Population history of Egypt
Encyclopedia
The land currently known as Egypt
has a long and involved population history. This is partly due to its geographical location at the crossroads of several major cultural areas: the Mediterranean, the Middle East
, the Sahara
and East Africa
. In addition Egypt has experienced several invasions during its long history, including by the Canaan
ites, the Libya
ns, the Nubians
, the Assyria
ns, the Kushites, the Persians, the Greeks
, the Macedonians
, the Romans and the Arabs
. The various conquests over time have made the relationship between Modern Egyptians
and Ancient Egypt
ians a topic of investigation.
, and East towards the Nile Valley. It was these populations, in addition to Neolithic farmers
from the Near East
, that played a major role in the formation of the Egyptian state as they brought their food crops, sheep, goats and cattle to the Nile Valley.
. This culture, among others, has links to the Levant
. The pottery of the Buto Maadi culture, best known from the site at Maadi
near Cairo, also shows connections to the southern Levant
.
In Upper Egypt
the predynastic Badarian culture was followed by the Naqada culture
. The origins of these people is still not fully understood, but one study has described human remains from both the Naqada and Badarian cultures as clustering more with Nubians and East Africans than with northern Egyptian remains.
based their hypothesis on the increased novelty and seemingly rapid change in Predynastic pottery and noted trade contacts between ancient Egypt and the Middle East. This is no longer the dominant view in Egyptology, however the evidence on which it was based still suggests influence from these regions. Fekri Hassan and Edwin et al. point to mutual influence from both inner Africa as well as the Levant. However according to one author this influence seems to have had minimal impact on the indigenous populations already present.
One author has stated that the Naqada
phase of Predynastic Egyptians in Upper Egypt
shared an almost identical culture with A-group peoples of the Lower Sudan. Based in part on the similarities at the royal tombs at Qustul, some scholars have even proposed an Egyptian origin in Nubia among the A-group. In 1996 Lovell and Prowse reported the presence of individual rulers buried at Naqada in what they interpreted to be elite, high status tombs, showing them to be more closely related morphologically to populations in Northern Nubia than those in Southern Egypt. Most scholars however, have rejected this hypothesis and cite the presence of royal tombs that are contemporaneous with that of Qustul and just as elaborate, together with problems with the dating techniques
.
The language of the Nubian people is one of the Nilo-Saharan languages
, whereas the language of the Egyptian people was one of the Afro-Asiatic languages
.
Toby Wilkinson, in his book "Genesis of the Pharaohs", proposes an origin for the Egyptians somewhere in the Eastern Desert
. He presents evidence that much of predynastic Egypt duplicated the traditional African cattle-culture typical of Southern Sudanese and East African pastoralists of today. Kendall agrees with Wilkinson's interpretation that ancient rock art in the region may depict the first examples of the royal crowns, while also pointing to Qustul in Nubia as a likely candidate for the origins of the white crown, being that the earliest known example of it was discovered in this area.
There is also evidence that sheep and goats were introduced into Nabta from Southwest Asia
about 8,000 years ago. There is some speculation that this culture is likely to be the predecessor of the Egyptians, based on cultural similarities and social complexity which is thought to be reflective of Egypt's Old Kingdom
.
. Consequently most DNA studies have been carried out on modern Egyptian populations with the intent of learning about the influences of historical migrations on the population of Egypt.
argue that the Egyptians were primarily Africoid before the many conquests of Egypt diluted the Africanity of the Egyptian people, other scholars such as Frank Yurco believe that Modern Egyptians are representative of the ancient population.
In general, various DNA studies have found that the gene frequencies of modern North African populations are intermediate between those of the Horn of Africa
and Eurasia, though possessing a greater genetic affinity with the populations of Eurasia than they do with the former.
Luis, Rowold et al. found that the diverse NRY haplotypes observed in a population of mixed Arabs and Berbers found that the majority of haplogroups, about 59% were of Eurasian origin. They found that markers signaling the Neolithic expansion from the Middle East constitute the predominant component. The remaining 39.5% were clades that belonged to Haplogroup E1b1b, found exclusively amongst the populations of the Horn of Africa and the Mediterranean basin. E1b1b and its derivatives are characteristic of Afro-Asiatic speakers and is believed to have originated in either North Africa
, the Horn of Africa
or nearby areas of the Near East
.
A study by Krings et al. from 1999 on mitochondrial DNA
clines along the Nile Valley found that a Eurasian cline runs from Northern Egypt to Southern Sudan. Similarly, an mtDNA study of modern Egyptians from the Gurna
region near Thebes in Southern Egypt revealed that Eurasian haplogroups represented 61% of the population, with the remainder 39% being of Ethiopic origin. The oral tradition of the Gurna people indicates that they, like most modern day Egyptians, descend from the ancient Egyptians
A 2009 study on modern Upper (Southern) Egyptians using comparisons based on frequency and molecular data found that :
The results of these genetic studies is consistent with the historical record, which records significant bidirectional contact between Egypt, Nubia, and the Levant within the last few thousand years, but with general poulation continuity from the Early Dynastic period up to the modern day era.
cannot be a reliable indicator of inherited influences such as ethnicity. This conclusion was supported in 2003 in a paper by Gravlee, Bernard and Leonard. A study by Beals, Smith, and Dodd (1984) found that “race” and cranial variation had low correlations, and that cranial variation was instead strongly correlated with climate variables. This view is also supported by Kemp. Other studies have shown that the typical cranial shapes of some African (Sudanic and Ethiopic, but not Bantu), Arab and Berber ethnic groups are largely the same.
