I'll have to bookmark it for later to spend more time than just skimming, but I find 2 things interesting. The lack of any Egyptian archeologists on most interesting and significant findings about Ancient Egypt is one. The other is the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian which is pretty cool.
Egyptians don't like the notion that "they moved there from somewhere". They claim their own unique, uninterrupted, history and connection to the land as well as their civilizational independence from Mesopotamian, Asia Minor, Europe, and Africa.
It's also the same you rarely find Egyptian archeologists/scholars on scientific papers. While this might be a matter of ancient history and science to everyone, it's a matter of current day politics for Egyptians and especially the Egyptian government. The "findings" of the paper has to agree with the narrative built and proposed by the ministry of antiquities or they will literally charge whoever publishes it with a national crime.
> Egyptians don't like the notion that "they moved there from somewhere". They claim their own unique, uninterrupted, history and connection to the land as well as their civilizational independence from Mesopotamian, Asia Minor, Europe, and Africa.
Same here in India.
These ideas about civilization and racial purity/superiority are a scientific nonsense but very useful for getting people to hate each other.
Chinese mythology says they came from 崑崙 (Kunlun Mountain). The description of which sounds like Egypt coincidentally.
Translated something like: “To the south of the Western Sea, along the banks of the Flowing Sands, beyond the Red Water and before the Black Water, there lies a great mountain called the Kunlun Hill.”
Human populations almost never sat still in one place and avoided mixing with others. Go back far enough, and Europeans and Indians are related. Go back further, and they're both related to Native North Americans. Go back far enough and we're all related. Anyone making claims that their ethnic group is somehow "pure" is ignoring linguistics, genetics, archaeology, and basic human nature.
We move around. We meet people. We make new people.
“LET’S SET THE EXISTENCE-OF-GOD ISSUE ASIDE FOR A later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored.” Cryptonomicon. Page 24.
It's interesting that in Judaism, it's the opposite. Always moving in and then forcibly moved out. Abraham came from Ur (Mesopotamia), then Exodus from Egypt into Canaan, then Babylonian exile and back to Judea.
In myth-making, you've got to work with the established facts on the ground. It makes sense for China, India and Egypt to perpetuate the "always been here" mythology, but obviously for Jews being forcibly moved around and discriminated against is a given, so you build around that.
Look up the Harrapan Continuity Hypothesis. Very few scholars in India take it seriously but somehow it still finds its way into high school textbooks.
> . The other is the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian which is pretty cool.
Finding some individuals to whom this applies "20% of his genetic ancestry can be traced to genomes representing the eastern Fertile Crescent" doesn't really prove that at all, though?
> The other is the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian which is pretty cool.
What strong conclusion? You "skim" the article and feel justified making outlandish politicized statements?
> They claim their own unique, uninterrupted, history and connection to the land as well as their civilizational independence from Mesopotamian, Asia Minor, Europe, and Africa.
As does everyone else and which is true for the most part. Does anyone dispute ancient egypt's civilizational status?
> While this might be a matter of ancient history and science to everyone
It isn't a matter of ancient history and science to everyone. Ancient history, science and archaelogy are political for everyone. Egyptology as a field was created by europeans partly to justify taking over egypt. It literally was part of european colonialism.
> It's also the same you rarely find Egyptian archeologists/scholars on scientific papers.
You find it odd that egyptians aren't too keen on egyptology?
> The "findings" of the paper has to agree with the narrative built and proposed by the ministry of antiquities or they will literally charge whoever publishes it with a national crime.
I highly doubt that. Maybe if the "study" undermines egypt's attempt to get their stolen antiquities back. But even then your claim seems outlandish.
The same is true for many people, e.g. the Japanese. You’re prohibited from digging up the bones of ancient empties and doing DNA testing to see if they’re korean.
The other is the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian which is pretty cool. Egyptians don't like the notion that "they moved there from somewhere".
How do you conclude that from the fact that 1 man of the era had 20% of his genetic material from Mesopotamia?
Actually, I think it’s wrong to say that this paper proves Egyptians moved from somewhere else. As with any research paper, it is part of a conversation and moving consensus. It is a journey.
> Our knowledge of ancient Egyptians has increased through decades of bioarchaeological analyses including dental morphological studies on their relatedness to other populations in North Africa and West Asia
There are other footsteps. The DNA is just a notable rock they’ve clambered over.
> The body was placed in a large pottery vessel inside a rock-cut tomb (Fig. 1b and Extended Data Fig. 1). This treatment would have ordinarily been reserved for individuals of a higher social class relative to others at the site
But,
> This and various activity-induced musculoskeletal indicators of stress revealed that he experienced an extended period of physical labour, seemingly in contrast to his high-status tomb burial.
> In this case, although circumstantial, they are not inconsistent with those of a potter, as depicted in ancient Egyptian imagery.
Checking the corpses of nobility would be a bad idea because they are shipped around for diplomatic reasons. I guess a potter moves around less (though, as a skilled worker, probably moved around a bit?).
> The other is the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian which is pretty cool.
there was no such conclusion that i saw having read this.
they are talking of genetic admixture...so the person shared ancestors with someone else sequenced from the mesopotamian area...maybe they both were kids with a parent elsewhere, for example.
I think conclusion is a bit of a strong term to use here, as far as i can read its a possibility, but the only real conclusion is that there has been human movement between the regions, which might indicate mixing (that is, they didn't move there, at least, not all of them).
And where did the Mesopotamians move from? If you don't see the political context of the science then too bad.
Like, you know people till now take pride in the exploits and culture of their supposed ancient ancestors, never mind that for the the vast majority of people, there is no simple and direct line from some ancient illustrious people to them.
The latent political context is the assumption driving the research, that Egyptian culture had to have come from somewhere else, so let's go look for it. You see the same thing when evidence of cultural achievements elsewhere in Africa is unearthed.
