 The Dynastic Race theory has been largely replaced by the theory Egypt was a hydraulic empire.In the 1950s, when the Dynastic Race Theory was widely accepted by mainstream scholarship, the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop was publicising his theory that the Ancient Egyptians were "Black Africans".Diop "paid special attention to the emergence of the Dynastic Race Theory", and claimed that European scholars supported this theory to avoid having to admit that the Ancient Egyptians were black and to charactise them as "Semitic" or "Caucasian".