Ancient Egyptian population biology, "race" debate

Evidence 1: Cranial non-metric


Source: Hanihara, 2003

The ancient Egyptian skeletal samples are:

#59: Naqada, Predynastic Egypt, c. 4,400–3,100 BCE
#60: Gizeh, 26th–30th Dynasty Egypt, 664–343 BCE (aka Howell's "E Series")

Since the Gizeh sample belongs to the Late Period, I'll only consider the Naqada sample, which plots closest to:

#48: Greece, ancient and modern
#62: Nubia, early Christian-era

Evidence 2: Cranial metric



Source: Froment, 1992 (credit: Arch Hades added the colours)

The metric data is concordant with the non-metric. Its clear the ancient Egyptians plot roughly equidistant (in terms of morphometric space) between their geographical neighbours: Greece and Levant, in the north, and Sudan and Eritrea in the south. As Froment explains:

"The intermediate position [of Egypt] near the inhabitants of the Maghreb, Levant ["proto-Mediterranean"], Indus, Nubians and Somalians; gradient between these diverse populations prohibits establishing racial barriers."​

Ancient Egyptians do not cluster with Sub-Saharan Africans, nor West Eurasians. They plot overall between these high-low latitude extremes, but as an intermediate gradient of course will show closest biological affinity to populations nearest to them, in the north and south.

 

This essay gives a general overview of the evidence pointing to an African origin of Ancient Egyptian civilization whose population shared biological characteristics with neighbors to the South.


The Geographical Origins and Population Relationships of Early Ancient Egyptians

Professor S.O.Y. Keita
Department of Biological Anthropology
Oxford University

Professor A. J. Boyce
University Reader in Human Population
Oxford University

What was the primary geographical source for the peopling of the Egyptian Nile Valley? Were the creators of the fundamental culture of southern predynastic Egypt—which led to the dynastic culture—migrants and colonists from Europe or the Near East? Or were they predominantly African variant populations?

These questions can be addressed using data from studies of biology and culture, and evolutionary interpretive models. Archaeological and linguistic data indicate an origin in Africa. Biological data from living Egyptians and from skeletons of ancient Egyptians may also shed light on these questions. It is important to keep in mind the long presence of humans in Africa, and that there should be a great range of biological variation in indigenous "authentic" Africans.

Scientists have been studying remains from the Egyptian Nile Valley for years. Analysis of crania is the traditional approach to assessing ancient population origins, relationships, and diversity. In studies based on anatomical traits and measurements of crania, similarities have been found between Nile Valley crania from 30,000, 20,000 and 12,000 years ago and various African remains from more recent times (see Thoma 1984; Brauer and Rimbach 1990; Angel and Kelley 1986; Keita 1993). Studies of crania from southern predynastic Egypt, from the formative period (4000-3100 B.C.), show them usually to be more similar to the crania of ancient Nubians, Kushites, Saharans, or modern groups from the Horn of Africa than to those of dynastic northern Egyptians or ancient or modern southern Europeans.

Another source of skeletal data is limb proportions, which generally vary with different climatic belts. In general, the early Nile Valley remains have the proportions of more tropical populations, which is noteworthy since Egypt is not in the tropics. This suggests that the Egyptian Nile Valley was not primarily settled by cold-adapted peoples, such as Europeans.

Art objects are not generally used by biological anthropologists. They are suspect as data and their interpretation highly dependent on stereotyped thinking. However, because art has often been used to comment on the physiognomies of ancient Egyptians, a few remarks are in order. A review of literature and the sculpture indicates characteristics that also can be found in the Horn of (East) Africa (see, e.g., Petrie 1939; Drake 1987; Keita 1993). Old and Middle Kingdom statuary shows a range of characteristics; many, if not most, individuals depicted in the art have variations on the narrow-nosed, narrow-faced morphology also seen in various East Africans. This East African anatomy, once seen as being the result of a mixture of different "races," is better understood as being part of the range of indigenous African variation.

The descriptions and terms of ancient Greek writers have sometimes been used to comment on Egyptian origins. This is problematic since the ancient writers were not doing population biology. However, we can examine one issue. The Greeks called all groups south of Egypt "Ethiopians." Were the Egyptians more related to any of these "Ethiopians" than to the Greeks? As noted, cranial and limb studies have indicated greater similarity to Somalis, Kushites and Nubians, all "Ethiopians" in ancient Greek terms.

There are few studies of ancient DNA from Egyptian remains and none so far of southern predynastic skeletons. A study of 12th Dynasty DNA shows that the remains evaluated had multiple lines of descent, including not surprisingly some from "sub-Saharan" Africa (Paabo and Di Rienzo 1993). The other lineages were not identified, but may be African in origin. More work is needed. In the future, early remains from the Nile Valley and the rest of Africa will have to be studied in this manner in order to establish the early baseline range of genetic variation of all Africa. The data are important to avoid stereotyped ideas about the DNA of African peoples.

