The elephantnose fish has the highest brain-to-body oxygen consumption ratio of all known vertebrates
The bony-eared assfish has the smallest brain-to-body weight ratio of all known vertebrates
Fish intelligence is "...the resultant of the process of
acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving, combining, comparing, and
using in new contexts information and conceptual skills" as it applies to fish.
According to Culum Brown from Macquarie University,
"Fish are more intelligent than they appear. In many areas, such as
memory, their cognitive powers match or exceed those of ‘higher’ vertebrates including non-human primates."
Fish hold records for the relative brain weights of vertebrates. Most vertebrate species have similar brain-to-body mass ratios. The deep sea bathypelagic bony-eared assfish, has the smallest ratio of all known vertebrates. At the other extreme, the electrogenic elephantnose fish,
an African freshwater fish, has one of the largest brain-to-body weight
ratios of all known vertebrates (slightly higher than humans) and the
highest brain-to-body oxygen consumption ratio of all known vertebrates
(three times that for humans).
Fish typically have quite small brains relative to body size compared
with other vertebrates, typically one-fifteenth the brain mass of a
similarly sized bird or mammal. However, some fish have relatively large brains, most notably mormyrids and sharks, which have brains about as massive relative to body weight as birds and marsupials.
The cerebellum of cartilaginous and bony fishes
is large and complex. In at least one important respect, it differs in
internal structure from the mammalian cerebellum: The fish cerebellum
does not contain discrete deep cerebellar nuclei.
Instead, the primary targets of Purkinje cells are a distinct type of
cell distributed across the cerebellar cortex, a type not seen in
mammals. The circuits in the cerebellum are similar across all classes of vertebrates, including fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. There is also an analogous brain structure in cephalopods with well-developed brains, such as octopuses. This has been taken as evidence that the cerebellum performs functions important to all animal species with a brain.
In mormyrid fish
(a family of weakly electrosensitive freshwater fish), the cerebellum
is considerably larger than the rest of the brain put together. The
largest part of it is a special structure called the valvula, which has an unusually regular architecture and receives much of its input from the electrosensory system.
Memory
Individual carp captured by anglers have been shown to become less catchable thereafter.
This suggests that fish use their memory of negative experiences to
associate capture with stress and therefore become less easy to catch. This type of associative learning has also been shown in paradise fish (Macropodus opercularis) which avoid places where they have experienced a single attack by a predator and continue to avoid for many months.
Red Sea clownfish can recognize their mate after 30 days separation.
A number of studies have shown that fish can retain information for months or years. Anecdotally, channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) can remember the human voice call announcing food five years after last hearing that call. Goldfish remember the colour of a tube dispensing food one year after the last tube presentation. Sockeye salmon still react to a light signal that precedes food arrival up to eight months since the last reinforcement. Some common rudd and European chub could remember the person who trained them to feed from the hand, even after a 6-month break. Crimson-spotted rainbowfish
can learn how to escape from a trawl by swimming through a small hole
in the center and they remember this technique 11 months later. Rainbow trout can be trained to press a bar to get food, and they remember this three months after last seeing the bar. Red Sea clownfish can recognize their mate 30 days after it was experimentally removed from the home anemone.
Several fish species are capable of learning complex spatial relationships and forming cognitive maps. They can orient themselves using multiple landmarks or symbols and they are able to integrate experiences which enable them to generate appropriate avoidance responses.
Tool use
is sometimes considered as an indication of intelligence in animals.
There are few examples of tool use in fishes, perhaps because they have
only their mouth in which to hold objects.
Several species of wrasse hold bivalves (scallops and clams) or sea urchins in their mouth and smash them against the surface of a rock (an "anvil") to break them up.This behaviour in an orange-dotted tuskfish (Choerodon anchorago) has been filmed;
the fish fans sand to unearth the bivalve, takes it into its mouth,
swims several metres to a rock which it uses as an anvil by smashing the
mollusc apart with sideward thrashes of the head.
Archerfish (family
Toxotidae) squirt jets of water at insects on plants above the surface
to knock them into the water; they can adjust the size of the squirts to
the size of the insect prey and learn to shoot at moving targets.
Whitetail damselfish clean the rock face where they intend to lay eggs by sucking up and blowing sand grains onto the surface. Triggerfish blow water at sea urchins to turn them over, thereby exposing their more vulnerable underside. River stingrays create water currents with their fins to suck food out of a PVC pipe. Banded acaras (Bujurquina vittata) lay their eggs on a loose leaf and carry the leaf away when a predator approaches.
In one laboratory study, Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) given access to an operant
feeding machine learned to pull a string to get food. The researchers
had also tagged the fish by threading a bead in front of their dorsal
fin. Some fish snagged the string with their bead, resulting in food
delivery. These fish eventually learned to swim in a particular way to
repeatedly make the bead snag the string and get food. Because the fish
used an object external to their body in a goal-oriented way, this
satisfies some definitions of tool use.
Construction
As
for tool use, construction behaviour may be mostly innate. Yet it can
be sophisticated, and the fact that fish can make judicious repairs to
their creation suggests intelligence. Construction methods in fishes can
be divided into three categories: excavations, pile-ups, and gluing.
Excavations may be simple depressions dug up in the substrate, such as the nests of bowfin, smallmouth bass, and Pacific salmon,
but it can also consist of fairly large burrows used for shelter and
for nesting. Burrowing species include the mudskippers, the red band-fishCepola rubescens (burrows up to 1 m deep, often with a side branch), the yellowhead jawfishOpistognathus aurifrons (chambers up to 22 cm deep, lined with coral fragments to solidify it), the convict blennyPholidichthys leucotaenia whose burrow is a maze of tunnels and chambers thought to be as much as 6 m long, and the Nicaragua cichlid, Hypsophrys nicaraguensis, who drills a tunnel by spinning inside of it. In the case of the mudskippers, the burrows are shaped like a J and can be as much as 2 m deep. Two species, the giant mudskipperPeriophthalmodon schlosseri and the walking goby Scartelaos histophorus,
build a special chamber at the bottom of their burrows into which they
carry mouthfuls of air. Once released the air accumulates at the top of
the chamber and forms a reserve from which the fish can breathe – like
all amphibious fishes, mudskippers are good air breathers. If
researchers experimentally extract air from the special chambers, the
fish diligently replenish it. The significance of this behaviour stems
from the facts that at high tide, when water covers the mudflats, the
fish stay in their burrow to avoid predators, and water inside the
confined burrow is often poorly oxygenated. At such times these
air-breathing fishes can tap into the air reserve of their special
chambers.
Mounds are easy to build, but can be quite extensive. In North American streams, the male cutlip minnowExoglossum maxillingua,
90–115 mm (3.5–4.5 in) long, assembles mounds that are 75–150 mm
(3.0–5.9 in) high, 30–45 cm (12–18 in) in diameter, made up of more than
300 pebbles 13–19 mm in diameter (a quarter to half an inch). The fish
carry these pebbles one by one in their mouths, sometimes stealing some
from the mounds of other males. The females deposit their eggs on the
upstream slope of the mounds, and the males cover these eggs with more
pebbles. Males of the hornyhead chubNocomis biguttatus, 90 mm (3.5 in) long, and of the river chubNocomis micropogon,
100 mm (3.9 in) long, also build mounds during the reproductive season.
They start by clearing a slight depression in the substrate, which they
overfill with up to 10,000 pebbles until the mounds are 60–90 cm
(2.0–3.0 ft) long (in the direction of the water current), 30–90 cm
(0.98–2.95 ft) wide, and 5–15 cm (2.0–5.9 in) high. Females lay their
eggs among those pebbles. The stone accumulation is free of sand and it
exposes the eggs to a good water current that supplies oxygen.
Males of many mouthbrooding cichlid species in Lake Malawi and Lake Tanganyika
build sand cones that are flattened or crater-shaped at the top. Some
of these mounds can be 3 m in diameter and 40 cm high. The mounds serve
to impress females or to allow species recognition during courtship.
Male pufferfish, Torquigener sp., also build sand mounds
to attract females. The mounds, up to 2 m in diameter, are intricate
with radiating ridges and valleys.
