There are a number of different ways in which we can define the ancient Egyptians themselves as a distinct racial and ethnic group, but the question of their roots and their sense of their own identity has provoked considerable debate. Linguistically, they belonged to the Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic) family, but this is simply another way of saying that, as their geographical position implies, their language had some similarities to contemporary languages both in parts of Africa and in the Near East.
Anthropological studies suggest that the predynastic population included a mixture of racial types (negroid, Mediterranean, and European), but it is the question of the skeletal evidence at the beginning of the pharaonic period that has proved to be most controversial over the years. Whereas the anthropological evidence from this date was once interpreted, by Bryan Emery and others, as the rapid conquest of Egypt by people from the east whose remains were racially distinct from the indigenous Egyptians, it is now argued by some scholars that there may have been a much slower period of demographic change, probably involving the gradual infiltration of a different physical type from Syria-Palestine, via the eastern Delta.
The iconography of the Egyptians’ depictions of foreigners suggests that for much of their history they saw themselves as midway between the black Africans and the paler Asiatics. It is also clear, however, that neither Nubian nor Syro-Palestinian origins were regarded as particularly disadvantageous factors in terms of individuals’ status or career prospects, particularly in the cosmopolitan climate of the New Kingdom, when Asiatic religious cults and technological developments were particularly widely accepted. Thus the demonstrably negroid features of the high official Maiherpri did not prevent him from attaining the special privilege of a burial in the Valley of the Kings at about the time of Thutmose 111 (1479-1425 bc). In the same way, a man called Aper-el, whose name indicates his Near Eastern roots, rose to the rank of vizier (the highest civil office below that of the king himself) in the late i8th Dynasty.
World History