The information from the living Egyptian population may not be as useful because historical records indicate substantial immigration into Egypt over the last several millennia, and it seems to have been far greater from the Near East and Europe than from areas far south of Egypt. "Substantial immigration" can actually mean a relatively small number of people in terms of population genetics theory. It has been determined that an average migration rate of one percent per generation into a region could result in a great change of the original gene frequencies in only several thousand years. (This assumes that all migrants marry natives and that all native-migrant offspring remain in the region.) It is obvious then that an ethnic group or nationality can change in average gene frequencies or physiognomy by intermarriage, unless social rules exclude the products of "mixed" unions from membership in the receiving group. More abstractly this means that geographically defined populations can undergo significant genetic change with a small percentage of steady assimilation of "foreign" genes. This is true even if natural selection does not favor the genes (and does not eliminate them).

Examples of regions that have biologically absorbed genetically different immigrants are Sicily, Portugal, and Greece, where the frequencies of various genetic markers (and historical records) indicate sub-Saharan and supra-Saharan African migrants.

This scenario is different from one in which a different population replaces another via colonization. Native Egyptians were variable. Foreigners added to this variability.

The genetic data on the recent Egyptian population is fairly sparse. There has not been systematic research on large samples from the numerous regions of Egypt. Taken collectively, the results of various analyses suggest that modern Egyptians have ties with various African regions, as well as with Near Easterners and Europeans. Egyptian gene frequencies are between those of Europeans and some sub-Saharan Africans. This is not surprising. The studies have used various kinds of data: standard blood groups and proteins, mitochondrial DNA, and the Y chromosome. The gene frequencies and variants of the "original" population, or of one of early high density, cannot be deduced without a theoretical model based on archaeological and "historical" data, including the aforementioned DNA from ancient skeletons. (It must be noted that it is not yet clear how useful ancient DNA will be in most historical genetic research.) It is not clear to what degree certain genetic systems usually interpreted as non-African may in fact be native to Africa. Much depends on how "African" is defined and the model of interpretation.

The various genetic studies usually suffer from what is called categorical thinking, specifically, racial thinking. Many investigators still think of "African" in a stereotyped, nonscientific (nonevolutionary) fashion, not acknowledging a range of genetic variants or traits as equally African. The definition of "African" that would be most appropriate should encompass variants that arose in Africa. Given that this is not the orientation of many scholars, who work from outmoded racial perspectives, the presence of "stereotypical" African genes so far from the "African heartland" is noteworthy. These genes have always been in the valley in any reasonable interpretation of the data. As a team of Egyptian geneticists stated recently, "During this long history and besides these Asiatic influences, Egypt maintained its African identity . . ." (Mahmoud et al. 1987). This statement is even more true in a wider evolutionary interpretation, since some of the "Asian" genes may be African in origin. Modern data and improved theoretical approaches extend and validate this conclusion.

In summary, various kinds of data and the evolutionary approach indicate that the Nile Valley populations had greater ties with other African populations in the early ancient period. Early Nile Valley populations were primarily coextensive with indigenous African populations. Linguistic and archaeological data provide key supporting evidence for a primarily African origin.


References Cited:

Angel, J. L., and J. O. Kelley, Description and comparison of the skeleton. In The Wadi Kubbaniya Skeleton: A Late Paleolithic
Burial from Southern Egypt. E Wendorf and R. Schild. pp. 53-70. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. 1986

Brauer, G., and K. Rimbach, Late archaic and modern Homo sapiens from Europe, Africa, and Southwest Asia: Craniometric comparisons and phylogenetic implications, Journal of Human Evolution 19:789-807. 1990

Drake, St. C., Black Folk Here and There, vol 1. Los Angeles: University of California. 1987

Keita, S.O.Y., Studies and comments on ancient Egyptian biological relationships. History in Africa 20:129-154. 1993

Mahmoud, L. et. al, Human blood groups in Dakhlaya. Egypt. Annuals of Human Biology. 14(6):487-493. 1987

Paabo, S., and A. Di Rienzo, A molecular approach to the study of Egyptian history. In Biological Anthropology and the Study
of Ancient Egypt. V. Davies and R. Walker, eds. pp. 86-90. London: British Museum Press. 1993

Petrie, W.M., F. The Making of Egypt. London: Sheldon Press. 1984

Thoma, A., Morphology and affinities of the Nazlet Khaterman. Journal of Human Evolution 13:287-296. 1984

 

Look at the dendograms in Kemp (2006), and see Froment (1992) above. Ancient Lower Egyptians plot morphometrically closer to Levant/Southern Europe than Nubia/Somalia, while the reverse is true for Upper Egypt. As a whole, however, ancient Egyptians are equidistant between these.

