the 2020s · Africandecade
One late cemetery cannot tell you who founded Egypt
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A recent genetics paper concluded that the ancient Egyptians were of Levantine origin. The DNA behind it came from a single locality in northern Egypt, dating to more than two thousand years after Egyptian civilisation was founded, in a district that had been absorbing arrivals from the Levant for over a millennium by that point. Some came as artisans and makers of valued goods whom Egyptian rulers invited in and settled. The Hyksos invaded out of the Levant in the seventeenth century BCE and governed much of the north for more than a hundred years, adding the same ancestry to that same corner of the country. Christopher Ehret answers the paper with a comparison. Take DNA from a South Boston graveyard filled in the 1890s and the sample will report that Americans are of Irish descent, and that the men who founded the United States a century before that were Irish too. The method fails identically in both cases. A late and heavily settled edge of a country is made to speak for a founding population it never held.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.