, the "father of history", wrote that Egyptians had dark skin and woolly hair. A range of scholars have cited the classical observations of prominent
Greeks and
Romans as forms of primary evidence to denote the physical appearance of the early Egyptians. Some historical accounts have drawn close physical and cultural resemblances between Egyptians and
Ethiopians whereas others have associated them more closely with
northern Indians. In the
fifth century BCE, Greek historian,
Herodotus, described the Egyptians as having “melanchrones skin and wooly hair and secondly, and more reliably for the reason that alone among mankind the Egyptians and the Ethiopians have practiced circumcision since time immemorial.” Herodotus also wrote that the Ammonians of
Siwa Oasis are "colonists from Egypt and Aethiopia and speak a language compounded of the tongues of both countries". In the
first century BCE, Greek historian
Diodorus Siculus, in his work
Bibliotheca Historica, reported that the Ethiopians claimed that
Egypt was an early colony, and that the Ethiopians also cited evidence that they were more ancient than the Egyptians as he wrote: {{Blockquote
Ammianus Marcellinus, (325/330-after 391) served as a Greco-Roman historian in
4th century CE, He described “the men of Egypt are mostly brown and black with a skinny and desiccated look.”
Arrian, Greek historian, wrote in the
1st-century AD that "The appearance of the inhabitants is also not very different in India and Ethiopia: the southern Indians are rather more like Ethiopians as they are black to look on, and their hair is black; only they are not so snub-nosed or woolly-haired as the Ethiopians; the northern Indians are most like the Egyptians physically". According to a passage sourced from
Strabo, Greek geographer,
1st-century AD, northern Indians held similar physical characteristics as the Egyptians: "As for the people of India, those in the south are like the Aethiopians in colour, although they are like the rest in respect to countenance and hair (for on account of the humidity of the air their hair does not curl), whereas those in the north are like the Aegyptians". Secondary interpretation of these historical descriptions have remained a source of academic contention. Professor of African Studies at Temple University,
Molefi Kete Asante has referenced other examples from Herodotus's primary account for which he interprets to describe the physical appearance of Egyptians as Africans. This has included the following sourced statements "the flooding of the Nile could not be caused by snow, because the natives of the country (Egypt) are black from the heat" and descriptions of an oracle as Egyptian based on Dodoneans "calling the dove black,[which] they indicated that the woman was Egyptian". However, Professor
Yaacov Shavit of Tel Aviv University, argued that "[t]he evidence clearly shows that those
Greco-Roman authors who refer to the skin color and other physical traits distinguish sharply between Ethiopians (Nubians) and Egyptians, and rarely do they refer to the Egyptians as black, even though they were described as darker than themselves.... [in addition,] Egyptians and Nubians were both clearly distinguished from the black Africans." Classical author
Frank Snowden argued that terms used by ancient Greek and Roman writers to describe the physical characteristics of other ancient peoples differed from contemporary racial terminology in the West. Keita and Boyce expressed caution on the use and reliability of primary accounts and instead favoured
population biology. Nonetheless, they found these descriptions on the origins of early Egyptians aligned with modern sources of anthropological data (cranial, limb proportion studies) which identified greater similarities between early Egyptians and North-East African populations (
Somalia, Nubia and
Kushites) that were "Ethiopians" in the Greek traditional sense. In a later chapter, Keita observed that some Greeks reported that Egypt was an Ethiopian colony but distinctions were made between Egyptians and Ethiopians in ancient accounts, but it remained unclear whether these distinctions were made on cultural rather on biological grounds.
Academic consensus on the peopling of Egypt Mainstream scholarship have situated the ethnicity and the origins of predynastic, southern Egypt as a foundational community primarily in northeast Africa which included
the Sudan,
tropical Africa and
the Sahara whilst recognising the population variability that became characteristic of the pharaonic period. Pharaonic Egypt featured a physical
gradation across the regional populations, with Upper Egyptians having shared more biological affinities with
Sudanese and
southernly African populations, whereas Lower Egyptians had closer genetic links with
Levantine and
Mediterranean populations. International scholarship reflected in the
UNESCO General History of Africa have expressed a similar position. A majority of the scholars that contributed to the Volume II edition (1981) considered Egypt an indigenous African civilisation with a
mixed population that originated largely in the
Sahara and featured a variety of skin colours from north and south of the Saharan region. In the view of Egyptian scholar and featured editor, Gamal Mokhtar, Upper Egypt and Nubia held "similar
ethnic composition" with comparable material culture. An updated volume IX publication launched in 2025, reaffirmed the view that Egypt had
African and
Eurasian populations. The review section which focused on the 1974 "Peopling of Egypt" symposium stated that accumulated research over the three decades had confirmed the migration from
Southernly African along with Saharan populations into the early Nile Valley.
Upper Egypt was now positioned as a origin point of Pharaonic unification, with supporting
archaeological,
anthropological,
genetic and
linguistic sources of evidence having identified close affinities between Upper Egypt and other Sub-Saharan African populations. ==Identifiable people==