The question of the origins of ancient Egyptian civilization has been one of the most politically charged topics in academic history.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European scholars often proposed that the civilization of ancient Egypt was the product of influences from outside Africa — from Mesopotamia, from Europe, from hypothetical “superior” populations that supposedly introduced civilization to an otherwise primitive continent.

These ideas were rooted in the racist assumptions of their time, which presumed that black African populations could not have developed complex civilization independently.

The counter-argument — developed most forcefully by African scholars and taken up by the broader field of Egyptology — is that ancient Egypt was an African civilization, built by people indigenous to the Nile Valley, and that its extraordinary achievements were the product of African ingenuity rather than external influence.