Were the Ancient Egyptians Black? - Tales of Times Forgotten
There is a lot of public controversy over which “race” the ancient Egyptians belonged to. Western media has traditionally portrayed nearly all ancient Egyptians as having white skin. Unfortunately, some films are still portraying the Egyptians this way; the 2014 film Exodus: Gods and Kings and the 2016 film Gods of Egypt both received widespread … Continue reading "Were the Ancient Egyptians Black?"
· archived 5/20/2026, 5:32:32 AMcached html Were the Ancient Egyptians Black? <img width="1200" height="336" src="https://i0.wp.com/talesoftimesforgotten.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ancient-Egyptians.jpg?fit=1200%2C336&ssl=1" class="attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/talesoftimesforgotten.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ancient-Egyptians.jpg?w=1810&ssl=1 1810w, https://i0.wp.com/talesoftimesforgotten.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ancient-Egyptians.jpg?resize=300%2C84&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/talesoftimesforgotten.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ancient-Egyptians.jpg?resize=1024%2C287&ssl=1 1024w, https://i0.wp.com/talesoftimesforgotten.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ancient-Egyptians.jpg?resize=768%2C215&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/talesoftimesforgotten.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ancient-Egyptians.jpg?resize=1536%2C430&ssl=1 1536w, https://i0.wp.com/talesoftimesforgotten.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ancient-Egyptians.jpg?resize=1200%2C336&ssl=1 1200w, https://i0.wp.com/talesoftimesforgotten.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ancient-Egyptians.jpg?w=1680&ssl=1 1680w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 60vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" data-eio="l" /> There is a lot of public controversy over which “race” the ancient Egyptians belonged to. Western media has traditionally portrayed nearly all ancient Egyptians as having white skin. Unfortunately, some films are still portraying the Egyptians this way; the 2014 film Exodus: Gods and Kings and the 2016 film Gods of Egypt both received widespread criticism for the fact that nearly all the lead roles were played by white actors. Nevertheless, I think that, with a few exceptions, nowadays, most people realize that the idea of the ancient Egyptians as almost entirely what we consider “white” is nothing but a racist fantasy. A great deal of controversy still rages, though, over whether the ancient Egyptians were what we consider “black.” A number of authors have tried to argue that ancient Egypt was exclusively or primarily a “black civilization” and that the ancient Egyptians defined themselves as “black people.” Since the skin color of the ancient Egyptians is a matter of such great controversy, in this article, I want to take a thorough and honest look at the evidence. In this article, we will examine evidence from Egyptian iconography, from Egyptian mummies, from ancient Greek descriptions of the Egyptians, from genetics, and from the conquests and migrations of recorded history. We will discover that Egypt has always been a very ethnically diverse place and that the ancient Egyptians cannot be uniformly classified as belonging to any particular “race.” First, a little qualification about “race” People in ancient times did not think of race in the same way that we do. In the twenty-first century, we define “race” in terms of skin color, but, in the ancient world, the concept of skin-color-based racial classification did not exist. The concepts of a “black race” and a “white race” would be totally foreign to them. People recognized that some people had light skin and other people had dark skin, but they didn’t see these things as defining racial characteristics. Instead, people in the ancient world thought in terms of what we would call “nationalities.” The ancient Egyptians thought of themselves as Egyptians, not “black people” or “white people.” Likewise, all the other peoples of Africa thought of themselves as belonging to whatever nation they belonged. For instance, the people of the Kingdom of Kush thought of themselves as Kushites, not “black people.” If you walked up to a random man on the street in the Egyptian city of Waset (i.e. “Thebes”) in the fourteenth century BC and asked him, “Are you a member of the black race?” he would be totally confused and he would have no idea what you were talking about. It would be like asking someone on the street today with olive-colored skin, “Are you a member of the olive race?” The ideas of a “white race” and a “black race” were invented in modern times in order to justify the enslavement of people of African descent by people of western European descent. These concepts are based on extremely superficial physical characteristics and they are scientifically meaningless; anthropologists now regard racial divisions as a cultural phenomenon, not a biological one. When we apply modern racial divisions to the ancient world, it is very important that we realize that this is deeply anachronistic and that we are applying labels to people that they never would have used themselves and that have no real scientific meaning. Unfortunately, because racial divisions based on skin color are so utterly dominant and inescapable in modern culture, we find ourselves forced to apply them to the ancient world. <img decoding="async" src="https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-e0bb7a029e02e674865995a71f3143ac-c" alt="" data...