A craniofacial study by C. Loring Brace
et al. (1993) concluded that: "The Predynastic of Upper Egypt and the Late Dynastic of Lower Egypt are more closely related to each other than to any other population. As a whole, they show ties with the European Neolithic, North Africa, modern Europe, and, more remotely, India, but not at all with sub-Saharan Africa, eastern Asia, Oceania, or the New World." He also commented,"We conclude that the Egyptians have been in place since back in the Pleistocene and have been largely unaffected by either invasions or migrations. As others have noted, Egyptians are Egyptians, and they were so in the past as well.".
A survey cited by Kemp (2005) of ancient Egyptian crania spanning all time periods found that the Egyptian population as a whole clusters more closely to modern Egyptians than to other groups, but that they also cluster more closely to the Asian and Mediterranean groups than they did to the earlier Sub-Saharan African groups. Kemp also noted that Egypt conquered and settled Nubia beginning in the 1st Dynasty.
Anthropologist Nancy Lovell states the following:
This view was also shared by the late Egyptologist, Frank Yurco.
A 2005 study by Keita of predynastic Badarian (Southern Egyptian) crania found that the Badarian samples cluster more closely with East African (Ethiopic) samples than they do with Northern European (Berg and Norse) samples, though no Asian and Southern European samples were included in the study. Keita has also said that the predyastic crania are different to the lower Egyptian samples, which display a mean part way between modern Europeans and Ethiopians.
Sonia Zakrzewski in 2007 noted that population continuity occurs over the Egyptian Predynastic into the Greco-Roman periods, and that a relatively high level of genetic differentiation was sustained over this time period. She concluded therefore that the process of state formation itself may have been mainly an indigenous process, but that it may have occurred in association with in-migration, particularly during the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods.
In 2008 Keita found that the early predynastic groups in Southern Egypt were similar craniometrically to Nile valley groups of Ethiopic extraction, but as a whole the dynastic Egyptians (includes both Upper and Lower Egyptians) show much closer affinities with the modern day population and Eurasians than they do to Sub-Saharan Africans. He also concluded that more material is needed to make a firm conclusion about the relationship between the early Holocene
Nile valley populations and later ancient Egyptians.
points out that limb elongation is "clearly related to the dissipation of metabolically generated heat" in areas of higher ambient temperature. He also stated that "skin color intensification and distal limb elongation is apparent wherever people have been long-term residents of the tropics". He also points out that the term super negroid is inappropriate, as it is also applied to non negroid populations. These features have been observed among Egyptian samples. According to Robins and Shute the average limb elongation ratios among ancient Egyptians is higher than that of modern West Africans who reside much closer to the equator. Robins and Shute therefore term the ancient Egyptians to be "super-negroid" but state that although the body plans of the ancient Egyptians were closer to those of modern negroes than for modern whites, “this does not mean that the ancient Egyptians were negroes". Anthropologist S.O.Y. Keita criticized Robins and Shute, stating they do not interpret their results within an adaptive context, and stating that they imply “misleadingly” that early southern Egyptians were not a "part of the Saharo-tropical group, which included Negroes". Gallagher et al. also points out that "body proportions are under strong climatic selection and evidence remarkable stability within regional lineages". Zakrzewski (2003) studied skeletal samples from the Badarian period to the Middle Kingdom. She confirmed the results of Robins and Shute that Ancient Egyptians in general had "tropical body plans” but that their proportions were actually "super-negroid".
Trikhanus (1981) found Egyptians to plot closest to tropical Africans and not Mediterranean Europeans residing in a roughly similar climatic area. A more recent study compared ancient Egyptian osteology to that of African-Americans and White Americans, and found that the stature of the Ancient Egyptians was more similar to the stature of African-Americans, although it was not identical.
study on the dental morphology
of ancient Egyptians by Prof. Joel Irish shows dental traits characteristic of current indigenous North Africans and to a lesser extent Southwest Asian and southern European populations, but not at all to sub Saharan populations. Among the samples included in the study is skeletal material from the Hawara tombs of Fayum, (from the Roman period) which clustered very closely with the Badarian series of the predynastic
period. All the samples, particularly those of the Dynastic period, were significantly divergent from a neolithic West Saharan sample from Lower Nubia. Biological continuity was also found intact from the dynastic to the post-pharaonic periods. According to Irish:
Anthropologist Shomarka Keita
takes issue with the suggestion of Irish that Egyptians and Nubians were not primary descendants of the African epipaleolithic and Neolithic populations. Keita also criticizes him for ignoring the possibility that the dentition of the ancient Egyptians could have been caused by "in situ microevolution" driven by dietary change, rather than by racial admixture. However Keita himself has observed population continuity from the Pleistocene to the present in modern Egyptians.
