Istwa Nou

The country in which Egyptian civilisation was assembled runs from a point several hundred kilometres south of the meeting of the White Nile and the Blue Nile north to El Badari in Middle Egypt, about fifteen hundred kilometres of river. That stretch is the cultural heartland. The Delta and the coastal contacts with the Levant belong to later chapters, and a single late northern site has been carrying an argument about origins that it cannot support. Skeletal evidence from the founding cemeteries of the fourth millennium BCE, El Badari and Naqada above all, agrees with what the geography already indicates. The people who built the first Egyptian communities came from the south and from the African interior. Upper Egypt and Nubia, the regions the European tradition files as peripheral, are where the civilisation was made. Selective genetic sampling from the wrong place and the wrong century does not change the address.

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.