Skeletal samples from Upper Egypt, especially near the border of Nubia are going to show closer relatedness to their southern African neighbours (and not Levantines or Greeks) based on the shorter geographical distance (= more gene flow and more similar climatic adaptation):

"The works of Mukherjee et al (1955), Hillson (1978, Brauer (1976, 1980), and Keita (1988, 1990) contain data which demonstrate the overlap of early southern Egyptians with Sudanese and more southern Africans." (Keita, 1993)​

My issue with Keita, is he doesn't acknowledge the closer Levantine or Southern European (i.e. Greek) biological affinities for Lower Egypt. Why this is suspicious is because he admits ancient/modern Maghreb (who are the same latitude as Lower Egypt) are closer to South Europeans:

"The supra-Atlas mountain and coastal northern Africans are viewed here as perhaps being biologically more, but not only related to southern Europeans, primarily by gene flow." (Keita, 1993)​

And yet, when it comes to ancient Lower Egyptians suddenly they are different. Why? I suspect this is down to mild Afrocentric bias. Howe (1998, p. 133) in his book debunking Afrocentric claims, has noted: "Somarka Keita though evidently more sympathetic to Afrocentric ideas".

 

Having read more of Keita, I've discovered he accepts Lower Egyptian crania are less related to Sudanese and more southern African populations than Upper Egyptians:

"Using published and new data and multidimensional scaling, Hillson (1978 found two trends in Nile valley series: a Lower Egyptian and northern tendency and a southern Egyptian-southerly African trend; Upper Egyptians overlapped notably with more southern African groups. These trends are also found by Keita (1990, 1992), who noted extensive overlap of southern Egyptians and more southerly Africans." (Keita, 1993)​

But instead of conceding Lower Egyptians show closer biological affinities to Levant/South Europe, he has them generally equidistant to Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans:

"The Lower Egyptian pattern is intermediate to that of the various [northern] Europeans and West African and Khoisan series." (Keita, 1993)​

However, most studies (e.g. Howells, 1973, 1989; Musgrave and Evans, 1980; Froment, 1992) contra Keita show the Late Period skulls from Gizeh ("E series") are more closely related to the nearest circum-Mediterranean populations in the north, particularly Greeks:

"However, of interest is the consistent tendency of the Egyptian Twenty sixth - Thirtieth Dynasty “E” series to position nearer to the Greek series than to the corpus of other Egyptian series." (Keita, 1988) [here Keita is discussing Musgrave and Evans, 1980)​

"Egyptian populations studied by Howells (1973, 1989) are consistently more similar to Europeans than to populations elsewhere in the world." (Bulbeck, 2011)

Howells' skeletal sample only includes the "E series" from Lower Egypt, so of course his data should not be misread as saying Upper Egyptians are more similar to Europeans, than Sudanese (i.e. Nubia) and more southern African populations. Its undeniable though dynastic Lower Egyptians are more related to circum-Mediterranean populations in the north such as Greeks, than Sudanese and more southern African populations.

 

Looking at the OP graph from Froment, I see a lot of overlap between the Lower Egyptian (orange) and the Nubian (brown) clusters as well as the Upper Egyptian (red) ones. I also see most of the European crania that approach the AE/Nubian cluster (despite their centroid being further removed from the Egyptian ones than Nubia) are of Neolithic age. There is some evidence that Neolithic-era populations in West Eurasia had some Northeast African ancestry.

 

No doubt Lower Egyptians are morphometrically closest to Upper Egyptians, but they are closer to Levant/Greece than Sudanese and more southern African populations based on the fact Lower Egypt is closer to the circum-Mediterranean region, than Sudan.

Note the Lower Egyptian skeletal sample ("E series") which plots very close to Neolithic Greece contains over 1000 crania. The others contain very few, e.g. Froment's Sakara (Saqqara) contains only 44 crania from Batrawi and Morant (1947); "reliable interpretations of the biological affinities of the people of Lower Egypt are currently hampered by a lack of well preserved skeletal material" (Bard, 2005). It is only the Late Period Gizeh/"E series" which is a reliable sample size, which is why Kemp (2006) uses no others from northern Egypt.

The "E series" c. 664–343 BCE predates Ptolemaic Egypt. Usefully, Froment has split the 26th dynasty from the 27th-30th. The 26th predates the Achaemenids, and look where it plots. The Afrocentric argument the "E series" represents mass foreign settlement doesn't really make any sense.

 

Lol at Ligurian using the race concept. Suddenly we can classify people as "Neolithic Greek"? Is that not a "type"?

 

I think calling Keita an Afrocentrist or accusing him of an Afrocentric bias is inaccurate. In my experience reading Keita's papers, watching his videos and communicating with him via email I have found him to be an objective scholar. Howe is not qualified to critique cranial studies. He accuses Keita of being more sympathetic to Afrocentric ideas because he doesn't like what he has to say although I'll note that in the full passage you quoted Howe is saying that Keita agrees broadly with the conclusions of Brace et al. (1993) about the biological affinities of the Ancient Egyptians. This is actually not accurate as Keita wrote a very critical review of the article that Brace and his colleagues wrote which contained many disagreements.

Your main point of contention seems to be with the idea that the Ancient Lower Egyptians were closer in biological affinity to coastal Northwest Africa and Southern Europe than to more Southerly Africans in Nubia and the Horn of Africa like the Upper Egyptians and that there was a skin color cline in Egypt with people in the North of the country being lighter-skinned and people in the South being darker-skinned meaning that the Ancient Egyptians did not fit in to a "Black" or "White" category as those modern racial labels have been conceptualized to mean but rather the society had diverse phenotypes that do not fit in to a racial box. I have discussed this issue with Keita. According to Keita we can not determine skin color from physical remains without doing a histological analysis of the skin. What he believes is that there was some variability in phenotypes in Ancient Egypt and that foreigners added to that variability.