Ancient Egyptian languages are classified into six major chronological divisions; Archaic Egyptian
, Old Egyptian
, Middle Egyptian
, Late Egyptian
, Demotic Egyptian, and Coptic
.
language family
. The Afro-Asiatic language family is believed by most linguists to have originated in Northeast Africa with a minority postulating an origin in the Levant
(ancient Canaan). Afro-Asiatic also includes several ancient languages, such as Ancient Egyptian, Biblical Hebrew, and Akkadian (the language of the Babylonians and Assyrians). Of the six subfamilies of Afro-Asiatic, the Semitic languages
form the only Afro-Asiatic subfamily that currently exists in both Africa and Asia. The other five of the six Afro-Asiatic subfamilies are restricted to the African continent. The majority of the diversity in the Afro-Asiatic language family is found in Ethiopia
, where diverse languages exist in close geographic proximity.
UCLA Professor of African history, Christopher Ehret
, claims that the Ancient Egyptians are descended from speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic who migrated from further south to the Nile Valley. According to Ehret archeological and linguistic evidence indicates that the speakers of the earliest Afroasiatic languages occupied lands between Nubia
and northern Somalia
around 15,000-13,000 B.C. before the formation of the Ancient Egyptian state. In Black Athena
Professor Martin Bernal
argues that the phylum may instead have emerged around the Great Rift Valley
in southern Ethiopia
and northern Kenya
.
. However, the Hieratic script was used in parallel although mostly reserved for priests but also for magical purposes and administrative and legal documents. This script used cursive and simplified forms of the Hieroglyphic writing to ease and speed writing. It was mostly written on papyrus, wood, leather and ostraca. It lasted until the ninth century BCE when it was replaced by the "Abnormal Hieratic" in southern Egypt. Another third script was the Demotic
which was developed in Lower Egypt
during the later part of the 25th Dynasty.
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
has a long and involved population history. This is partly due to its geographical location at the crossroads of several major cultural areas: the Mediterranean, the Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
, the Sahara
Sahara
The Sahara is the world's second largest desert, after Antarctica. At over , it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as Europe or the United States. The Sahara stretches from the Red Sea, including parts of the Mediterranean coasts, to the outskirts of the Atlantic Ocean...
and East Africa
East Africa
East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN scheme of geographic regions, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:...
. In addition Egypt has experienced several invasions during its long history, including by the Canaan
Canaan
Canaan is a historical region roughly corresponding to modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and the western parts of Jordan...
ites, the Libya
Ancient Libya
The Latin name Libya referred to the region west of the Nile Valley, generally corresponding to modern Northwest Africa. Climate changes affected the locations of the settlements....
ns, the Nubians
Nubians
The Nubians are an ethnic group originally from northern Sudan, and southern Egypt now inhabiting North Africa and some parts of East Africa....
, the Assyria
Assyria
Assyria was a Semitic Akkadian kingdom, extant as a nation state from the mid–23rd century BC to 608 BC centred on the Upper Tigris river, in northern Mesopotamia , that came to rule regional empires a number of times through history. It was named for its original capital, the ancient city of Assur...
ns, the Kushites, the Persians, the Greeks
Ptolemaic Egypt
Ptolemaic Egypt began when Ptolemy I Soter invaded Egypt and declared himself Pharaoh of Egypt in 305 BC and ended with the death of queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt and the Roman conquest in 30 BC. The Ptolemaic Kingdom was a powerful Hellenistic state, extending from southern Syria in the east, to...
, the Macedonians
Ancient Macedonians
The Macedonians originated from inhabitants of the northeastern part of the Greek peninsula, in the alluvial plain around the rivers Haliacmon and lower Axios...
, the Romans and the Arabs
Arab Egypt
Arab Egypt may refer to*Egypt after the Arab conquest of AD 639, see History of Muslim Egypt*modern Egypt under a state doctrine of Pan-Arabism, see**United Arab Republic **Arab Republic of Egypt...
. The various conquests over time have made the relationship between Modern Egyptians
Egyptians
Egyptians are nation an ethnic group made up of Mediterranean North Africans, the indigenous people of Egypt.Egyptian identity is closely tied to geography. The population of Egypt is concentrated in the lower Nile Valley, the small strip of cultivable land stretching from the First Cataract to...
and Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
ians a topic of investigation.
Prehistory
During the Paleolithic the Nile Valley was inhabited by various hunter gatherer populations. About 10,000 years ago the Sahara Desert had a wet phase. People from the surrounding areas moved into the Sahara, and evidence suggests that the populations of the Nile Valley reduced in size. About 5,000 years ago the wet phase of the Sahara came to end. Saharan population retreated to the south towards the SahelSahel
The Sahel is the ecoclimatic and biogeographic zone of transition between the Sahara desert in the North and the Sudanian Savannas in the south.It stretches across the North African continent between the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea....
