Who were the ancient Egyptians, and why is the question so contested?

There is no simple answer, because the question as usually asked, "black or white?", relies on modern categories that most scholars say do not fit. The question itself arose from the early racial concepts of the 18th and 19th centuries, linked to models of racial hierarchy based on skull and body measurements. Both labels were claimed early: in the 18th century the French writer Volney argued that the ancient Egyptians were Africans like all others born on the continent, while Georges Cuvier considered them Caucasian.

Mainstream Western scholars reject the idea that Egypt was a "white" or a "black" civilization: in their view, applying modern notions of race to ancient Egypt is anachronistic, and the population was not homogeneous. Most biological anthropologists now reject race as a valid concept in human biology. Mainstream scholarship places the origins of predynastic southern Egypt primarily in northeast Africa, including the Sudan and the Sahara, and describes a gradation: Upper Egyptians had more biological affinities with Sudanese and more southerly African populations, Lower Egyptians closer links with Levantine and Mediterranean ones.

The debate has been sharp. At a 1974 UNESCO symposium, Cheikh Anta Diop proposed a "Black Hypothesis" of a homogeneous Egyptian population; most participants disagreed, and the disagreement was largely about methods and insufficient data. Other scholars, such as Stuart Tyson Smith, argue that Egyptologists have often detached Egypt from its northeast African context.

The newest evidence is DNA, and it is limited. A 2017 study extracted DNA from 151 mummies from a single site in Middle Egypt, but obtained genome-wide data from only three individuals, and the researchers themselves cautioned that these may not represent all ancient Egyptians.