We do have to acknowledge that at different moments in time especially in Northern Egypt various peoples who were non-Egyptian in terms of their ethno-nationality did in fact come in to the country. - (Keita: National Geographic interview)

 

Keita is an Absurd Afrocentrist however. It is quite clear that 'Ancient Egypt, was is a Geographical location spanning over 3000 years and considerable area and that there have been massive varieties in people who lived there, Certainly people we would describe as black, more so in the south and people we would see as 'mediterrenean and every variety in between. Absurd lunatics will try and insist that Cleopatra was black, when clearly she was no such thing , out of some perverse need to label a famous person as black as if this proved anything.

 

I don't think any of them were Black. There is no evidence of this. Nubians are half and half, and they were not Egyptians.

 

'Black' is a subjective term. They didn;t look like West Africans certainly.

These Girls are from southern Egypt and are certainly black

 

How can you say Black is subjective and then say so-and-so are "certainly" Black? What is your definition? Just visual based on personal feeling? I define "Black" by ancestry or shared genetics, preferring to use the more precise word "Negro". The fact is that Nubians are genetically and ancestrally closer to Caucasoids than Negroids, looking at PCA charts.



Source Nature 2015

They cluster with Sudanese Arabs and Ethiopians. So your definition of "Black" is clearly divorced from a natural defintion based on ancestry.

The Negrocentic "scholars" EJ copy pastes tend to look at cherry picked ancestry uninformative traits like body-plan and jaw shape to falsely infer ancestry.

 

What is your basis for calling Keita an Afrocentrist? Are you at all familiar with his research?

Very few people even Afrocentrists claim that Cleopatra was Black. Anyone who knows history knows that she was of Macedonian Greek descent. It is interesting to note however that her bloodline may not have been pure Greek according to the research of some British Anthropologists.

[video=youtube;iCTzfb5tWDg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCTzfb5tWDg[/video]

The whole Cleopatra issue is a red herring. I don't consider her or the Ptolemies to be native Egyptians. When I talk about the Ancient Egyptians I'm talking about the Early Dynastic to New Kingdom period excluding the Hyksos and any foreign entities. Eurocentrists such as Vekimekim deny that any of the Ancient Egyptians were Black. To do this you have to deny the Egyptians' own depictions of themselves in their artwork, the cranial evidence, the limb proportions, the genetic evidence, the archeological and linguistic evidence and the histological analysis of mummy skin.

Evidence #1: Cranial studies



Source: Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization by Barry Kemp, 2006

A review of studies covering the biological relationship of the ancient Egyptians was undertaken. An overview of the data from the studies suggests that the major biological affinities of early southern Egyptians lay with tropical Africans. The range of indigenous tropical African phenotypes is great; and this range of variation must be considered in any discussion of the Nile Valley peoples. The early southern Egyptians belonged primarily to an African descent group which gained some Near Eastern affinity through gene flow with the passage of time.

Source: A brief review of studies and comments on ancient Egyptian biological relationships International Journal of Anthropology Volume 10, Issue 2, pp 107-123 (1995)


Evidence #2: Limb Proportions



The nature of the body plan was also investigated by comparing the intermembral, brachial, and crural indices for these samples with values obtained from the literature. No significant differences were
found in either index through time for either sex. The raw values in Table 6 suggest that Egyptians had the “super-Negroid” body plan described by Robins (1983). The values for the brachial and crural
indices show that the distal segments of each limb are longer relative to the proximal segments than in many “African” populations (data from Aiello and Dean, 1990). This pattern is supported by Figure 7
(a plot of population mean femoral and tibial lengths; data from Ruff, 1994), which indicates that the Egyptians generally have tropical body plans. Of the Egyptian samples, only the Badarian and Early
Dynastic period populations have shorter tibiae than predicted from femoral length. Despite these differences, all samples lie relatively clustered together as compared to the other populations.

Source: Variation in Ancient Egyptian Stature and Body Proportions AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 121:219–229 (2003)

Evidence #3: Genetics



Source: The Levant versus the Horn of Africa: Evidence for Bidirectional Corridors of Human Migrations The American Journal of Human Genetics Volume 74, Issue 3, p532–544 (2004)

Using ADMIXTURE17 and principal-component analysis (PCA)18 (Figure 1A), we estimated the average proportion of non-African ancestry in the Egyptians to be 80% and dated the midpoint of the admixture event by using ALDER20 to around 750 years ago (Table S2), consistent with the Islamic expansion and dates reported previously.

Source: Tracing the Route of Modern Humans out of Africa by Using 225 Human Genome Sequences from Ethiopians and Egyptians The American Journal of Human Genetics 96, 986–991, June 4 (2015)

Evidence #4: Skin



Skin sections showed particularly good tissue preservation, although cellular outlines were never distinct. Although much of the epidermis had already separated from the dermis, the remaining
epidermis often was preserved well (Fig. 1). The basal epithelial cells were packed with melanin as expected for specimens of Negroid origin. In the dermis, the hair follicles, hair, and sebaceous and sweat glands were readily apparent (Fig. 2).