Several species build up mounds of coral pieces either to protect the entrance to their burrows, as in tilefishes and gobies of the genus Valenciennea, or to protect the patch of sand in which they will bury themselves for the night, as in the Jordan's tuskfish Choerodon jordani and the rockmover wrasseNovaculichthys taeniourus.
Male sticklebacks are well known for their habit of building an
enclosed nest made of pieces of vegetation glued together with
secretions from their kidneys. Some of them adorn the entrance of the
nest with unusually colored algae or even shiny tinfoil experimentally
introduced in the environment.
Foam nests, made up of air bubbles glued together with mucus from the mouth, are also well known in gouramis and armoured catfish.
Social intelligence
Fish
can remember the attributes of other individuals, such as their
competitive ability or past behavior, and modify their own behavior
accordingly. For example, they can remember the identity of individuals
to whom they have lost in a fight, and avoid these individuals in the
future; or they can recognize territorial neighbors and show less
aggression towards them as compared to strangers.
They can recognize individuals in whose company they obtained less
food in the past and preferentially associate with new partners in the
future.
Fish can seem mindful of which individuals have watched them in the past. In an experiment with Siamese fighting fish,
two males were made to fight each other while being watched by a
female, whom the males could also see. The winner and the loser of the
fight were then, separately, given a choice between spending time next
to the watching female or to a new female. The winner courted both
females equally, but the loser spent more time next to the new female,
avoiding the watcher female. In this species, females prefer males they have seen win a fight over males they have seen losing,
and it therefore makes sense for a male to prefer a female that has
never seen him as opposed to a female that has seen him lose.
Social interactions also provides the context for a test of
transitive inference, that is figuring out that if A > B and B >
C, then A > C. In a study with the cichlid Astatotilapia burtoni,
observer fish could watch aggressive interactions between pairs of
other individuals. They witnessed individual A beat individual B, then
individual B beat individual C, then C beat D, and D beat E. The
observer fish were then given a choice of associating with either B or D
(both of which they had seen win once and lose once). All eight
observer fish tested spent more time next to D. Fish in this species
prefer to associate with more subordinate individuals, so the preference
for D showed that the observers had worked out that B was superior to
C, and C to D, and therefore D was subordinate to B.
Deception
There are several examples of fish being deceptive, suggesting to some researchers that they may possess a theory of mind.
However, most of the observations of deception can be understood as
instinctive patterns of behavior that are triggered by specific
environmental events, and they do not require a fish to understand of
the point of view of other individuals.
Distraction display
Adult male bowfins distract potential predators away from their fry by thrashing as if injured.
In the threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus),
males sometimes see their nest full of eggs fall prey to groups of
marauding females; some males, when they see a group of females
approaching, swim away from their nest and start poking their snout into
the substrate, as would a female raiding a nest. This distraction display
commonly fools the females into behaving as if a nest has been
discovered there and they rush to that site, leaving the male's real
nest alone. Bowfin (Amia calva)
males caring for their free-swimming fry exhibit a related distraction
display when a potential fry-predator approaches; they move away and
thrash about as if injured, drawing the predator's attention toward
himself.
False courtship behaviour
In the Malili Lakes of Sulawesi, Indonesia, one species of sailfin silverside (Telmatherina sarasinorum) is an egg predator. They often follow courting pairs of the closely related species T. antoniae. When those pairs lay eggs, T. sarasinorum darts in and eats the eggs. On four different occasions in the field (out of 136 observation bouts in total), a male T. sarasinorum who was following a pair of courting T. antoniae eventually chased off the male T. antoniae
and took his place, courting the heterospecific female. That female
released eggs, at which point the male darted to the eggs and ate them.
Death feigning
Death feigning as a way to attract prey is another form of deception. In Lake Malawi, the predatory cichlid Nimbochromis livingstonii
have been seen first remaining stationary with their abdomen on or near
sand and that then dropping onto their sides. In a variant behaviour,
some N. livingstonii fell through the water column and landed
onto their side. The fish then remained immobile for several minutes.
Their colour pattern was blotchy and suggested a rotting carcass. Small
inquisitive cichlids of other species often came near and they were
suddenly attacked by the predator. About a third of the death-feigning
performances led to an attack, and about one-sixth of the attacks were
successful. Another African cichlid, Lamprologus lemairii, from Lake Tanganyika, has been reported to do the same thing. A South American cichlid, the yellowjacket cichlid Parachromis friedrichsthalii,
also uses death feigning. They turn over onto their sides at the bottom
of the sinkholes they inhabit and remain immobile for as long as 15
minutes, during which they attack the small mollies that come too close to them. The comb grouper Mycteroperca acutirostris
may also be an actor, though in this case the behaviour should be
called dying or illness feigning, rather than death feigning, because
while lying on its side the fish occasionally undulates its body. In
1999, off the coast of southeastern Brazil, one juvenile comb grouper
was observed using this tactic to catch five small prey in 15 minutes.
Cooperation
Cooperative
foraging reflects some mental flexibility and planning, and could
therefore be interpreted as intelligence. There are a few examples in
fishes.
Yellowtail amberjack
can form packs of 7-15 individuals that maneuver in U-shaped formations
to cut away the tail end of prey shoals (jack mackerels or Cortez
grunts) and herd the downsized shoal next to seawalls where they proceed
to capture the prey.
In the coral reefs of the Red Sea, roving coralgrouper that have spotted a small prey fish hiding in a crevice sometimes visit the sleeping hole of a giant moray
and shake their head at the moray, and this seems to be an invitation
to group hunting as the moray often swims away with the grouper, is led
to the crevice where the prey hides, and proceeds to probe that crevice
(which is too small to let the grouper in), either catching the prey by
itself or flushing it into the open where the grouper grabs it. The closely related coral trout
also enrolls the help of moray eels in this way, and they only do so
when the prey they seek is hidden in crevices, where only the eel can
flush them. They also quickly learn to invite preferentially those
individual eels that collaborate most often.
Similarly, zebra lionfish
that detect the presence of small prey fishes flare up their fins as an
invitation to other zebra lionfish, or even to another species of
lionfish (Pterois antennata),
to join them in better cornering the prey and taking turns at striking
the prey so that every individual hunter ends up with similar capture
rates.
Numeracy
Mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki)
can distinguish between doors marked with either two or three geometric
symbols, only one of which allows the fish to rejoin its shoalmates.
This can be achieved when the two symbols have the same total surface
area, density and brightness as the three symbols.
Further studies show this discrimination extends to 4 vs 8, 15 vs 30,
100 vs 200, 7 vs 14, and 8 vs 12 symbols, again controlling for
non-numerical factors.
Many studies have shown that when given a choice, shoaling fish
prefer to join the larger of two shoals. It has been argued that several
aspects of such choice reflect an ability by fish to distinguish
between numerical quantities.
Social learning
Fish can learn how to perform a behavior simply by watching other individuals in action. This is variously called observational learning, cultural transmission, or social learning. For example, fish can learn a particular route after following an experienced leader a few times. One study trained guppies
to swim through a hole marked in red while ignoring another one marked
in green in order to get food on the other side of a partition; when
these experienced fish (“demonstrators”) were joined by a naive one (an
“observer”), the observer followed the demonstrators through the red
hole, and kept the habit once the demonstrators were removed, even when
the green hole now allowed food access. In the wild, juvenile French grunt
follow traditional migration routes, up to 1 km long, between their
daytime resting sites and their nighttime foraging areas on coral reefs;
if groups of 10-20 individuals are marked and then transplanted to new
populations, they follow the residents along what is for them – the
transplants – a new migration route, and if the residents are then
removed two days later, the transplanted grunts continue to use the new
route, as well as the resting and foraging sites at both ends.
Through cultural transmission, fishes could also learn where good food spots are. Ninespine stickleback,
when given a choice between two food patches they have watched for a
while, prefer the patch over which more fish have been seen foraging, or
over which fish were seen feeding more intensively.
Similarly, in a field experiment where Trinidadian guppies were given a
choice between two distinctly marked feeders in their home rivers, the
subjects chose the feeder where other guppies were already present, and
in subsequent tests when both feeders were deserted, the subjects
remembered the previously popular feeder and chose it.
