So there has been a
report in the journal Nature on the genetic makeup of some mummified remains in a part of Egypt. Not a few commentators have been using this report to assert that Egyptians were white, some to the extent of “nordic”. However; those of us familiar with Egypt wouldn’t be surprised by the findings in Nature. Let’s discuss. First we have this in the abstract which is important:
in the first millennium BCE Egypt endured foreign domination leading to growing numbers of foreigners living within its borders possibly contributing genetically to the local population. Here we present 90 mitochondrial genomes as well as genome-wide data sets from three individuals obtained from Egyptian mummies.
This is well known, even among the pro-black “hotep” crowd. No one has ever claimed that Egypt was 100% black with absolutely no one else living there. Indeed Egypt was the place to be during it’s time so we
expect to find all kinds of people there.
The samples recovered from Middle Egypt span around 1,300 years of ancient Egyptian history from the New Kingdom to the Roman Period.
It is important to note here that Egypts ages are broken up into Old Kingdom, Middle kingdom, New Kingdom and then Roman period. The remains discussed in the piece are from the last period of Egypts history. To put this into context, imagine that in the year 6000 someone dug up remains of the US and found the population of 1990s Harlem, NYC and asserted from those findings that NY and indeed the entire United States were typically African.
Right.
Secondly, the geographic location puts these individuals in Middle Egypt and closer to the delta region rather than upper Egypt. This is important since one would expect that Egyptians in upper Egypt would/could be more like the persons in Nubia and Ethiopia rather than those closest to the sea and Arabia (which was a part of ancient Egypt at points in it’s history). Hence I find the following statement suspect:
Our analyses reveal that ancient Egyptians shared more ancestry with Near Easterners than present-day Egyptians, who received additional sub-Saharan admixture in more recent times.
Rather it should say “ancient Egyptians in the middle region during the new kingdom...” because that is what they studied.
First a quick primer on Egypt. Egypts Old Kingdom is the age of the Pyramids (2613-2180) BCE.
Secondly Upper Egypt
is quite close to Nubia and is in what we now call Sudan (The black land). I’m quite certain that no one considers the Sudanese to be European by any stretch of the imagination. One cannot discuss the genetic make up of “ancient Egyptians” and not discuss upper Egypt.
We can see from the article that the mummies are located far away from upper Egypt (Luxor for reference in Upper Egypt)
So we can argue that not only is this set of mummies not representative geographically, but also chronologically.
I want to stress here that I am not discussing or critiquing specific DNA results or techniques. I am wholly unqualified to do so. This is an argument about representation. I will say however, that the “discovery” that Yorubas are not represented in the gene pool of these mummies puts the last nail in the coffin of those persons who like to claim that West Africans are somehow the descended of some “Asiatic black man”. Enough of that nonsense. Carrying on:
The archaeological site Abusir el-Meleq was inhabited from at least 3250BCE until about 700CE and was of great religious significance because of its active cult to Osiris, the god of the dead, which made it an attractive burial site for centuries2.
This means that the area was inhabited by persons prior to the unification of the two lands under Menes. This also means that the mummies under study were no earlier than 1550 BCE. A nearly 2000 years after the unified Egypt came into existence. Again, I would ask whether we would see the current population of America and state with any sanity that because we see all these different races of people here now, that it must have been that way in 1776. Indeed the authors themselves state as much:
However, we note that all our genetic data were obtained from a single site in Middle Egypt and may not be representative for all of ancient Egypt. It is possible that populations in the south of Egypt were more closely related to those of Nubia and had a higher sub-Saharan genetic component, in which case the argument for an influx of sub-Saharan ancestries after the Roman Period might only be partially valid and have to be nuanced. Throughout Pharaonic history there was intense interaction between Egypt and Nubia, ranging from trade to conquest and colonialism, and there is compelling evidence for ethnic complexity within households with Egyptian men marrying Nubian women and vice versa51,52,53. Clearly, more genetic studies on ancient human remains from southern Egypt and Sudan are needed before apodictic statements can be made. [my underlines]
Many reviewers apparently missed this point. Also:
Our genetic time transect suggests genetic continuity between the Pre-Ptolemaic, Ptolemaic and Roman populations of Abusir el-Meleq, indicating that foreign rule impacted the town’s population only to a very limited degree at the genetic level. It is possible that the genetic impact of Greek and Roman immigration was more pronounced in the north-western Delta and the Fayum, where most Greek and Roman settlement concentrated43,55
Which is what I have been saying from the beginning.
I believe what we have here is twofold:
1) The writers themselves used language that implied that Egyptians were not “Africans”. Indeed by the accompanying charts their claim appears to be that they are using the term “sub-Saharan African” to mean “West and South African” genotypes. Which none of us should be expecting.
2) Writers, particularly those with rightward affinities and perhaps white identitarian types, didn’t read the actual Nature article or did not understand what they were reading and thought the study was representative of the entirety of ancient Egypt.
I’m also going to suppose that not a few black outlets will
not report on this article because they think it says what it doesn’t. That or there will be an attempt to dismiss the article as a whitewash. Such head burying will help nobody.
