Apparently this is, like, a whole controversy?
I don't think the ancient world, especially very cosmopolitan places like Egypt, were a single people that can be traced as a single lineage all the time. Ancient Egypt was around for thousands of years and comprised of various people that would flow in and out.
Also tracing lineage back to literally 4500 years ago is tricky enough, because eventually everyone's related. I'm a typical white American and I wouldn't be surprised if 4500 years ago I had ancestors from Libya or the Levant or even ancient Egypt.
It's only controversial because people think all of history happened like the 19th and 20th.
Well the Americans killed all the Indians so obviously the Arabs did the same to North Africa.
It's only a "controversy" according to Hoteps and white supremacists, who each want to claim they are the true pharoahs.
That's why I asked here, I was pretty sure there was some bullshit involved
They can trace their lineage back to ancient Egyptians, genetics wise over 85% the same according to most scientific research. Arab influence is much more of a cultural thing than ethnicity.
Only people claiming otherwise would be hoteps and "Egypt is Arab not African" weirdos.
There are definitely some white supremacists who think the Ancient Egyptians were essentially white Greeks, too.
Yeah, that was just the royalty like Cleopatra. Those white supremacists are a real bunch of clowns
Yes. People living there today had ancestors living there 5000 years ago.
I mean people move around a lot in 7000 years.
DNA from mummies is apparently pretty unreliable and we don’t even know for sure if the ancient Egyptian ruling class was ethnically representative of their subjects, so there isn’t a lot of physical evidence which makes speculation easy.
Unsurprisingly lots of weirdos want to claim the “first” great monument building civilisation as their ancestors.
Edit: Revisiting the and I realized I wasn't clear, what evidence does exist heavily supports modern Egyptians being descended from ancient Egyptians with some influence from other groups in that area. There's no significant evidence to the contrary, but it's almost impossible to prove given the massive time difference and the interconnectedness of the region.
also the Ptolomies weren't the ones that built the famous pyramids
I don't think anybody knows for sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_race_controversy
Bear in mind that when you talk about "Ancient Egyptians", you're talking about over 3000 years of history over an entire imperial region: they're not necessarily monoethnic.
Well “ancient Egypt” was Greek/Persian/Roman for like a thousand years or whatever so probably not many actual Middle Kingdom folks still around
This is mostly true of the ruling class, of whom we have the most/only records because, well, antiquity.
My very unfounded speculation is that It's likely that the more trade-heavy parts of the kingdom had a mostly mediterranean/levantine genetic makeup, and the more up the Nile you go, the more the people would be like the Nubians or so on.
Well “ancient Egypt” was Greek/Persian/Roman for like a thousand years
Correct
or whatever so probably not many actual Middle Kingdom folks still around
This really depends what you mean. If you mean culturally, linguistically and religiously that is true, but you don't need to reference Greeks, Romans, Persians etc. to know that the culture/language/religion of the Middle Kingdom doesn't exist today.
However, the claim that people who lived in the Middle Kingdom don't have descendants today is wrong. Most Egyptians today had ancestors living in Egypt during the Middle Kingdom (I'm sure many have ancestors from other places too). None of the groups who dominated Egypt historically tried to kill everyone or to force everyone in the region to move out. Without evidence of large scale ethnic cleansing occuring, trying to claim modern Egyptians aren't descended from ancient Egyptians doesn't make a lot of sense.
People tended not to move around very much before cars. Like, yeah any particular person could end up anywhere, there were trade networks. However on the level of populations people didn't move about much. So it would be weird to see that the people had changed en mass. I can see rascist people wanting to divorce Egypt from "Africa" so that'd be a drive to look for excuses. Also, ancient Egypt was old when Rome was founded, so we do need to define what period we are talking about a little better.
That's what I mean we need to be carful with terms. Cause the various types of pre German people moved around pre-germany. Pick a random subsistance farmer off the map and their people have likely been there through several different waves of pre-German scootin about.
People tended not to move around very much before cars.
Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain
The Migration Age in general (German tribes migrating into Roman lands en masse)
The deportation of the Ionian Greeks into central Asia
The Han settling of Manchuria at the behest of the Qing emperor
Mongol invasions
Fuck it, the migration of Homo Sapiens out of Africa to the whole world
Proto-IndoEuropeans apparently went all the way to the Amur River before settling near the Caspian Sea. And turkic peoples today can be found in the far eastern parts of the Russian Arctic.
