Race: It Didn’t Matter to the Ancients and it Shouldn’t Matter Now

Were Ancient Egyptians black? That seems to be on the minds of everyone today, for we are a people obsessed with ethnicity. When combined with our obsession for the past, we form a dangerous cycle. We view ourselves as oppressors or the oppressed due to our view of the past; specifically, the past we would like to remember.

This is why we have such a black and white (no pun intended) view of the past. We remember the horrors of black slavery in America, which was meant to be the land of the free from its inception, and we forever view blacks as disadvantaged and as oppressed peoples even today, long after both slavery and segregation have been abolished, but we don’t remember the Vikings taking Saxons as slaves and selling them to Muslim masters. The idea that someone can be both privileged and underprivileged, victim and victimizer tends to fall on deaf ears. That's not to say the nuance is lost on everyone, but a lot of people prefer a very simplistic and hierarchical view of privilege.

And just as we look to the past to inform us of how disadvantaged we are (or how horrible we are), so do we look for our triumphs. As such, we spend too much time doing things like trying to prove that Europe was always diverse and multicultural, usually by catching sight of a dark Ethiopian man in a medieval painting. The fact that we never see black women or children, however, signals that these were likely traders, only there temporarily on business or as visitors. That doesn’t stop us from trying our hardest to change history, however, rather than take it, for better or for worse, as it happened.

We also spend time worrying about whether Egypt was black or not. After all, it’s an African country! It also doesn’t help that in many classic Hollywood films, Egyptians were almost unanimously portrayed by white actors, giving audiences the impression that Egyptians were mostly white.

The question is whether or not the evidence supports either of these notions and whether or not we should be basing our self-worth on the past.

A Disclaimer About Race

The first problem we run into is that our definition of race is very different than an ancient person’s. Race being defined by skin tones (white, black, brown, bronze, etc.) is actually very new. So new, in fact, that if you were to leap just 500 years into the past, people wouldn’t understand what you mean by saying Irish, Norwegian, Germans, English, French, and Russians are all one race, one people: white.

Ancient people weren’t color blind, but they didn’t see skin color as race. Race was actually conflated with nationality. A kingdom that was unabashedly black was the Kingdom of Kush, but they didn’t call themselves “black”, they called themselves “Kushites”, which were different than other African peoples.

Modern definitions of race came about two ways: one was the justification of the enslavement of black people (by ‘othering’ them) and the other was the inability for enslaved people to identify themselves as anything other than black, seeing as how they became unable to properly trace their ancestry back to a particular tribe or nation.

As such, we must bear in mind that when we look to the past and apply our own definition of race, we are, in a way, depriving them of the ability to define themselves. We are forcing our own worldview onto history, trying to force it to comply with our modern ideals, and it doesn’t necessarily cooperate with us. Not only is our current definition of race unscientific, but applying it to ancient people is heavily anachronistic!

Let’s Do a Deep Dive!

Bear in mind, before we get started here, that we should establish that black people certainly did exist in Egypt. We’ll talk about that in a jiffy, naturally. What we’re examining in this lengthy article is whether or not Egypt was a predominately “black” nation. With that out of the way, let’s jump right in.

Were There ‘Black’ People in Egypt?

Let’s start with this basic question. The obvious answer is that there were what we would call blacks in Egypt.

One piece of early evidence is the mummy of Lady Rai (approximately 1560-1530 BC). She was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Ahmose-Nefertari during her reign and was buried in Thebes. Hers is one of the best-preserved mummies ever found, even her exquisite braids still intact, and she is definitely what we would define as ‘black’ today.

Another bit of early evidence we have comes from the reign of Thutmose IV, who ruled from 401-1391 BC in the form of a man named Maiherpri, a nobleman. Upon his death, he was buried in the Valley of the Kings along with his own copy of the Book of the Dead. What’s interesting here is that this copy features an illustration of Maiherpri, and he has much darker skin than the normal brown and copper tones that often depict Egyptians. Furthermore, his mummy also shows that he had dark skin and has a wig of black, curly hair, clearly representing the form and texture of his hair in life. This man is definitely what we would call ‘black’ in our society today.

I'll show you their mummies later, but I wanted to clarify that black people did, indeed, live in Egypt and were considered just as Egyptian as everybody else.

The key here, however, is that Maiherpri is depicted in a way that isn’t usual for Egyptians. Most of them don’t feature such dark skin and are more tanned in color. So, why do Afrocentrists insist that Egyptians were a ‘black’ nation?

The Linguistics of the Egyptian Word “Kemet”

Most of the arguments for a ‘black’ Egyptian people come from the Ancient Egyptian word “kemet”, or “black”. According to them, Ancient Egyptians called their country “Kemet”, or “Land of the Black People.” Some, though not all, take it further and insist that they called the entire continent of Africa “kemet”, implying that either all Egyptians were black or that all blacks are somehow Egyptian, ignoring the ancient categories of race.

In fact, there is no evidence that Egyptians even had a name for the continent of Africa. They did refer to the land around the Nile as “kemet”, spelled “kmt” as in these hieroglyphics, but it almost certainly refers to the fertile land around the famous river, not to the skin color of the people living in the area.

As I’ve already stated, ancient peoples didn’t view themselves as monolithic people based on skin color. Even after race-based slavery came to replace class-based slavery (whites enslaved Native Americans and Africans based on race and Arabs enslaved whites based on race), ‘white’ people still didn’t view themselves as being one race. The ‘whites’ were the English, Spanish, and French, but the Scandinavians, Germans, Russians, Italians, Irish, etc. were still ‘other’. This is because they still viewed themselves as being too different in terms of culture, politics, language, etc. to lump themselves together as a single people.

