A lot of people today seem to have quite a fascination with the subject of race in the ancient world. I frequently encounter questions on Quora asking whether various historical figures from ancient times were “Black” or “white.” Elsewhere online, I often encounter claims about the racial identities of people from ancient times.
Back in September 2019, I wrote an article in response to various articles I had encountered claiming that the Roman emperor Septimius Severus was Black. In that article, I concluded that, while you could certainly describe Septimius Severus as what we today would call a “person of color,” it would be misleading to describe him as Black without any kind of careful qualification.
Another historical figure from ancient times whose racial identity seems to provoke a great deal of controversy is the early fifth-century AD Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, who is often cited (quite anachronistically) as an example of a Black woman who excelled in STEM. In this article, I will answer the question: “Was Hypatia of Alexandria really Black?”
An anachronistic question
As I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2020, race is a social and cultural construct, not an innate biological reality. Moreover, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not think about race in the same ways that Americans think about it today in the twenty-first century.
Most significantly, they had no concept of a “white race” whatsoever. The Greek word Αἰθίοψ (Aithíops) does typically refer to a person with features which most twenty-first-century Americans would consider racially Black, but the connotations and cultural associations of this word are, in many ways, strikingly different from the connotations and cultural associations of Blackness in the twenty-first-century United States.
It is therefore inherently anachronistic to ask the question whether Hypatia—or any other ancient figure—was racially Black. It is more accurate to ask whether she bore physical features that most twenty-first-century Americans would consider markers of racial Blackness.
Who was Hypatia of Alexandria?—A recap
Before we discuss Hypatia’s race, we should talk a little bit about who she was. She was a mathematician and scholar who lived in the city of Alexandria, which is located on the northern coast of Egypt along the Mediterranean Sea in the Nile River Delta. She was born at some point in the mid-to-late fourth century AD, at a time when Egypt was ruled by the Roman Empire. She was the daughter of Theon of Alexandria, who was the most respected mathematician of his generation. Her mother is not mentioned in any surviving sources and her identity is completely unknown.
Over the course of her career, Hypatia taught a number of students, including Synesios, who later became the bishop of the city of Ptolemaïs in northern Libya. In the early 410s AD, Hypatia became entangled in a bitter political feud between Orestes, the Roman governor of Egypt, and Cyril, the Christian bishop of Alexandria. As a result of Hypatia’s involvement in this feud, a mob of Cyril’s supporters brutally murdered her in March 415 AD.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation about Hypatia floating around, especially on the internet and in popular sources. There is a fairly high probability that, if you have read about her elsewhere, much of what you have read about her is simply made up. It really annoys me how much fiction there is about Hypatia that is presented as fact, especially since the truth about her is far more interesting.
Here is a link to a quite extensive article I published on 6 August 2018 debunking a number of popular misconceptions about Hypatia of Alexandria. Here is a link to another article I published more recently in which I debunk some quotes that have been falsely attributed to Hypatia on the internet (along with many other quotes misattributed to people from ancient times).
ABOVE: Modern fictional illustration from the book Vies des savants illustres, depuis l’antiquité jusqu’au dix-neuvième siècle by Louis Figuier, published in 1866, depicting how the illustrator imagined Hypatia’s murder in March 415 AD might have looked
Hypatia’s ancestry
Race is generally seen as tied to a person’s ancestry. Therefore, in order to assess whether Hypatia may have been what most twenty-first-century Americans would consider racially Black, we need to know something about her ancestry.
All our surviving evidence indicates that Hypatia belonged to a wealthy, highly educated, and thoroughly culturally Greek family. Hypatia seems to have lived her whole life in the city of Alexandria, which was the center of Greek culture in Egypt at the time. Both she and her father Theon had Greek names and they both wrote exclusively in the Greek language. This does not, however, automatically mean that Hypatia did not have any Black ancestry.
As I discuss in this article I wrote in April 2020, we know for a verifiable fact that there were at least some Egyptian people in ancient times whose appearances would fit twenty-first-century American definitions of Blackness. It is also entirely possible that Hypatia may have had some native Egyptian ancestors. In order to understand this possibility, we need to go back into history many centuries before Hypatia.
