THE RACES OF EUROPE

The less numerous Badarians were probably absorbed into the Naqada population, though there is no direct evidence to confirm this assumption.

In Lower Egypt lived another group of Mediterranean predynastic people who differed from the Upper Egyptians in certain noticeable ways. The heads were broader, the cranial indices higher, reaching a mean of 75, whereas the Upper Egyptian mean is nearly 72. The vault height is less, the face is no broader, but somewhat longer, and the nasal index is lower.

The two types from Upper and Lower Egypt represent the extremes of a purely native Egyptian population, but from the beginning of dynastic times, around 3000 B.C. until Ptolemaic times, the numerous series which give an excellent picture of the progress of racial continuity and change in Egypt show the interactions of these two types. The racial history of Egypt in the course of three thousand years was simply the gradual replacement of the Upper Egyptian type by that of Lower Egypt.²² (See Appendix I, cols. 7, 8.) As one looks at the tables from century to century, one sees that the crania increased gradually in breadth from 131 to 139 mm., and the faces from 124 to 129 mm. Ancient Egypt must remain the most outstand­ing example yet known in the world of an important, naturally isolated region in which native racial types were permitted to develop their own way for several thousand years completely uninfluenced by foreign contacts.

Modern Copts, who probably represent the ancient Egyptian type more faithfully than the Moslem population, have diverged from the earlier types only in a reduction of the skull length from about 183 mm. to 177 mm. Therefore, evolutionary change in Egypt consisted entirely of a slight reduction of head length, and in places of a lengthening of the face, and a narrowing of the nose; but the change has not been notable. Changes in physical type in any part of Europe within the last five hundred years have been much greater than in Egypt during five thousand.

The wealth of contemporary illustrative material from Egyptian art sources may be divided into two classes, conventional representations and portraits. The former show a definite and well-recognized type; slender­bodied and wiry, with narrow hips and small hands and feet. The head and face are those of a smoothly contoured fine Mediterranean form.

The portraits, on the other hand, show two things in particular: that there was considerable individual variation in bodily build as in head and face form within the dolichocephalic and mesocephalic range, and that many of the officials, courtiers, and priests, representing the upper class of Egyptian society but not the royalty, looked strikingly like modern Europeans, especially long-headed ones. This is due perhaps to the fact that the Egyptian nose was not typically high rooted, like those of the

22. Morant, op. Cit., 1925.

97

Fig. 24 Fig. 25

Fig, 22, portrait head of a man, in green slate, in Agyptisches Museum, Berlin; after anon., The Art of Ancient Egypt, Phaidon Press, Vienna, 1936, Plate 166. Fig. 23, portrait of Rahotep, Cairo Museum, after Schafer, H., and Andrae, W., Die Kunst des alten Orients, 1925, p. 222. Fig. 24, plaster mask from workshop of the sculptor Thutmosis, Statlisches Museum, Berlin. Schafer and Andrae, p. 339. Fig. 25, statue in possession of the Earl of Camavon, Frontispiece, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 7, 1917.

THE RACES OF EUROPE

Mesopotamians as depicted in their art; and also, perhaps, because the portraiture, at least of the men, shows a greater angularity of line and form than do the conventional representations.

There may also have been some distinction of type in the royal families, for the rulers often have that extremely dolichocephalic head form, coupled with a sloping forehead and high nasal aquilinity, with highly excavated nostrils, seen so typically in the familiar mummy of Rameses III, as in the living emperor of Ethiopia, Hailie Selassie. This strain may well have been derived in most ancient times from the headwaters of the Nile.

The pigmentation of the Egyptians was usually a brunet white; in the conventional figures the men are represented as red, the women often as lighter, and even white. Although the hair is almost inevitably black or dark brown, and the eyes brown, Queen Hetep-Heres II, of the Fourth Dynasty, the daughter of Cheops, the builder of the great pyramid, is shown in the colored bas reliefs of her tomb to have been a definite blond. Her hair is painted a bright yellow stippled with fine red horizontal lines,²³ and her skin is white. This is the earliest known evidence of blond- ism in the world. Later Egyptian reliefs, however, frequently represented Libyans as blond,²⁴ and in early Egyptian times, the territory of the Libyans extended to the Delta itself. The Egyptian representation of foreigners is quite accurate; besides the Libyans, who have Nordic features as well as coloring, Asiatics, with prominent noses and curly hair, sea peoples from the Mediterranean, with lighter skins and a more pronounced facial relief than the Egyptians, are also shown, as well as negroes.

The blondism of Hetep-Heres II apparently belonged to the Delta and to the connections outside to east or west, rather than to Egypt proper, for it never recurred as an important or characteristic Egyptian trait. The Mediterranean pigmentation of the Egyptians has probably not greatly changed during the last five thousand years.

2. Neolithic north africa

In view of the importance of North Africa as one of the two main cor­ridors of Neolithic diffusion into Europe, it is extremely disappointing that in it very few human remains of this cultural period have been found. A handful of skulls from Redeyef and Tebessa, near the border between Algeria and Tunisia, are the only surely Neolithic ones that have been described.²⁶ These are all of the small-statured, thin-boned, small-headed, dolicho- to low mesocephalic variety of Mediterranean already seen at Muge; smaller, on the whole, than most of the early Egyptians, and

“ Reisner, G. A., BBMF, vol. 25, #151, Octobcr, 1927, pp. 64-79.