To one familiar with the striking and beautiful types arising from the
mingling of Negro with Latin and Germanic types in America, the puzzle of
the Egyptian type is easily solved. It was unlike any of its neighbors and
a unique type until one views the modern mulatto; then the faces of
Rahotep and Nefert, of Khafra and Amenemhat I, of Aahmes and Nefertari,
and even of the great Ramessu II, become curiously familiar.

The history of Egypt is a science in itself. Before the reign of the first
recorded king, five thousand years or more before Christ, there had
already existed in Egypt a culture and art arising by long evolution from
the days of paleolithic man, among a distinctly Negroid people. About 4777
B.C. Aha-Mena began the first of three successive Egyptian empires. This
lasted two thousand years, with many Pharaohs, like Khafra of the Fourth
Dynasty, of a strongly Negroid cast of countenance.

At the end of the period the empire fell apart into Egyptian and Ethiopian
halves, and a silence of three centuries ensued. It is quite possible that
an incursion of conquering black men from the south poured over the land
in these years and dotted Egypt in the next centuries with monuments on
which the full-blooded Negro type is strongly and triumphantly impressed.
The great Sphinx at Gizeh, so familiar to all the world, the Sphinxes of
Tanis, the statue from the Fayum, the statue of the Esquiline at Rome,
and the Colossi of Bubastis all represent black, full-blooded Negroes and
are described by Petrie as "having high cheek bones, flat cheeks, both in
one plane, a massive nose, firm projecting lips, and thick hair, with an
austere and almost savage expression of power."[7]

Blyden, the great modern black leader of West Africa, said of the Sphinx
at Gizeh: "Her features are decidedly of the African or Negro type, with