Recently came across a portrait of a mother and her children from Egypt, made about 1800 years ago. They look pretty much exactly like present-day Arabs and North-Africans look. Not black. Not white. Distinctly Middle-Eastern in phenotype.

I’ve heard many people say “Egyptians were black! They only look like Arabs today because of the Muslim conquests!” but this is, of course, demonstrably false when the people above already look like Arabs, hundreds of years before the Prophet Muhammad was even born. Now Arabs, of course, come in many shades. From very dark-skinned Yemenites to fair-skilled Syrians and Lebanese in the Levant. Still, very few of them look like black Africans.

We have a pretty good idea of what the ancient Egyptians looked like, even much further back — their mummies remain. And studying their often remarkably well-kept mortal remains, we find more confirmation of what I wrote before… just look at the reconstruction above of the body of Ramesses II, Egypt’s longets-lived Pharaoh. He rather reminds me of Sir Ben Kingsley. If I spotted him today in a little Moroccan or Egyptian teashop, I wouldn’t be surprised. He would not look out of place one bit.

Ancient Egyptians weren’t, of course, a monolith. There were darker people, paler people. There was intermarriage of Egyptians with dark Africans and more fair-skinned Eastern European traders. On average, they just looked exactly as they do now — like the same North-African people you still see today.