King Alexandros III of Makedonia, who is commonly known as “Alexander the Great,” gave Alexandria its name in the 331 BC. After Alexander’s death in June 323 BC, his empire fragmented into a number of Hellenistic kingdoms ruled by Greek monarchs. Egypt came under the rule of the Greek rulers of the Ptolemaic Dynasty and Alexandria became its capital.
The Ptolemaic rulers deliberately attracted large numbers of Greek people to settle permanently in Egypt. Many of these Greeks settled permanently in Alexandria. Thus, Alexandria became known as a Greek city, but its inhabitants were not exclusively ethnically Greek. The main ethnic groups in the city were Greeks, native Egyptians, and Jews.
Under Ptolemaic rule, Greeks had special social and political privileges over native Egyptians. At first, Greek Egyptians were generally endogamous, but, by around 250 BC, surviving papyrus documents indicate that some Greek Egyptians were beginning to intermarry with native Egyptians. The scholar Dorothy J. Thompson analyzes the evidence for these mixed marriages in her chapter “Families in Early Ptolemaic Egypt,” published in the book The Hellenistic World: New Perspectives (pages 137–156), edited by Daniel Ogden and published in 2002.
Thompson identifies that, in this period, in roughly nine percent of households in which the husband had a Greek name, the wife had a native Egyptian name, indicating that the husband was probably Greek and the wife probably Egyptian. She finds no examples of households in which the husband had a native Egyptian name and the wife had a Greek name.
By the late third century BC, it was common for people who had been born of mixed marriages with Greek fathers and Egyptian mothers to carry two names: a Greek name and a native Egyptian name. Some of the best evidence for mixed marriages in Ptolemaic Egypt come from the Dryton and Apollonia Archive, a collection of fifty-three papyri and eight ostraka, some of which are written in Koine Greek and others in Demotic Egyptian, dating to the second century BC.
Dryton was a Greek horseman with a Greek name who was probably born sometime around 192 BC and served in the Ptolemaic cavalry. In around 152 BC, when he was probably about forty years old, he was transferred to the military camp in the town of Pathyris in Upper Egypt. There, he married a teenaged girl from a local family whose members had both Greek and native Egyptian names. The girl herself sometimes went by the Greek name Apollonia and sometimes went by the native Egyptian name Senmonthis. Apollonia/Senmonthis gave birth to five daughters, each of whom bore both a Greek name and a native Egyptian name.
By the time Hypatia was born in the fourth century AD, probably over five hundred years after Dryton and Apollonia/Senmonthis’s marriage, Greek Egyptians and native Egyptians had intermarried so extensively that many people who lived in Alexandria, were culturally Greek in every way, and saw themselves as Greek probably had at least some Egyptian ancestry. Thus, although we can be virtually certain that Hypatia had Greek ancestry, it is entirely possible that she may have had some native Egyptian ancestry as well.
What did Hypatia look like?
Race is also generally associated with certain physical features, especially skin color. Unfortunately, we have absolutely no information whatsoever about the color of Hypatia of Alexandria’s skin because, quite simply, we have no trustworthy information about what she looked like whatsoever. There are no surviving depictions of her from ancient times whatsoever. All the depictions of her you see on the internet are modern fictional representations. These images only reflect how people have imagined Hypatia, not how she really looked.
In fact, the only possible clue we have to Hypatia’s physical appearance at all is one very vague description of her written by the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher Damaskios of Athens (lived c. 458 – c. 538 AD), who was born nearly half a century after her death. A passage from Damaskios’s Life of Isidoros that has been preserved through quotation in the Souda, a tenth-century Byzantine Roman encyclopedia, states that Hypatia was “exceedingly beautiful and fair of form” and that she often wore a tribon, a kind of cloak associated with the Cynics.
I, however, am personally quite skeptical of the idea that Damaskios’s description can tell us anything about what the historical Hypatia really looked like, since she was already long dead by the time Damaskios was even born, there is no possibility that Damaskios could have actually seen her in person, and it is highly unlikely that he ever met anyone who had known Hypatia while she was alive or had access to any resources that could have reliably told him about her appearance.
In any case, even if we assume that Damaskios’s description is completely trustworthy, nothing he says can even remotely be construed as saying anything about her race or the color of her skin.