This distinction is telling, as it shows that they refused to see Africans as anything other than a collection of dark-skinned potential slaves. They were just ‘black’, not people of different tribes, kingdoms, languages, cultures, politics, or thought. Meanwhile, ‘whites’ still saw each other as distinct: French, Italian, Russian, Norwegian, Finnish, German, etc.

Perhaps, in my opinion, we should extinguish these simplified categories of black, brown, white, and Asian and embrace our nationality as our diversity, instead becoming American, British, Kenyan, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Danish, Swedish, Spanish, etc. Diversity of thought, to this writer’s mind, is far more valuable and indicative than the diversity of skin color. It would also combat the racism that still gives us trouble today.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, the point is that “kemet” didn’t refer to skin. To add an extra bit of proof, the Egyptians referred to the desert as “dsrt”, which just means “red”.

Skin Color in Egyptian Art

One of the best ways to peer into the mind of an Ancient Egyptian and give them leeway to define themselves on their own terms is to simply look at how they depicted themselves in art. Lucky for us, they made a lot of art, and they used a wide variety of colors to portray themselves and how they viewed the world around them.

A fascinating aspect of ancient peoples in the Mediterranean is that skin color, at least in art, doesn’t define ethnicity, but rather gender. Men are typically depicted tanned or copper skin and women with pale or light brown skin. This is true in Minoan art as well as Egyptian art.

The reason for this is because, to reveal a hint of the rampant sexism and misogyny of the time, women were expected to remain inside and not be seen in public. Men were outside, working and enjoying public life. It was a similar convention to pale skin representing the upper class in later eras, as the nobility were able to remain indoors while the poor were out tending fields; hence pale skin becoming synonymous with beauty in an egregious example of classism.

Skin color didn’t just depict gender in Ancient Egyptian art, however. The use of color in art, especially around Hellenistic times, depicted all kinds of societal ideas. Because of this, there’s a certain folly in looking exclusively at art to get an idea of what anyone looked like, as lifelike portraits weren’t desirable to the Ancient Egyptians.

Still, it’s telling that, where the original colors are preserved, Egyptians typically portray themselves as having brown skin and Nubians as having dark skin. What many Egyptologists take away from such bits of art is that, while a wide range of skin tones certainly existed in Egypt, they most saw themselves as being a nation of brown-skinned people. Even their women are depicted, usually, with light brown skin as opposed to white skin.

Other surviving frescoes portray the stereotypical look of multiple nationalities, with Egyptians still portraying themselves with brown skin.

Another piece of evidence worth mentioning is the bust of Nefertiti. Again, her skin in this bust may be paler than she actually had, highlighting her sex as per the trend of the era, but it’s likely to be a fairly realistic portrayal of her actual appearance. This isn’t a fresco or symbolic statue, it’s a bust that appears to at least attempt to mirror her actual appearance.

Mummies and Outsider Observations

As children, we most often associate Egypt with mummies, and Halloween by extension, despite the holiday not existing yet. However, mummies provide us with more than creepy images of bodies wrapped in cloth – they provide us with actual evidence for how people looked and lived.

From mummies, we can see that dental problems were abundant in a land where so much sand was mixed with bread, get a fantastic idea of the Egyptian burial rituals and afterlife beliefs, and get a general idea of how people looked, even if we don’t get much real detail. Still, it’s better than the highly conventionalized artistic view we see.

The problem is that the embalming process often distorts or destroys certain aspects of an individual’s visage, especially in the face. Many mummies are also wearing wigs instead of natural hair, and their natural hair, when present, is often dyed. It’s unknown if this was intentional or if it was just part of the process of mummification, much in the way that the chemicals often distorted skin color. Either way, you could wind up walking into the afterlife looking very, very different than you anticipated!

Perhaps due to so many people, perhaps erroneously, associating the Pharaoh of the Exodus with Ramses II, his mummy is one of the most famous. Arguably, it’s also one of the most telling.

If you look at the mummy itself, it appears to have brownish skin and strawberry hair. However, in an example of not being able to take even mummies at face value, a forensic examination in 1987 concluded that the famous pharaoh’s skin had been chemically darkened during the embalming process and that his skin in life would have been lighter.

On that note, Ramses II’s hair was also dyed, likely to showcase the hair color he sported when younger, much like the wig that was made for Maiherpri. In reality, his hair was white when he passed. The man was in his 90s, and if he still retained his natural hair color throughout all his follicles, then he’d happened upon a magnificent discovery many of us would love to know about.

Now, I wouldn’t use the fact that Ramses II was maybe white to say that most Egyptians were white any more than having a black POTUS like Obama means most Americans are black. However, it does prove that there were white people in Egypt, too, pointing towards its diverse population.

Beyond mummies, we can also point to the observations of outsiders, specifically the Greeks.

When Egypt was thrust into the Hellenistic period, we get a glimpse of more lifelike depictions of Egyptians. Specifically, the people who lived in Lower Egypt are brought to life via the Fayum Mummy Portraits, or the funerary encaustic panel portraits that were brought by the Hellenistic and Roman periods. These portraits were highly detailed, capturing the look of people in the region more accurately than previous traditions.

Instead of describing them, I’ll just let you meet them face-to-face:

Conclusions

Egypt has a diverse, rich population. Trying to portray them as a racial monolith is a bad idea because ethnicity was national and cultural. It was derived from your values, not your skin. Whether this is good or bad is up to you.