Of course you will find a somewhere else, no matter how tenuous the connection, in which case my first sentence above comes into play: let's keep finding the somewhere else until we all get back to Africa, supposedly the birthplace of it all.
EDIT: Since this is being misunderstood, this what I actually mean: For some reason, this finding somewhere else is not applied consistently. Either we should keep finding the somewhere else for all cultures for as far back as we can, or else stop with this nonsensical subtext that just because a culture has some roots from elsewhere, so therefore it cannot have made innovations by itself beyond its supposed origins.
One of the problems with modern discourse is everyone has a platform, myself included, and grievance and pride tend to make compelling narratives. There’s alot of quacking and noise.
There’s no dishonor in learning more and figuring it out. People babbling about stealing “dibs” from Africa are intellectually not really understanding what they are reading and applying their 2025 perspectives and problems to people hundreds of generations ago who had no conception of Africa, Europe and Asia as artifacts as we see them today.
Think about the situation on the ground. Egypt was the closest thing to Eden on earth. Mesopotamia was the birthplace, in the region if not the world, of the next level of urbanization and state power and economics. So yeah, no doubt through intermarriage, trade, teaching and migration the knowledge of Mesopotamia spread and influenced the Nile… and to great effect… the Egyptian civilization thrived for many centuries.
That's exactly the brand of nonesense that is sold to people there as "progressive" and "anti-colonialism" while infact it's just pure nonesense.
Of course every culture/society had to have come from some previous place/culture/society that changed over time due to an incredibly long and complex set of circumstances. The story one must believe to accept your view is that at a flick of the wrist, humans turned from Cave Men to some vague list of "root societies/civilizations" people moved around. Understanding how that movement happened 15 thousands years ago won't make the jews take over Egypt I promise.
I think you misunderstand my point. You are kind of confirming my point.
What I am saying is that for some reason, this finding somewhere else is not applied consistently. Either we should keep finding the somewhere else for all cultures for as far back as we can, or else stop with this nonsense that just because a culture has some roots from elsewhere, so therefore it cannot have made innovations by itself beyond its supposed origins.
> Either we should keep finding the somewhere else for all cultures for as far back as we can,
I'm not a scientist, but as far as I can tell... do that?
Half the interest in archeological type studies seems to be "ok, this the earliest history we know of, what came before that?"
I agree that humans tend to get way too entitled about (maybe) sharing genes with someone who did something cool in past history, but learning about which populations migrated to egypt and from where and when, seems unrelated.
Of course nationalism and rasism infects science, especially what findings are considered canon in a culture. That only means you might have such findings not that it is the only thing created.
There are lots of replies to this already but I think it's worth simply copying out the relevant parts of the conclusion:
> Although our analyses are limited to a single Egyptian individual who ... may not be representative of the general population, our results revealed ancestry links to earlier North African groups and populations of the eastern Fertile Crescent. ... The genetic links with the eastern Fertile Crescent also mirror previously documented cultural diffusion ... opening up the possibility of some settlement of people in Egypt during one or more of these periods.
Happens everywhere. Nationalism is hidden in every country's history curriculum. I learned my country was the first in the world to abolish slavery (actually had them til 1950s, documented) among a bunch of other lies I only discovered later. Most of them are embellishments of real things but others are just flat out wrong.
If you want to see examples you don't even need my school books. Compare these chronological lists in both languages, in English wikipedia or Portuguese wikipedia:
>The lack of any Egyptian archeologists on most interesting and significant findings about Ancient Egypt is one.
It seems like Egyptian archaeologists is a clique of academics that do not like to rock the apple cart and go against established ideas about Egyptian history. There is a lot of gate keeping going on, mostly in part of Zahi Hawass, a narcissist that likes to self insert into every research into the subject, and control publication of results, etc. Even worse, claim attribution for work he's not even part of. So, if you don't kiss the ring, or dare to challenge ideas without his blessing, you'll be pretty much become a pariah that will never access archaeological sites again. Because of this, research in the field seems to be stagnant.
It's big business, has been for almost 5,000 years, and keeping the mysteries alive keeps the money flowing to the cult of Kufu or the modern equivalent.
History for Granite ( https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryforGRANITE ) touches on this powerful explanation for several observable aspects of these ancient sites that otherwise defy explanation. The top of The Great Pyramid was likely flattened so that rich visitors could pay to have an unforgettable picnic at the top. Many passages were filled up with sand and rubble because guides didn't enjoy the extra time and effort in hot dark bat infested areas that tourists demanded. And so on. Zahi is carrying on a long tradition.
I quite enjoy that YouTube channel. I watch any history content on YouTube with enormous fear and worry of crackpottery and "alternative history"-type charlatanry, and I feel like this one hasn't let me down yet, though I'll probably never feel at ease watching it given the subject matter.
I really appreciate his nuanced stance that even cranks and kooks are capable of observation and recording what they see. And his obsession with correlating details through original historical accounts. And the work he's doing mapping the individual blocks of the casings and throughout the passages. It's one of the channels that convinced me that Youtube was a legitimate path for getting your scientific research funded.
Here's the thing, one can promote tourism while also being academically honest. Hawass just wants to be the top dog in the field and does not want to be wrong about some of the things he claimed in his publications.
No, I'm not. The Great Pyramid was built circa 2500 - 2600 BC, or about 4600 years ago. I think it's fair to say that civilization was humming before that, and that even the construction likely attracted tourists. Seems to be part of the point of monuments.
Djoser's pyramid seems to have been completed around a hundred years prior to that, and would have drawn crowds sufficient to warrant the large temple, grand entrance, and colonnades which are part of the complex.
There is a great deal of evidence that offerings provided by people traveling to these complexes sustained the religious orders on site who provided guardianship, maintenance, and worship. And that this was planned as part of the construction.