What people from Lower Egypt looked like in late antiquity
Our information about Hypatia’s ancestry is too vague to draw any conclusions and we have no trustworthy information about her appearance, but exploring further leaves the seeker for an answer to the question about Hypatia’s race even more aporic. We can’t even really guess what she might have looked like based on what other people who lived in the same place and general time period as her looked like because she lived in a place and time that was what modern Americans would consider remarkably racially diverse.
Perhaps the best illustration of this comes from mummy portraits. Many people who lived and died in Egypt during the time of the Roman Empire had their bodies mummified in the Egyptian fashion, but many of these people also had highly detailed encaustic panel portraits of themselves painted in a realistic Greek style placed over the faces of their mummies to show what they looked like while they were alive.
These portraits are conventionally known as the “Fayum mummy portraits” because many of them were found at sites located near the Fayum Basin. They provide remarkable glimpses into the varied appearances of the inhabitants of Upper Egypt during this time period. Here are a few examples:
ABOVE: Portrait of a young woman from the city of Antinopolis in Lower Egypt dating to around the second or third century AD or thereabouts
ABOVE: Portrait of a young military officer from Lower Egypt, dating to the time of the Roman Empire
ABOVE: Portrait of a young man from the city of Antinopolis in Lower Egypt dating to around the second or third century AD or thereabouts
ABOVE: Portrait of an elderly Egyptian man from the Roman period
ABOVE: Portrait of a young man from the site of Hawara in Lower Egypt
ABOVE: Portrait of a woman dating to the early second century AD
ABOVE: Portrait of a military officer from Lower Egypt from the middle of the second century AD
ABOVE: Portrait of an Egyptian man from the Staatliche Museum in Berlin
ABOVE: Portrait of an Egyptian woman dating to the late second century AD
ABOVE: Portrait of a young man from Fayum dating to around the second or third century AD or thereabouts
ABOVE: Portrait of a woman from Lower Egypt dating to around the late second century AD or thereabouts
ABOVE: Portrait of a man from Fayum, dating to around the mid-second century AD or thereabouts
Modern depictions of Hypatia
As a result of the fact that our information about Hypatia’s ancestry is vague, we have no trustworthy information whatsoever about her appearance, and she lived in a time and place that was what we would consider remarkably diverse, modern artists have imagined her in drastically different ways.
For instance, in 1908, the illustrator Jules Maurice Gaspard made a portrait of what he imagined Hypatia might have looked like for a fictional “biography” of Hypatia written by the American writer Elbert Hubbard (lived 1856 – 1915) for his series Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers. Gaspard’s illustration portrays Hypatia with features that are generally seen as distinctively white.
ABOVE: Modern fictional portrait of Hypatia by Jules Maurice Gaspard from 1908, depicting her looking like a white English woman
By contrast, an illustration of Hypatia that has become widely circulated on the internet in recent years, whose original source I am unable to identify, depicts Hypatia with features that are generally seen as distinctively Black.
ABOVE: Modern fictional portrait of Hypatia from this rather historically dubious article depicting her with features that are generally seen as distinctively Black
These two illustrations are drastically different, but neither is provably inaccurate, since we know nothing about Hypatia’s appearance. One person’s guess is just as good as any other person’s.
My only question is how much of the Nubian influence was there still remaining in Egypt around Hypatias’ time? Every scholar knows that Egypt was ruled by Nubian Pharoahs during the 25th dynasty and these Kings ( Piye, Shebitku, Taharqa, Tantamani) from Nubia (modern Sudan) left their influence, knowledge, culture and many people of black (African) decent in upper and lower Egypt. If you look at Egyptians today they are a mix of Middle East and African in appearance with….
I can agree that black is never a great term to use when speaking about ancient people I would correct you in saying that Romans and Greeks did care about skin colour, you only have to look at the root of the word out Eqypt and Ethiopia to prove that. If this was true, why don’t we see many African features in their paintings even though we know that they dealt with dark skinned Africans a lot.
BTW sub-saharan pynotypes have existed in north Africa for 30,000 years and never left, this is also pretty problematic way to frame African history or history of the African region. There has never been a time when darker skinned people were not in north Africa even during the invasions.