Through social learning, fishes might learn not only where to get
food, but also what to get and how to get it. Hatchery-raised salmon
can be taught to quickly accept novel, live prey items similar to those
they will encounter once they will be released in the wild, simply by
watching an experienced salmon take such prey. The same is true of young perch. In the laboratory, juvenile European seabass can learn to push a lever in order to obtain food just by watching experienced individuals use the lever.
Fishes can also learn from others the identity of predatory species. Fathead minnows,
for example, can learn the smell of a predatory pike just by being
simultaneously exposed to that smell and the sight of experienced
minnows reacting with fear, and brook stickleback can learn the visual identity of a predator by watching the fright reaction of experienced fathead minnows.
Fish can also learn to recognize the odor of dangerous sites when they
are simultaneously exposed to it and to other fish that suddenly show a
fright reaction. Hatchery-raised salmon can learn the smell of a predator by being simultaneously exposed to it and to the alarm substance released by injured salmon.
Latent learning
Latent learning
is a form of learning that is not immediately expressed in an overt
response; it occurs without any obvious reinforcement of the behaviour
or associations that are learned. One example in fish comes from
research with male three spot gouramis (Trichopodus trichopterus).
This species quickly form dominance hierarchies. To appease
dominants, subordinates adopt a typical body posture angled at 15-60ยบ to
the horizontal, all fins folded and pale body colors. Individuals
trained to associate a light-stimulus with the imminent arrival of food
exhibit this associative learning by approaching the surface where the
food is normally dropped immediately the light-stimulus is presented.
However, if a subordinate is placed in a tank with a dominant individual
and the light-stimulus is presented, the subordinate immediately
assumes the submissive posture rather than approaching the surface. The
subordinate has predicted that going to the surface to get food would
place it in competition with the dominant, and to avoid potential
aggression, it immediately attempts to appease the dominant.
Cleaner fish
Bluestreak cleaner wrasse (bottom) with a client fish
The bluestreak cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) performs a service for “client” fishes (belonging to other species) by removing and eating their ectoparasites.
Clients can invite a cleaning session by adopting a typical posture or
simply by remaining immobile near a wrasse's cleaning station. They can
even form queues while doing so. But cleaning sessions do not always end
up well, because wrasses (or wrasse-mimicking parasitic sabre-toothed blennies)
may cheat and eat the nutritious body mucus of their clients, rather
than just the ectoparasites, something that makes the client jolt and
sometimes flee. This system has been the subject of extensive
observations which have suggested cognitive abilities on the part of the
cleaner wrasses and their clients. For example, clients refrain from
soliciting a cleaning session if they have witnessed the cleaning
session of the previous client ending badly.
Cleaners give the impression of trying to maintain a good reputation,
because they cheat less when they see a big audience (a long queue of
clients) watching.
Cleaners sometimes work as male-female teams, and when the smaller
female cheats and bites the client, the larger male chases her off, as
if to punish her for having tarnished their reputation.
Play
Play
behaviour is often considered a correlate of intelligence. One possible
example in fish is provided by the electrolocating Peters' elephantnose
fish (mentioned above as having one of the largest brain-to-body weight
ratios of all known vertebrates). One captive individual was observed
carrying a small ball of aluminum foil (a good conductor of electricity)
to the outflow tube of the aquarium filter, letting the current push
the ball away before chasing after it and repeating the behaviour. Captive white-spotted cichlids have also been seen hitting a floating thermometer hundreds of times to make it wobble and bob.
Food stocking
Food stocking can be viewed potentially as an animal planning for the future. One example of short-term stocking involves climbing perch (Anabas testudineus).
Individuals were kept singly in aquaria and fed with pellets dropped at
the surface. When the pellets were dropped one after the other at 1-s
intervals, the fish took them as they reached the surface and stocked
them inside the mouth. On average, the fish placed 7 pellets in their
mouth before moving away to consume them. When starved for 24-h before
the feeding test, they doubled the number of pellets stocked (14 on
average); the underside of their heads bulged under the load. The
behaviour may be an indication that competition for food is normally
severe in this species and that any adaptation to secure food would be
beneficial.
The question of the race of ancient Egyptians was raised historically as a product of the early racial concepts of the 18th and 19th centuries, and was linked to models of racial hierarchy primarily based on craniometry and anthropometry. A variety of views circulated about the racial identity of the Egyptians and the source of their culture. Some scholars argued that ancient Egyptian culture was influenced by other Afroasiatic-speaking populations in North Africa or the Middle East, while others pointed to influences from various Nubian groups or populations in Europe.
In more recent times some writers continued to challenge the mainstream
view, some focusing on questioning the race of specific notable
individuals such as the king represented in the Great Sphinx of Giza, native Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, Egyptian Queen Tiye, and Greek Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra VII.
Mainstream scholars reject the notion that Egypt was a white or
black civilization; they maintain that, despite the phenotypic diversity
of Ancient and present-day Egyptians, applying modern notions of black or white races to ancient Egypt is anachronistic. In addition, scholars reject the notion, implicit in the notion of a
black or white Egypt hypothesis, that Ancient Egypt was racially
homogeneous; instead, skin color varied between the peoples of Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt, and Nubia,
who in various eras rose to power in Ancient Egypt. Within Egyptian
history, despite multiple foreign invasions, the demographics were not
shifted substantially by large migrations.
Origins
In the 18th century, Constantin Franรงois de Chassebลuf, comte de Volney,
wrote about his thoughts on the contentions regarding the race of the
ancient Egyptians. In one translation, he noted that "the Copts
are the proper representatives of the Ancient Egyptians" due to their
"jaundiced and fumed skin, which is neither Greek, Negro nor Arab, their
full faces, their puffy eyes, their crushed noses, and their thick
lips...the ancient Egyptians were true negroes of the same type as all
native born Africans".
Volney also said that the Sphinx gave him the key to the riddle as to
why all the Egyptians he saw across the country "have a bloated face,
puffed-up eyes, flat nose, thick lips – in a word, the true face of the
mulatto." He wrote he was tempted to attribute it to the climate, but
upon visiting the Sphinx, its appearance gave him the answer; "seeing
that head, typically negro in all its features",
Volney saw it as the "true solution to the enigma (of how the modern
Egyptians came to have their 'mulatto' appearance)". He goes on to
postulate, "the Copts were "true negroes" of the same stock as all the
autochthonous peoples of Africa" and they "after some centuries of
mixing..., must have lost the full blackness of its original color."
Another early example of the controversy is an article published in The New-England Magazine of October 1833, where the authors dispute a claim that "Herodotus
was given as authority for their being negroes." They point out with
reference to tomb paintings: "It may be observed that the complexion of
the men is invariably red, that of the women yellow; but neither of them
can be said to have anything in their physiognomy at all resembling the
Negro countenance."
A few years later, in 1839, Jean-Franรงois Champollion stated in his work Egypte Ancienne that the Egyptians and Nubians are represented in the same manner in tomb paintings and reliefs,
further suggesting that: "In the Copts of Egypt, we do not find any of
the characteristic features of the ancient Egyptian population. The
Copts are the result of crossbreeding with all the nations that
successfully dominated Egypt. It is wrong to seek in them the principal
features of the old race."
This memoir was made in the context of the first tribes that would have
inhabited Egypt, his opinion was noted after his return from Nubia. In
1839, Champollion's and Volney's claims were disputed by Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac, who blamed a misunderstanding of the ancients for spreading a false impression of a "Negro" Egypt, stating "the two physical traits of black skin and wooly hair are not enough to stamp a race as negro"and
"the opinion that the ancient population of Egypt belonged to the Negro
African race, is an error long accepted as the truth. ... Volney's
conclusion as to the Negro origin of the ancient Egyptian civilization
is evidently forced and inadmissible."
Foster summarized the early 19th century "controversy over the
ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians" as a debate of conflicting theories
regarding the Hamites. "In ancient times, the Hamites, who developed the civilization of Egypt, were considered Black." Foster describes the 6th century CE curse of Ham theory, which began "in the Babylonian Talmud, a collection of oral traditions of the Jews, that the sons of Ham are cursed by being black."