, and East towards the Nile Valley. It was these populations, in addition to Neolithic farmers
Neolithic Revolution
The Neolithic Revolution was the first agricultural revolution. It was the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement. Archaeological data indicates that various forms of plants and animal domestication evolved independently in 6 separate locations worldwide circa...
from the Near East
Near East
The Near East is a geographical term that covers different countries for geographers, archeologists, and historians, on the one hand, and for political scientists, economists, and journalists, on the other...
, that played a major role in the formation of the Egyptian state as they brought their food crops, sheep, goats and cattle to the Nile Valley.
Predynastic Egypt
The Predynastic period dates to the end of the fourth millennium BC. From about 4800 to 4300BC the Merimde culture flourished in Lower EgyptLower Egypt
Lower Egypt is the northern-most section of Egypt. It refers to the fertile Nile Delta region, which stretches from the area between El-Aiyat and Zawyet Dahshur, south of modern-day Cairo, and the Mediterranean Sea....
. This culture, among others, has links to the Levant
Levant
The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...
. The pottery of the Buto Maadi culture, best known from the site at Maadi
Maadi
Maadi is a wealthy suburb south of Cairo, Egypt. The town is home to the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt, Cairo American College , Lycée Français du Caire , Misr American College , Maadi British International School , the Cairo Rugby Club, and the national Egyptian Geological Museum.-...
near Cairo, also shows connections to the southern Levant
Levant
The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...
.
In Upper Egypt
Upper Egypt
Upper Egypt is the strip of land, on both sides of the Nile valley, that extends from the cataract boundaries of modern-day Aswan north to the area between El-Ayait and Zawyet Dahshur . The northern section of Upper Egypt, between El-Ayait and Sohag is sometimes known as Middle Egypt...
the predynastic Badarian culture was followed by the Naqada culture
Naqada culture
The Naqada culture is an archaeological culture of Chalcolithic Predynastic Egypt , named for the town of Naqada, Qena Governorate....
. The origins of these people is still not fully understood, but one study has described human remains from both the Naqada and Badarian cultures as clustering more with Nubians and East Africans than with northern Egyptian remains.
Biogeographic origin based on cultural data
Located in the extreme north-east corner of Africa, Ancient Egyptian society was at a crossroads between the African and Near Eastern regions. Early proponents of the Dynastic Race TheoryDynastic Race Theory
The Dynastic Race Theory was the earliest thesis to attempt to explain how predynastic Egypt developed into the sophisticated monarchy of Dynastic Egypt. The Theory holds that the earliest roots of the Ancient Egyptian dynastic civilisation were imported by invaders from Mesopotamia who then...
based their hypothesis on the increased novelty and seemingly rapid change in Predynastic pottery and noted trade contacts between ancient Egypt and the Middle East. This is no longer the dominant view in Egyptology, however the evidence on which it was based still suggests influence from these regions. Fekri Hassan and Edwin et al. point to mutual influence from both inner Africa as well as the Levant. However according to one author this influence seems to have had minimal impact on the indigenous populations already present.
One author has stated that the Naqada
Naqada
Naqada is a town on the west bank of the Nile in the Egyptian governorate of Qena. It was known in Ancient Egypt as Nubt and in classical antiquity as Ombos. Its name derives from ancient Egyptian nub, meaning gold, on account of the proximity of gold mines in the Eastern Desert.Naqada comprises...
phase of Predynastic Egyptians in Upper Egypt
Upper Egypt
Upper Egypt is the strip of land, on both sides of the Nile valley, that extends from the cataract boundaries of modern-day Aswan north to the area between El-Ayait and Zawyet Dahshur . The northern section of Upper Egypt, between El-Ayait and Sohag is sometimes known as Middle Egypt...
shared an almost identical culture with A-group peoples of the Lower Sudan. Based in part on the similarities at the royal tombs at Qustul, some scholars have even proposed an Egyptian origin in Nubia among the A-group. In 1996 Lovell and Prowse reported the presence of individual rulers buried at Naqada in what they interpreted to be elite, high status tombs, showing them to be more closely related morphologically to populations in Northern Nubia than those in Southern Egypt. Most scholars however, have rejected this hypothesis and cite the presence of royal tombs that are contemporaneous with that of Qustul and just as elaborate, together with problems with the dating techniques
Dating methodology (archaeology)
Dating material drawn from the archaeological record can be made by a direct study of an artifact or may be deduced by association with materials found in the context the item is drawn from or inferred by its point of discovery in the sequence relative to datable contexts...
.
The language of the Nubian people is one of the Nilo-Saharan languages
Nilo-Saharan languages
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers , including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of Nile meet...
, whereas the language of the Egyptian people was one of the Afro-Asiatic languages
Afro-Asiatic languages
The Afroasiatic languages , also known as Hamito-Semitic, constitute one of the world's largest language families, with about 375 living languages...
