When Europeans/whites say ancient Egyptians were neither black nor African, they cannot back their claims with facts or evidence because they don’t exist. And when they are proved wrong they shift the goal posts and say, “but the Sumerians were ahead of the ancient Egyptians by thousands of years”.
This hypothesis has been tested and it has been proven wrong. Egyptian civilisation antedated Sumerian civilisation by thousands of years. In fact, Egyptian civilisation is the first known civilisation in the world. Western historiography purveys the narrative that Africans or the Negros came to ancient Egypt as slaves later in history, they were not an autochthonous population.
The main reason Europeans/whites refuse to acknowledge the racial affiliation or Africanness of the ancient Egyptians is based on nothing else than an intense anti-black racism and white supremacy that black Africans cannot be the authors of the first civilisation in the world.
They would then say, “Colour or race is irrelevant, it doesn’t mean anything.” That’s false, it does in a big way. On social media they are pathetic. They come across as shallow yet patronising. They dissociate ancient Egyptians and Egypt from the African continent and associate it with the Mediterranean, western Asia, the Levant and Europe.
When they don’t have answers or can’t rebut a point, they say to the person whose argument they can’t challenge, “You have not read and understood my post.” They are insinuating that one doesn’t understand English because they are African. They deliberately play stupid, but that will not help them.
They have not learned that it is impossible to turn lies into the truth.
The following facts, although they may be incomprehensible to readers not familiar with this subject, they are absolutely important, have been advanced by Egyptologist, anthropologist and historian Dr Cheikh Anta Diop to prove that ancient Egyptians were black Africans because Western scholars were adamant that they were white, Indo-European or Semites, not African and black:
Evidence of Physical Anthropology on the race of the Ancient Egyptians
There is evidence that proves the basis of the Egyptian population was Negro in the Pre-Dynastic epoch.
The word Negro is used to refer to Africans, it is not used derogatively. Available physical anthropological evidence is incompatible with theories that the Negro element only infiltrated into Egypt at a late stage.
Human images of the Protohistoric Period: Their Anthropological Value
The study of human images, according to Flinders Petrie, shows that the ethnic type was black. The natives of the country are always represented with unmistakably chiefly emblems for which one looks in vain among the infrequent portrayals of other races, who are all shown as servile foreign elements having reached the valley by infiltration.
The mural tomb of Hierakonpolis shows the native-born blacks subjugating the foreign intruders into the valley. Below is the black ship at Hierakonpolis belonging to the black men who are shown as conquering the red men.
Wherever the autochthonous racial type is represented with any degree of clearness, it evidently Negroid. Nowhere are the Indo-European and Semitic elements shown even as ordinary freemen serving a local chief, but invariably as conquered foreigners.
Europeans/whites who claim Africans were not the original inhabitants of Egypt misconstrue and deliberately misread images of foreigners on the murals described above. They are influenced by Western anthropologists.
Melanin Dosage Test
Dr Cheikh Anta Diop, who was also a nuclear physicist, invented the melanin dosage test which he used to establish the racial affiliation of the ancient Egyptians. He said it is practically possible to determine directly the skin colour and hence the ethnic affiliations of ancient Egyptians by microscopic analysis in the laboratory. Melanin, the chemical body responsible for skin pigmentation, is insoluble and is preserved for millions of years in the skins of fossil animals. It is more readily recoverable in skins of Egyptian mummies, despite a tenacious legend that the skin of mummies, tainted by the embalming material, is no longer susceptible to any analysis.
Although the epidermis is the main site of the melanin, the melanocytes penetrating the dermis at the boundary between it and the epidermis, even where the latter has mostly been destroyed by the embalming materials, show a melanin level which is non-existent in the white-skinned races.
The evaluation of melanin level by microscopic examination is a laboratory method which enables us to classify the ancient Egyptians unquestionably among the black races.
Osteological Measurements
Among the criteria accepted in physical anthropology for classifying races, the osteological or bone measurements are perhaps the least misleading (in contrast to craniometry) for distinguishing a black man from a white man. By this criterion, also, the Egyptians belong among the black races.
Blood Groups
It is a fact that even today Egyptians, particularly in Upper Egypt, belong to the same Group B as populations of western Africa on the Atlantic seaboard and not the A2 Group characteristic of the white race prior to any crossbreeding. Present-day techniques make it possible to study the extent of Group A2 distribution in Egyptian mummies.
The Egyptian Race According to the Classical Authors of Antiquity
The Greek and Latin writers who were contemporaneous with the ancient Egyptians had no problem with the physical classification of the ancient Egyptians. They said ancient Egyptians were Negros with thick lips, kinky hair and thin legs.
The Egyptians as they saw themselves
The Egyptians had only one term to designate themselves: kmt, literally meaning the Negros. The word is the etymological origin of the well-known root kamit which has proliferated in modern anthropological literature.
The Divine Epithets
The black or Negro is the divine epithet invariably used for the chief beneficent gods of Egypt, whereas all the malevolent spirits are qualified as red; it is also known that to Africans this form applies to white people. This held good for Egypt too.
Witness of the Bible
The Bible mentions the sons of Ham were Cush, and Mizraim i.e. Egypt, and Phut, and Canaan. And the sons of Cush; Seba, and Havilah, and Sabtah, and Raamah, and Satechah. Generally speaking, all Semitic tradition (Jewish and Arab) classes ancient Egypt with the countries of the blacks. They have nothing to gain by presenting a false ethnic picture of them.
Cultural data
There are many identical cultural traits recorded in Egypt and in present-day black Africa such as circumcision and totemism. According to Herodotus, circumcision is of African origin. Egyptian totemism retained its vitality down to the Roman period and Plutarch also mentions it.
Linguistic Affinity
Wolof, a Senegalese language spoken in the extreme west of Africa on the Atlantic Ocean, is perhaps as close to ancient Egyptian as Coptic.
Those who claim that ancient Egyptians were not black Africans can refute the facts presented in this article that were presented by Dr Diop with 30 years of multi-disciplinary scholarship. In 1960 when he was conferred D.Litt at the Sorbone University in France, he had defeated the French intelligentsia on their own turf. In 1974 in Egypt, Dr Diop defeated academics from Europe and all over the world during a Unesco symposium on the topic of the Africanness of ancient Egyptians. Diop’s academic excellence is never spoken about and celebrated by Africans.
* Ditshego is an independent researcher.