A Fabricated Portrait of Race in Antiquity
The popular 19th-century drawing attributed to Seti I’s tomb, which purports to depict the four “races” known to the ancient Egyptians as Libyan, Kushite, Asiatic, and Egyptian, is neither ancient nor accurate. It is a modern European reinterpretation, made during the colonial era, and rooted in deeply flawed racial ideologies. The drawing has become widely referenced, but its colour palette, facial structure, and figure order reflect 19th-century European imagination more than they reflect any ancient reality.
The scene, found in a damaged part of Seti I’s tomb, has undergone heavy sabotage, loss of pigment, and restoration. Yet, despite this damage, remnant pigments still contradict the portrayal given in the European drawing. When original colours, ethnographic parallels, and the full range of comparative tomb art are considered, the entire composition falls apart as an accurate depiction of the ancient worldview.
The Libyans: Indigenous Africans Misrepresented as Pale-Skinned Foreigners
Perhaps the most visually striking and historically absurd feature of the drawing is the pale skin of the figure labelled “Libyan.” This contradicts not only physical anthropology but environmental logic. The climate of ancient Libya would not favour pale-skinned populations. More importantly, authentic depictions of Libyans in Egyptian tombs, such as those in the tomb of Huy, present feathered figures in a variety of African brown tones, from medium to deep hues.
The tomb of Huy (TT40) serves as direct visual evidence that Libyans were painted in black and brown skin tones. Individuals in that tomb who wear the ostrich feather headdress, the same cultural marker used in the Seti I tomb, are depicted with African features and complexions. Their identification as Libyans, based on the feather symbolism accepted by Egyptologists, aligns them both visually and culturally with native Africans.
These figures share not only pigmentation but hairstyles and adornments that link them directly to the Fulani, whose cultural practices of plaits and feathers mirror those in ancient depictions.
Critics of the drawing have pointed out the absurdity of assigning a pale-skinned phenotype to a people native to one of the hottest, sun-exposed climates on Earth. Indeed, the paleness of the Libyans as portrayed by Giovanni Battista Belzoni contradicts the climate of the region and challenge the plausibility of the reconstruction. It is not merely a matter of pigmentation, but of biological realism. Additionally, the hairstyles and adornments attributed to the so-called Libyans in the drawing; most notably the ostrich feathers and side-braided hair, bear striking similarity to those still worn by certain ethnic groups in Africa today, particularly the Fulani or Fulbe people.
These features are not random stylistic relics but demonstrate a consistent cultural thread stretching across millennia.
Fulani hairstyles, including the twisted front fringe and long single side plait, mirror precisely the hair depicted on the Libyan figure in the Seti I drawing.
Such detailed resemblance cannot be coincidental. The Fulani are not merely similar in appearance but retain ancestral customs dating back to at least 6,000–5,000 BCE, including distinctive hair preparations, feather decorations, and possibly even traditional body painting. These practices are not the result of retroactive imitation; they represent continuous cultural inheritance.
Observers have argued that what the tomb depicted was not a pale-skinned foreigner but a reddish brown skinned African adorned in ceremonial dress and markings that might have included skin decoration or body paint.
The paleness in the European drawing, therefore, might be a misinterpretation of rubbed, faded, or superficially lightened pigment, exacerbated by the colonial artist’s bias toward light skin as an index of civilisation.
In addition, the ancient term “Rebu” (Libyans) evolved from earlier terms like “Jahenu,” reflecting a long-standing presence of North African peoples in Egyptian historical consciousness. These names were associated not with race, but with geographical and political identities. The assertion that the Egyptians viewed such peoples as racially distinct based on skin tone is a modern imposition. The ancient worldview categorised people culturally and tribally, not racially in the 19th-century European sense.
Further examination of the tomb wall reveals that the figures were not even drawn in the same order or configuration as the modern “Four Races” illustration. The 19th-century artist responsible for the reproduction rearranged and selectively combined fragments from different areas, crafting a fictional alignment that never existed in a single ancient composition. For example, figures that appear next to each other in the drawing are separated by space and context in the actual tomb, indicating editorial fabrication rather than faithful copying. Moreover, the hairstyle assigned to the pale figure makes little sense when matched with a European phenotype. The side plait and braids are hairstyles requiring dense, tightly coiled hair, incompatible with straight or loosely curled European hair. Such styles, still visible in certain Fulani communities and attested in prehistoric rock art, form part of the tangible cultural toolkit of African civilisation, not Mediterranean or European ethnic groups.
The Kushites: Mistakenly Called “Nubians,” But Representing the Deep South
The darkest figure in the colonial illustration is usually labelled “Nubian.” However, this identification is historically incorrect. The figure corresponds to the ancient “Nehesu” or “Nhsw,” whom the Egyptians depicted as originating from Kush. These people occupied regions of modern Sudan and South Sudan, aligning with populations like the Nuer; tall, dark-skinned pastoralists with distinct African features.
Modern references to them as “Nubians” conflate distinct ethnic and cultural groups. The term “Nubian” only emerged later and is tied to the Ta Seti region, a nome within Egypt itself. The people of Ta Seti were Upper Egyptians, not foreigners, and part of the Kemetic culture from the beginning. To label all southern black populations in Egyptian art as Nubians is to erase the role of indigenous southern nations, such as Kush, whose people shared religious, linguistic, and political ties with Egypt.
In many depictions; including those in the tomb of Rameses III (KV11), Kushites and Egyptians are shown with identical pigmentation, often both rendered in jet black. This tomb is the one of the only known instances where Egyptians were not painted in reddish brown but in the same black hue as their southern neighbours. This visual unity powerfully confirms that the Egyptians did not conceive of the Kushites as a racially separate group. Instead, they were depicted as part of the same African continuum, differentiated not by colour but by geographic and cultural markers.
