Population history of Egypt
In addition, Egypt has experienced several invasions and being part of many regional empires during its long history, including by the Canaanites, the Ancient Libyans, the Assyrians, the Kushites (a Nubian civilization), the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs.
[6] Some studies based on morphological,[7] genetic,[8][9][10][11][12] and archaeological data[13][14][15][16] have attributed these settlements to migrants from the Fertile Crescent in the Near East returning during the Egyptian and North African Neolithic, bringing agriculture to the region.
However, other scholars have disputed this view and cited linguistic,[17] biological anthropological,[18][19] archaeological[20][4][21] and genetic data[22][23][24][25] which does not support the hypothesis of a mass migration from the Levantine during the prehistoric period.
It was these populations, in addition to Neolithic farmers from the Near East, that likely played a role in the formation of the Egyptian state as they brought their food crops, sheep, goats, and cattle to the Nile Valley.
[43] Frank Yurco in 1989 expressed the view that among foreign populations, Nubians were closest ethnically to the Egyptians, shared the same culture in the predynastic period, and used the same pharaonic political structure.
[46] In 1996 he said that "the peoples of Egypt, the Sudan, and much of North-East Africa are generally regarded as a Nilotic continuity, with widely ranging physical features (complexions light to dark, various hair and craniofacial types)".
Y. Keita, and Paul Newman have also argued that archaeological evidence does not support a spread of migrating Neolithic farmers from Asia into northern Africa, but rather a gradual incorporation of animal husbandry into indigenous foraging cultures.
In particular, he argued that the cultural features which characterised the Egyptian civilisation were "widely distributed in north-eastern Africa but not in western Asia" and this had earlier origins in the Saharan wet phase period.
[70] Donald B. Redford wrote in 2004 that it is reasonable to assume that the Seventeenth Dynasty originated in Nubia based on the expanded presence of Nubians in Egypt during that time period.
[74] Deitrich Wildung (2018) examined Eastern Saharan pottery styles and Sudanese stone sculptures and suggested these artefacts were transmitted across the Nile Valley and influenced the pre-dynastic Egyptian culture in the Neolithic period.
[81] A study published in 2017 described the extraction and analysis of DNA from 151 mummified ancient Egyptian individuals, whose remains were recovered from Abusir el-Meleq in Middle Egypt.
[85] In 2023, Christopher Ehret criticised the conclusions of the 2017 study which proposed the ancient Egyptians had a Levantine background based on insufficient sampling and a biased interpretation of the genetic data.
Ehret argued this was reminiscent of earlier scholarship and also conflicted with existing archaeological, linguistic and biological anthropological evidence which situated ancient Egypt in a northeastern African context.
[87] A 2020 DNA study by Gad, Hawass et al., analysed mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal haplogroups from Tutankhamun's family members of the 18th Dynasty, using comprehensive control procedures to ensure quality results.
Keita analysed 8 Short Tandem loci (STR) data published as part of these studies by Hawass et al., using an algorithm that only has three choices: Eurasians, sub-Saharan Africans, and East Asians.
[97] Joseph Deniker and other early anthropologists similarly noted that the overall cranial form of Ethiopid, Near Eastern Semitic and Berber ethnic groups, all of whom speak Hamito-Semitic languages, are largely the same.
She also wrote that the archaeological and inscriptional evidence for contact between Egypt and Syro-Palestine "suggests that gene flow between these areas was very likely," and that the early Nile Valley populations were "part of an African lineage, but exhibiting local variation".
[107] In 2007, Strouhal et al. described the physical features of ancient A-Group Nubians as "Caucasoid" which were "not distinguishable from the contemporary Predynastic Upper Egyptians of the Badarian and Nagadian cultures" based in reference to previous anthropological studies from 1975 and 1985.
Keita on First Dynasty crania from the royal tombs in Abydos, noted the predominant pattern was "Southern" or a “tropical African variant” (though others were also observed), which had affinities with Kerma Kushites.
[115] Patricia Smith, in her entry noted that "the biological characteristics of modern Egyptians show a north-south cline, reflecting their geographic location between sub-Saharan Africa and the Levant.
"[116] Pagani, Luca et al. (2012) stated “that North Africans share substantially more variation with non-African populations (80%) than do Ethiopians (40%–50%)” with a PCA analysis performed on a sample of two Egyptians.
[122] According to Robins and Shute (1986) the average limb elongation ratios among pre-dynastic ancient Egyptians is higher than that of modern West Africans who reside much closer to the equator.
Her raw data suggested that the Ancient Egyptians in general had "tropical body plans" but that their proportions were actually "super-negroid", i.e. the limb indices are relatively longer than in many "African" populations.
Zakrzewski concluded that the "results must remain provisional due to the relatively small sample sizes and the lack of skeletal material that cross-cuts all social and economic groups within each time period.
This may suggest that Egyptians are closely related to circum-Mediterranean and/or Near Eastern groups, but quickly developed limb length proportions more suited to their present very hot environments.
Although, the authors cautioned that "the high intralimb indices and greater body mass relative to stature in the Kellis 2 sample suggest that generalized terms to categorize Egyptians, such as “tropical,” “Negroid,” and “super-Negroid” may be grossly inaccurate, and may additionally obscure localized adaptations within larger geographical areas.
[141] Eric Crubezy (2010) found that a predynastic cemetery in Adaima in Upper Egypt showed "Khoisan" dental markers (formally referred to as "Bushmen canine").
[142] [143] In 2023, Christopher Ehret reported that the physical anthropological findings from the “major burial sites of those founding locales of ancient Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE, notably El-Badari as well as Naqada, show no demographic indebtedness to the Levant”.
[148] Christopher Ehret describes the oldest speakers of the Afro-Asiatic language family as "a set of peoples whose lands between 15,000 and 13,000 BCE stretched from Nubia in the west to far northern Somalia in the east.
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.