.
Toby Wilkinson, in his book "Genesis of the Pharaohs", proposes an origin for the Egyptians somewhere in the Eastern Desert
Eastern Desert
The Eastern Desert is the section of Sahara Desert east of the Nile River, between the river and the Red Sea. It extends from Egypt in the north to Eritrea in the south, and also comprises parts of Sudan and Ethiopia.-Features:...
. He presents evidence that much of predynastic Egypt duplicated the traditional African cattle-culture typical of Southern Sudanese and East African pastoralists of today. Kendall agrees with Wilkinson's interpretation that ancient rock art in the region may depict the first examples of the royal crowns, while also pointing to Qustul in Nubia as a likely candidate for the origins of the white crown, being that the earliest known example of it was discovered in this area.
There is also evidence that sheep and goats were introduced into Nabta from Southwest Asia
Southwest Asia
Western Asia, West Asia, Southwest Asia or Southwestern Asia are terms that describe the westernmost portion of Asia. The terms are partly coterminous with the Middle East, which describes a geographical position in relation to Western Europe rather than its location within Asia...
about 8,000 years ago. There is some speculation that this culture is likely to be the predecessor of the Egyptians, based on cultural similarities and social complexity which is thought to be reflective of Egypt's Old Kingdom
Old Kingdom
Old Kingdom is the name given to the period in the 3rd millennium BC when Egypt attained its first continuous peak of civilization in complexity and achievement – the first of three so-called "Kingdom" periods, which mark the high points of civilization in the lower Nile Valley .The term itself was...
.
DNA studies
Attempts to extract ancient DNA or aDNA from Ancient Egyptian remains have yielded mainly Eurasian DNA types from the Dakleh Oasis cemetery site (from Southern Egypt), and they show a considerable increase in the amount of sub Saharan mitchondrial DNA over the past 2,000 years, suggesting that within this timeframe there was more migration from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Nile Valley than from Eurasia to the latter. One successful study was performed on ancient mummies of the 12th Dynasty, by Paabo and Di Rienzo, which identified multiple lines of descent, a minority of which originated in sub-Saharan Africa. Contamination from handling and intrusion from microbes have also created obstacles to recovery of Ancient DNAAncient DNA
Ancient DNA is DNA isolated from ancient specimens. It can be also loosely described as any DNA recovered from biological samples that have not been preserved specifically for later DNA analyses...
. Consequently most DNA studies have been carried out on modern Egyptian populations with the intent of learning about the influences of historical migrations on the population of Egypt.
DNA studies on modern Egyptians
Egypt has experienced several invasions during its history. However, these do not seem to account for more than about 10% overall of current Egyptians ancestry when the DNA evidence of the ancient mitochondrial DNA and modern Y chromosomes is considered. While Afrocentrists such as Ivan van SertimaIvan van Sertima
Ivan Gladstone Van Sertima was an associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University in the United States....
argue that the Egyptians were primarily Africoid before the many conquests of Egypt diluted the Africanity of the Egyptian people, other scholars such as Frank Yurco believe that Modern Egyptians are representative of the ancient population.
In general, various DNA studies have found that the gene frequencies of modern North African populations are intermediate between those of the Horn of Africa
Horn of Africa
The Horn of Africa is a peninsula in East Africa that juts hundreds of kilometers into the Arabian Sea and lies along the southern side of the Gulf of Aden. It is the easternmost projection of the African continent...
and Eurasia, though possessing a greater genetic affinity with the populations of Eurasia than they do with the former.
Luis, Rowold et al. found that the diverse NRY haplotypes observed in a population of mixed Arabs and Berbers found that the majority of haplogroups, about 59% were of Eurasian origin. They found that markers signaling the Neolithic expansion from the Middle East constitute the predominant component. The remaining 39.5% were clades that belonged to Haplogroup E1b1b, found exclusively amongst the populations of the Horn of Africa and the Mediterranean basin. E1b1b and its derivatives are characteristic of Afro-Asiatic speakers and is believed to have originated in either North Africa
North Africa
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...
, the Horn of Africa
Horn of Africa
The Horn of Africa is a peninsula in East Africa that juts hundreds of kilometers into the Arabian Sea and lies along the southern side of the Gulf of Aden. It is the easternmost projection of the African continent...
or nearby areas of the Near East
Near East
The Near East is a geographical term that covers different countries for geographers, archeologists, and historians, on the one hand, and for political scientists, economists, and journalists, on the other...
.