Djosers pyramid has an inner chamber that is suported by massive cedar timbers hauled from Lebenon.....and we have the Epic of Gilgamesh which details the triumph of Gilgamesh over humbiwaba the forest guardian, and harvesting and transport of cedars from Lebenon, we also have the commercial records of the mesopotamians trading activities over vast distances and time periods, and so it is zero surprise to find that "the black haired people" also left there genetic's with the rest of the cultural, linguistic, and mythical baggage that we are consiously or un consiously hauling around, still.
The tomb and temple complexes aren't built to accommodate demand. They're built at the size the king wants them to be, and used for official ceremonies.
Nope. There are literally voyage reports by Herodotus, who describes guides to the pyramids, street food vendors, and translators. That was about 2500 years ago, for example.
You might notice that 2500 years ago is a lot less than 5000 years ago. 5000 years ago, there were no guides to the pyramids. There was no tourism. There wasn't really writing, either.
Today tourism makes up a little more than 10% of the economy of Egypt. 2500 years ago, it would have been around 0%, for the simple reason that almost nobody could afford to be a tourist. The big businesses were grain and gold. 5000 years ago, it was actually 0%. That's when the desertification of the Sahara began and the people who had lived there came to Egypt and inserted themselves at the top of society.
Just because they were called pilgrims, they did the same thing as modeen tourists, with the corresponding economic activities: visiting landmarks, sleeping, eating, shopping.
Praying wasn't even free, if they had to sacrifice some animal.
> That's when the desertification of the Sahara began and the people who had lived there came to Egypt and inserted themselves at the top of society.
It's very interesting to imagine the "green Sahara" cultures, with all of their cities and temples now under tons of sand, that we otherwise have no knowledge of.
Yes, Zahi Hawass is a comical example at this point. But I'm afraid he is merely the manifestation of general desire from the political regime as well as the majority of the uneducated masses there. Zahi Hawass is just the current sociopath to happen to benifiet from the situation to call himself a "scholar".
I spent a significant part of my teen years in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. There isn't really 1 unified feelings towards the "Ancient Egypt" history among Egyptians. First time I heard about the "Ancient Aliens" conspiracy WAS from an Egyptian. I never really paid the theory much attention until all the articles about how "it's a racist theory" "basically indigenous people can't do things without aliens" narrative was surprising.
There was pride in the telling of the conspiracy theory of Ancient Egyptians contacting aliens. "Of course when the Aliens visited Earth, they had to come to Egypt, you konw. We were in touch with aliens and had far more advanced technologies than all other societies. sadly it's been lost" type thinking.
The general opinion was split between people who don't give a shit about all this pharo shit, people who think it's a cool marketing story in the 21st century, people who think it's their history and identity. It was allover the place
> But I'm afraid he is merely the manifestation of general desire from the political regime as well as the majority of the uneducated masses there.
Hawass may be more a manifestation of what foreigners believe an Egyptologist should look like: Indiana Jones hat, cigar, etc. He is influential in large parts because of his popularity in the media outside Egypt.
Not OP but.. The ptolemaic Pharaohs (Cleopatra..) and after are not related to the dynastic cultures which made the pyramids. They were greeks. Subsequent occupation by post Roman cultures including the Byzantine, and Islamic Arabic tribes, and the Ottomans, means the culture and genetics of modern Egypt have little to do with pyramids and pre-roman era mummies and culture/religion/beliefs.
Waves of occupation over 2000 years eroded any cultural link.
What I read suggests the Berbers have some historical relationship and the Bedouin less. Nasser was an arabist, as were the young egypt political movement of the 19th century.
It's like asking why modern British people aren't strongly identifying with pictish culture or beaker people.
The Egyptian archaeologists assert nationalism and cultural goals and have to deal with Islamic fundamentalists who push back on pre Islamic religious artefacts. Saudi archaeologists have similar pressures.
Egypt is an Arab country. They're literally called the Arab Republic of Egypt. Before that the United Arab Republic. Official language Arabic.
Arabs came from Arabia, not Egypt.
Copts are a bit closer to ancient Egypt (their language especially) but their religion is Orthodox Christianity which influences their culture, which came out of the Greek/Roman culture of Ptolemaic-Roman Egypt.
“…the Nuwayrat individual is predicted to have had brown eyes, brown hair and skin pigmentation ranging from dark to black skin, with a lower probability of intermediate skin colour”
The SI has much more information along these lines, including a facial reconstruction. Our Ancient Egyptian looks basically Arabian -- the closest match is a modern Bedouin.
> Next, according to the CRANID nearest neighbour discriminant analysis, the
individual cranium most like Nuwayrat is from a West Asian Bedouin male (Individual 2546 in CRANID database), with the following rounding out the top five: Egyptian 26th-30th Dynasty male (Ind 1034), Indian male (2576), Lachish male (2668), and another 26th-30th Dynasty Egyptian male (1031).
> Thus, in line with the genetic results the Nuwayrat individual, subject to limitations imposed by the comparative samples available in the two program datasets (as above), appears most akin phenetically to: Western Eurasians rather than subSaharan Africans dentally and, more specifically, premodern West Asians, i.e., Lachish, based on craniometrics. It is secondarily most similar in craniometric dimensions to ancient Egyptians of a more recent time.
> the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian
Touch some grass, seriously. They looked at the DNA of 1 (in words: one) guy and now it's "hey in fact Egyptians all came from Mesopotamia"? You'd have to take many more samples to support such a broad claim, and it's not because of the Ministry of Antiquities suppressing ideas.
Mankind likely did not originate in the Nile valley, hence the fact we find people there from some point in history means they migrated from somewhere else. If you subscribe to the single-origin story (which I think is plausible but not the only possible one, the alternative being various human populations that got separated and re-united in different parts of the world) and think, just for the sake of argument, of Lucy as 'the first human' then humans are immigrants almost everywhere (this will be hard to swallow for lots of people and we know from the historical record (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIJF2RomfGE) that the Voth had problems with that, too, so it's very human).
