Egypt was African. The pharaohs were African. And the founders?They were Black.

Egypt was African. The pharaohs were African. And the founders?
They were Black.

Schuenemann et al. (2017) tested zero royal mummies. Their 90 mtDNA and 3 Y-DNA samples had no names, no titles, no royal tombs, no radiocarbon dates—just anonymous remains from a single Greco-Roman period site in Abusir el-Meleq, which was never the royal burial ground of any dynasty.

Meanwhile, right in the heart of Egypt’s New Kingdom imperial age, Pharaoh Ramesses III carried Y-DNA haplogroup E-M2 (E1b1a)—a lineage still common among West and Central Africans (Hawass et al., 2012). His father, Setnakhte, carried the same. Three of his ten sons—Ramesses IV, VI, and VIII—became pharaohs. Four of his grandsons—Ramesses V, VII, IX, and X—also ascended the throne. That’s nine pharaohs of the 20th Dynasty with unmistakably African paternal ancestry.

So when someone claims there’s “no genetic evidence” of African pharaohs—or that only the 25th Dynasty rulers were Black—they’re not just wrong. They’re willfully allergic to evidence.

Let’s be clear: E-M2 is not Eurasian. It didn’t walk in from Greece or Persia. It’s African in origin, deeply embedded in the continent’s biological and cultural legacy, and it appears in the royal line of ancient Kemet—the land Eurocentrics desperately try to gentrify.

Schuenemann’s data? A small sample from a non-royal, mixed-period burial site, during one of Egypt’s most cosmopolitan and colonized eras. The authors themselves warned the results “may not represent all of ancient Egypt.” (Schuenemann et al., 2017)

So if you still cite that study to erase Africa from Egypt, you’re not doing science—you’re doing pseudoscientific fan fiction.

The genetic evidence is not vague. It’s engraved in pharaonic bloodlines. The art isn’t ambiguous. It’s painted in 45 shades of African brown. The history isn’t missing. It’s just been buried under colonial denial.

And your comment?
It’s the intellectual equivalent of showing up to a hieroglyphics exam with an Indo-European oral fictional story.

Egypt was African. The pharaohs were African. And the founders?
They were Black.