Foster said "throughout the Middle Ages and to the end of the
eighteenth century, the Negro was seen by Europeans as a descendant of Ham." In the early 19th century, "after Napolean's expedition to Egypt, the Hamites began to be viewed as having been Caucasians." However, "Napolean's scientists concluded that the Egyptians were Negroid." Napoleon's colleagues referenced prior "well-known books" by Constantin Franรงois de Chassebลuf, comte de Volney and Vivant Denon that described Ancient Egyptians as "negroid".
Finally, Foster concludes, "it was at this point that Egypt became the
focus of much scientific and lay interest, the result of which was the
appearance of many publications whose sole purpose was to prove that the
Egyptians were not Black, and therefore capable of developing such a
high civilization."
The debate over the race of the ancient Egyptians intensified during the 19th century movement to abolish slavery in the United States,
as arguments relating to the justifications for slavery increasingly
asserted the historical, mental and physical inferiority of black
people.
For example, in 1851, John Campbell directly challenged the claims by
Champollion and others regarding the evidence for a black Egypt,
asserting "There is one great difficulty, and to my mind an
insurmountable one, which is that the advocates of the negro
civilization of Egypt do not attempt to account for, how this
civilization was lost.... Egypt progressed, and why, because it was
Caucasian."
The arguments regarding the race of the Egyptians became more
explicitly tied to the debate over slavery in the United States, as
tensions escalated towards the American Civil War. In 1854, Josiah C. Nott
with George Glidden set out to prove: "that the Caucasian or white, and
the Negro races were distinct at a very remote date, and that the Egyptians were Caucasians." Samuel George Morton,
a physician and professor of anatomy, concluded that "Negroes were
numerous in Egypt, but their social position in ancient times was the
same that it now is [in the United States], that of servants and
slaves." In the early 20th century, Flinders Petrie, a professor of Egyptology at the University of London, in turn spoke of "a black queen", Ahmose-Nefertari, who was the "divine ancestress of the XVIIIth dynasty". He described her physically as "the black queen Aohmes Nefertari had an aquiline nose, long and thin, and was of a type not in the least prognathous".
Modern scholars who have studied ancient Egyptian culture and
population history have responded to the controversy over the race of
the ancient Egyptians in various ways.
At the UNESCO "Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script" in Cairo in 1974, the "Black Hypothesis" met with "profound" disagreement by scholars.
Similarly, none of the participants voiced support for an earlier
postulation that Egyptians were "white with a dark, even black,
pigmentation." The arguments for all sides are recorded in the UNESCO publication General History of Africa, with the "Origin of the Egyptians" chapter being written by Cheikh Anta Diop,
a proponent of the "Black Hypothesis". At the 1974 UNESCO conference,
most participants concluded that the ancient Egyptian population was
indigenous to the Nile Valley, and was made up of people from north and south of the Sahara who had a range of skin colors.
Since the late 20th century, as the science of human population genetics has advanced, most biological anthropologists have come to reject the notion of race as having any validity in the study of human biology.
Frank M. Snowden
wrote: "Egyptians, Greeks and Romans attached no special stigma to the
colour of the skin and developed no hierarchical notions of race whereby
highest and lowest positions in the social pyramid were based on
colour."
Frank J. Yurco
wrote in 1990: "When you talk about Egypt, it's just not right to talk
about black or white .... To take the terminology here in the United
States and graft it onto Africa is anthropologically inaccurate". Yurco
added that "We are applying a racial divisiveness to Egypt that they
would never have accepted, They would have considered this argument
absurd, and that is something we could really learn from."
Yurco wrote in 1996 that "the peoples of Egypt, the Sudan, and much of
North-East Africa are generally regarded as a Nilotic continuity, with
widely ranging physical features (complexions light to dark, various
hair and craniofacial types)". In a 1989 article, he elaborated: "In short, ancient Egypt, like modern Egypt, consisted of a very heterogeneous population".
Bernard R. Ortiz De Montellano wrote in 1993: "The claim that all
Egyptians, or even all the pharaohs, were black, is not valid. Most
scholars believe that Egyptians in antiquity looked pretty much as they
look today, with a gradation of darker shades toward the Sudan".
Nancy Lovell wrote in 1999 that studies of skeletal remains
indicate that the physical characteristics of ancient southern Egyptians
and Nubians were "within the range of variation" for both ancient and
modern indigenous peoples of the Sahara and tropical Africa, and that
the distribution of population characteristics "seems to follow a clinal
pattern from south to north", which may be explained by natural
selection as well as gene flow between neighboring populations. She also
wrote that the archaeological and inscriptional evidence for contact
between Egypt and Syro-Palestine "suggests that gene flow between these
areas was very likely," and that the early Nile Valley populations were
"part of an African lineage, but exhibiting local variation".
Stuart Tyson Smith
wrote in 2001: "Any characterization of race of the ancient Egyptians
depends on modern cultural definitions, not on scientific study. Thus,
by modern American standards it is reasonable to characterize the
Egyptians as 'black', while acknowledging the scientific evidence for
the physical diversity of Africans."
Donald B. Redford
wrote in 2004 that: "The old notion of waves of "races" flowing up the
Nile Valley, effecting cultural change and improvement, is now known to
be as erroneous as it was simplistic. New ideas need not come by means
of invasion: occasionally they are indigenous and may parallel similar
discoveries elsewhere which are wholly unrelated."
He also wrote: "It would be interesting to know how the Nubians reacted
to the racial attitudes Egypt manifested towards them, and in
particular whether they shared a similar xenophobic aversion to all
Egyptians."
Barry J. Kemp
wrote in 2007 that the black/white argument, though politically
understandable, is an oversimplification that hinders an appropriate
evaluation of the scientific data on the ancient Egyptians since it does
not take into consideration the difficulty in ascertaining complexion
from skeletal remains. It also ignores the fact that Africa is inhabited
by many other populations besides Bantu-related ("Negroid") groups. He wrote that in reconstructions of life in ancient Egypt, modern Egyptians would therefore be the most logical and closest approximation to the ancient Egyptians.
S. O. Y. Keita wrote in 2008 that "There is no scientific reason
to believe that the primary ancestors of the Egyptian population emerged
and evolved outside of northeast Africa.... The basic overall genetic
profile of the modern population is consistent with the diversity of
ancient populations that would have been indigenous to northeastern
Africa and subject to the range of evolutionary influences over time,
although researchers vary in the details of their explanations of those
influences."
Barbara Mertz wrote in 2011: "Egyptian civilization was not Mediterranean or African, Semitic or Hamitic, black or white, but all of them. It was, in short, Egyptian."
Kathryn Bard wrote in 2014: "Egyptians were the indigenous
farmers of the lower Nile valley, neither black nor white as races are
conceived of today".
Nicky Nielsen wrote in 2020: "Ancient Egypt was neither black nor
white, and the repeated attempt by advocates of either ideology to
seize the ownership of ancient Egypt simply perpetuates an old
tradition: one of removing agency and control of their heritage from the
modern population living along the banks of the Nile."
Marc Van De Mieroop wrote in 2021: "Some scholars have tried to
determine what Egyptians could have looked like by comparing their
skeletal remains with those of recent populations, but the samples are
so limited and the interpretations so fraught with uncertainties that
this is an unreliable approach". He concluded that ancient Egypt's
"location at the edge of northeast Africa and its geography as a
corridor between that continent and Asia opened it up to influences from
all directions, in terms of both culture and of demography."
Some modern views on bias in Egyptology
Various scholars have highlighted the role of colonial racism in
shaping the attitudes of early Egyptologists, and criticized the
continued over-representation of North American and European
perspectives in the field.
Diop in his work, "The African Origin of Civilization" argued that the
prevailing views in Egyptology were driven by biased scholarship and
colonial attitudes.Similarily,
Bruce Trigger wrote that early modern scholarship on the Nile Valley
populations had been "marred by a confusion of race, language, and
culture and by an accompanying racism".