The narrower Nile valley must have been a relatively inhospitable place for a human during the African Wet Period. When that came to an end around ~7ky ago or so that change made the Nile valley rather suddenly more attractive to many thousands of people who used to roam the lands to the right and left of it. As desertification progressed, communities were forced to go someplace else with some ending up in the Nile valley. In a way, you can to this day see the echoes of that time in the ethnic and cultural diversity of Egyptian society which I think is more of a hallmark of this civilization than an imagined homogenized one-mold-fits-all view.
And it's totally not out of place that some people with roots in Ancient Egypt should have an ancestry that came from the Levant or further from Anatolia or Mesopotamia. Egypt was a big place, rich in people, culture, food, arts and opportunity (and, not to forget, regular festivals with beer, wine and music at the cultural centers; today people cross continents for taking part in festivals with beer, wine and music). Egypt had trade, diplomatic relations and 'military exchanges' (war) with those far-flung places and captives were either maimed or indentured, so as a matter of course we find Egyptians with Mesopotamian admixtures, what did you think?
Humanity routinely has a similar kind of ego that requires relevance. But fortunately we still have a distributed knowledge system that excises and corrects local folklore.
I don’t think it is interesting that there aren’t Egyptian scholars on the topic, whether this national/cultural identity existed or not.
I obviously don’t care if it bruises an ego, I would care if the lack of representation overlooks something though.
The article states that 'his genetic affinity is similar to the ancestry appearing in Anatolia and the Levant during the Neolithic and Bronze Age.' As a layperson, I don't think we would find this particularly shocking. It's well known from written sources that there was significant communication and movement between Egypt and those areas during the broader Bronze Age, even extending back into the Neolithic for some cultural exchanges. This even aligns with biblical narratives that describe individuals and families traveling to and from Egypt for periods of time.
Worth noting for context that "Anatolia and the Levant" (better known perhaps as the Ancient Near East) also included plenty of darker-skinned folks in that time period, with an appearance that we might nowadays associate with Sub-Saharan Africa - and they were highly integrated in their societies, not just a servile underclass. This is also true of the ancient Mediterranean region as a whole. We're especially sure about this because of surviving pictorial/visual (e.g. from the Minoan civilization in Crete) and textual sources. So our Old-Kingdom Ancient Egyptian could well have looked quite "Sub-Saharan" in appearance, despite not originating anywhere south of present-day Sahara.
Gonna need a source for your assertion since the Egyptians and Minoans always differentiated between themselves and Nubians/Libyans in art and literature...
People from the ancient near East nearly always depicted themselves as somewhere between white and reddish/light brown and their modern populations fall within the same spectrum.
There's no evidence for near Eastern populations having ever looked "Sub Saharan".
Can’t we think of it as just one large land mass? Maybe 5000 years ago the Sinai peninsula was more land, less sea—the Red Sea not as big, and the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba as we know it now was land mass. Then it wouldn’t be hard to imagine freedom of travel in all kinds of directions.
How do we even know this person was upper class or some itinerant migrant worker that came from somewhere else?
Even the citation claiming the burial method was associated with upper class raises doubts: following the link mentions "pot burial" which has commonly been associated with the poor. The problem with identifying bones with "population" is it often says what the common man was like but not the minority elite that ruled and had power if one isn't careful about who they think they're identifying or the demographic structure of society in these ancient cultures.
Well, I assume the lowest-budget way to deal with a corpse in ancient Egypt is to toss it into the Nile.
More generally, if what you're looking at is a cemetery for the poor, there should be a lot of remains, and there shouldn't be much in the way of decoration. If someone carved a tomb for the remains to be in ("The body was interred in a ceramic pot within a rock-cut tomb"), that already disqualifies them from being poor.
Culture matters a lot, the lowest budget is not necessarily the one that will be used. The cheapest way to dispose of a body is to eat it, but almost no cultures do that, I don't know the burial rituals of ancient Egyptian laborers, but tossing them in the Nile seems incredibly unlikely.
I'll have to bookmark it for later to spend more time than just skimming, but I find 2 things interesting. The lack of any Egyptian archeologists on most interesting and significant findings about Ancient Egypt is one. The other is the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian which is pretty cool.
Egyptians don't like the notion that "they moved there from somewhere". They claim their own unique, uninterrupted, history and connection to the land as well as their civilizational independence from Mesopotamian, Asia Minor, Europe, and Africa.
It's also the same you rarely find Egyptian archeologists/scholars on scientific papers. While this might be a matter of ancient history and science to everyone, it's a matter of current day politics for Egyptians and especially the Egyptian government. The "findings" of the paper has to agree with the narrative built and proposed by the ministry of antiquities or they will literally charge whoever publishes it with a national crime.
> Egyptians don't like the notion that "they moved there from somewhere". They claim their own unique, uninterrupted, history and connection to the land as well as their civilizational independence from Mesopotamian, Asia Minor, Europe, and Africa.
Same here in India.
These ideas about civilization and racial purity/superiority are a scientific nonsense but very useful for getting people to hate each other.
The same ideas exist in China, which claims a whole (and scientifically since disproven) distinct origin of humanity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_Man
Chinese mythology says they came from 崑崙 (Kunlun Mountain). The description of which sounds like Egypt coincidentally.
Translated something like: “To the south of the Western Sea, along the banks of the Flowing Sands, beyond the Red Water and before the Black Water, there lies a great mountain called the Kunlun Hill.”
