Ancient Egypt was the most successful and longest lasting civilization on Earth, and it was African. Since the second half of the 20th century, scholarly consensus has held that applying modern notions of Egyptian Race is anachronistic.

The earliest examples of disagreement in modern times, regarding the race of the ancient Egyptians, occurred in the work of Europeans and Americans early in the 19th century.

The ancient Egyptians were very consistent as to how they painted themselves – dark reddish brown for men, yellow for women. They also recognized and were willing to paint other races with classic racial characteristics of that particular group.

The tomb painting of ancient Egypt recognized that Nubians (i.e., Sudanese) were black and that Libyans and Syrians were “white” (actually, in this case, a light yellow). Culture characteristics were also carefully recorded.

Linguistically, Egyptians spoke and wrote a language that held Semitic and sub-Saharan African properties. Their language fell into the language group that linguists call, “Afro-Asiatic”.

The original Egyptians were unmixed pure black folks. When they were at the pinnacle of their glory they were not a mixed group by any means. During the middle dynasties especially (and later) when people migrated to this great land, there was some intermarrying. This is natural and doesn’t need to be debated.

Herodotus, the father of history, believed that the Colchicines are Egyptian by race. Herodotus reverts several times to the negroid character of the Egyptians and each time uses it as a fact of observation to argue more or less complex theses.

Aristotle in one of his minor works attempts with unexpected naivete to establish a correlation between the physical and moral natures of living beings and leaves us evidence on the Egyptian-Ethiopian race which confirms what Herodotus says.

Two Variants of The Black Egyptian Race

There are two variants of the black race: (a) straight-haired, represented in Asia by the Dravidians and in Africa by the Nubians and the Tubbou or Tedda, all three with jet-black skins; (b) the kinky-haired blacks of the Equatorial regions. Both types entered into the composition of the Egyptian population.

Together, the pictorial and written sources indicate most often four broad divisions of human beings, as in the Underworld Books (in tombs of kings in the New Kingdom): Egyptians, those living to the south (Nubians and others), those living in the west (western nomads, ‘Libyans’ in the sense of anyone living west of the Nile and south of the Mediterranean) and those living to the east (Asiatics).