Frank Martin, critical of bias in Western scholarship and the
shifting consensus, stated in 1984 that "Egyptologists, archaeologists,
anthropologists, classicists, and scholars from other disciplines who
have touched on the question almost invariably have asserted that
Pharaonic Egyptians were whites. At first, many even dogmatically
asserted that Egyptians were of Asiatic origin. That untenable position
seems to have been abandoned by most serious contemporary scholars, but
these same scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge the fact of the
African origin of Egyptians in the sense of their being racially as well
as culturally and linguistically related to Africans to the south and
west of Egypt, thus leaving us with a people who seem to stand by
themselves and have no ethnic and linguistic ties with any other
people”.
Toby Wilkinson
in 1999 outlined that "The Theory of the 'dynastic race'- a 'master
race" of invaders from the east, to be responsible for imposing
civilisation on the 'primitive' and unsophisticated indigenous Egyptians
- had been articlated by Petrie (1939)...was still being espoused
enthusiastically by scholars such as Emery (1961) and Edwards (1971)"
although he felt that there was a change in perception among scholars at
the time.
Stephen Quirke wrote in 2011 that the UNESCO-sponsored conference
on the General History of Africa in 1974 "did not change the
Eurocentric climate of research" and of the need to incorporate both
African-centred studies and White European, academic persepectives. He
later outlines that "research conferences and publications on the
history and language of Kemet [Egypt] remain dominated.....by those
brought up and trained in European, not African societies and languages
(which include Arabic)".
Sally-Ann Ashton wrote in 2011: "The fact that Ancient Egypt is
forced to justify its African identity through its geographical location
has not gone unnoticed....critics of the mainstream Eurocentric view of
Ancient Egypt claim that not only is the connection between Egypt and
Africa neglected, it is consciously denied". She later outlines "This is
partly the legacy of the "rediscovery" of Egypt by Europe at the end of
the 18th century. In addition to this historical context, Egyptology as
a discipline is dominated by scholars who are White Europeans or North
Americans".
Uros Matic wrote in 2018 that the residue of scientific racism
and old approaches were still present in modern archaeology and
historiography of ancient Egypt and Nubia. He outlines that "although
later authors such as such as Trigger and Tรถrรถk distanced themselves
from racial science and anthropology, they kept this approach to
iconography. What we can notice here are the remnants of the old
colonialist episteme which appear in the works of Trigger, Tรถrรถk, and Donald B. Redford,
however now being part of a new episteme". Matic concludes that
"Epistemological de-colonization of our discipline should not only be a
postcolonial criticism of its past, but a fundamental rethinking of its
colonial remnants in the present, and how these remnants still shape our
interpretations of Egypt and Nubia".
Stuart Tyson Smith
wrote in 2018 that a common practice among Egyptologists was to
"divorce Egypt from its proper northeast African context, instead
framing it as fundamentally part of a Near Eastern or “Mediterranean”
economic, social and political sphere, hardly African at all or at best a
crossroad between the Near East, the eastern Mediterranean and Africa,
which carries with it the implication that it is ultimately not really
part of Africa". He explicitly criticises Van De Mieroop's comments that
ancient Egypt was clearly ‘in Africa’ it was not so clearly‘of Africa’
as reflecting "long-standing Egyptological biases". He concludes that
the interrelated cultural features shared between northeast African
dynamic and Pharonic Egypt are not “survivals” or coincidence, but
shared traditions with common origins in the deep past".
Marc Van De Mieroop wrote in 2021: "It was only recently that
traditional scholarship started to acknowledge the African background of
Egyptian culture, partly in response to world history's aim to replace
dominant western-centered narratives with others than focused more on
the contributions of other regions, including Africa. At the same time,
primarily African diaspora communities wanted the continent's ancient
history to be approached outside a Eurocentric context, and insisted,
for example, on the use of ancient Egyptian term kemet instead of the European one".
Keith Crawford in 2021 presented a critique of the "Black Pharaohs" narrative accepted among mainstream scholars in which the Twenty-fifth Dynasty
rulers were the only dynasty of Black African origin and academic
representation of Egyptian-Kushite interactions. He concludes "The
separation of Egypt from Africa, beginning nearly two centuries ago,
resulted from Egyptologists, historians, and anthropologists
interpreting archaeological finds and physical remains through a prism
blurred by the racism of the time. These views have persisted to this
day, despite overwhelming evidence that refutes them".
Genetic studies have been criticised by several scholars for a
range of methodological problems and providing misleading,
interpretations on racial classifications.
Specifically, Keita and Kittles argue that DNA studies applied to the
Nile Valley region have downplayed or excluded data on comparable,
African populations in order to maintain certain racial models along
with pre-selected data categories.
Boyce and Keita in a later study, argue that certain studies have
adopted a selective approach in sampling, such as using samples drawn
mostly from northern (Lower) Egypt, which has historically had the
presence of more foreigners from the Mediterranean and the Near East,
and using those samples as representing the rest of Egypt. Thus,
excluding the 'darker' south or Upper Egypt which presents a false
impression of Egyptian variability. The authors also note that
chromosonial patterns have featured inconsistent labelling such as
Haplotype V as seen the with use of misleading terms like "Arabic" to
describe it, implying this haplotype is of 'Middle Eastern' origins.
However, when the hapotype V variant is looked at in context, it does
have a very high prevalence in African countries above the Sahara and
in Ethiopia.
Present-day controversies
Today the issues regarding the race of the ancient Egyptians are
"troubled waters which most people who write about ancient Egypt from
within the mainstream of scholarship avoid." The debate, therefore, takes place mainly in the public sphere and tends to focus on a small number of specific issues.
Several scholars, including Diop, have claimed that Tutankhamun was black, and have protested that attempted reconstructions of Tutankhamun's facial features (as depicted on the cover of National Geographic magazine) have represented the king as "too white". Among these writers was Chancellor Williams, who argued that King Tutankhamun, his parents, and grandparents were black.
Forensic artists and physical anthropologists from Egypt, France,
and the United States independently created busts of Tutankhamun, using
a CT-scan
of the skull. Biological anthropologist Susan Anton, the leader of the
American team, said the race of the skull was "hard to call". She stated
that the shape of the cranial cavity indicated an African, while the
nose opening suggested narrow nostrils, which is usually considered to
be a European characteristic. The skull was thus concluded to be that of
a North African. Other experts have argued that neither skull shapes nor nasal openings are a reliable indication of race.
Although modern technology can reconstruct Tutankhamun's facial
structure with a high degree of accuracy, based on CT data from his
mummy, determining his skin tone and eye color
is impossible. The clay model was therefore given a coloring, which,
according to the artist, was based on an "average shade of modern
Egyptians".
Terry Garcia, National Geographic's
executive vice president for mission programs, said, in response to
some of those protesting against the Tutankhamun reconstruction:
The
big variable is skin tone. North Africans, we know today, had a range
of skin tones, from light to dark. In this case, we selected a medium
skin tone, and we say, quite up front, 'This is midrange.' We will never
know for sure what his exact skin tone was or the color of his eyes
with 100% certainty.... Maybe in the future, people will come to a
different conclusion.
When pressed on the issue by American activists in September 2007, the Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass stated "Tutankhamun was not black."
In a November 2007 publication of Ancient Egypt
magazine, Hawass asserted that none of the facial reconstructions
resemble Tut and that, in his opinion, the most accurate representation
of the boy king is the mask from his tomb. The Discovery Channel commissioned a facial reconstruction of Tutankhamun, based on CT scans of a model of his skull, back in 2002.
In 2011, the genomics company iGENEA launched a Tutankhamun DNA
project based on genetic markers that it indicated it had culled from a
Discovery Channel special on the pharaoh. According to the firm, the microsatellite data suggested that Tutankhamun belonged to the haplogroup R1b1a2, the most common paternal clade
among males in Western Europe. Carsten Pusch and Albert Zink, who led
the unit that had extracted Tutankhamun's DNA, chided iGENEA for not
liaising with them before establishing the project. After examining the
footage, they also concluded that the methodology the company used was
unscientific with Putsch calling them "simply impossible".