Source: Determination of optimal rehydration, fixation and staining methods for histological and immunohistochemical analysis of mummified soft tissues Biotechnic & Histochemistry 80(1): 7-13 (2005)

Evidence #5: Artwork



Source: Giovanni Battista Belzoni: Egyptian race portrayed in the Book of Gates (Wikipedia).



Source: King Tut Bust (historymuseum.ca).

[video=youtube;5RAH_a99EhQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RAH_a99EhQ[/video]

Evidence #6: Archeology and Linguistics




Ancient Egyptian as an African Language, Egypt as an African Culture

Christopher Ehret
Professor of History, African Studies Chair
University of California at Los Angeles

Ancient Egyptian civilization was, in ways and to an extent usually not recognized, fundamentally African. The evidence of both language and culture reveals these African roots.

The origins of Egyptian ethnicity lay in the areas south of Egypt. The ancient Egyptian language belonged to the Afrasian family (also called Afroasiatic or, formerly, Hamito-Semitic). The speakers of the earliest Afrasian languages, according to recent studies, were a set of peoples whose lands between 15,000 and 13,000 B.C. stretched from Nubia in the west to far northern Somalia in the east. They supported themselves by gathering wild grains. The first elements of Egyptian culture were laid down two thousand years later, between 12,000 and 10,000 B.C., when some of these Afrasian communities expanded northward into Egypt, bringing with them a language directly ancestral to ancient Egyptian. They also introduced to Egypt the idea of using wild grains as food.

A new religion came with them as well. Its central tenet explains the often localized origins of later Egyptian gods: the earliest Afrasians were, properly speaking, neither monotheistic nor polytheistic. Instead, each local community, comprising a clan or a group of related clans, had its own distinct deity and centered its religious observances on that deity. This belief system persists today among several Afrasian peoples of far southwest Ethiopia. And as Biblical scholars have shown, Yahweh, god of the ancient Hebrews, an Afrasian people of the Semitic group, was originally also such a deity. The connection of many of Egypt's predynastic gods to particular localities is surely a modified version of this early Afrasian belief. Political unification in the late fourth millennium brought the Egyptian deities together in a new polytheistic system. But their local origins remain amply apparent in the records that have come down to us.

During the long era between about 10,000 and 6000 B.C., new kinds of southern influences diffused into Egypt. During these millennia, the Sahara had a wetter climate than it has today, with grassland or steppes in many areas that are now almost absolute desert. New wild animals, most notably the cow, spread widely in the eastern Sahara in this period.

One of the exciting archeological events of the past twenty years was the discovery that the peoples of the steppes and grasslands to the immediate south of Egypt domesticated these cattle, as early as 9000 to 8000 B.C. The societies involved in this momentous development included Afrasians and neighboring peoples whose languages belonged to a second major African language family, Nilo-Saharan (Wendorf, Schild, Close 1984; Wendorf, et al. 1982). The earliest domestic cattle came to Egypt apparently from these southern neighbors, probably before 6000 B.C., not, as we used to think, from the Middle East.

One major technological advance, pottery-making, was also initiated as early as 9000 B.C. by the Nilo-Saharans and Afrasians who lived to the south of Egypt. Soon thereafter, pots spread to Egyptian sites, almost 2,000 years before the first pottery was made in the Middle East.

Very late in the same span of time, the cultivating of crops began in Egypt. Since most of Egypt belonged then to the Mediterranean climatic zone, many of the new food plants came from areas of similar climate in the Middle East. Two domestic animals of Middle Eastern origin, the sheep and the goat, also entered northeastern Africa from the north during this era.

But several notable early Egyptian crops came from Sudanic agriculture, independently invented between 7500 and 6000 B.C. by the Nilo-Saharan peoples (Ehret 1993:104-125). One such cultivated crop was the edible gourd. The botanical evidence is confirmed in this case by linguistics: Egyptian bdt, or "bed of gourds" (Late Egyptian bdt, "gourd; cucumber"), is a borrowing of the Nilo-Saharan word *bud, "edible gourd." Other early Egyptian crops of Sudanic origin included watermelons and castor beans. (To learn more on how historians use linguistic evidence, see note at end of this article.)

Between about 5000 and 3000 B.C. a new era of southern cultural influences took shape. Increasing aridity pushed more of the human population of the eastern Sahara into areas with good access to the waters of the Nile, and along the Nile the bottomlands were for the first time cleared and farmed. The Egyptian stretches of the river came to form the northern edge of a newly emergent Middle Nile Culture Area, which extended far south up the river, well into the middle of modern-day Sudan. Peoples speaking languages of the Eastern Sahelian branch of the Nilo-Saharan family inhabited the heartland of this region.

