I've heard claims that ancient Egyptians were "pitch black" in terms of skin tone. I know this comes from a very afrocentric view of history, which carries a lot of political connotations. But can we for certain say "the ancient Egyptians were X color"?
No. We can't know for certain.
All we have to go on is how the Egyptians represented themselves in their art and the general skin tone of modern Egyptians, who are, on average, not particularly dark.
For what it's worth, here's one guess at what Tutankhamun looked like:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/photogalleries/tut_mummy/photo4.html
But even that is disputed.
Most scholars realize the argument is largely political and probably futile, so they stay away from the topic.
This article may be of some interest for you. crow_hill is largely correct, in that Egyptian art shows one mostly-uniform not-too-dark skin tone. And we should temper that on one hand with its close match to modern Egyptian skin tone, and on the other with all of the cultural baggage art carries, and that such at has indeed changed with material conditions over the intervening millennia.
Returning to the article, Egypt is certainly not considered 'sub-Saharan,' but it was also a major trading power, and prior to major Middle Eastern civilization, it was as African as anything else. The point I'm trying to make is we shouldn't think of Egyptians as being monolithic (unintentional pun) but instead that African groups have incredible in-group diversity compared to many other regions. Were some of the people in Egypt five thousand years ago pitch black? Almost certainly. Was a majority? We don't have any sort of record to demonstrate either way, unfortunately.
Afrocentric ideas are important to historiography in the same way Marxist ones and feminist ones are. There are many complexities we should be aware of and thoughtful of when we deal with history.
hi! this question comes up here all the time. Check out the most recent posts
What was the colour of the hair of Ramses II? And the race of the egyptians? Were they black, or semitic or what? - includes links to about a dozen more
This question has always perplexed me. The first thing to note is race is fake. There's no DNA representation of race, what do I mean by that? If 500yrs from now we were to find Halle Berry's remains, archeologist would measure her femur, her skull and jaw and conclude she was a white woman. That's only a half truth. You should recognize the difference between phenotype and genotype, one is traceable through DNA the other is represented by features we see. Race is a creation of phenotype.
We're putting a very modern context on something that's only existed within the last 300yrs.
The reason you hear black ppl saying Egyptians were "black" is because the way in which we use the word in the modern context would define the ancients as such. Have you ever wondered why modern Egyptians don't practice the same religions as the ancients or know of the ancient's philosophy's or can even decipher hieroglyphics for that matter? It's because something happen around 639CE that migrated Arabs into the area.
But don't take my word or even other black ppl's word for it, dig into it yourself. I most certainly have. When ppl say Ancient Egyptians were black they cite things like:
Ancient Egyptians migrated North up the Nile from Africa's interior, this is why there are more pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt.
Look up what Queen Tiye looked like, she was the mother of Akhnaten (look up what he looked like), he was the father of Tutankhamun. By every "western" standard when your dad is "black" (once again a made up lexicon) you're pretty "black".
In the Louvre Museum in Paris there's paintings of Amenhotep III taken from his tomb. Many peoples have seen these themselves and would conclude that if that guy was alive in 1960's Alabama he'd have to sit at the back of the bus.
Notice I didn't link any images because I want you to search for yourself if you care enough. Black people have reason to be reluctant to the classifications of scholars, historically speaking there's been a pervasive inclination of academia to deny african achievement. Case and point would be the discovery of Great Zimbabwe, when archeologist found the ruins they immediately thought they couldn't have been of African origins. They came up with crazy theories to explain how it got there - look into Cecil Rhodes.
If you really want to have your mind blown to bits when it comes to the Ancients look up Nabta Playa. This site was no doubt the birth of Ancient Egyptian cosmology and predates the earliest pyramids by over 3k years. It's in Africa as is Egypt.