Human populations almost never sat still in one place and avoided mixing with others. Go back far enough, and Europeans and Indians are related. Go back further, and they're both related to Native North Americans. Go back far enough and we're all related. Anyone making claims that their ethnic group is somehow "pure" is ignoring linguistics, genetics, archaeology, and basic human nature.
We move around. We meet people. We make new people.
Go back further still, and we're related to cyanobacteria.
“LET’S SET THE EXISTENCE-OF-GOD ISSUE ASIDE FOR A later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored.” Cryptonomicon. Page 24.
https://xkcd.com/2608/
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It's interesting that in Judaism, it's the opposite. Always moving in and then forcibly moved out. Abraham came from Ur (Mesopotamia), then Exodus from Egypt into Canaan, then Babylonian exile and back to Judea.
In myth-making, you've got to work with the established facts on the ground. It makes sense for China, India and Egypt to perpetuate the "always been here" mythology, but obviously for Jews being forcibly moved around and discriminated against is a given, so you build around that.
I have heard that the story of Moses was developed as way to unite the northern people Judah with the southern Israelites.
They needed a central story to unite the ideas.
I’m no expert but I think I have the theory straight.
I never know anyone claiming that in India
Look up the Harrapan Continuity Hypothesis. Very few scholars in India take it seriously but somehow it still finds its way into high school textbooks.
https://www.voanews.com/a/petition-in-india-s-supreme-court-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/30/hardline-hindu...
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> . The other is the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian which is pretty cool.
Finding some individuals to whom this applies "20% of his genetic ancestry can be traced to genomes representing the eastern Fertile Crescent" doesn't really prove that at all, though?
> The other is the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian which is pretty cool.
What strong conclusion? You "skim" the article and feel justified making outlandish politicized statements?
> They claim their own unique, uninterrupted, history and connection to the land as well as their civilizational independence from Mesopotamian, Asia Minor, Europe, and Africa.
As does everyone else and which is true for the most part. Does anyone dispute ancient egypt's civilizational status?
> While this might be a matter of ancient history and science to everyone
It isn't a matter of ancient history and science to everyone. Ancient history, science and archaelogy are political for everyone. Egyptology as a field was created by europeans partly to justify taking over egypt. It literally was part of european colonialism.
> It's also the same you rarely find Egyptian archeologists/scholars on scientific papers.
You find it odd that egyptians aren't too keen on egyptology?
> The "findings" of the paper has to agree with the narrative built and proposed by the ministry of antiquities or they will literally charge whoever publishes it with a national crime.
I highly doubt that. Maybe if the "study" undermines egypt's attempt to get their stolen antiquities back. But even then your claim seems outlandish.
The same is true for many people, e.g. the Japanese. You’re prohibited from digging up the bones of ancient empties and doing DNA testing to see if they’re korean.
The other is the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian which is pretty cool. Egyptians don't like the notion that "they moved there from somewhere".
How do you conclude that from the fact that 1 man of the era had 20% of his genetic material from Mesopotamia?
Actually, I think it’s wrong to say that this paper proves Egyptians moved from somewhere else. As with any research paper, it is part of a conversation and moving consensus. It is a journey.
> Our knowledge of ancient Egyptians has increased through decades of bioarchaeological analyses including dental morphological studies on their relatedness to other populations in North Africa and West Asia
There are other footsteps. The DNA is just a notable rock they’ve clambered over.
Kind of like checking one British royalty corpse for Danish ancestry.
They actually studied the skeleton as well.
> The body was placed in a large pottery vessel inside a rock-cut tomb (Fig. 1b and Extended Data Fig. 1). This treatment would have ordinarily been reserved for individuals of a higher social class relative to others at the site
But,
> This and various activity-induced musculoskeletal indicators of stress revealed that he experienced an extended period of physical labour, seemingly in contrast to his high-status tomb burial.
> In this case, although circumstantial, they are not inconsistent with those of a potter, as depicted in ancient Egyptian imagery.
Checking the corpses of nobility would be a bad idea because they are shipped around for diplomatic reasons. I guess a potter moves around less (though, as a skilled worker, probably moved around a bit?).
> The other is the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian which is pretty cool.
there was no such conclusion that i saw having read this.
they are talking of genetic admixture...so the person shared ancestors with someone else sequenced from the mesopotamian area...maybe they both were kids with a parent elsewhere, for example.
When your research has to align with a state-approved version of history, real collaboration becomes tricky
I think conclusion is a bit of a strong term to use here, as far as i can read its a possibility, but the only real conclusion is that there has been human movement between the regions, which might indicate mixing (that is, they didn't move there, at least, not all of them).
And where did the Mesopotamians move from? If you don't see the political context of the science then too bad.
Like, you know people till now take pride in the exploits and culture of their supposed ancient ancestors, never mind that for the the vast majority of people, there is no simple and direct line from some ancient illustrious people to them.
The latent political context is the assumption driving the research, that Egyptian culture had to have come from somewhere else, so let's go look for it. You see the same thing when evidence of cultural achievements elsewhere in Africa is unearthed.
Of course you will find a somewhere else, no matter how tenuous the connection, in which case my first sentence above comes into play: let's keep finding the somewhere else until we all get back to Africa, supposedly the birthplace of it all.
EDIT: Since this is being misunderstood, this what I actually mean: For some reason, this finding somewhere else is not applied consistently. Either we should keep finding the somewhere else for all cultures for as far back as we can, or else stop with this nonsensical subtext that just because a culture has some roots from elsewhere, so therefore it cannot have made innovations by itself beyond its supposed origins.
One of the problems with modern discourse is everyone has a platform, myself included, and grievance and pride tend to make compelling narratives. There’s alot of quacking and noise.
There’s no dishonor in learning more and figuring it out. People babbling about stealing “dibs” from Africa are intellectually not really understanding what they are reading and applying their 2025 perspectives and problems to people hundreds of generations ago who had no conception of Africa, Europe and Asia as artifacts as we see them today.