From the Middle Nile, Egypt gained new items of livelihood between 5000 and 3000 B.C. One of these was a kind of cattle pen: its Egyptian name, s3 (earlier *sr), can be derived from the Eastern Sahelian term *sar. Egyptian pg3, "bowl," (presumably from earlier pgr), a borrowing of Nilo-Saharan *poKur, "wooden bowl or trough," reveals still another adoption in material culture that most probably belongs to this era.

One key feature of classical Egyptian political culture, usually assumed to have begun in Egypt, also shows strong links to the southern influences of this period. We refer here to a particular kind of sacral chiefship that entailed, in its earliest versions, the sending of servants into the afterlife along with the deceased chief. The deep roots and wide occurrence of this custom among peoples who spoke Eastern Sahelian languages strongly imply that sacral chiefship began not as a specifically Egyptian invention, but instead as a widely shared development of the Middle Nile Culture Area.

After about 3500 B.C., however, Egypt would have started to take on a new role vis-a-vis the Middle Nile region, simply because of its greater concentration of population. Growing pressures on land and resources soon enhanced and transformed the political powers of sacral chiefs. Unification followed, and the local deities of predynastic times became gods in a new polytheism, while sacral chiefs gave way to a divine king. At the same time, Egypt passed from the wings to center stage in the unfolding human drama of northeastern Africa.

A Note on the Use of Linguistic Evidence for History

Languages provide a powerful set of tools for probing the cultural history of the peoples who spoke them. Determining the relationships between particular languages, such as the languages of the Afrasian or the Nilo-Saharan family, gives us an outline history of the societies that spoke those languages in the past. And because each word in a language has its own individual history, the vocabulary of every language forms a huge archive of documents. If we can trace a particular word back to the common ancestor language of a language family, then we know that the item of culture connoted by the word was known to the people who spoke the ancestral tongue. If the word underwent a meaning change between then and now, a corresponding change must have taken place in the cultural idea or practice referred to by the word. In contrast, if a word was borrowed from another language, it attests to a thing or development that passed from the one culture to the other. The English borrowing, for example, of castle, duke, parliament, and many other political and legal terms from Old Norman French are evidence of a Norman period of rule in England, a fact confirmed by documents.


References Cited:

Ehret, Christopher, Nilo-Saharans and the Saharo-Sahelian Neolithic. In African Archaeology: Food, Metals and Towns. T. Shaw, P Sinclair, B. Andah, and A. Okpoko, eds. pp. 104-125. London: Routledge. 1993

Ehret, Christopher, Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, Tone Consonants, and Vocabulary. Los Angeles: University of California Press, Berkeley. 1995

Wendorf, F., et al., Saharan Exploitation of Plants 8000 Years B.P. Nature 359:721-724. 1982

Wendorf, F., R. Schild, and A. Close, eds. Cattle-Keepers of the Eastern Sahara. Dallas: Southern Methodist University, Department of Anthropology. 1984

 

It's not a race, but an archaeological skeletal sample, i.e. a local breeding population:

"The concept of “biological affinity” as used here differs from a concept of “racial” identity in that it presumes only the reality of the local breeding population, or its oft-assumed operational equivalent—the archeological skeletal series. The local population is the unit of analysis (Hiernaux 1975). Working from this perspective means evaluating “populations” with statistical techniques and seeing what kinds of patterns emerge. This inductive approach is preferable (Greene 1981). Similarity or dissimilarity between populations is interpreted as indicative of degrees of biological affinity. Hence there are no preconceptions. This avoids already decided “racial” taxonomic schemes (some still persisting) passed on from earlier periods and even the pre-genetic era. Thus, ideal typological thinking is minimized." (Keita, 1993)

Local breeding populations (demes) are not races. You've set up the same straw man for the past 3 years that if someone denies race they deny there is human population structure.

 

Oh I see. You set an arbitrary limit on "similarity or dissimilarity between populations [to indicate] degrees of biological affinity" but do not explain why this cannot extend up to the level of a Caucasoid/Negroid distinction. I'm applying exactly the same criterion: genetic similarity to establish "biological affinity" which is another term for shared ancestry. I just don't fail to apply it at the race level because I'm not a politically "correct" pseudo-scientist.

 

Its not only gene flow with Levant/Aegean, but the fact Lower Egypt, especially the northern coastal region has a different climate than Upper Egypt. The northern coast of Egypt isn't classified as hot desert climate like the rest of Egypt, but as Mediterranean climate. In fact since the whole Nile Delta is a lot cooler, this is generally seen as an extension of the Mediterranean climatic zone:

"The Maghreb, possibly Sedment, and E-series are seen as representing an African Mediterranean climatic zone, while the Southern Egyptian series from Abydos and Naqada predynastic series as denoting a zone between the Mediterranean and tropical Africa. The Badari series seems to belong in a tropical zone." (Keita, 1988​

As Keita realizes, we have to look at more than just gene flow, but selection, genetic drift etc. I think the closer affinities of ancient Lower Egyptian crania to Levant/Aegean (e.g. Musgrave & Evans, 1980) is based on all of these things, and not only a simplistic admixture model.

