civilization it is an
African one, straddling two zones, the Middle East and
Africa. It is an obvious thing that the ancient Egypt` s
cultural roots are not in Asia but in Africa.
Being a country with a subtropical desert climate and with
people that migrated from different ethnic groups, it is a
normal thing that the ancient Egyptians were a mixture of
numerous types of individuals having many tones of skin some
coming from the sub-Saharan zones and some of them coming
from the Mediterranean climes.
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It’s no
possible to put these people in categories of ‘white’ and
‘black’ but we can classify them taking into consideration
their language, their historical records, material cultures
as well as their physical remains. The skulls were compared
and measured and the DNA tests were made in different ways
but the conclusions are not too many. The skulls look more
like the ones discovered in the Northern Sudan and not so
much with the ones discovered in Turkey, Palestine and West
Africa. A genetic continuity from the pre dynastic times
till the Middle Kingdom is possible; after this continuity,
an important infiltration in the Nile Valley of the outside
nations took place. It is a certain thing that the
Egyptians` color was a dark one so the most of them could
have been called ‘black’. The captive Nubians depicted on
the tombs` paintings have a very dark color, but it is only
an artistic convention that stereotypes a nationality. More,
the tones of skins with which the Egyptians used to depict
themselves in art is an adhering to the conventions and not
a totally accurate reality description.
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The guardian
statues of Tutankhamun discovered in his tomb show him
black, beige or even brown. The DNA tested by the Cairo
University` s scientists, from the pyramids` workers and
dating from 2600 BC proved that the ancient Egyptians` DNA
matches with the one of the modern Egyptians.
This may lead to
the conclusion that the Egypt’s present people are in
essence the same with those that lived with thousands of
years ago. The ancient Egyptians frequencies of the ABO type
blood don’t show some signs of significant differences from
the ones of the present Egyptians. The scientists say that
the blood groups distribution taken from Aswan, Gebelen and
Asiut tombs shows similarities with the one of the Egypt’s
present population.
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