The portraits you shown only portray people with European features but we do know that there were still many Africans living in eqypt during the time and Hellenization didn’t change the features of the area although many Greeks migrated to the eqypt.
Some Coptic Christians would have African pynotypes and darker skin, it wasn’t uncommon for people to have darker skin. We only assume this now because of the revisioning of the classics that have happened pretty recently.
Furthermore saying that these portraits look like modern eqyptians is also a mischaracterisation because even modern eqyptians have many different pynotypes. Youre also forgetting that eqypt has native darker skin people who still live there today too, maybe not portrayed in mainstream media. I fear that we use western revisionist lenses to frame history to suit our needs.
I’m not even saying she was dark skin or had so called sub-saharan features as you put it but I am saying probabilistic there is a high chance she did not look Hellenistic or anything like those paintings. those paintings cannot be your only proof to say what she looked like.
For example we don’t know who her Mather was but her father was also born in eqypt just like her. The eraser of local darker skin Africans in Hellenistic societies is clearly a modern revision of history. Especially when it’s to do with eqypt and the classics.
Another thread which is always missing is the connection of traditional kemetic and kushite religion on the mathematics of the alexandria. This is always ignored when speaking about the history of maths for example how arithmetics, astrology, geometry and trigonometry already existed in eqypt before the Hellenistic era. This is according to greek sources.
This is the only reason greek scholars were even in eqypt in the first place because of the ancient knowledge.
No, dear. Modern Egyptians aren’t darker or different from those portraits, most of them look similar to those in the portraits and their features are 100% Egyptian.
The Kush rulers were about 1000 years earlier than the discussed time period, however there was always a great deal of cultural exchange between Egypt and Nubia. The farther south you went the more influence from Nubia, and naturally the lowland places like Alexandria were also influenced by mediterranean cultures. By Hypatia’s time, the Hellenized world was, well, pretty Greek. Which, to the author’s point, tells us nothing about how people looked, other than probably looking like a mix of what we now describe as Mediterranean and African. Which totally makes sense for an African city on the coast of the mediterranean like Alexandria. But again the racial concepts of Black and White are fairly new, as far as human history goes, and didn’t apply back then.
I understand the desire to reclaim history- and great historical figures- from the centuries of white-washing recent European hegemony has introduced. But I think that rather than trying to play the game by the dichotomous framework imposed by the colonialist exploiters, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to reframe the issue as more along the lines of
For example, instead of asking if Hypatia (or Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Socrates, etc…) were black – maybe the better question is: why do we still assume they were white when, lol, white people didn’t even exist back then?
Frankly, we can never remind folks enough that inventing categories like “White” was just a way of justifying getting rich off of stealing the labor, land, and lives of other people. We’re stuck with concepts like skin-based race for the time being, but we have to be careful about projecting our contemporary framework on the past.
edit:
I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to reframe the issue as more along the lines of
Why are we in the West still
so beholden to these white-washed depictions of history inherited from 15th century NW European backwaters like England, Portugal, et al when the rest of the (civilized) world has long known who the real barbarians are?
For example, instead of asking if Hypatia (or Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Socrates, etc…) were black – maybe the better question is: why do we still assume they were white when, lol, white people didn’t even exist back then?
A fair question indeed! I don’t think I have to spell out the answer for you 🙂 Quite frankly, you and I both know that in order to push an agenda of subjugation, control, and supremacy you have to present a narrative that your group is superior to other groups. This has been a underlying theme throughout modern and ancient history. Whether it be The North Atlantic Slave trade or Adolf Hitler or President Andrew Jackson and his attempt to control Native Americans it is all the same 🙁
Ancient Egyptians were Eastern Mediterranean, DNA from 5000 year old mummies has proven that the Ancient Egyptians came from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant primary Cyprus and Greece and absolutely no Sub-Saharan DNA was found so asking if Hypatia was Black makes absolutely no sense in the first place as ancient Egyptians were never black to begin with, Cleopatra was Greek.
Also to the person that said White people didn’t exist back during Ancient Egypt is very very misinformed White Europeans have existed for over 30.000 years ancient Egypt is 12.000 years old MAX.
I’m going to have to correct you on a few things. First of all, as I discuss in this article from February 2020, modern DNA studies that claim to prove that people of a certain ancient culture belonged to some race or another or that they are related to some contemporary ethnic group are extremely problematic to say the least. Population genetics is a lot more complicated than most people realize, especially when it comes to ancient history.