The race and skin color of Cleopatra VII, the last active Hellenistic ruler of the Macedonian GreekPtolemaic dynasty of Egypt, established in 323 BCE, has also caused some debate, although generally not in scholarly sources. For example, the article "Was Cleopatra Black?" was published in Ebony magazine in 2012, and an article about Afrocentrism from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch mentions the question, too. Mary Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College, traces the main origins of the black Cleopatra claim to the 1946 book by J.A. Rogers
called "World's Great Men of Color.", although noting that the idea of
Cleopatra as black goes back to at least the 19th century.
Lefkowitz refutes Rogers' hypothesis, on various scholarly grounds. The
black Cleopatra claim was further revived in an essay by afrocentrist John Henrik Clarke, chair of African history at Hunter College, entitled "African Warrior Queens." Lefkowitz notes the essay includes the claim that Cleopatra described herself as black in the New Testament's Book of Acts – when in fact Cleopatra had died more than sixty years before the death of Jesus Christ.
The Berlin Cleopatra, a Roman sculpture and marble portrait of the queen in the Altes Museum, 1st century BC
Scholars identify Cleopatra as essentially of Greek ancestry with some Persian and Syrian ancestry, based on the fact that her Macedonian Greek family (the Ptolemaic dynasty) had intermingled with the Seleucid aristocracy of the time. Grant states that Cleopatra probably had not a drop of Egyptian blood and that she "would have described herself as Greek."
Roller notes that "there is absolutely no evidence" that Cleopatra was
racially black African as claimed by what he dismisses as generally not
"credible scholarly sources."
Cleopatra's official coinage (which she would have approved) and the
three portrait busts of her which are considered authentic by scholars,
all match each other, and they portray Cleopatra as a Greek woman. Polo writes that Cleopatra's coinage presents her image with certainty, and asserts that the sculpted portrait of the "Berlin Cleopatra" head is confirmed as having a similar profile.
In 2009, a BBC
documentary speculated that Cleopatra might have been part North
African. This was based largely on the claims of Hilke Thรผr of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, who in the 1990s had examined a headless skeleton of a female child in a 20 BCE tomb in Ephesus (modern Turkey),
together with the old notes and photographs of the now-missing skull.
Thรผr hypothesized the body as that of Arsinoe, half-sister to Cleopatra. Arsinoe and Cleopatra shared the same father (Ptolemy XII Auletes) but had different mothers,
with Thรผr claiming the alleged African ancestry came from the
skeleton's mother. To date it has never been definitively proved that
the skeleton is that of Arsinoe IV. When a DNA test attempted to
determine the identity of the child, it was impossible to get an
accurate reading since the bones had been handled too many times, and the skull had been lost in Germany during World War II.
Numerous studies have shown that cranial variation has a low
correlation with race, and rather that cranial variation was strongly
correlated with climate variables. Mary Beard
states that the age of the skeleton is too young to be that of Arsinoe
(the bones said to be that of a 15–18-year-old child, with Arsinoe being
around her mid twenties at her death).
Great Sphinx of Giza
The Sphinx in profile in 2010
The identity of the model for the Great Sphinx of Giza is unknown. Most experts believe that the face of the Sphinx represents the likeness of the PharaohKhafra, although a few Egyptologists and interested amateurs have proposed different hypotheses.
An early description of the Sphinx, "typically negro in all its features", is recorded in the travel notes of a French scholar, Volney, who visited Egypt between 1783 and 1785 along with French novelist Gustave Flaubert. A similar description was given in the "well-known book" by Vivant Denon, where he described the sphinx as "the character is African; but the mouth, the lips of which are thick." Following Volney, Denon, and other early writers, numerous Afrocentric scholars, such as Du Bois, Diop and Asante have characterized the face of the Sphinx as Black, or "Negroid".
American geologist Robert M. Schoch has written that the "Sphinx has a distinctive African, Nubian, or Negroid aspect which is lacking in the face of Khafre", but he was described by others such as Ronald H. Fritze and Mark Lehner of being a "pseudoscientific writer". David S. Anderson writes in Lost City, Found Pyramid: Understanding Alternative Archaeologies and Pseudoscientific Practices that Van Sertima's claim that "the sphinx was a portrait statue of the black pharoah Khafre" is a form of "pseudoarchaeology" not supported by evidence. He compares it to the claim that Olmec colossal heads had "African origins", which is not taken seriously by Mesoamerican scholars such as Richard Diehl and Ann Cyphers.
Ancient Egyptians referred to their homeland as Kmt (conventionally pronounced as Kemet). According to Cheikh Anta Diop, the Egyptians referred to themselves as "Black" people or kmt, and km was the etymological root of other words, such as Kam or Ham, which refer to Black people in Hebrew tradition. A review of David Goldenberg's The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam
states that Goldenberg "argues persuasively that the biblical name Ham
bears no relationship at all to the notion of blackness and as of now is
of unknown etymology". Diop, William Leo Hansberry, and Aboubacry Moussa Lam have argued that kmt was derived from the skin color of the Nile valley people, which Diop claimed was black. The claim that the ancient Egyptians had black skin has become a cornerstone of Afrocentric historiography.
Mainstream scholars hold that kmt means "the black land"
or "the black place", and that this is a reference to the fertile black
soil that was washed down from Central Africa by the annual Nile inundation. By contrast the barren desert outside the narrow confines of the Nile watercourse was called dลกrt (conventionally pronounced deshret) or "the red land". Raymond Faulkner's Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian translates kmt into "Egyptians", Gardiner translates it as "the Black Land, Egypt".
At the UNESCO Symposium in 1974, Sauneron, Obenga, and Diop concluded that KMT and KM meant black. However, Sauneron clarified that the adjective Kmtyw means "people of the black land" rather than "black people", and that the Egyptians never used the adjective Kmtyw to refer to the various black peoples they knew of, they only used it to refer to themselves.
Ancient Egyptian tombs and temples contained thousands of paintings,
sculptures, and written works, which reveal a great deal about the
people of that time. However, their depictions of themselves in their
surviving art and artifacts are rendered in sometimes symbolic, rather
than realistic, pigments. As a result, ancient Egyptian artifacts
provide sometimes conflicting and inconclusive evidence of the ethnicity
of the people who lived in Egypt during dynastic times.
In their own art, "Egyptians are often represented in a color that is officially called dark red", according to Diop.
Arguing against other theories, Diop quotes Champollion-Figeac, who
states, "one distinguishes on Egyptian monuments several species of
blacks, differing...with respect to complexion, which makes Negroes
black or copper-colored."
Regarding an expedition by King Sesostris, Cherubini states the
following concerning captured southern Africans, "except for the panther
skin about their loins, are distinguished by their color, some entirely
black, others dark brown.
University of Chicago scholars assert that Nubians are generally
depicted with black paint, but the skin pigment used in Egyptian
paintings to refer to Nubians can range "from dark red to brown to
black". This can be observed in paintings from the tomb of the Egyptian Huy, as well as Ramses II's temple at Beit el-Wali.
Also, Snowden indicates that Romans had accurate knowledge of "negroes
of a red, copper-colored complexion ... among African tribes".
Conversely, in 2003 Najovits wrote that "Egyptian art depicted
Egyptians on the one hand and Nubians and other blacks on the other hand
with distinctly different ethnic characteristics and depicted this
abundantly and often aggressively. The Egyptians accurately, arrogantly
and aggressively made national and ethnic distinctions from a very early
date in their art and literature."
He continues, "There is an extraordinary abundance of Egyptian works of
art which clearly depicted sharply contrasted reddish-brown Egyptians
and black Nubians."
Barbara Mertz in 2011 wrote in Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt:
"The concept of race would have been totally alien to them [Ancient
Egyptians] [..]The skin color that painters usually used for men is a
reddish brown. Women were depicted as lighter in complexion,
perhaps because they didn’t spend so much time out of doors. Some
individuals are shown with black skins. I cannot recall a single example
of the words “black,” “brown,” or “white” being used in an Egyptian
text to describe a person." She gives the example of one of Thutmose III’s “sole companions”, who was Nubian or Kushite. In his funerary scroll, he is shown with dark brown skin instead of the conventional reddish brown used for Egyptians.
Table of Nations controversy
The "Table of Nations", from Lepsius: Top row, left to right: "Aamu" (Asiatics), "Nehesu" (Nubians), and "Themehu" (Libyans); middle row: a deity, "Reth" (Egyptians), "Aamu" (Asiatics).