 

There is a continuum of local breeding populations (demes) but they don't cluster, at least not continentally. The arbitrariness is your position, not mine. I don't try to force breeding populations into subjective racial categories. My position is that of Cavilla-Sforza, and other leading population geneticists:

"Cavilla-Sforza treats panmictic populations as real but characterizes attempts to classify 'clusters' of populations into races as a futile exercise. This is because any such classification would involve an arbitrary privileging of a given time slice with its particular geographic distribution of populations over another, a concern that coincides with Marks' objection." (Rheinberger & Gaudillière, 2004)

 

Castor beans?

The seeds from the castor bean plant, Ricinus communis, are poisonous to people, animals and insects.

Maybe they meant to say chic peas.. There's ample evidence that they were cultivated by 11,000 BC.

 

There was no population replacement or mass settlement of foreign peoples during Achaemenid, or Ptolemaic Egypt. Certainly the rulers were foreigners, but the majority of common people were not. Movement from Persia and Greece during that time certainly increased, but the Egyptians were never swamped with foreigners, or displaced by them. The latter is an Afrocentric invention because the skeletal data e.g. "E series" shows ancient Lower Egyptians had closer biological affinity to the Levant/Aegean than Nubia or more southern African populations.

Another Afrocentric delusion, is that somehow the Egyptian population became a lot lighter skinned through mass admixture with Eurasians. No Egyptologist takes this claim seriously:

"I have encountered arguments that the ancient Egyptians were much 'blacker' than their modern counterparts, owing to the influx of Arabs at the time of the conquest, Caucasian slaves under the Mamlukes, or Turks and French soldiers during the Ottoman period. However, given the size of the Egyptian population against these comparatively minor waves of northern immigrants, as well as the fact that there was continuous immigration and occasional forced deportation of both northern and southern populations into Egypt throughout the pharaonic period, I doubt that the modern population is significantly darker or lighter, or more or less 'African' than their ancient counterparts."
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/afrocent_roth.html

For Vekimekim, "Black" = Negroid/West Sub-Saharan African. Look at the dendogram you posted. West Sub-Saharan Africans are the furthest away in terms of morphometric space to the ancient Egyptians. On this point, Vekimekim is correct - where he's wrong is his outdated Caucasoid nonsense where he considers North Africa to cluster with West Eurasians. Read above, and he thinks Nubians are Caucasoid, or heavily Caucasoid-admixed.

 

You gotta love how he will quote people like Roth (and earlier Howe) who don't necessarily know jack about physical anthropology. Meanwhile, he's lying about how representative the "E" series is of ancient Egyptians in general:

 

You say that it is an Afrocentric delusion that immigrants could have impacted the population of Egypt and that no Egyptologist takes the claim seriously. Then you post the opinion of one Egyptologist on the matter.

I'll refer to Keita's comments in the essay I posted about foreign immigration and the fact that as little as 1% influx in to a country over centuries can have a massive impact on the country over time.

"The information from the living Egyptian population may not be as useful because historical records indicate substantial immigration into Egypt over the last several millennia, and it seems to have been far greater from the Near East and Europe than from areas far south of Egypt. "Substantial immigration" can actually mean a relatively small number of people in terms of population genetics theory. It has been determined that an average migration rate of one percent per generation into a region could result in a great change of the original gene frequencies in only several thousand years. (This assumes that all migrants marry natives and that all native-migrant offspring remain in the region.) It is obvious then that an ethnic group or nationality can change in average gene frequencies or physiognomy by intermarriage, unless social rules exclude the products of "mixed" unions from membership in the receiving group. More abstractly this means that geographically defined populations can undergo significant genetic change with a small percentage of steady assimilation of "foreign" genes. This is true even if natural selection does not favor the genes (and does not eliminate them)."

Source: The Geographical Origins and Population Relationships of Early Ancient Egyptians by Shomarka Keita and A.J. Boyce

So we have a scientific position based on population genetic theory postulating a major influence of foreigners in Egypt. Also contrary to Roth's contentions about the population size making it unlikely for foreigners to have an impact in Egypt we know from the historical record that the Egyptian population was much smaller in ancient times. According to the CIA World Factbook the modern Egyptian population in 2015 was about 88,487,396. According to historical records the Pharaonic Egyptian population was only about 8 million.

"The actual size of the population also poses some questions. Whatever estimate may be given for the Late Pharaonic Period, there can be no doubt that there was considerable increase under the Ptolemies, and the population probably reached its maximum in the early Roman period. Josephus, writing in about AD 75, gives a figure of 7.5 million, excluding perhaps half a million resident of Alexandria, alleged to be based on the evidence of tax records, but some modern scholars consider this impossibly large. Any trust which may be placed in it depends first, upon our assessment of whether a dramatic increase from, say, 3 million to 7.5 million is in itself plausible and second, upon the capacity of the land to support a population of this size. The increase from a Late Pharaonic populations estimated at 3 million to one of 7.5 million would in fact take only about fifty years at an average annual increase of 20/1000 or 0.2 percent, completely discounting any effects of immigration. As a useful analogy, an increase of this order can be documented for the years 1821-46, under the influence of population and economic improvements in the country brought by Mohammad Ali and although the rate of increase slowed thereafter, the census figures for 1882 record a population of 6.8 million.

