I presume that Guest 22 Mar 05 - 04:17 PM is talking to me when s/he [???] asks "what makes you say the Egyptians of today don't resemble the ancient ones?"

Books that I have read on ancient Egypt refer to a population made up of different racial groups and quite a bit of interracial lovin going on..Furthermore, I have read that there were more darker skinned Egyptians than then there are now..

I cannot find quotes that specifially address those points but see this rather long excerpt about interracial mating in the ancient Greco-Roman world..

"In the modern world the crucial test of the white man's acceptance of the Negro is the attitude toward miscegnation. Greek and Roman accounts of race mixture between Ethiopians and Mediterranean whites reveal no repugnance at the idea of racial crossings between whites and non-whites. Herodotus' report on the 240,000 rebellious Egyptians who settled in the reign of Psammetichus I among the Ethiopians and mixed with them is a case in point...Nor does Plutarch when citing the Herodotean account, have anything to say in condemnation of the Ethiopian-Egyptian racial mixture...No explanatory or apolegetic note accompanies mention of Danatis' seven daughtes by an Ethiopian woman, or of the black lover of Aurora, the father of Memnon. Josephus records a legend which declares that Tharbis, the duaghter of the king of the Ethiopians, fell madly in love with Moses when Ethiopia was invaded. Moses accepted her proposal in marriage and after celebrating the nuptials, led the Egyptians back to their own land. Again, there is no comment on the interracial marriage....

Racial mixture of white and Negroid types were frequent enough to the [Roman] Empire for the stirists to find a source of amusement for the Roman public in references to miscegenation..Juvenal implies that mulattoes would be more were it not for the practice of abortion...

The statues of mulattoes and of mixed racial types are proof of the miscegenation noted in the texts. It is safe to assume, therefore, that in course of time many Ethiopians were assimilated into a predominatly white population. Completely random mating regardkess of racial differences in the United States, it has been pointed out, would result in the virtual elimination of darker shades of Negroes and in the almost complete disappearance of Negroid traits. Some such process was not unlikely in the Greco-Roman world in view if the evidence for racial mixture in a society which had no prohibition against miscegenation. {Frank M. Snowden, Jr, "Before Color Prejudice-The Ancient View of Blacks"; pp 192-195}.