Second of all, there were definitely some people in ancient Egypt who we today would consider “black.” This is evidenced by surviving ancient depictions and mummies of people who are obviously what we consider “black,” as well as the presence of black people in Egypt today. Egypt has always been a very ethnically diverse country with inhabitants of all different skin tones.
Also, ancient Egyptian civilization only goes back to around 4000 BC, making it only around 6,000 years old. I’m not sure where you are getting the idea that Egyptian civilization is 12,000 years old. There were certainly people living in Egypt 12,000 years ago, but there were people living in Egypt long before that also and the people living in Egypt 12,000 years ago were not what we would call a “civilization.”
Thank you for correcting the previous poster. Some people are extremely ignorant about the history of ancient North Africa and the present day Middle East. I would suggest discussing the story of Pharoah/King Piyanki (Piye) and the successive 25th dynasty (Shebitku,Shebaka, Taharqa, Tantamani~730-620BCE) to help educated those unfamiliar with Egyptian history and the fact yes blacks/Nubians ruled Egypt for almost 100 years…it is the present day racism they unfortunately clouds people’s ability to examine history with an open mind and look at the evidence and apply just basic logic…think where Egypt is located of course there were ancient people of Nubian/Black, Arabic, Mesopotamian, Greek and Asian ethnic groups…I still contend the possibility remains Hypatia may have been more of a hybrid of cultures to include African…just makes sense given people of the ancient world looked very similar to Egyptians today with skin ranging from pale to dark complexion…these modern ethnic constructs are counterproductive and a waste of scholarly research…Hypatia was in all likelihood a person of color…not saying she looked like a Nubian but more akin to someone like any Egyptian today…
Egypt don’t have what you call “black” people, or at least a Native black Egyptians, they are mostly people of color (with different shades from white to brown). And yes, the ancient Egyptian civilization is more than 6k years old, it’s around 10,000 yrs old
Kip, thanks to both you and Spencer for you corrections.
I personally found out about Hypatia as an Undergraduate student sometime way last century. I always admired her and still get angry when discussing her demise (along with all the unique manuscripts in the Library of Alexandria) and the bad taste I get in my mouth when discussing Bishop, cum St., Cyril.
PS – If you include some of the remains found in the past 20 years or so, but seldom discussed anywhere, in the Bosnia region of Eastern Europe, you may want to put a few more zeros on that 30.000 year figure for Caucasoid Europeans.
“White people didn’t even exist back then”
You do realise the irony and the racist subtones of your entire argument, right?
“White people didn’t even exist back then…” Anyone like to handle this one? Because even with 30 years as a psychotherapists I still have no clue how to deal with an adult, chronologically, with a 40 or 50 IQ. There is just no point of mental contact where information can be given, absorbed, manipulated, and remembered…nothing. A little like talking to a rock.
What are some of your sources? I’d love to do some reading on the subject!
Not certain our host is filtering comments sufficiently as someone used the “N” word and it did not get flagged as inappropriate content. Clearly a low IQ and racist person not worthy of having a serious academic discourse into a subject that is interesting if not on the order of profound…Hypatia in all likelihood was an ancient world “mut” with lots of diverse cultures in her bloodline just like Egypt to include africans, Arabs, mongols, Greeks, and others…Her brilliance as a mathematician should never be overlooked as she helped lay the foundation for modern female scientists…Her ethnicity may remain a mystery but her prowess can still inspire countless young women to bust the glass ceiling of STEM professionals….
I have already deleted the comment you are referring to. I initially allowed it because I was working on a reply pointing out the commenter’s racist hypocrisy and false reasoning, but I decided that allowing a comment like that to exist at all was just unconscionable, even if I left a reply pointing out the commenter’s mistakes. I decided that, when someone uses the n-word, it’s really not much use to point out to them that they’re being racist; at that point, when they’re using that word, they clearly already know that they’re being racist and they just don’t care.
Regarding your comment here, I don’t think that it is ever accurate to apply the word “mutt” to a human being, since, not only is this word deeply pejorative, but it also inaccurately implies that races are a real biological phenomenon. In reality, of course, race is a social construct.
