What race were the Ancient Egyptians?

The very earliest Pharaohs were probably black Africans but it is possible that the lower classes were a different race. Due to the dearth of historical records from that era there is little evidence to work with. Human migration has taken place as long as people have lived on earth so once cannot assume as some do that the ancient Egyptians were African or Semitic. We really do not know. The last Pharaohs were of Macedonian ancestry, descendants of Alexander the Great's right hand man, Ptolemy. (Cleopatra was the last ruler of that dynasty - we know from Roman records that she had red hair and green eyes.) It is likely that Ptolemy brought many Macedonians with him when he took over the country.

(As a historian I dislike the term "race." There is really only one race - the human race. Modern DNA research is showing that all of us have ancestors from places other than our homelands. All of us are, to some extent, mongrels, which, in my opinion, is not a bad thing.)

Modern Egyptians are mostly of Arab ancestry, being the descendants of the Islamic armies who overran northern Africa and much of the Mediterranean lands in the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries but there are also people of African race in the southern part of the country.

Africans and Middle Eastern mix, most likely .

Arabic African Egyptians. The same as modern day Egyptians.

Actually, no one knows for sure. That is the reason why the scientists had a lot of trouble figuring out which shade of colour to put on the computerized King Tuk image. You can't really tell by looking at today's Egyptian, coz the Greek invaded them, then the Roman and later the Arabs. There are ancient evidences that there were ppl living in the area before there was even an Egypt. I can’t say where did they come from, but I am pretty sure they weren’t from outer space like some loony sci-fi “authors” suggest.

They are Semetic. Both Jewish people and Muslim/Islam (middle eastern) people are Semetic.

Odd huh? That both groups hate eachother so much, yet are more closely related to eachother than any other race.

Fascinating world we live in. There are many different "theories" or "studies" on this....especially how "whites" came into existence. Its a very interesting subject if you're so inclined.

i think they were back as well. i don't know if you read the bible, but most of the people in it are either black or middle eastern. hebrews and egyptians were two different skin colors. thats why i laugh at the idea that Jesus was white with blue eyes! it says he had hair like the lamb. that means course and curly, not blonde. there are mentions in the tora that says the egyptians were african. the garden of eden was set in ethiopia.

Actually they were of the human race. Race has yet to be defined in objective genetic terms that are quantifiably measurable. Egyptians normally portrayed Africans to the south as darker and more "Negroid" than Egyptians, while peoples to the north were drawn in lighter shades. They showed no notion of being in the same "race" as any of these foreign peoples.

Hebrews?! Maybe. I'm not sure. Yeah, as other people have said, the human race. interesting yet unusual question:)

this might help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_characteristics_of_ancient_Egyptians

As Djehuti rightly notes, this question has been asked many, many times in this forum and it usually gets the same bunch of misguided or misleading answers. To get sensible information about the Ancient Egyptian population type, look for work by physician and archaeologist Shomarka O.Y. Keita, based at the National Human Genome Centre, Howard University. Keita is one of the leading scholars in this area and has produced some ground-breaking research. Some of his findings are discussed at the National Geographic site, first link below. He also appears in a number of talks on Youtube (just search for "SOY Keita") To put it in a nutshell: the Ancient Egyptians were African. They were broadly similar to the North African and North East African peoples who live in the region today. They were not sub-Saharan Africans as such. Nor did they come from Europe, Asia, or anywhere else. Any answer which tries to shoe-horn human populations into labels like "*****ıd, Caucasoid" etc is misguided (and wrong). These terms are obsolete relics of 19th century anthropology and don't play a role in current scholarship. You can safely ignore the answer from Wolf - he is citing work from 19th century anthropologists like G. Sergi and Elliot Smith. Those ideas have been long overtaken by later research - especially since the rise of genetic analysis in the 1980s. It is like saying that light travels through the luminiferous aether, or that diseases are caused by noxious miasmas. Likewise, Dave87gn says: "there are 3 races .. caucasoids, ne groids and mongoloids". That is an unscientific fair tale, which has nothing to do with any mainstream theory in current anthropology or population genetics. Hope this helps.

They were in a melting pot. The first pharaohs were black, most of them were semites and some momies with red hair and white features have been found. There was no racism back then.