Apparently scientists dispute the bloodline of the Ancient Egyptians. Some say they were closer to modern day Black Africans than Caucasians but other studies say otherwise.
What’s the truth about this?
What do you mean by “closer to modern day Black Africans”? Black Africans are not one single group. There’s considerably more genetic diversity among Africans than in the rest of the world combined.
Ancient Egypt lasted about 3000 years, from the pre dynastic era to the final conquest by the Romans under Octavian after Actim in 30BC.
Egypt saw many bands of peoples and conquerors in that time. You had black Nubians to red headed probably Hyksos descended Ramses dynasty and everything else. And they mixed and continued to do so.
Your language is what mother spoke. Your ethnicity is what grandad said it was. Your “bloodline” is whatever is convenient.
Wasn’t it clear? He said closer as compared to Caucasians. One could claim that any population is “not a single group”.
But I’d like to see a cite that there is scientific controversy about this before answering the question.
I was thinking I ran across a old long, insane thread on this subject, but some googling shows that that thread was about European royalty being black. Plenty of older threads are on Afrocentrism and Egypt, though.
The claim that Egyptians were substantially (on up to “wholly”) black, sub-Saharan Africans is pretty much nonsense promoted in the last few decades by (for want of a better word) “black pride” groups, and not much more accurate in the historical record than the invention from whole cloth of the “goddess religions” the power-feminist factions promote/d.
There were are are undoubtedly strains of all African groups in the long lines of Egyptian genealogy, including “Nubian” from the south, but no serious expert denies that the original founding and major northern component of the population are of Indus Valley/Mediterranean origins. They were not Caucasian (except perhaps in a technical sense) and would not pass for anything like northern or central European today. All good evidence is that they would look, individually and as crowds, much like what we see in the Middle East today.
With some lighter and darker variations, and some negroid features from Nubian slave girl grandmothers and scribes, and the mix you’d expect from a civilization spanning three millennia and nearly half a huge and varied continent.
But in general, treat any 'black Egypt" claims with great suspicion until they’re backed with accepted sources and interpretations, not some revelation from the 1970s.
Black southern Nubians are clearly depicted as a different colour in Egyptian art than Egyptians.
Indus Valley??? Egypt is on the Mediterranean Sea so that makes it Mediterranean by definition. What possible proof do you have for any Indus Valley origin?
A couple of scientists, a few scientists, or a majority? Where are you reading this, and what kind of “scientists” are saying this?
middle eastern people of course also show a lot of variation in physical phenotype as well. There are blond-haired, blue-eyed Circassians in Jordan and then there are Yemenis who look quite “African”, like that girl in the National Geographic piece on yemen about ten years ago.
the master speaks!
Close, “SDStaff DavidB, Straight Dope Science Advisory Board”
It’s startling to realize that the major founding text of Afrocentrism, Black Athena by Martin Bernal, is now 30 years old. It caused a huge controversy when it first appeared, with counter-books and counter-counter-books flying back and forth. AFAIK, the most specific claims about African founding of Mediterranean cultures have been completely discredited. This is now pretty old stuff. My impression is that pretty much everybody realized he had way overstepped his case, possibly just to provoke people and remind them of the overwhelming racism that pervades classics studies, and a better balanced look at the diversity of the past has resulted.
For this thread, I think the best online one-page read is What Race Were the Ancient Egyptians? It collects a variety of Egyptian painting clearly depicting different skin colors for Syrians, Nubians, Libyans, and Egyptians. That Egyptians and Nubians were consistently depicted as black while Egyptians thought of themselves as brown makes it difficult to sell the idea that the population saw itself as black. That is not exactly the same as a racial difference, though.
Tomb paintings usually depicted Nubians with noticeably darker skin than Egyptians.
Tomb paintings usually depicted Hittites and Canaanites with noticeably lighter skin than Egyptians.
However, color in Egyptian art was often meant to convey symbolic meaning, rather than literal representation, so one should be cautious about drawing any conclusions.
An interesting essay on the topic:
Bolding mine.
Bummer of a typo there Exapno. 
Once I start typing my fingers take on a life of their own. Let me retype that properly.
For this thread, I think the best online one-page read is What Race Were the Ancient Egyptians? It collects a variety of Egyptian painting clearly depicting different skin colors for Syrians, Nubians, Libyans, and Egyptians. That Nubians were consistently depicted as black while Egyptians thought of themselves as brown makes it difficult to sell the idea that the population saw itself as black. That is not exactly the same as a racial difference, though.
:smack: sorry! For some reason I never see the bylines in those articles; some mental glitch or something.
mc
Here is a fairly lifelike depiction of an Egyptian couple who lived 5000 years ago.
What would you call them.
Jared and Ivanka?
I’d have to go back through some older books in my AEgyptian collection, but my understanding is that the population of Egypt at the time of Narmer was formed of inflow from both Northern Africa and travelers/captives/migrants from Mesopotamia. Of course, this is probably spanning millennia before Duane Johnson turned into a Scorpion, but war with the adjacent Asian nations certainly added Caucasian/Mesopotamian/Hittite and other peoples to the mix by the time of the Old Kingdom.