A study by Krings et al. from 1999 on mitochondrial DNA
Mitochondrial DNA
Mitochondrial DNA is the DNA located in organelles called mitochondria, structures within eukaryotic cells that convert the chemical energy from food into a form that cells can use, adenosine triphosphate...
clines along the Nile Valley found that a Eurasian cline runs from Northern Egypt to Southern Sudan. Similarly, an mtDNA study of modern Egyptians from the Gurna
Kurna
Kurna are various spelling for a group of three closely related villages located on the West Bank of the River Nile opposite the modern city of Luxor in Egypt near the Theban Hills.New Qurna was designed and built in the late 1940s and early 1950s by...
region near Thebes in Southern Egypt revealed that Eurasian haplogroups represented 61% of the population, with the remainder 39% being of Ethiopic origin. The oral tradition of the Gurna people indicates that they, like most modern day Egyptians, descend from the ancient Egyptians
A 2009 study on modern Upper (Southern) Egyptians using comparisons based on frequency and molecular data found that :
The results of these genetic studies is consistent with the historical record, which records significant bidirectional contact between Egypt, Nubia, and the Levant within the last few thousand years, but with general poulation continuity from the Early Dynastic period up to the modern day era.
Craniofacial criteria
Craniofacial criteria are no longer universally accepted as reliable indicators of population grouping or ethnicity. In 1912 Franz Boas demonstrated that cranial shape is heavily influenced by environmental factors, and can change within a few generations if conditions change, and therefore cranial measurementsCephalic index
Cephalic index is the ratio of the maximum width of the head multiplied by 100 divided by its maximum length ....
cannot be a reliable indicator of inherited influences such as ethnicity. This conclusion was supported in 2003 in a paper by Gravlee, Bernard and Leonard. A study by Beals, Smith, and Dodd (1984) found that “race” and cranial variation had low correlations, and that cranial variation was instead strongly correlated with climate variables. This view is also supported by Kemp. Other studies have shown that the typical cranial shapes of some African (Sudanic and Ethiopic, but not Bantu), Arab and Berber ethnic groups are largely the same.
A craniofacial study by C. Loring Brace
C. Loring Brace
C. Loring Brace is an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. He considers the attempt "to introduce a Darwinian outlook into biological anthropology" to be his greatest contribution to the field of anthropology.-Life and work:...
et al. (1993) concluded that: "The Predynastic of Upper Egypt and the Late Dynastic of Lower Egypt are more closely related to each other than to any other population. As a whole, they show ties with the European Neolithic, North Africa, modern Europe, and, more remotely, India, but not at all with sub-Saharan Africa, eastern Asia, Oceania, or the New World." He also commented,"We conclude that the Egyptians have been in place since back in the Pleistocene and have been largely unaffected by either invasions or migrations. As others have noted, Egyptians are Egyptians, and they were so in the past as well.".
A survey cited by Kemp (2005) of ancient Egyptian crania spanning all time periods found that the Egyptian population as a whole clusters more closely to modern Egyptians than to other groups, but that they also cluster more closely to the Asian and Mediterranean groups than they did to the earlier Sub-Saharan African groups. Kemp also noted that Egypt conquered and settled Nubia beginning in the 1st Dynasty.
Anthropologist Nancy Lovell states the following:
[Data] "must be placed in the context of hypotheses informed by archaeological, linguistic, geographic and other data. In such contexts, the physical anthropological evidence indicates that early Nile Valley populations can be identified as part of an African lineage, but exhibiting local variation. This variation represents the short and long term effects of evolutionary forces, such as gene flow, genetic drift, and natural selection, influenced by culture and geography."
This view was also shared by the late Egyptologist, Frank Yurco.
A 2005 study by Keita of predynastic Badarian (Southern Egyptian) crania found that the Badarian samples cluster more closely with East African (Ethiopic) samples than they do with Northern European (Berg and Norse) samples, though no Asian and Southern European samples were included in the study. Keita has also said that the predyastic crania are different to the lower Egyptian samples, which display a mean part way between modern Europeans and Ethiopians.
Sonia Zakrzewski in 2007 noted that population continuity occurs over the Egyptian Predynastic into the Greco-Roman periods, and that a relatively high level of genetic differentiation was sustained over this time period. She concluded therefore that the process of state formation itself may have been mainly an indigenous process, but that it may have occurred in association with in-migration, particularly during the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods.
In 2008 Keita found that the early predynastic groups in Southern Egypt were similar craniometrically to Nile valley groups of Ethiopic extraction, but as a whole the dynastic Egyptians (includes both Upper and Lower Egyptians) show much closer affinities with the modern day population and Eurasians than they do to Sub-Saharan Africans. He also concluded that more material is needed to make a firm conclusion about the relationship between the early Holocene
Holocene
The Holocene is a geological epoch which began at the end of the Pleistocene and continues to the present. The Holocene is part of the Quaternary period. Its name comes from the Greek words and , meaning "entirely recent"...
Nile valley populations and later ancient Egyptians.
