Queries & Comments

Were the Ancient Egyptians of the Black Race?

A letter in our May/June issue (Queries & Comments, BAR 15:03) from Mrs. Joan P. Wilson asserting that the Egyptian queen Nefertiti was black and, indeed, that the Egyptians are “a black race of people” brought a flood of mail—so much that we decided to ask an expert Egyptologist to consider the matter. In “Were the Ancient Egyptians Black or White?” Frank J. Yurco of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago discusses the issues at some length.

Nevertheless, we print here a few of our readers’ letters. Some make supplementary points. Others we publish because we want to let you know what our readers are thinking. But perhaps most interesting are points made both by Egyptologist Yurco and by our readers’ letters. Both may be correct, but the implications—or shadings, since we are talking about race—can be quite different. For example, consider the matter of black pharaohs or the conventional coloring of males as red or brown and females as yellow, or white in Egyptian art. How do these facts bear on the question?—Ed.

In the May/June issue, one of your readers deplored the depiction of Queen Nefertiti as a white woman. Mrs. Joan P. Wilson claims that Nefertiti was “a beautiful black Egyptian queen,” and that the Egyptians are “a black race of people.”

This is a common misperception based on a sketchy understanding of ancient Egypt.