Long story short. I was confronted by 2 African-American women telling me I was a "fake Egyptian". They told me that they were the actual descendants of the Ancient Egyptian civilization.
I don't know if that's relevant but I'm an Egyptian from Coptic descent (Christian Orthodox Church in Egypt). I don't know if us and Muslims had a different route.
Is is true? I've never came across that view before and never thought about it. I always assumed the population and the pharaohs were dark skinned (caramel/arab-like), but not "black" like West Africans. I know the population was diverse though (slaves, merchants and so on could be black?).
Hi, not completely my area of expertise, but I've studied the area extensively and even lived in Egypt for a time.
The short tl;dr answer is that it's complicated but generally the two women were wrong.
The long answer is that they are over-simplifying a complex idea in order to fit their bias. Egyptians, if we go back to the Ancient Egyptians, looked different than sub-Saharan Africans or even Nubians, who they saw as a completely different kind of people. [Here] (http://www.thetravelword.com/2011/01/05/%E2%80%9Cfor-the-love-of-my-queen%E2%80%9D-the-temples-of-abu-simbel-in-southern-egypt/) is a pretty good blog by Dr. Benedict Davies covering the temple of Abu Simbel which was built by Ramsses II on the Nubian/Egyptian border (at the time) depicting African slaves taken by Ramsses II. They look decidedly different than Egyptians, especially Ramsses himself. Interestingly, Egyptians also seem to have looked different (or at least perceived themselves to be different-looking ) from Asiatic prisoners such as Assyrians ( [Here] (http://www.touregypt.net/images/touregypt/enemies4.jpg) ).
However, we're talking several thousands of years of culture in Egypt and, at some points in Egyptian history, they were ruled by Nubians. ( [Here] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EasSs1VED8w) is a BBC documentary that does a fair job of speaking to the complex relationship with Nubia). Basically from around 760 BCE to about 650 BCE, the 25th Dynasty of Egyptian Pharaohs were from the Nubian kingdom of Kush, in modern day Sudan/South Egypt.
It gets even more complicated on top of that. In all these instances, we're talking about royalty which tended to itnerbreed and remain apart from others. It was considered a sign of their purity that they never mixed with the commoners, so their complextion (and genetics) are definitely NOT reflective of the general Egyptian society. To make matters even more tangled, Egypt has always been a vibrant crossroads civilization for millenia and remains so today, so there was intermixing of racial stock which results in the general make-up of average Egyptians today. Genetically, there were "black" Africans as well as Asiatic Africans, North Africans, Greeks, Romans, and even Arabs had settled, or been intermingled, into Egyptian society long before the Muslim armies spread out of the Peninsula in the 7th c. CE.
Contemporary depictions of race in Egypt are also often a complicating factor, with soap operas, films, and the like portraying black Egyptians, Sudanese, and Nubians as simpletons, sly schemers, comic relief, and dupes, much in the same way African-Americans were portrayed in American media in the same period. Conversely, lighter-skinned Egyptians have been portrayed as heroic, brilliant, honorable, leaders, and so on (though they also get to play bad guys too, usually the boss or the heavy), just like American cinema. I used to have a book on blackface in Egyptian cinema but have lost it over the years; I am certain another of my colleagues here will fill in the gaps.
So in summation, the ladies are wrong and you are as authentically Egyptian as can be, short of a DNA test.
Follow-up historiographical question: what are the origins of revisionist afrocentrist history? Claims about the ethnic blackness of the Egyptians and Phoenecians, of Cleopatra and Christ, etc? Is this part of a scholarly movement, however fringe-y? Is it a purely popular conception?
I am very surprised no one mentioned Cheikh Anta Diop, because his whole argument was that Egyptians were black Africans in his 1974 book The African Origins of Western Civilization: Myth or Reality. He was an French-trained African scholar engaging in an old discourse about who, exactly, the Egyptians were and he was butting up against the works of people like C.G. Seligman who wrote Egypt and Negro Africa: A Study in Divine Kingship in 1934. Both are involved in examining the Hamitic Hypothesis: whether the Egyptians were in any way related to the cursed son of Noah, Ham, or some other group of Caucasians that migrated to Egypt. Edith Sanders has the best quick discussion of the Hamitic Hypothesis in her 1977 article The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origin in Time. These arguments are all edited in Robert O. Collins Problems in African History: the Precolonial Period. This might be a good book for you to check out and check up on these old historiographical arguments. Good Luck!
Hello everyone,
In this thread, there have been a large number of incorrect, speculative, or otherwise disallowed comments, including many asking about the deleted comments, which merely compounds the issue. As such, they were removed by the mod-team.
This thread is also attracting a lot of follow-up questions about the ethnicity of ancient Egyptians, which are themselves interesting questions but some of which may work better in their own threads. Please do remember that we don't want to stray too far afield, and consider creating a new thread if your question is awfully tangential.
Also, before you attempt to answer the question, keep in mind our rules concerning in-depth and comprehensive responses. Users that post bad answers in the thread will be fed to the hellmouth ... er, that is, will be banned temporarily or permanently according to their sins.
Additionally, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with off topic conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to modmail, or a META thread. Thank you!
