An interesting video on the subject of “what ethnicity were the ancient Egyptians.” One point raised that I’d never heard of before, but which is obvious now that I’ve seen it, is that in Egyptian art the men are consistently shown as darker than the women. The explanation for this *seems* to be that at least for the “Egyptians who mattered,” you know, the rich and powerful, the menfolk went outside and did stuff while the women stayed in the home, out of the sun. Thus the men would get tanned while the women wouldn’t. This is more a function of lighter skin.
The end result is that apart from the Ptolomaic pharaohs, who were ethnically Greek, and the 25th dynasty pharaohs, who were ethnically Nubian, the average Egyptian would have been… Egyptian. Neither a blond, blue-eyed white guy nor a black sub-Saharan African, but akin to other north Africans. Being at the crossroads of continents and cultures, doubtless Egypt would have been a melting pot of ethnic groups from the region. As more and more mummies are subjected to genetic testing, the picture should get clearer.