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Wait until the paper with effective Old Kingdom royalty comes out.
What did ancient egyptians look like? Especially, how did the Egyptians of the Middle Kingdom differ from Cyrus' Persians, or Alexander's Greeks, or Caesar's Romans?
I absolutely love the maps you have up at "Distribution maps of autosomal admixtures in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa," and while I can't link to them, they suggest that modern people in those areas are all extremely similar, except that the Egyptians lack any West European Hunter-Gatherer ancestry. But modern and ancient peoples are, of course, not the same. I understand that modern Copts are a reasonable stand-in for the descendants of old Egyptians, and looking at pictures of them, they seem a heterogeneous bunch (probably because I'm getting many non-Coptic people in my searches).
Were the ancient Egyptians most physically similar to Persians?
Yes, I think this closely reflects the way my own thinking on the subject has changed over the years.I think Ancient Egyptians were a Caucasoid type of people with olive skin, but with a darker tone because of the sun. I mean the majority of them, since people have always been mixed. I tend to think that back then people were a lot more racist than we are today, so if they were seen as different coexistence with white races like Romans, Greeks would have been difficult. But there was always trade exchange between Europeans and Egyptians. Today Egyptians show an obvious mix with sub-Saharan people.
Yes, I think this closely reflects the way my own thinking on the subject has changed over the years.
I never saw Egyptians as "black," but I did think of them as their own sort of "brown," and likely somewhere in between classical Africans and Europeans. However, this doesn't accord with genetic findings. Although there are numerous studies (many of which have been mentioned earlier in the thread) one of my favorite reports was something I found on this very website, and is a major reason why I post here:
Italians, Greeks, Arabs, and (look closely at the fan-shaped area at the southeastern end of the Mediterranean - that's the Nile Delta) Modern Egyptians derive between 80 and 90% of their ancestry from these Early European Farmers. Although the Copts may have a slightly different proportion, and Ancient Egyptians a different proportion still, what we are looking at is a map tying all of these peoples to common genetic origin.
In other words, Egyptians, Italians, Greeks, and Arabs were never really very different genetically. Cavalli-Sforza provides F_ST (x 10,000) values for numerous populations, with high values in the 4000's between Mbuti Pygmies and groups like Aboriginal Australians; the distances between Near-Eastern (Egyptian etc.) peoples is:
Greek: 129
Iranian: 158
Italian: 208
English: 236
Basque: 246
For comparison, here are some more pairs:
Greek x English: 204
Greek x Italian: 77
Greek x Iranian: 70
Italian x English: 51
Italian x Iranian: 133
Iranian x English: 197
Usually, a firm border is drawn across the Mediterranean when ethnic groups are classified. Yet what all of this suggests is that the "European" ethnic group is probably imperfectly described. However powerfully these groups may have diverged culturally, linguistically, and even genetically over the last two millennia, it makes more sense to speak of
1. A Northern European group, exemplified by the Finns and Balts who derive less than 30% of their ancestry from the Early European Farmers, gradually blending into
2. A broad Mediterranean group, exemplified by the Sicilians who derive over 90% of their ancestry from this group. Egyptians then would be on the southern edge of this Mediterranean group, genetically olive-skinned, but as Tutkan Arnaut says, "with a darker tone because of the sun."
What fascinates me especially about this perspective is the way in which it highlights the incredible achievements of this broad "Mediterranean" people - agriculture on the fertile crescent, all the major monotheisms, the earliest literature, all the philosophical, mathematical, and technical inventions of the ancient Occidental world. Even the birth of modern experimental science is ultimately Mediterranean, since almost all of the earliest experimentalists, including
lived, of all places, in Egypt.
- Eratosthenes (2nd century BC, possibly early to be called a scientist)
- Ptolemy (1st century AD)
- John Philoponus (6th century AD) and
- Hasan Ibn al-Haytham (10th century AD)
Can you tell us anything about those papers right now? You've mentioned them before, but this is the first I'm hearing of it.We'll know enough about Egyptian population history within this year to next. What with the upcoming Egyptian paper, the paper with Mesolithic Tunisian samples, research on Pastoral Neolithic, apparently research on Saudi Arabia.
Living in the modern world it can be hard to see that - I had no awareness of it until recently.I agree! Mediterranean people started everything.
Of course (though I might not call the Mesopotamians "Arabs"). The Nile made things incredibly easy because it would flood regularly, rejuvenating the soil. The situation with the Tigris & Euphratis rivers was similar; those areas were dry and free of clouds, yet also marshy, meaning that there was a great abundance of water and sun to grow plants.Mostly at the earliest times were Egyptians and Arabs. Arabs at about 3000 BC had sea going boats. Meantime Chinese that had a bigger civilization had flat bottom boats up to the first century a.d, that were not sea worth. I think Nile Delta was very important because was a fertile land that could support a lot of people. That played a major role in their civilization.
Can you tell us anything about those papers right now? You've mentioned them before, but this is the first I'm hearing of it.
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