However, Manu Ampim, a professor at Merritt College specializing in African and African American history and culture, claims in the book Modern Fraud: The Forged Ancient Egyptian Statues of Ra-Hotep and Nofret,
that many ancient Egyptian statues and artworks are modern frauds that
have been created specifically to hide the "fact" that the ancient
Egyptians were black, while authentic artworks that demonstrate black
characteristics are systematically defaced or even "modified". Ampim
repeatedly makes the accusation that the Egyptian authorities are
systematically destroying evidence that "proves" that the ancient
Egyptians were black, under the guise of renovating and conserving the
applicable temples and structures. He further accuses "European"
scholars of wittingly participating in and abetting this process.
Ampim has a specific concern about the painting of the "Table of Nations" in the Tomb of Ramesses III (KV11). The "Table of Nations"
is a standard painting that appears in a number of tombs, and they were
usually provided for the guidance of the soul of the deceased. Among other things, it described the "four races of men" as follows: (translation by E.A. Wallis Budge) "The first are RETH, the second are AAMU, the third are NEHESU, and the fourth are THEMEHU. The RETH are Egyptians,
the AAMU are dwellers in the deserts to the east and north-east of
Egypt, the NEHESU are the black races, and the THEMEHU are the
fair-skinned Libyans."
The archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius documented many ancient Egyptian tomb paintings in his work Denkmรคler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien. In 1913, after the death of Lepsius, an updated reprint of the work was produced, edited by Kurt Sethe.
This printing included an additional section, called the
"Ergรคnzungsband" in German, which incorporated many illustrations that
did not appear in Lepsius' original work. One of them, plate 48,
illustrated one example of each of the four "nations" as depicted in
KV11, and shows the "Egyptian nation" and the "Nubian nation" as
identical to each other in skin color and dress. Professor Ampim has
declared that plate 48 is a true reflection of the original painting,
and that it "proves" that the ancient Egyptians were identical in
appearance to the Nubians,
even though he admits no other examples of the "Table of Nations" show
this similarity. He has further accused "Euro-American writers" of
attempting to mislead the public on this issue.
The late Egyptologist Frank J. Yurco
visited the tomb of Ramesses III (KV11), and in a 1996 article on the
Ramesses III tomb reliefs he pointed out that the depiction of plate 48
in the Ergรคnzungsband section is not a correct depiction of what is
actually painted on the walls of the tomb. Yurco notes, instead, that
plate 48 is a "pastiche" of samples of what is on the tomb walls,
arranged from Lepsius' notes after his death, and that a picture of a
Nubian person has erroneously been labeled in the pastiche as an
Egyptian person. Yurco points also to the much more recent photographs
of Dr. Erik Hornung as a correct depiction of the actual paintings. (Erik Hornung, The Valley of the Kings: Horizon of Eternity,
1990). Ampim nonetheless continues to claim that plate 48 shows
accurately the images that stand on the walls of KV11, and he
categorically accuses both Yurco and Hornung of perpetrating a
deliberate deception for the purposes of misleading the public about the
true race of the ancient Egyptians.
Fayyum mummy portraits
The realistic Fayum mummy portraits show the diversity of Egyptians in the Roman period
The Roman era Fayum mummy portraits attached to coffins containing the latest dated mummies discovered in the Faiyum Oasis represent a population of both native Egyptians and those with mixed Greek heritage.
The dental morphology of the mummies align more with the indigenous
North African population than Greek or other later colonial European
settlers.
Black queen controversy
The late British Africanist Basil Davidson
stated "Whether the Ancient Egyptians were as black or as brown in skin
color as other Africans may remain an issue of emotive dispute;
probably, they were both. Their own artistic conventions painted them as
pink, but pictures on their tombs show they often married queens shown
as entirely black being from the south."
Ahmose-Nefertari is an example. In most depictions of Ahmose-Nefertari, she is pictured with black skin, while in some instances her skin is blue or red. In 1939 Flinders Petrie said "an invasion from the south...established a black queen as the divine ancestress of the XVIIIth dynasty" He also said "a possibility of the black being symbolic has been suggested" and "Nefertari must have married a Libyan, as she was the mother of Amenhetep I, who was of fair Libyan style." In 1961 Alan Gardiner, in describing the walls of tombs in the Deir el-Medina
area, noted in passing that Ahmose-Nefertari was "well represented" in
these tomb illustrations, and that her countenance was sometimes black
and sometimes blue. He did not offer any explanation for these colors,
but noted that her probable ancestry ruled out that she might have had
black blood. In 1974, Diop described Ahmose-Nefertari as "typically negroid." In the controversial book Black Athena, the hypotheses of which have been widely rejected by mainstream scholarship, Martin Bernal considered her skin color in paintings to be a clear sign of Nubian ancestry. In 1981 Michel Gitton noted that while in most artistic depictions of the queen she is pictured with black complexion, there are other cases in which she is shown with a pink, golden, blue, or dark red skin color.
Gitton called the issue of Ahmose-Nefertari's black color "a
serious gap in the Egyptological research, which allows approximations
or untruths".
He pointed out that there is no known depiction of her painted during
her lifetime (she is represented with the same light skin as other
represented individuals in tomb TT15, before her deification); the
earliest black skin depiction appears in tomb TT161, circa 150 years after her death.
Barbara Lesko wrote in 1996 that Ahmose-Nefertari was "sometimes
portrayed by later generations as having been black, although her coffin
portrait gives her the typical light yellow skin of women."
In 2003, Betsy Bryan wrote in The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt
that "the factors linking Amenhotep I and his mother with the
necropolis region, with deified rulers, and with rejuvenation generally
was visually transmitted by representations of the pair with black or
blue skin – both colours of resurrection." In 2004 Aidan Dodson
and Dyan Hilton recognized in a later depiction of the queen, "the
black skin of a deity of resurrection" in connection to her role as a
patron goddess of the Theban necropolis. Scholars such as Joyce Tyldesley,
Sigrid Hodel-Hoenes, and Graciela Gestoso Singer, argued that the skin
color of Ahmose-Nefertari is indicative of her role as a goddess of resurrection, since black is both the color of the fertile land of Egypt and that of Duat, the underworld. Singer recognizes that "Some scholars have suggested that this is a sign of Nubian ancestry."
Singer also states a statuette of Ahmose-Nefertari at the Museo Egizio
in Turin which shows her with a black face, though her arms and feet are
not darkened, thus suggesting that the black coloring has an
iconographic motive and does not reflect her actual appearance.
In 2014, Margaret Bunson wrote that "the unusual depictions of
Ahmose-Nefertari in blue-black tones of deification reflect her status
and cult." In a wooden votive statue of Ahmose-Nefertari, currently in the Louvre museum, her skin was painted red, a color commonly seen symbolizing life or a higher being, or elevated status.
Historical hypotheses
Since the second half of the 20th century, typological and hierarchical models of race have increasingly been rejected by scientists, and most scholars have held that applying modern notions of race to ancient Egypt is anachronistic. The current position of modern scholarship is that the Egyptian civilization was an indigenous Nile Valley development (see population history of Egypt).
At the UNESCO symposium in 1974, most participants concluded that the
ancient Egyptian population was indigenous to the Nile Valley, and was
made up of people from north and south of the Sahara who were
differentiated by their color.
The Black Egyptian hypothesis is the hypothesis that ancient Egypt was a "Black" civilization.
Although there is consensus that Ancient Egypt was indigenous to
Africa, the hypothesis that it was a "Black" civilization has met with
"profound" disagreement, particularly because it rests upon a scientifically outdated conception of race.
The Black Egyptian hypothesis includes a particular focus on links to Sub Saharan cultures and the questioning of the race of specific notable individuals from Dynastic times, including Tutankhamun the person represented in the Great Sphinx of Giza, and the Greek Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra. Advocates of the Black African model rely heavily on writings from Classical Greek historians, including Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Herodotus. Advocates claim that these "classical" authors referred to Egyptians as "Black with woolly hair".
The Greek word used was "melanchroes", and the English language
translation of this Greek word is disputed, being translated by many as
"dark skinned" and by many others as "black".
