As there is
a lot of misunderstanding (and, at times, utter nonsense) by some members of
the Church, both in the past and even today, about the racial identity of
Egyptians based on misreading various texts in the Book of Abraham, I am
reproducing the following on the topic:
The Racial
and Ethnic Identity of the Egyptians
There are a number of different ways in which
we can define the ancient Egyptians themselves as a distinct racial and ethnic
group, but the question of their roots and their sense of their own identity
has provoked considerable debate. Linguistically, they belonged to the
Afro-Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic) family, but this is simply another way of saying
that, as their geographical position implies, their language had some
similarities to contemporary languages both in parts of Africa and in the Near
East.
Anthropological studies suggest that the
predynastic population included a mixture of racial types (negroid,
Mediterranean, and European), but it is the question of the skeletal evidence
at the beginning of the pharaonic period that has proved to be most
controversial over the years. Whereas the anthropological evidence from this
date was once interpreted by Bryan Emery and others, as the rapid conquest of
Egypt by people from the east whose remains were racially distinct from the
indigenous Egyptians, it is now argued by some scholars that there may have
been a much slower period of demographic change, probably involving the gradual
infiltration of a different physical type from Syria-Palestine, via the eastern
Delta.
The iconography of the Egyptians’ depictions
of foreigners suggests that for much of their history they saw themselves as
midway between the black Africans and the paler Asiatics. It is also clear,
however, that neither Nubian nor Syro-Palestinian origins were regarded as
particularly disadvantageous factors in terms of individuals’ status or career
prospects, particularly in the cosmopolitan climate of the New Kingdom, when
Asiatic religious cults and technological developments were particularly widely
accepted. Thus the demonstrably negroid features of the high official Maiherpri
did not prevent him from attaining the special privilege of a burial in the
Valley of the Kings at about the time of Thutmose III (1479-1425 BC). In the
same way, a man called Aper-el, whose name indicates his Near Eastern roots,
rose to the rank of vizier (the highest civil office below that of the king
himself) in the late 18th Dynasty. (Ian Shaw, “Egypt and the Outside World” in Ian
Shaw, ed. The Oxford History of Ancient
Egypt [New York: Oxford University Press, 2003], 308-23, here, p. 309)