I am under the impression that even though those were significant migrations, most the poor people just kinda stayed put under new management and their grandkids would change religion. There are of course exceptions but I thought DNA evidence was in on this one.
most the poor people just kinda stayed put
No, ancient tribal migrations involved the whole tribe, from the royal family to the slaves. Humans used to all be nomadic before the advent of cities after the Neolithic revolution. Even then, tribes and peoples still migrated to greener pastures when the local environment was depleted or they were driven out by other people moving into their area.
The concept of the poor people staying in place while the lord changed is a feudal concept, when serfs were bound to their land and forbidden from leaving. This was not the case in ancient times.
Most historical migrations/invasions in Europe & West Asia did not involve significant replacements of the population. For example, despite the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, your average white British person is still basically a descendant of the ancient Britons. In cases like the Germanic and Arab invasions, the conquered populations were much larger than the invading body, and while in some cases the invading language dominated (like in Britain and North Africa), in many other cases the invaders were effectively absorbed into the native population (like in Gaul/Francia/France).
It was the development of (early) modern settler-colonialism that shifted the paradigm towards extermination of the local populations.
It was the development of (early) modern settler-colonialism that shifted the paradigm towards extermination of the local populations.
This is wrong, otherwise Indians Africans and East Asians wouldn't be around today. The level of white ancestry in these colonized territories is zero (like, not even a rounding error).
We can divide recently colonized territories into two groups:
white settlement:
- North America
- South America
- Siberia
- South Africa
- Oceania
white extraction:
- Africa
- India
- Southeast Asia
- The Middle East
So why didn't whites settle places like India or Myanmar? Because they couldn't, because there were literally too many people around.
The extraction of wealth was the BEGINNING of white settlement: once enough wealth was extracted from India&others, and enough Indians/Burmese/etc had died, then they would have started settling it. But anti-colonialism became too popular by then, and the mayos got kicked out so never happened.
So then the question becomes, why were whites SUCCESSFUL at settling the Americas, Australia, etc.
And the answer to that is just sparse populations, caused by lack of exposure to bronze age tools. This lack of exposure is obviously due to geography.
Metal allows people to make "forever" tools, which makes farming and agriculture turbo-productive, which rockets population numbers.
Ever since the bronze age, populations have become demographically "unconquerable". If you look at the genetics of India, Europe, all of East Asia, Africa, the Middle East, they've all been basically unchanged for 4000 years (longer in East Asia and MENA)
The only places that got changed by mayo-colonialism were unexposed to the Asian bronze age, and still had population densities reminiscent of Hunter gatherers. Native North Americans, MOST South Americans, Australian Natives, Khoisan Hunters of South Africa.
The only major exceptions to this rule are Siberia and the agricultural civilizations of Central-South America. Siberia was just sparse due to climate, and South America while "civilized" and with metal technology, was still at an early stage of it, and would be more analogous to European farmers from 5000 years ago (who also got conquered and highly mixed with by Indoeuropeans)
There's actually one more major exception to this rule, which is Central Asia, where Indoeuropean-Iranian related people were conquered by East Asian Turkic and Mongol conquerors, and were highly mixed with (which is why those areas look fairly "Asian" today)
But this exception follows the same basic rule of having a lower population density.
The higher a population, and the more recent the invasion happens, the less settlement occurs (because it literally can't).
the "new" ancient Egyptians were MENA (like around Cleopatra's and possibly Tut's time)
the "old" ancient Egyptians were probably some kind of Black African. It's just really obvious when you look at the sphinx.
There's also a disturbingly small amount of DNA samples available from Egypt, despite having some of the best preserved DNA of the last 6000 years. DNA DOES degrade fast in hot climates, but Egypt is bone-dry and they have tons of it in underground chambers, which are cooler. There should be no excuse.
The genomic data we have of them being MENA comes from only 3 ancient individuals (I forget which era). To put that into perspective, we have over 100 genomic samples from the Central Asian steppe 5000 years ago. It's very hard to believe that in a bone-dry environment where people entombed mummified corpses in underground cool chambers, and only a few thousand years ago, that there's no ancient DNA left.
TLDR:
- the further back you go, the blacker it looks
- the further back you go, the more mind-boggling the architecture/technology becomes
- Zahi Hawass and co. are almost definitely hiding DNA and archeological evidence (in my opinion)
and no I'm not Black, I'm Indian, but we're very familiar with mayos and their pets whitewashing or "lightwashing" our history as well. Depictions of Rajendra Chola for example, have become literally Turkish looking, despite him being a Tamil king with 1000-year-old cave paintings depicting him as dark brown.
