# Founding fathers of Kemetology paint Kemites as mixed or white  
Sir William Flinders Petrie, the foremost nineteenth-century Egyptologist and archaeologist, was the first to assign, simultaneously, an outside origin and a mixed African-Libyan origin to Kemet: ‘The Egyptians were largely formed from Libyan immigrants to begin with; the basis of the race apparently being a mulatto of Libyan-negro mixture, judging from the earliest skeletons at Medum' (Flinders Petrie, 1974a, p. 63). In another work, Petrie ascribed each new introduction of ceramic design styles to the 'entry of a fresh civilisation, and probably a fresh race' (Flinders Petrie, 1974b, p. 16; emphasis added). This monumental imagining of a 'fresh race', 'a dynastic race', 'a new race' - in short, a non-African 'race' - is too ubiquitous to warrant detailing (Wilkinson, 1996; Maspero, 1920; etc.). Wallis Budge, Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum in the earlier part of the last century, clearly showed the development of his thinking as he gained wider access to records and cultures as his research progressed. In an 1893 publication, he repeated the dogma laid down by ethnologists and anthropologists according to which the Egyptians belong to the Caucasian race (Wallis Budge, 1893, p. 51). In the same publication, however, he soon goes on to compare the Kushites to descendants of the biblical Ham (Kem) and says that their 'bodily appearance is the same, though their skin is a little darker, and at the outset they appear to have had a religion and speech akin to that of the Egyptians' (Wallis Budge, 1893, p. 52; emphasis added). Though this dispels any notion of a Caucasian