Think about the situation on the ground. Egypt was the closest thing to Eden on earth. Mesopotamia was the birthplace, in the region if not the world, of the next level of urbanization and state power and economics. So yeah, no doubt through intermarriage, trade, teaching and migration the knowledge of Mesopotamia spread and influenced the Nile… and to great effect… the Egyptian civilization thrived for many centuries.
That's exactly the brand of nonesense that is sold to people there as "progressive" and "anti-colonialism" while infact it's just pure nonesense.
Of course every culture/society had to have come from some previous place/culture/society that changed over time due to an incredibly long and complex set of circumstances. The story one must believe to accept your view is that at a flick of the wrist, humans turned from Cave Men to some vague list of "root societies/civilizations" people moved around. Understanding how that movement happened 15 thousands years ago won't make the jews take over Egypt I promise.
i think you accidentally worded this in a way you might not have meant.
you said a culture (singular) had to have come from another culture (singular), missing the possibility of blending, as worded.
Yeah definitely meant to it plural
I think you misunderstand my point. You are kind of confirming my point.
What I am saying is that for some reason, this finding somewhere else is not applied consistently. Either we should keep finding the somewhere else for all cultures for as far back as we can, or else stop with this nonsense that just because a culture has some roots from elsewhere, so therefore it cannot have made innovations by itself beyond its supposed origins.
> Either we should keep finding the somewhere else for all cultures for as far back as we can,
I'm not a scientist, but as far as I can tell... do that?
Half the interest in archeological type studies seems to be "ok, this the earliest history we know of, what came before that?"
I agree that humans tend to get way too entitled about (maybe) sharing genes with someone who did something cool in past history, but learning about which populations migrated to egypt and from where and when, seems unrelated.
Of course nationalism and rasism infects science, especially what findings are considered canon in a culture. That only means you might have such findings not that it is the only thing created.
Stop downvoting this comment please.
There are lots of replies to this already but I think it's worth simply copying out the relevant parts of the conclusion:
> Although our analyses are limited to a single Egyptian individual who ... may not be representative of the general population, our results revealed ancestry links to earlier North African groups and populations of the eastern Fertile Crescent. ... The genetic links with the eastern Fertile Crescent also mirror previously documented cultural diffusion ... opening up the possibility of some settlement of people in Egypt during one or more of these periods.
This wording is definitely more circumspect than its headline version, "Breakthrough discovery REVEALS Egyptians are in fact MESOPOTAMIANS"
Happens everywhere. Nationalism is hidden in every country's history curriculum. I learned my country was the first in the world to abolish slavery (actually had them til 1950s, documented) among a bunch of other lies I only discovered later. Most of them are embellishments of real things but others are just flat out wrong.
If you want to see examples you don't even need my school books. Compare these chronological lists in both languages, in English wikipedia or Portuguese wikipedia:
- https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronologia_da_aboli%C3%A7%C3...
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_sla...
Very different!
>The lack of any Egyptian archeologists on most interesting and significant findings about Ancient Egypt is one.
It seems like Egyptian archaeologists is a clique of academics that do not like to rock the apple cart and go against established ideas about Egyptian history. There is a lot of gate keeping going on, mostly in part of Zahi Hawass, a narcissist that likes to self insert into every research into the subject, and control publication of results, etc. Even worse, claim attribution for work he's not even part of. So, if you don't kiss the ring, or dare to challenge ideas without his blessing, you'll be pretty much become a pariah that will never access archaeological sites again. Because of this, research in the field seems to be stagnant.
I think, as much or more than Hawass's ego, the fact that tourism to Egypt and specifically Giza amounts to nearly a tenth of Egypt's GDP: https://egyptianstreets.com/2024/12/09/tourism-contribution-... accounts for a lot of his behavior.
It's big business, has been for almost 5,000 years, and keeping the mysteries alive keeps the money flowing to the cult of Kufu or the modern equivalent.
History for Granite ( https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryforGRANITE ) touches on this powerful explanation for several observable aspects of these ancient sites that otherwise defy explanation. The top of The Great Pyramid was likely flattened so that rich visitors could pay to have an unforgettable picnic at the top. Many passages were filled up with sand and rubble because guides didn't enjoy the extra time and effort in hot dark bat infested areas that tourists demanded. And so on. Zahi is carrying on a long tradition.
I quite enjoy that YouTube channel. I watch any history content on YouTube with enormous fear and worry of crackpottery and "alternative history"-type charlatanry, and I feel like this one hasn't let me down yet, though I'll probably never feel at ease watching it given the subject matter.
I really appreciate his nuanced stance that even cranks and kooks are capable of observation and recording what they see. And his obsession with correlating details through original historical accounts. And the work he's doing mapping the individual blocks of the casings and throughout the passages. It's one of the channels that convinced me that Youtube was a legitimate path for getting your scientific research funded.
Here's the thing, one can promote tourism while also being academically honest. Hawass just wants to be the top dog in the field and does not want to be wrong about some of the things he claimed in his publications.
> It's big business, has been for almost 5,000 years
I think you're confusing "Egyptian economic activity related to tourism" with "the existence of civilization in Egypt".
No, I'm not. The Great Pyramid was built circa 2500 - 2600 BC, or about 4600 years ago. I think it's fair to say that civilization was humming before that, and that even the construction likely attracted tourists. Seems to be part of the point of monuments.
Djoser's pyramid seems to have been completed around a hundred years prior to that, and would have drawn crowds sufficient to warrant the large temple, grand entrance, and colonnades which are part of the complex.
There is a great deal of evidence that offerings provided by people traveling to these complexes sustained the religious orders on site who provided guardianship, maintenance, and worship. And that this was planned as part of the construction.
