HISTORY LESSON

Egypt’s conquest of the Levant under the New Kingdom, along with earlier prehistoric expansions, provides a clear explanation for the genetic similarities observed between ancient Egyptians and some Semitic-speaking populations. These overlaps do not imply that Egypt was founded by Levantines — rather, they reflect the long and dynamic history of outward Egyptian influence, imperial governance, and bidirectional population movement over millennia.

A direct quote from Pagani et al 2015 explains why calling affinity with the modern Levantine populations evidence they founded Egypt is naive: “The predominantly African origin of all modern human populations is well established, but the route taken out of Africa is still unclear…Two alternative routes, via Egypt and Sinai or across the Bab el Mandeb strait into Arabia, have traditionally been proposed…We generated 225 whole-genome sequences…If the northern route was the predominant path followed by the ancestors of the OOA populations, and modern African populations are representative of those at the time of the exit, Egyptians should be genetically more similar to modern non-Africans. Conversely, if the southern route was the main way out of Africa, Ethiopians should be closest to the OOA populations…The haplotype and MSMC analyses thus suggest a predominant northern route out of Africa via Egypt.”

During episodes of Sahara desertification (beginning around 6000 BCE), populations from the interior of Africa migrated into the Nile Valley, contributing significantly to Egypt’s early demographic and cultural foundations. This migratory influx, documented archaeologically in the form of early Neolithic settlements and Saharan cultural motifs in predynastic Upper Egypt, predates any meaningful external contact with the Levant.

Over thousands of years, migrations did occur both into and out of Egypt — particularly during periods of climatic stress, economic expansion, or military conquest. Genetic studies reflect this. For example, lineages like E-M35 (a branch of E1b1b), while found in the Levant, also have African origins and a deep-time presence in Northeast Africa, especially in Egypt, Sudan, and the Horn. Scholars such as D’Atanasio et al. (2018) have demonstrated that haplogroups like E-M78, E-V38, and A3-M13 — all common in the Nile Valley — emerged within Africa and spread both northward and eastward due to African expansions, not the reverse.

Egypt’s New Kingdom military dominance (c. 1550–1070 BCE) established permanent administrative, military, and trade outposts across the Levant. Numerous stelae, statues, and letters attest to Egyptian governors, intermarriages, tribute exchanges, and the installation of Egyptian religious symbols in cities like Byblos and Megiddo. The Amarna Letters (14th century BCE) alone are a record of Egypt’s tight grip on the political networks of Canaan. These long-term political and familial entanglements naturally led to gene flow from Egypt into the Levant, further complicating modern assumptions about directionality in ancient DNA.

What’s crucial is that shared genetic markers do not erase Egypt’s African identity. The presence of certain lineages in both Egypt and the Levant is better understood as Egyptian imperial legacy than evidence of a Levantine origin. The foundational populations of ancient Egypt — especially from the pre-dynastic and early dynastic periods — carried distinctly African genetic signatures such as E-M2, A3-M13, E-M78, and R-V88, as confirmed by D’Atanasio (2018), Hassan (2009), and Hollfelder (2017). These markers trace back to deep-time African population structures long predating the emergence of Semitic cultures.

Furthermore, none of the archaeological, genetic, or linguistic data support the idea that a non-African population migrated into the Nile Valley and constructed Egyptian civilization from scratch. On the contrary, Egyptian religious cosmology, kingship ideology, iconography, spiritual vocabulary, and even body plan — including tropical limb proportions — all align far more closely with other Nile Valley and inner African populations than with the Levant or Mesopotamia.

Egypt’s interactions with the Levant were part of its imperial export, not its origin story. Ancient Egyptians may have left genetic, cultural, and architectural footprints outside Africa, but the reverse is not supported by the data. No Levantine archaeological culture, language family, or biological population has ever been shown to predate, replace, or supplant the indigenous African foundations of dynastic Egypt.

In sum, genetic overlaps between Egyptians and Semitic peoples are the result of millennia of African-led expansions, military conquests, trade networks, and bidirectional flow — not evidence of Egyptian origin in the Levant. Egypt was built by Africans, on African soil, drawing on African spiritual, environmental, and genetic lineages. Nothing in modern genetics changes that fact — it only adds nuance to how far Egyptian civilization reached.

#Africa #BlackHistory #World