Limb ratios
Anthropologist C. Loring BraceC. Loring Brace
C. Loring Brace is an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. He considers the attempt "to introduce a Darwinian outlook into biological anthropology" to be his greatest contribution to the field of anthropology.-Life and work:...
points out that limb elongation is "clearly related to the dissipation of metabolically generated heat" in areas of higher ambient temperature. He also stated that "skin color intensification and distal limb elongation is apparent wherever people have been long-term residents of the tropics". He also points out that the term super negroid is inappropriate, as it is also applied to non negroid populations. These features have been observed among Egyptian samples. According to Robins and Shute the average limb elongation ratios among ancient Egyptians is higher than that of modern West Africans who reside much closer to the equator. Robins and Shute therefore term the ancient Egyptians to be "super-negroid" but state that although the body plans of the ancient Egyptians were closer to those of modern negroes than for modern whites, “this does not mean that the ancient Egyptians were negroes". Anthropologist S.O.Y. Keita criticized Robins and Shute, stating they do not interpret their results within an adaptive context, and stating that they imply “misleadingly” that early southern Egyptians were not a "part of the Saharo-tropical group, which included Negroes". Gallagher et al. also points out that "body proportions are under strong climatic selection and evidence remarkable stability within regional lineages". Zakrzewski (2003) studied skeletal samples from the Badarian period to the Middle Kingdom. She confirmed the results of Robins and Shute that Ancient Egyptians in general had "tropical body plans” but that their proportions were actually "super-negroid".
Trikhanus (1981) found Egyptians to plot closest to tropical Africans and not Mediterranean Europeans residing in a roughly similar climatic area. A more recent study compared ancient Egyptian osteology to that of African-Americans and White Americans, and found that the stature of the Ancient Egyptians was more similar to the stature of African-Americans, although it was not identical.
Dental morphology
A 2006 bioarchaeologicalBioarchaeology
The term bioarchaeology was first coined by British archaeologist Grahame Clark in 1972 as a reference to zooarchaeology, or the study of animal bones from archaeological sites...
study on the dental morphology
Morphology (biology)
In biology, morphology is a branch of bioscience dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features....
of ancient Egyptians by Prof. Joel Irish shows dental traits characteristic of current indigenous North Africans and to a lesser extent Southwest Asian and southern European populations, but not at all to sub Saharan populations. Among the samples included in the study is skeletal material from the Hawara tombs of Fayum, (from the Roman period) which clustered very closely with the Badarian series of the predynastic
Predynastic Egypt
The Prehistory of Egypt spans the period of earliest human settlement to the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period of Egypt in ca. 3100 BC, starting with King Menes/Narmer....
period. All the samples, particularly those of the Dynastic period, were significantly divergent from a neolithic West Saharan sample from Lower Nubia. Biological continuity was also found intact from the dynastic to the post-pharaonic periods. According to Irish:
[The Egyptian] samples [996 mummies] exhibit morphologically simple, mass-reduced dentitionDentitionDentition pertains to the development of teeth and their arrangement in the mouth. In particular, the characteristic arrangement, kind, and number of teeth in a given species at a given age...
s that are similar to those in populations from greater North Africa (Irish, 1993, 1998a–c, 2000) and, to a lesser extent, western Asia and Europe (Turner, 1985a; Turner and Markowitz, 1990; Roler, 1992; Lipschultz, 1996; Irish, 1998a).
Anthropologist Shomarka Keita
Shomarka Keita
Shomarka Omar Yahya Keita M.D., DPhil., is an American physician and anthropologist. He is affiliated with the National Human Genome Center of Howard University and the Department of Anthropology of the Smithsonian Institution....
takes issue with the suggestion of Irish that Egyptians and Nubians were not primary descendants of the African epipaleolithic and Neolithic populations. Keita also criticizes him for ignoring the possibility that the dentition of the ancient Egyptians could have been caused by "in situ microevolution" driven by dietary change, rather than by racial admixture. However Keita himself has observed population continuity from the Pleistocene to the present in modern Egyptians.
The language element
Archaic Egyptian
Archaic Egyptian is the stage of the Egyptian language spoken during the Early Dynastic Period, which lasted up to about 2600 BC. The first known inscriptions in Archaic Egyptian date from around 3400 BC....
, Old Egyptian
Old Egyptian
Old Egyptian is the stage of the Egyptian language spoken from 2600 BC to 2000 BC during the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period. The Pyramid Texts are the largest body of literature written in this phase of the language. Tomb walls of elite Egyptians from this period bear autobiographical...
, Middle Egyptian
Middle Egyptian
Middle Egyptian is the typical form of Egyptian written from 2000 BCE to 1300 BCE .Although evolving into Late Egyptian from the 14th century, Middle Egyptian remained in use as literary standard language until the 4th century AD. As such, it is the classical variant of Egyptian that historically...
, Late Egyptian
Late Egyptian
Late Egyptian is the stage of the Egyptian language that was written by the time of the New Kingdom around 1350 BC – the Amarna period. Texts written wholly in Late Egyptian date to the Ramesside Period and later...
, Demotic Egyptian, and Coptic
Coptic language
Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...
.
Origins
The Ancient Egyptian language has been classified as a member of the Afro-AsiaticAfro-Asiatic languages
The Afroasiatic languages , also known as Hamito-Semitic, constitute one of the world's largest language families, with about 375 living languages...
language family
Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...
