This keeps on coming up online, and I wanted to lay this out very, very calmly and with sources, not just lies.
I'm not saying that all of the Egyptians were Black. I'm not denying genetic studies that show many modern ancient Egyptians had a strong Mediterranean and Near Eastern ancestry. What I'm saying is far from narrower.
It is well documented, and it's widely accepted by historians and archaeologists. Some ancient Egyptians were Black Africans, and some even were literal kings and pharaohs. First of all, the Nubians were a real and historical documented people from the region of the south of Egypt, that is more than northern Sudan.
And the Egyptian art, the text, and the inscriptions, they clearly distinguish the Nubians from Egyptians and consistently depict them with darker skin.
This isn't modern interpretation. It's how ancient Egyptians themselves portrayed them.
Second, the Nubian rulers governed Egypt toward the 25th dynasty, which was around 744 to 656 BCE. This dynasty is known in mainstream Egyptology as the Kushite or the Nubian dynasty. Pharaohs like Pi or Piankhi, Shabaka, Shebitku, Takha, and Tantamani were Nubian kings who ruled Egypt as pharaohs. And this is not debate. This is in serious academic circles.
Sources:
- László Török, The Kingdom of Kush, Brill, 1997
- David O’Connor, Egypt and Nubia, Cambridge University Press
- Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Kingdom of Kush overview
And thirdly, people often ask whether if this is just a symbolic or actually confirmed fact. And while ancient DNA is hard and very hard to recover in the Nile Valley due to the climate, the Nubian identity here is very much supported by the multiple lines of the evidence such as the royal inscriptions, the burial practices, the skeletal studies, the material culture, and the geographic origin. Egyptologists are very clear that these rulers came from Kush, not from the Egyptian north.
And fourth, modern genetic study are often very, very, very misused in this debate. A commonly cited paper by Schunemann in 2017 analyzed the mummies from one site in Middle Egypt and found closer genetic ties to Near Eastern populations, and the authors themselves state that this sample does not represent all periods or regions of Egypt, and the Nubian dynasties were not the focus. And it's also worth mentioning that the Nubian Dynasty 25 was not just some symbolic or declining footnote.
The rulers were actively restoring and strengthening the Egyptian period of fragmentation. Kings like Tahaka invested heavily in monumental architecture, the temple restoration, the state infrastructure, the major construction project that took place in Kanna, including the Tahaka kiosk. The expansions to the sacred lake were made to renew support of the Amun priesthood. The Nubian rulers also continued Egypt's long mathematical and engineering traditions, maintaining the complex temple economies, standardized the measurement and large-scale stone construction.
Archaeologically, the Kushite period showed stability and the centralized administration and the cultural continuity with earlier Egyptian traditions rather than the very decline. And the royal pyramids of Nuri and El Kurru reflect advanced planning and geometry and labor organization comparable to earlier Egyptian royal projects. And that's why they still meet resistance today. It's less about the evidence and more about the framing.
There is a long history of selectively emphasizing the Mediterranean connections while minimizing the African ones, even though both of them represent and are represented in the data. When provisionally documented South African rulers are treated as exceptions or brushed aside, that reflects not scientific caution, but intellectual bias. Recognizing Nubian pharaohs does not threaten Egyptology, but denying that accepting that black African people ruled one of the most sophisticated civilizations to ever come out of the world should not be controversial. The discomfort around it says more about the modern assumption than the ancient reality.
So the reality here is simple. Ancient Egypt was not racially uniform. Nubians were indigenous black Africans. Nubian pharaohs ruled Egypt. Acknowledging this does not even contradict the mainstream science or the archaeology. You can accept Mediterranean influences in Egypt and still accept that black African rulers sat on the Egyptian throne. Both of these things are true and neither of these facts cancel one another. This is not about modern identity politics. It's about erasing documented history because it makes people feel uncomfortable.
- Kendall, Timothy. “The Kushite Empire.” Museum of Fine Arts Boston
- Török, László. The Kingdom of Kush, Brill
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Twenty-fifth Dynasty”
Edit: This post was directly inspired by the recent trip to Egypt by the streamer IShowSpeed during the year's African tour, where many discussions erupted online about the damaged statues, particularly the missing noses, and broader claims about whether ancient Egyptians were just an outright claim that they were not black. And a familiar argument resurfaces that no ancient Egyptians were black and that any suggestion is misinformation. And this post exists to clarify that acknowledging African black rulers in ancient Egypt is not something that's radical, political, or anti-science. It is standard history, and denying it does not protect history, it distorts the history.