An estimate of the capacity of the land, published in 1836, reckoned that if all the land capable of cultivation were sown it could have supported an absolute maximum of 8 million. Could Egypt have approached this level of productivity in ancient times? The simple answer is that we cannot be sure. But an oversimplified calculation in equivalence of wheat productivity over 9 million arourae of land and calorie requirements for 1.5 million families suggests that each aroura would need to return approximately the equivalent of a ten-fold yield in wheat to support such a population after taxed were paid. Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to be certain what average yields were, although there is no doubt that by ancient standards there were very high indeed. Ammianus Marcellinus claimed that under an ideal inundation the very best land would return a seventy-fold yield, but the average must be many times lower than this. An average ten-fold yield is by no means impossible and may, indeed, be on the low side. Egypt was certainly the most populous country in the Hellenistic and Roman world and could well have supported a total population of the order of 8 million."

Source: Egypt After the Pharaohs: 332 BC-AD 642 : from Alexander to the Arab Conquest by Alan K. Bowman

Additionally while the immigration theory and Black Egyptian hypothesis was part of the thesis of Cheikh Anta Diop, detailed in his book The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, modern Afrocentrists did not invent these claims. You can go as far back as the writings of Count Constantin De Volney for statements suggesting that not only were the Ancient Egyptians Black but foreigners contributed to the dilution of their bloodline producing the complexion of the Copts.

I've been over this with him. Ancient Nubians did not have Caucasoid admixture. The idea of Wandering Caucasoids entering Africa and bringing civilization with them is a racist myth popularized by Charles Seligman and others. Seligman came up with the Hamitic Hypothesis postulating that there was a True Negro race in Africa and that admixed populations represented miscegenation between sedentary Negroids and civilization building Caucasoids. The Ancient Egyptians themselves were thought to be members of the Hamitic race. These ancient Hamites supposedly built Egyptian civilization (and apparently Nubian civilization as well) and enslaved the native Negroes. Groups such as the Somali and Ethiopians were thought to be Caucasoid-Negroid hybrids while the true Negro had much broader features than his narrow nosed and faced Hamitic counterparts. These ideas have been debunked by modern scientists based on evolutionary principles and genetic data.



An earlier generation of anthropologists tried to explain face form in the Horn of Africa as the result of admixture from hypothetical “wandering Caucasoids,” (Adams, 1967, 1979; MacGaffey, 1966; Seligman, 1913, 1915, 19341, but that explanation founders on the paradox of why that supposedly potent “Caucasoid” people contributed a dominant quantity of genes for nose and face form but none for
skin color or limb proportions. It makes far better sense to regard the adaptively significant features seen in the Horn of Africa as solely an in situ response on the part of separate adaptive traits to the selective forces present in the hot dry tropics of eastern Africa. From the observation that 12,000 years was not a long enough period of time to produce any noticeable variation in pigment by latitude
in the New World and that 50,000 years has been barely long enough to produce the beginnings of a gradation in Australia (Brace, 1993a1, one would have to argue that the inhabitants of the Upper Nile and the East Horn of Africa have been equatorial for many tens of thousands of years.

Source: Clines and Clusters Versus “Race:” A Test in Ancient Egypt and the Case of a Death on the Nile Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 36:1-31 (1993)

 

Take a look at Hanihara (2003) in my first post for non-metrics; #59 is pre-dynastic Naqada, #60 is the "E series". The distance between Naqada and the "E series" is only small, so you are talking nonsense:



Concerning the metrics from Zakrewski's (2004, 2007) studies, note how we're told 55 measurements were used, but whoever put together that box on windows-paint tool (probably Zaharan who is well known to distort data for his Afrocentric agenda) only shows a plot using 4 craniometric variables. The reason why the full data isn't shown - is because it probably shows the "E series" a lot closer to the other Egyptian skeletal samples.

 

Also I think Afrocentrists further contradict themselves. Isn't there limb-metric data showing Greek and Roman era Egypt, showed no significant changes to earlier dynasties?

 

@ EgalitarianJay

"The ancient Egyptians were neither 'black' nor 'white'; they were Egyptians, a population of largely indigenous origins and a high degree of continuity across time — including, it seems probable, continuity up to the present." - Howe, Stephen. (1998. Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. London: Verso. p. 132

"In spite of all this, however, the genetic continuity in situ maintained a predominately Egyptian configuration in those trivial biological features that have no differential survival value. Like China, which has managed to absorb its various Manchu and Mongol conquerors and yet remain recognizably Chinese since the Neolithic (Brace and Tracer, 1992; Li et al., 1991), Egypt, also from the Neolithic on, absorbed its various Assyrian, Persian, and Greek rulers with barely detectable effects on its basically Egyptian identity (Berry et al., 1967)." (Brace et al. 1993)​

Note also the dendogram from Kemp (2006) has early dynastic Egyptians closest to Egyptians from the 3rd century CE to the 20th century. If there wasn't a high degree of genetic continuity between these time periods, this wouldn't be possible.

 

Egyptians were white, get over it anti white racists.