. The Afro-Asiatic language family is believed by most linguists to have originated in Northeast Africa with a minority postulating an origin in the Levant
Levant
The Levant or ) is the geographic region and culture zone of the "eastern Mediterranean littoral between Anatolia and Egypt" . The Levant includes most of modern Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and sometimes parts of Turkey and Iraq, and corresponds roughly to the...
(ancient Canaan). Afro-Asiatic also includes several ancient languages, such as Ancient Egyptian, Biblical Hebrew, and Akkadian (the language of the Babylonians and Assyrians). Of the six subfamilies of Afro-Asiatic, the Semitic languages
Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
form the only Afro-Asiatic subfamily that currently exists in both Africa and Asia. The other five of the six Afro-Asiatic subfamilies are restricted to the African continent. The majority of the diversity in the Afro-Asiatic language family is found in Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
, where diverse languages exist in close geographic proximity.
UCLA Professor of African history, Christopher Ehret
Christopher Ehret
Christopher Ehret , a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, is a writer on African history and African historical linguistics, particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archeological record...
, claims that the Ancient Egyptians are descended from speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic who migrated from further south to the Nile Valley. According to Ehret archeological and linguistic evidence indicates that the speakers of the earliest Afroasiatic languages occupied lands between Nubia
Nubia
Nubia is a region along the Nile river, which is located in northern Sudan and southern Egypt.There were a number of small Nubian kingdoms throughout the Middle Ages, the last of which collapsed in 1504, when Nubia became divided between Egypt and the Sennar sultanate resulting in the Arabization...
and northern Somalia
Somalia
Somalia , officially the Somali Republic and formerly known as the Somali Democratic Republic under Socialist rule, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. Since the outbreak of the Somali Civil War in 1991 there has been no central government control over most of the country's territory...
around 15,000-13,000 B.C. before the formation of the Ancient Egyptian state. In Black Athena
Black Athena
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization is a highly controversial three-volume work by Martin Bernal. He discusses Ancient Greece in a new light. Bernal's thesis discusses the perception of ancient Greece in relation to Greece's African and Asiatic neighbors, which he...
Professor Martin Bernal
Martin Bernal
Martin Gardiner Bernal is a Professor Emeritus of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is a scholar of modern Chinese political history...
argues that the phylum may instead have emerged around the Great Rift Valley
Great Rift Valley
The Great Rift Valley is a name given in the late 19th century by British explorer John Walter Gregory to the continuous geographic trench, approximately in length, that runs from northern Syria in Southwest Asia to central Mozambique in South East Africa...
in southern Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
and northern Kenya
Kenya
Kenya , officially known as the Republic of Kenya, is a country in East Africa that lies on the equator, with the Indian Ocean to its south-east...
.
Scripts
Most surviving texts in the Egyptian language are primarily written in the Hieroglyphic scriptEgyptian hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs were a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that combined logographic and alphabetic elements. Egyptians used cursive hieroglyphs for religious literature on papyrus and wood...
. However, the Hieratic script was used in parallel although mostly reserved for priests but also for magical purposes and administrative and legal documents. This script used cursive and simplified forms of the Hieroglyphic writing to ease and speed writing. It was mostly written on papyrus, wood, leather and ostraca. It lasted until the ninth century BCE when it was replaced by the "Abnormal Hieratic" in southern Egypt. Another third script was the Demotic
Demotic (Egyptian)
Demotic refers to either the ancient Egyptian script derived from northern forms of hieratic used in the Delta, or the stage of the Egyptian language following Late Egyptian and preceding Coptic. The term was first used by the Greek historian Herodotus to distinguish it from hieratic and...
which was developed in Lower Egypt
Lower Egypt
Lower Egypt is the northern-most section of Egypt. It refers to the fertile Nile Delta region, which stretches from the area between El-Aiyat and Zawyet Dahshur, south of modern-day Cairo, and the Mediterranean Sea....
during the later part of the 25th Dynasty.
External links
See also
- EgyptiansEgyptiansEgyptians are nation an ethnic group made up of Mediterranean North Africans, the indigenous people of Egypt.Egyptian identity is closely tied to geography. The population of Egypt is concentrated in the lower Nile Valley, the small strip of cultivable land stretching from the First Cataract to...
- Archaeogenetics of the Near EastArchaeogenetics of the Near EastThe archaeogenetics of the Near East involves the study of aDNA or ancient DNA, identifying haplogroups and haplotypes of ancient skeletal remains from both YDNA and mtDNA for populations of the Ancient Near East The archaeogenetics of the Near East involves the study of aDNA or ancient DNA,...
- Demographics of EgyptDemographics of EgyptEgypt is the most populous country in the Middle East and the third-most populous on the African continent . Nearly 100% of the country's 80,810,912 people live in three major regions of the country: Cairo and Alexandria and elsewhere along the banks of the Nile; throughout the Nile delta, which...
- Genetic history of North AfricaGenetic history of North AfricaThe population genetics of North Africans has been heavily influenced by geography.The Sahara desert to the south and the Mediterranean Sea to the North were important barriers to gene flow in prehistoric times. However Eurasia and Africa form a single land mass at the Suez. At the Straits of...