The race and origins of the ancient Egyptians have been a source of considerable debate. Scholars in the late and early twentieth centuries rejected any consideration of the Egyptians as black Africans by defining the Egyptians either as non-African (i.e., either Near Eastern or Indo- Aryan), or as members of a separate brown (as opposed to black) race, or as a mixture of lighter-skinned peoples with black Africans. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Afrocentric scholars have countered this Eurocentric and often racist perspective by characterizing the Egyptians as black and African. A common feature of all of these approaches, including the last, is the connection of race to cultural achievement. At the same time, however, modem physical anthropologists have increasingly challenged the entire notion of race, replacing it with the more complex and scientifically based population genetics.
The origins of the modern conception of race derive from the work of nineteenth-century anthropologists like L. H. Morgan and E. B. Tyior, who developed "scientific" unilinear evolutionary models for the development of human beings from "savagery" to "civilization." This model profoundly influenced early Egyptological views of race. Racial groups were ranked by evolutionary categories linked to supposed intellectual capacities based on elaborate cranial measurements, allegedly providing causal links among phenotypic traits, mental capacity, and sociopolitical dominance. This methodology, not coincidentally, reinforced the existing Euro-American domination of Third World peoples with the claim of scientifically "objective" methodologies based on race and evolution. Thus, the great achievements of ancient Egypt could not flow from black Africans, since theirs was an inferior race;
so the "Dynastic Race" must have been white, or at least brown.
As early as 1897, Franz Boas challenged this racial ideology, in particular the argument for connections among language, culture, and biology (i.e., race). Boas demonstrated that supposedly distinctive core racial indicators could change quickly in response to clothing styles, nutrition, and cultural and environmental factors. Ashley Montague, a student of Boas, played a key role in developing and disseminating this concept; he argued in Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York, 1942) that the old paradigm of static races should be replaced by dynamic populations with overlapping characteristics. Far from being absolute, genetic traits are distributed in dines, or continuously varying distributions of traits inconsistent with racial categories. Modern physical anthropology has demonstrated that 94 percent of human variation is found within human populations, rather than between the major populations traditionally labeled races. Biological characteristics affected by natural selection, migration, or drift are distributed in geographic gradations. These encompass all the features used to define racial physical "phenotypes," including facial form, hair texture, blood type, and epidermal melanin (the chemical determining darkness of skin). These physical features cross alleged racial boundaries as if they were nonexistent, leading to the inevitable conclusion that there are no biological races, just dines. Physical anthropologists are increasingly concluding that racial definitions are the culturally defined product of selective perception and should be replaced in biological terms by the study of populations and dines. Consequently, any characterization of the race of the ancient Egyptians depends on modern cultural definitions, not 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.
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The origins of the modern conception of race derive from the work of nineteenth-century anthropologists like L. H. Morgan and E. B. Tyior, who developed "scientific" unilinear evolutionary models for the development of human beings from "savagery" to "civilization." This model profoundly influenced early Egyptological views of race. Racial groups were ranked by evolutionary categories linked to supposed intellectual capacities based on elaborate cranial measurements, allegedly providing causal links among phenotypic traits, mental capacity, and sociopolitical dominance. This methodology, not coincidentally, reinforced the existing Euro-American domination of Third World peoples with the claim of scientifically "objective" methodologies based on race and evolution. Thus, the great achievements of ancient Egypt could not flow from black Africans, since theirs was an inferior race;
so the "Dynastic Race" must have been white, or at least brown.
As early as 1897, Franz Boas challenged this racial ideology, in particular the argument for connections among language, culture, and biology (i.e., race). Boas demonstrated that supposedly distinctive core racial indicators could change quickly in response to clothing styles, nutrition, and cultural and environmental factors. Ashley Montague, a student of Boas, played a key role in developing and disseminating this concept; he argued in Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York, 1942) that the old paradigm of static races should be replaced by dynamic populations with overlapping characteristics. Far from being absolute, genetic traits are distributed in dines, or continuously varying distributions of traits inconsistent with racial categories. Modern physical anthropology has demonstrated that 94 percent of human variation is found within human populations, rather than between the major populations traditionally labeled races. Biological characteristics affected by natural selection, migration, or drift are distributed in geographic gradations. These encompass all the features used to define racial physical "phenotypes," including facial form, hair texture, blood type, and epidermal melanin (the chemical determining darkness of skin). These physical features cross alleged racial boundaries as if they were nonexistent, leading to the inevitable conclusion that there are no biological races, just dines. Physical anthropologists are increasingly concluding that racial definitions are the culturally defined product of selective perception and should be replaced in biological terms by the study of populations and dines. Consequently, any characterization of the race of the ancient Egyptians depends on modern cultural definitions, not 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.
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