It is wrong to seek in them the principal features of the old race." The Copts are the result of crossbreeding with all the nations that successfully dominated Egypt. In 1839, Jean-François Champollion suggested that: "In the Copts of Egypt, we do not find any of the characteristic features of the ancient Egyptian population. Another early example of the controversy is an article published in The New-England Magazine of October 1833, where the authors dispute a claim that " Herodotus was given as authority for their being negroes." They point out with reference to tomb paintings: "It may be observed that the complexion of the men is invariably red, that of the women yellow but neither of them can be said to have anything in their physiognomy at all resembling the Negro countenance." The leading French scientist of the 18th century, Georges Cuvier, considered the Egyptians to be Caucasian, and it was with Cuvier that Augustus Granville sided in the dissection and first scientific autopsy of an ancient Egyptian mummy in 1825. He goes on to postulate, "the Copts were "true negroes" of the same stock as all the autochthonous peoples of Africa" and they "after some centuries of mixing., must have lost the full blackness of its original color." Jacques Joseph Champollion-Figeac criticized Volney and called his conclusion "evidently forced and inadmissible". Volney also said that the Sphinx gave him the key to the riddle as to why all the Egyptians he saw across the country "have a bloated face, puffed-up eyes, flat nose, thick lips – in a word, the true face of the mulatto." He wrote he was tempted to attribute it to the climate, but upon visiting the Sphinx, its appearance gave him the answer "seeing that head, typically negro in all its features", Volney saw it as the "true solution to the enigma (of how the modern Egyptians came to have their 'mulatto' appearance)". In the 18th century, French philosopher and abolitionist, Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, in a set of comments regarding the race of the ancient Egyptians, wrote that "the Copts are the proper representatives of the Ancient Egyptians due to their jaundiced and fumed skin, which is neither Greek nor Arab, their full faces, their puffy eyes, their crushed noses, and their thick lips.the ancient Egyptians were true Negroes of the same type as all native born Africans". Within Egyptian history, despite multiple foreign invasions, the demographics were not shifted substantially by large migrations. In addition, scholars reject the notion, implicit in the notion of a black or white Egypt hypothesis, that Ancient Egypt was racially homogeneous instead, skin color varied between the peoples of Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt, and Nubia, who in various eras rose to power in Ancient Egypt. Mainstream scholars reject the notion that Egypt was a white or black civilization they maintain that applying modern notions of black or white races to ancient Egypt is anachronistic. In more recent times some writers continued to challenge the mainstream view, some focusing on questioning the race of specific notable individuals such as the king represented in the Great Sphinx of Giza, native Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, Egyptian Queen Tiye, and Greek Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra VII. Some scholars argued that ancient Egyptian culture was influenced by other Afroasiatic-speaking populations in North Africa, the Horn of Africa or the Middle East, while others pointed to influences from various Nubian groups or populations in Europe. A variety of views circulated about the racial identity of the Egyptians and the source of their culture. The question of the race of ancient Egyptians was raised historically as a product of the early racial concepts of the 18th and 19th centuries, and was linked to models of racial hierarchy primarily based on craniometry and anthropometry. The representation of ethnic groups in Egyptian iconography has been a source of dispute among scholars. Each group is also marked with their own distinctive hairstyles and clothing. The Egyptian is reddish-brown, while the Nubian is black. In terms of skin colour, the Libyan has the lightest complexion, followed by the Asiatic who is yellowish in appearance. Drawing by an unknown artist after a mural of the tomb of Seti I Copy by Heinrich Menu von Minutoli (1820). The Ancient Egyptian classification of ancient peoples (from left to right): a Libyan, a Nubian, an Asiatic, and an Egyptian. For discussion of the scientific evidence relating to the race of the ancient Egyptians, see Population history of Egypt and Genetic history of Egypt. This article is about the history of the controversy about the race of the ancient Egyptians.
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