I would also generally advise caution about invoking the concept of IQ. I do not believe that intelligence can be objectively measured and, unfortunately, the notion of IQ has been repeatedly used over the course of the past century to justify the oppression and mistreatment of people of color. I’m sure you’ve probably heard of The Bell Curve, a notorious work of racist pseudoscience that was published in 1994 that tries to argue that Black people are on average less intelligent than white people based on IQ, which the authors of the book wrongly claim as an objective measure of heritable intelligence.
It’s no surprise either that our racist president Donald Trump has repeatedly accused individual Black people of having low IQs, such as in 2018 when he called Representative Maxine Waters “an extraordinarily low-IQ person.”
I think you should try to learn a bit more history, because it’s fairly obvious you do not know much about the field. There were no Mongols or Arabs in 4th Century Roman Egypt. The Arabs were still divided tribes who lived in the Arabian desert (until the spread of Islam some 250 years later), while the Mongols would not reach anywhere near Egypt until over 900 years later, where they were defeated by the Mamluks in Palestina.
With regards to the city of Alexandria, there would not been any sizeable population of Nubians, perhaps the odd merchant or two. Modern day Egyptians themselves are also not single race, not sure where you got your ”she was likely a person of colour” claim from but it is not based on any fact.
Thank you quickly responding! Whomever that was is a sick and low life person. I am sure you know I meant no offense in using the term “mutt.” Well aware of the human ethnic constructs we refer to as race…there is only one race the HUMAN race unless you are talking about beings from another world 🙂 Lots of ethnic diversity among the citizens on this beautiful planet…Also, yes , very familiar with the BS Bell Curve book…It was released while I was an undergrad in EE and Applied Math so I had to strive to rise above the pseudoscience and absolutely BOGUS statistics contained in it as a member of the group referenced…The fact I was #4 graduating from HS in AP/Honors, took CALCULUS in HS, great SATs and earned Eagle Scout did not prevent a few of my college classmates from wondering what my melanated butt was doing in Fourier Analysis or Electromagnetic Waves or Control Systems courses. Racism is an ugly thing and I have felt it’s sting more times than I care to think about…I feel you brotha on your comments…Thank you! I hope you can publish a few good books with your research and help educate the ignorant on the fact the ancient world was primitive but racism did not exist and cultures battled over power/territory but with our current CinC we have regressed back to some dark days in this nation (pre-civil rights movement). Only the truly stupid assume that ethnicity determines intellect…met dumb and smart people from all ethnicities over the years and as always it seems to be normally distributed across cultures….Hypatia was a truly amazing mathematician and scientist and hope your research leads to further info about her ethnicity and her contributions to algebraic geometry…
There’s a lot of discussion about her color or race but in the drawing where Hypatia is being killed someone has gone to great lengths to make the killers look “Black.”
Depicting Black folk as evil and good people as White goes back a long way.
Black has also been a term for Non-White.
The default setting for has been to “whitewash” history. If they didn’t know they could just as easily make her look like a person of color. Or at least make an effort to reflect the location.
I agree with a lot of the article, but I disagree in claiming Ancient Greece and Rome were “color-blind” societies. It is absolutely true that racial standards vary according to time and space , and that the Ancients did not see race through a polarized lense (but many countries still don’t, including my own Brazil, where you can be white, black, in between, or something else), but even more than today, physical appearance was clearly indicative of origin. So every Roman or Greek knew that a black person (or as they called them Aethiopes), likely came from beyond Roman domains (or perhaps Southern Egypt), and as seen in Herodotus, Hippocrates and others, people associated appearence with personality and culture, and believe both arised directly from Geography (a belief which still was held by Linnaeus). You are right that “racism”, as specifcally anti-black did not exist, black people only became the target of inferiority beliefs due to slavery in the 16th century. If Hypatia were black, she would likely would have been mentioned as such, the same if she had red hair or blue eyes (Augustus blonde hairs and blue eyes are mentioned by Suetonius and Pliny, King David is described having red hair, Septimus Severus is described meeting a black soldier in Britain and seeing his skin as bad omen), unusual characteristics were generally mentioned. While someone’s more typical Mediterranean apperance, would likely not be described due to it being the norm.