Diop said "Herodotus applied melanchroes to both Ethiopians and
Egyptians...and melanchroes is the strongest term in Greek to denote
blackness." Snowden claims that Diop is distorting his classical sources and is quoting them selectively. There is dispute about the historical accuracy of the works of Herodotus – some scholars support the reliability of Herodotus while other scholars regard his works as being unreliable as historical sources, particularly those relating to Egypt.
Other claims used to support the Black Hypothesis included
anthropological measurements of Egyptian mummies, testing melanin levels
in a small sample of mummies, language affinities between ancient Egyptian language and sub-saharan languages, interpretations of the origin of the name Kmt, conventionally pronounced Kemet, used by the ancient Egyptians to describe themselves or their land (depending on points of view), biblical traditions, shared B blood group between Egyptians and West Africans, and interpretations of the depictions of the Egyptians in numerous paintings and statues. The hypothesis also claimed cultural affiliations, such as circumcision, matriarchy, totemism, hair braiding, head binding, and kingship cults. Artifacts found at Qustul (near Abu Simbel – Modern Sudan) in 1960–64 were seen as showing that ancient Egypt and the A-Group culture of Nubia shared the same culture and were part of the greater Nile Valley sub-stratum, but more recent finds in Egypt indicate that the Qustul rulers probably adopted/emulated the symbols of Egyptian pharaohs. Authors and critics state the hypothesis is primarily adopted by Afrocentrists.
The current position of modern scholarship is that the Egyptian civilization was an indigenous Nile Valley development (see population history of Egypt), and that modern racial categories like "Black" are social constructs inapplicable to Ancient Egypt.
Asiatic race theory
The Asiatic race theory,
which has been rejected by mainstream scholarship, is the hypothesis
that the ancient Egyptians were the lineal descendants of the biblical Ham, through his son Mizraim.
This theory was the most dominant view from the Early Middle Ages (c. 500 AD) all the way up to the early 19th century.
The descendants of Ham were traditionally considered to be the
darkest-skinned branch of humanity, either because of their geographic
allotment to Africa or because of the Curse of Ham. Thus, Diop cites Gaston Maspero
"Moreover, the Bible states that Mesraim, son of Ham, brother of Chus
(Kush) ... and of Canaan, came from Mesopotamia to settle with his
children on the banks of the Nile."
By the 20th century, the Asiatic race theory and its various
offshoots were abandoned but were superseded by two related theories:
the Eurocentric Hamitic hypothesis,
asserting that a Caucasian racial group moved into North and East
Africa from early prehistory subsequently bringing with them all
advanced agriculture, technology and civilization, and the Dynastic race theory,
proposing that Mesopotamian invaders were responsible for the dynastic
civilization of Egypt (c. 3000 BC). In sharp contrast to the Asiatic
race theory, neither of these theories proposes that Caucasians were the
indigenous inhabitants of Egypt.
At the UNESCO "Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script" in Cairo
in 1974, none of the participants explicitly voiced support for any
theory where Egyptians were Caucasian with a dark pigmentation.". The current position of modern scholarship is that the Egyptian civilization was an indigenous Nile Valley development (see population history of Egypt).
Caucasian / Hamitic hypothesis
The Caucasian hypothesis, which has been rejected by mainstream
scholarship, is the hypothesis that the Nile valley "was originally
peopled by a branch of the Caucasian race". It was proposed in 1844 by Samuel George Morton, who acknowledged that Negroes were present in ancient Egypt but claimed they were either captives or servants. George Gliddon
(1844) wrote: "Asiatic in their origin .... the Egyptians were white
men, of no darker hue than a pure Arab, a Jew, or a Phoenician."
The similar Hamitic hypothesis, which has been rejected by mainstream scholarship, developed directly from the Asiatic Race Theory, and argued that the Ethiopid and Arabid
populations of the Horn of Africa were the inventors of agriculture and
had brought all civilization to Africa. It asserted that these people
were Caucasians, not Negroid. It also rejected any Biblical basis
despite using Hamitic as the theory's name. Charles Gabriel Seligman in his Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan
(1913) and later works argued that the ancient Egyptians were among
this group of Caucasian Hamites, having arrived in the Nile Valley
during early prehistory and introduced technology and agriculture to
primitive natives they found there.
The Italian anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi (1901) believed that ancient Egyptians were the Eastern African (Hamitic) branch of the Mediterranean race,
which he called "Eurafrican". According to Sergi, the Mediterranean
race or "Eurafrican" contains three varieties or sub-races: the African
(Hamitic) branch, the Mediterranean "proper" branch and the Nordic
(depigmented) branch. Sergi maintained in summary that the Mediterranean race
(excluding the depigmented Nordic or 'white') is: "a brown human
variety, neither white nor Negroid, but pure in its elements, that is to
say not a product of the mixture of Whites with Negroes or Negroid
peoples". Grafton Elliot Smith modified the theory in 1911, stating that the ancient Egyptians were a dark haired "brown race",
most closely "linked by the closest bonds of racial affinity to the
Early Neolithic populations of the North African littoral and South
Europe", and not Negroid. Smith's "brown race" is not synonymous or equivalent with Sergi's Mediterranean race. The Hamitic Hypothesis was still popular in the 1960s and late 1970s and was supported notably by Anthony John Arkell and George Peter Murdock.
At the UNESCO "Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script" in Cairo
in 1974, none of the participants explicitly voiced support for any
theory where Egyptians were Caucasian with a dark pigmentation." The current position of modern scholarship is that the Egyptian civilization was an indigenous Nile Valley development (see population history of Egypt).
Turanid race hypothesis
The Turanid race hypothesis, which has been rejected by mainstream
scholarship, is the hypothesis that the ancient Egyptians belonged to
the Turanid race, linking them to the Tatars.
It was proposed by Egyptologist Samuel Sharpe
in 1846, who was "inspired" by some ancient Egyptian paintings, which
depict Egyptians with sallow or yellowish skin. He said "From the colour
given to the women in their paintings we learn that their skin was
yellow, like that of the Mongul Tartars, who have given their name to
the Mongolian variety of the human race.... The single lock of hair on
the young nobles reminds us also of the Tartars."
The current position of modern scholarship is that the Egyptian civilization was an indigenous Nile Valley development (see population history of Egypt).
The Dynastic race theory, which has been rejected by mainstream scholarship, is the hypothesis that a Mesopotamian force had invaded Egypt in predynastic times, imposed itself on the indigenous Badarian people, and become their rulers. It further argued that the Mesopotamian-founded state or states then conquered both Upper and Lower Egypt and founded the First Dynasty of Egypt.
It was proposed in the early 20th century by Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, who deduced that skeletal remains found at pre-dynastic sites at Naqada
(Upper Egypt) indicated the presence of two different races, with one
race differentiated physically by a noticeably larger skeletal structure
and cranial capacity.
Petrie also noted new architectural styles—the distinctly Mesopotamian
"niched-facade" architecture—pottery styles, cylinder seals and a few
artworks, as well as numerous Predynastic rock and tomb paintings
depicting Mesopotamian style boats, symbols, and figures. Based on
plentiful cultural evidence, Petrie concluded that the invading ruling
elite was responsible for the seemingly sudden rise of Egyptian
civilization. In the 1950s, the Dynastic Race Theory was widely accepted
by mainstream scholarship.
While there is clear evidence the Naqada II culture borrowed
abundantly from Mesopotamia, the Naqada II period had a large degree of
continuity with the Naqada I period, and the changes which did happen during the Naqada periods happened over significant amounts of time.
The most commonly held view today is that the achievements of the First
Dynasty were the result of a long period of cultural and political
development,
and the current position of modern scholarship is that the Egyptian
civilization was an indigenous Nile Valley development (see population history of Egypt).
The Senegalese Egyptologist Cheikh Anta Diop,
fought against the Dynastic Race Theory with their own "Black Egyptian"
theory and claimed, among other things, that Eurocentric scholars
supported the Dynastic Race Theory "to avoid having to admit that
Ancient Egyptians were black". Martin Bernal proposed that the Dynastic Race theory was conceived by European scholars to deny Egypt its African roots.
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