The Egyptians: Miscoloured by European Fantasy
The skin tone assigned to the Egyptian figure in the colonial illustration is unusually pale, lighter even than many Levantine populations depicted in Egyptian art. This is not consistent with original tomb imagery, in which Egyptians consistently painted themselves in a warm reddish-brown. The reddish hue was not symbolic of masculinity as is often claimed, but was part of a standardised default for male figures; representing their true complexion rather than a symbolic code.
In more reliable tombs like that of Rameses III, Egyptians are shown in deep black tones, indistinguishable from Kushites (phenotylically and culturally). The representation of Egyptians as pale or orangish is not found in untouched Egyptian art, but instead arises in overexposed photography and manipulated restorations. European draftsmen frequently produced lighter reconstructions and tampered with scenes to support emerging racial taxonomies that favoured a white or Near Eastern origin for civilisation.
Moreover, authentic artistic traditions in Egypt display a vast spectrum of African features, from full lips and broad noses to narrower nasal bridges, all of which fall within the indigenous phenotypic range of the African continent. Ancient Egyptian tomb art also employed alternating colours not to emphasise racial divergence, but to fulfil visual balance and compositional harmony. Artists routinely alternated tones; sometimes even painting individuals from the same cultural group in differing shades, strictly for aesthetic variety. This convention undermines any attempt to extract a racial gradient from Egyptian frescoes.
The Asiatics: Distinct, But Not “White”
The Asiatic figure in the drawing is another misrepresented character. While the Egyptians did interact with Levantine populations, the Asiatics shown in art are not European-like in skin tone or facial structure. Rather, they are depicted with curly or shoulder-length hair, hooked noses, and a range of skin tones beginning from jet black to light brown to tawny complexions. The figure in the European drawing, however, is depicted with ghostly pale skin that places him closer to a fantasy Celt than a Semitic-speaking Canaanite.
While the Asiatics did often have a lighter brown tone, their skin tone range often fell firmly within the dark brown complexion of other Africans, including the ancient Egyptians and Kushites.
Therefore, all four categories of nations or men overlapped in terms of complexion, and this can be visually proven through a collation of frescoes and paintings from various tombs. The true diversity of Asiatics in Egyptian depictions ranged from Hyksos rulers to nomadic traders, but they were never depicted as pale as modern Europeans. The drawing’s Asiatics fit into a fabricated racial narrative rather than an authentic historical classification. In some cases, even the garments in the drawing are inconsistent with the tunics or fringed robes worn by Syro-Palestinian groups. These misalignments point again to invention, not documentation.
Sabotage and Tampering: The Whitewashing of Tomb Iconography
Modern tampering has visibly altered tomb appearances, stripping them of their original cultural and visual integrity. The tombs of TT56 and Irukaptah offer some of the most egregious examples. Cement was smeared over frescoes to mask original paint. Black-skinned figures, particularly those wearing leopard skins or traditional ceremonial attire, were deliberately effaced.
Colour layers were chemically washed, and some images were scraped off or patched over with plaster. Even repainting occurred, with lighter hues substituted over faded or darkened original pigments. These actions, executed under colonial management, amount to a campaign of visual erasure. The cumulative effect of these interventions was not just cosmetic. It manipulated public perception and academic interpretation, rendering the African identity of Egypt less visible and more debatable. The Seti I wall and its misrepresented reconstruction are products of that same system of whitewashing, both literal and ideological.
A Civilisational View, Not a Racial One
Egyptian wall art does not display modern notions of race. Individuals were categorised by cultural groupings: where they lived, what language they spoke, and what gods they worshipped. The drawing in question attempts to racialise a tableau that was never meant as a racial taxonomy. This mirrors a larger trend in 19th-century anthropology, where European thinkers attempted to create hierarchical “tables of nations” out of ancient records that had no such intention.
The tomb of Seti I was not attempting to catalogue humanity into colour-coded races. Like the tomb of Huy, where all groups are depicted as black or brown, Seti’s tomb showed geopolitical realities, not skin colour ideologies. When Europeans painted the Libyan as white, the Egyptian as tan, the Asiatic as pale, and the Kushite as black, they imposed a fantasy of racial order onto a text that only ever spoke in cultural terms.
Conclusion: The Drawing Is a Fiction, the Tomb a Truth
The four-figure composition based on Seti I’s tomb is a work of European invention, not Egyptian reality. It tells more about 19th-century race science than it does about Bronze Age Africa. Real Egyptian tombs show Libyans in African brown, Kushites in jet black, Egyptians in red-brown, and Asiatics in tawny tan, not the racialist gradient that the illustration attempts to universalise.
By restoring these figures to their authentic artistic, historical, and cultural contexts, the fabricated racial ladder collapses. All four groups; the Libyan, the Kushite, the Asiatic, and the Egyptian, were part of the ancient world’s richly interconnected African and Afro-Asiatic tapestry. The wall scene in Seti I’s tomb speaks not of division, but of contact.
Modern forensic research confirms this view. Dermatological analysis of over 300 Theban mummies revealed definitively Black skin and tightly curled hair, even among priests and nobles. These were not symbols. They were lived realities. There is no need to invoke racial mixing or foreign ancestry to explain these depictions. The African continent’s internal diversity fully accounts for every phenotype portrayed in the tomb. The Seti I scene does not show four races. It shows four nations within a civilisational worldview, all coloured by the same sun, living across the same desert, and shaped by the same Nile.
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