Arabic would be an awful misnomer, since it refers to an ethnicity and a region the Ancient Egyptians were not a part of. I’ve rarely heard the word by itself used as a racial type. A “North African Caucasoid” would be much more appropriate.
Setting aside the descriptors of “Caucasian,” “Negroid” and “Mongloid” for a minute – by lay American standards, I see this picture of Tutakhamen, I think: that’s a black man. Mixed, or biracial but very definitely black. I venture the average African-American would say the same thing, hook nose or not.
So’s Haile Selaisse of Ethiopia.
But as I said: “race” is mutable. Blackness is a lot more flexible than the purity of whiteness and Asianness.
In Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, there’s a terrific description of the mortician in Memphis (and the Memphis of North Africa as well) “He’d seen black guys who’d looked like that. He’d seen white guys with tans that looked like that.”
Again, that betrays more my very common cultural bias than an absolute standard.
Colibri: Oh, tosh. I misspoke. We’ve communicated enough that you should know this isn’t a death wish on Boomers, jeez.
Lochdale: I don’t view the “one drop rule” as Southern racism; it’s too ingrained into the whole of African-American mores and cultural, has been since the 19th century. Jim Crow was Southern racism.
Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongloid need to be retired as descriptors.
Sorry, I don’t use American standards and neither did the ancient Egyptians. By Nazi standards, I should have been gassed twice; by Ben Franklin’s standards I shouldn’t have been allowed to visit the US of A even as a tourist; by Spanish standards I’m white. I use Spanish standards; my apology (for real) for not specifying it.
I once had a Jamaican landlady who would have been about one-eight black, seven-eights white (some of those eights were unknown; her skin color was about the same light brown as mine but you could see there had been a black ancestor somewhere). So by those American standards, I imagine you would have considered her black. Each generation of her descendants would get darker and darker; she would still say things like “you can’t trust dem colerd”. She saw herself as white (black greatgrandma and all), her first husband as “ha’f an’ ha’f but 'e was a 'ood man, 'e din’t beat me none”, the husbands of her daughter and granddaughter as “colerd”.
Or, we could just forget the whole silly notion of fitting every ethinic group into some predetermined racial box and just call them “Egyptians”.
Askia , I think you’d consider about half of Spain black. Just don’t tell all those guys who complain about the Black immigrants, ok? They’d get pretty pissed. That picture of Tut looks like a gypsy/notgypsy half and half to me.
Whoa. Half of Spain isn’t black?
As this is a thread in “General Questions” about Egyptian racial categorization, I thought correcting information relating to OP would be helpful. Sorry if that bothers you. I didn’t say they should be primarily called “North AAfrican Caucasoids.” I think ethnicity is much more important than race. But I don’t think my opinion about that general subject has much relevance to the precise OP.
Hear hear. I’m surprised to see them used here.
That’s a fairly expansive view of “blackness” you have there Askia. The problem I have with it is that certain historians/pundits/politicians of the Afro-centric persuasion use a similarly broad view of “blackness” to claim all of the accomplishments of certain cultures and nations as their own despite all evidence to the contrary.
Put another way, would the ancient Egyptians have considered themselves negroid? Did they have more in common with Arabic and European culture than with sub-Saharan African culture? For today’s African-American who can trace his or her history back to West Africa to claim some sort of kinship (or ownership) with the Egyptians lacks intellectual merit. It would be akin to me as an Irishman claiming “kinship” with the Mongols just because they intermarried with the Slavic peoples.
Lastly, even the Moors had significant Arabic (that is, caucasoid) stock so your claim that Spain is half-black (in jest I presume) doesn’t hold water.
Lochdale. At the risk of veering this thread even more off-topic, I admit to a very wide attitude towards “blackness,” a fairly narrow view of “white” and “African-American,” of parsing the niggling differences between “nigra”, “nigger” and “nigga” and to co-opting the term “diaspora.” I think race is mutable, ethnicity is more defined by language, location, traditions and mores, and that we’re all guilty of using a bunch of obsolete terms here.
I share your suspicion of extreme Afrocentric claims. But you nailed it with the use of the word kinship. Kinship transcends race, ethnicity and sometimes plausibility. Black studies frequently is about shared kinships since the slave trade than any actual consanguinity and cultural affinity.
The Moors, according to everything I’ve read, were - despite their immediate origins in North Africa - of fairly pure Arabic descent.
Asking whether ancient Egyptians would have considered themselves “negroid” is very likely a nonsensical question. As Askia illustrates, the concepts of “blackness” and “whiteness” that exist in the United States at least are not concepts based very heavily on biology or ethnicity at all but more on cultural definitions. Being of half-white and half-black ancestry in the United States definitely makes you black, and to challenge this on logical grounds is irrational because “blackness” is a cultural concept, not a biological one. I don’t know how United States standards relate to the rest of the Americas nor to the rest of the world, because the question even just as it pertains to the U.S. is immensely complicated. When someone is of fairly pure African descent, or fairly pure European descent, it’s visibly obvious, but if they are somewhere in the middle, the question is one of how the categories are defined.
We can take general guesses as to what they looked like. Trying to assign them into “black” and “white” categories, though, doesn’t make sense. And it makes even less sense if you wish to answer by reference to the Egyptians’ own self-conception, because they most likely did not have strict concepts of black and white, especially considering the diversity of skin colors present in the region. In fact, due to the genetics of skin color, when two people with medium skin have children, some of the kids will end up very noticeably lighter or darker than their parents; this is definitely the situation in much of the Caribbean. So it’s very possible that a single family of Egyptians would have had a broad range of skin colors.
Attempting to define Egyptians as white or black is sorta like that old joke about the Jew traveling in Northern Ireland. “Well, are you a Protestant Jew, or a Catholic Jew?” We can guess at their skin color, which probably was somewhat darker than a typical Norwegian and somewhat lighter than a typical Hutu. But since they don’t fall easily into categories of “obviously black” or “obviously white”, but rather halfway in the middle, then sorting them depends on making judgments based upon cultural definitions that just weren’t relevant to the Egyptians.