Djosers pyramid has an inner chamber that is suported by massive cedar timbers hauled from Lebenon.....and we have the Epic of Gilgamesh which details the triumph of Gilgamesh over humbiwaba the forest guardian, and harvesting and transport of cedars from Lebenon, we also have the commercial records of the mesopotamians trading activities over vast distances and time periods, and so it is zero surprise to find that "the black haired people" also left there genetic's with the rest of the cultural, linguistic, and mythical baggage that we are consiously or un consiously hauling around, still.
The tomb and temple complexes aren't built to accommodate demand. They're built at the size the king wants them to be, and used for official ceremonies.
Try imagining what those official ceremonies are for actually.
Nope. There are literally voyage reports by Herodotus, who describes guides to the pyramids, street food vendors, and translators. That was about 2500 years ago, for example.
You might notice that 2500 years ago is a lot less than 5000 years ago. 5000 years ago, there were no guides to the pyramids. There was no tourism. There wasn't really writing, either.
Today tourism makes up a little more than 10% of the economy of Egypt. 2500 years ago, it would have been around 0%, for the simple reason that almost nobody could afford to be a tourist. The big businesses were grain and gold. 5000 years ago, it was actually 0%. That's when the desertification of the Sahara began and the people who had lived there came to Egypt and inserted themselves at the top of society.
Just because they were called pilgrims, they did the same thing as modeen tourists, with the corresponding economic activities: visiting landmarks, sleeping, eating, shopping.
Praying wasn't even free, if they had to sacrifice some animal.
> That's when the desertification of the Sahara began and the people who had lived there came to Egypt and inserted themselves at the top of society.
It's very interesting to imagine the "green Sahara" cultures, with all of their cities and temples now under tons of sand, that we otherwise have no knowledge of.
Yes, Zahi Hawass is a comical example at this point. But I'm afraid he is merely the manifestation of general desire from the political regime as well as the majority of the uneducated masses there. Zahi Hawass is just the current sociopath to happen to benifiet from the situation to call himself a "scholar".
I spent a significant part of my teen years in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. There isn't really 1 unified feelings towards the "Ancient Egypt" history among Egyptians. First time I heard about the "Ancient Aliens" conspiracy WAS from an Egyptian. I never really paid the theory much attention until all the articles about how "it's a racist theory" "basically indigenous people can't do things without aliens" narrative was surprising.
There was pride in the telling of the conspiracy theory of Ancient Egyptians contacting aliens. "Of course when the Aliens visited Earth, they had to come to Egypt, you konw. We were in touch with aliens and had far more advanced technologies than all other societies. sadly it's been lost" type thinking.
The general opinion was split between people who don't give a shit about all this pharo shit, people who think it's a cool marketing story in the 21st century, people who think it's their history and identity. It was allover the place
I’m amazed he’s still at it but the last time I checked in on him he was fighting against all that “ancient aliens” crap so he’s not all bad.
> But I'm afraid he is merely the manifestation of general desire from the political regime as well as the majority of the uneducated masses there.
Hawass may be more a manifestation of what foreigners believe an Egyptologist should look like: Indiana Jones hat, cigar, etc. He is influential in large parts because of his popularity in the media outside Egypt.
They are ambivalent about "all this pharo" stuff because it is not really their heritage.
> because it is not really their heritage
Could you expand on this?
Not OP but.. The ptolemaic Pharaohs (Cleopatra..) and after are not related to the dynastic cultures which made the pyramids. They were greeks. Subsequent occupation by post Roman cultures including the Byzantine, and Islamic Arabic tribes, and the Ottomans, means the culture and genetics of modern Egypt have little to do with pyramids and pre-roman era mummies and culture/religion/beliefs.
Waves of occupation over 2000 years eroded any cultural link.
What I read suggests the Berbers have some historical relationship and the Bedouin less. Nasser was an arabist, as were the young egypt political movement of the 19th century.
It's like asking why modern British people aren't strongly identifying with pictish culture or beaker people.
The Egyptian archaeologists assert nationalism and cultural goals and have to deal with Islamic fundamentalists who push back on pre Islamic religious artefacts. Saudi archaeologists have similar pressures.
Thanks, you explained it better than I might have.
> What I read suggests the Berbers have some historical relationship and the Bedouin less.
I understand the Copts in Egypt also have a stronger relationship to the ancient culture than the the population as a whole.
Egypt is an Arab country. They're literally called the Arab Republic of Egypt. Before that the United Arab Republic. Official language Arabic.
Arabs came from Arabia, not Egypt.
Copts are a bit closer to ancient Egypt (their language especially) but their religion is Orthodox Christianity which influences their culture, which came out of the Greek/Roman culture of Ptolemaic-Roman Egypt.
“…the Nuwayrat individual is predicted to have had brown eyes, brown hair and skin pigmentation ranging from dark to black skin, with a lower probability of intermediate skin colour”
The SI has much more information along these lines, including a facial reconstruction. Our Ancient Egyptian looks basically Arabian -- the closest match is a modern Bedouin.
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
> Next, according to the CRANID nearest neighbour discriminant analysis, the individual cranium most like Nuwayrat is from a West Asian Bedouin male (Individual 2546 in CRANID database), with the following rounding out the top five: Egyptian 26th-30th Dynasty male (Ind 1034), Indian male (2576), Lachish male (2668), and another 26th-30th Dynasty Egyptian male (1031).
> Thus, in line with the genetic results the Nuwayrat individual, subject to limitations imposed by the comparative samples available in the two program datasets (as above), appears most akin phenetically to: Western Eurasians rather than subSaharan Africans dentally and, more specifically, premodern West Asians, i.e., Lachish, based on craniometrics. It is secondarily most similar in craniometric dimensions to ancient Egyptians of a more recent time.
> the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian
Touch some grass, seriously. They looked at the DNA of 1 (in words: one) guy and now it's "hey in fact Egyptians all came from Mesopotamia"? You'd have to take many more samples to support such a broad claim, and it's not because of the Ministry of Antiquities suppressing ideas.
Mankind likely did not originate in the Nile valley, hence the fact we find people there from some point in history means they migrated from somewhere else. If you subscribe to the single-origin story (which I think is plausible but not the only possible one, the alternative being various human populations that got separated and re-united in different parts of the world) and think, just for the sake of argument, of Lucy as 'the first human' then humans are immigrants almost everywhere (this will be hard to swallow for lots of people and we know from the historical record (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIJF2RomfGE) that the Voth had problems with that, too, so it's very human).
The narrower Nile valley must have been a relatively inhospitable place for a human during the African Wet Period. When that came to an end around ~7ky ago or so that change made the Nile valley rather suddenly more attractive to many thousands of people who used to roam the lands to the right and left of it. As desertification progressed, communities were forced to go someplace else with some ending up in the Nile valley. In a way, you can to this day see the echoes of that time in the ethnic and cultural diversity of Egyptian society which I think is more of a hallmark of this civilization than an imagined homogenized one-mold-fits-all view.
And it's totally not out of place that some people with roots in Ancient Egypt should have an ancestry that came from the Levant or further from Anatolia or Mesopotamia. Egypt was a big place, rich in people, culture, food, arts and opportunity (and, not to forget, regular festivals with beer, wine and music at the cultural centers; today people cross continents for taking part in festivals with beer, wine and music). Egypt had trade, diplomatic relations and 'military exchanges' (war) with those far-flung places and captives were either maimed or indentured, so as a matter of course we find Egyptians with Mesopotamian admixtures, what did you think?
>"hey in fact Egyptians all came from Mesopotamia"
Quite. Especially considering that the article states that this man was 80% North African with dark to black skin....
Additionally presence of certain genetic markers in two locations does not define the direction of travel.
Humanity routinely has a similar kind of ego that requires relevance. But fortunately we still have a distributed knowledge system that excises and corrects local folklore.
I don’t think it is interesting that there aren’t Egyptian scholars on the topic, whether this national/cultural identity existed or not.
I obviously don’t care if it bruises an ego, I would care if the lack of representation overlooks something though.
source?
The article states that 'his genetic affinity is similar to the ancestry appearing in Anatolia and the Levant during the Neolithic and Bronze Age.' As a layperson, I don't think we would find this particularly shocking. It's well known from written sources that there was significant communication and movement between Egypt and those areas during the broader Bronze Age, even extending back into the Neolithic for some cultural exchanges. This even aligns with biblical narratives that describe individuals and families traveling to and from Egypt for periods of time.
Worth noting for context that "Anatolia and the Levant" (better known perhaps as the Ancient Near East) also included plenty of darker-skinned folks in that time period, with an appearance that we might nowadays associate with Sub-Saharan Africa - and they were highly integrated in their societies, not just a servile underclass. This is also true of the ancient Mediterranean region as a whole. We're especially sure about this because of surviving pictorial/visual (e.g. from the Minoan civilization in Crete) and textual sources. So our Old-Kingdom Ancient Egyptian could well have looked quite "Sub-Saharan" in appearance, despite not originating anywhere south of present-day Sahara.
It didn’t. They clearly distinguished Nubians and Libyians from themselves in their art.
Gonna need a source for your assertion since the Egyptians and Minoans always differentiated between themselves and Nubians/Libyans in art and literature...
People from the ancient near East nearly always depicted themselves as somewhere between white and reddish/light brown and their modern populations fall within the same spectrum.
There's no evidence for near Eastern populations having ever looked "Sub Saharan".
Can’t we think of it as just one large land mass? Maybe 5000 years ago the Sinai peninsula was more land, less sea—the Red Sea not as big, and the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba as we know it now was land mass. Then it wouldn’t be hard to imagine freedom of travel in all kinds of directions.
The authors actually hypothesize that the Sinai desert was not the main migration path to Egypt here, that's speculative.
That said, it's essentially how most people think of the Mediterranean basin by the middle bronze age, not too much later than this.
The key isn't shifting land masses, but the fact that even with the existing terrain, people were moving, trading, and mixing across these regions
> Ancient Egyptian society flourished for millennia, reaching its peak during the Dynastic Period (approximately 3150–30 BCE)
Note, Ancient Egypt emerged from prehistoric times in 3150 BCE (it hadn’t existed for millennia then), with the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt.
How many other early genomes we've missed just due to preservation bias
How do we even know this person was upper class or some itinerant migrant worker that came from somewhere else?
Even the citation claiming the burial method was associated with upper class raises doubts: following the link mentions "pot burial" which has commonly been associated with the poor. The problem with identifying bones with "population" is it often says what the common man was like but not the minority elite that ruled and had power if one isn't careful about who they think they're identifying or the demographic structure of society in these ancient cultures.
Well, I assume the lowest-budget way to deal with a corpse in ancient Egypt is to toss it into the Nile.
More generally, if what you're looking at is a cemetery for the poor, there should be a lot of remains, and there shouldn't be much in the way of decoration. If someone carved a tomb for the remains to be in ("The body was interred in a ceramic pot within a rock-cut tomb"), that already disqualifies them from being poor.
Culture matters a lot, the lowest budget is not necessarily the one that will be used. The cheapest way to dispose of a body is to eat it, but almost no cultures do that, I don't know the burial rituals of ancient Egyptian laborers, but tossing them in the Nile seems incredibly unlikely.
> I assume the lowest-budget way to deal with a corpse in ancient Egypt is to toss it into the Nile.
You are wrong to think that the majority of Egyptians’ corpses were disposed of in the Nile.
Is that something I said?
You implied that lower class burials were likely in the Nile.
To advance the argument that a pot burial likely didn't indicate a poor burial.
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