HISTORY LESSON

Ancient Egypt: It is Only in Africa, but shares no burial or language connections with Africa

⸻

Tom made a lot of the typical mistakes individuals with ill-informed opinions about Egyptian history make:

■ Hasn’t done basic research to identify the roots of Predynastic and Old Kingdom Egyptian, which was a Black African language—not a European or Asian language.

■ Hasn’t done basic analysis of archaeological findings to trace the origins of the white crown or the shendyt kilt to Nubia, the astronomical alignments of Giza to Nabta Playa, or the hieroglyphic symbols to Qurta Rock Art.

■ Mistakes language families for racial identities, wrongly assuming that because Egyptian is Afroasiatic (like Semitic), it must be non-African—ignoring the fact that Afroasiatic is an African-rooted family that stretches deep into the Horn and Sahel.

■ Confuses geographic overlap with genetic origin, citing vague “Caucasoid” DNA (a debunked racial category) while ignoring core African Y-DNA haplogroups like E-M78, E-M2 (particularly E-V5001, E-V5280, and E-V4990), A3-M13, and R-V88 found in ancient Upper Egyptians and Saharans during 12.30 kya to 4.49 kya by D’Atanasio et al 2018. Three branches of E-M78 in particular have their roots in the Green Sahara: 12.30 kya for E-V264, 11.01 kya for E-V22 and 10.01 kya for E-V12.

■ Projects cultural influence backward in time, claiming Nubians “copied” Egypt, despite Ta-Seti, Nabta Playa, Gobero, and Qustul tombs predating Dynastic Egypt—when the flow of influence clearly went south-to-north.

■ Assumes absurd counterfactuals like Egyptians needing to have Zulu or Swahili names to be African—as if modern languages retroactively define ancient identity.

■ Turns melanin into a joke, mocking African skin tone relevance while ignoring that early Egyptian art consistently portrayed people with treasure trove of 45 to 50 reddish-brown hues—and that pigmentation was biologically adaptive to the African environment, and the UVB exposure levels of a population that developed locally within Egypt and Northeast, during 5,000-10,000 years ago. 

⸻

Tom’s comments are what happen when you try to remove Africa from Egypt but forget a Map Exists!

He said: “Egyptians were born in Africa. That’s about the only correct thing in that whole post.”

You know a rebuttal is going to be brilliant when it starts by conceding that Egypt is, in fact, in Africa—like that’s some minor geographical footnote and not the entire point. That’s like saying, “Mozart was born in Europe, but let’s not get carried away and start calling him European.”

🌍 Let’s start with the continent you tried to ghost.

Egypt is geographically African. But not just that—it is ecologically, genetically, linguistically, and culturally African too, especially in its foundational phases. North Africa is not a suburb of Europe or an extension of Mesopotamia. No matter how hard the pseudo-anthropological GPS is shaken, it won’t redraw the borders. Egypt formed in an African desert, by an African river, from populations that came primarily from the South and Sahara, not Europe or Arabia.

■ Now, the DNA gymnastics.

“They share their DNA with Caucasoids in the Middle East and even Europe.” This part is always rich. First, Caucasoid is a 19th-century racial fantasy, not a scientific classification. It’s the zoological version of astrology—popular, pseudoscientific, and utterly useless for explaining ancient populations.

Secondly, even the most misused study—Schuenemann et al. 2017—was conducted on late-period mummies from Northern Egypt, during eras of foreign occupation. And guess what? Even that study was criticized for excluding Southern Egyptians, which other research (e.g., D’Atanasio 2018, Hollfelder 2021) has shown to carry ancient lineages like E-M2, A3-M13, and R-V88, all rooted deep in Black Africa.

And when whole-genome analyses did look further south (see Keita 2022; Sirak 2021), they found significantly more sub-Saharan autosomal components—not less.

So, if Egyptians “share DNA” with Middle Easterners, it’s because Africa shared its people with the rest of the world long before any Semitic languages were even whispered.

■ Next: Linguistic Jenga.

“They wrote a language closely related to Semitic languages.” Correct—but only if you understand what closely means in a 12,000-year language family. Ancient Egyptian is Afroasiatic, but so is Hausa in Nigeria. So is Omotic in Ethiopia. So is Berber in Mali. Afroasiatic is an African language family, first reconstructed by scholars like Joseph Greenberg and later refined by people like Christopher Ehret—not a suitcase Semitic languages brought from the Levant.

Semitic is one branch, not the trunk. The core vocabulary and grammatical structures of Egyptian—such as its pronouns, roots for body parts, numerals, and kinship terms—line up with African patterns found far to the south, including Cushitic and Chadic languages.

Nobody was speaking Swahili in 3000 BCE. But that’s like saying Newton couldn’t be British because he didn’t speak modern Cockney slang. Languages evolve; regions don’t swap hemispheres.

And by the way, if Zulu or Swahili had appeared on the Nile in 3100 BCE, your argument would likely be: “That’s obviously fake. Those are sub-Saharan languages.” So… circular logic is doing overtime here.

■ And now: burial traditions.

You said Egyptian burial customs were “partially unique” and “partially common with Middle Eastern and European traditions.” Fascinating. Which European customs are you referring to? Are you thinking of the ritualistic mummification, soul boats, Saharan tumuli, or perhaps the painted cowhide burials of the pre-Dynastic Badarian people? Because none of those are European.

What actually is documented are Southern African burial connections: similarities between early Egyptian and Nubian C-group burials (before Nubia “copied” anything), and strong links to Saharan pastoralist funerary styles going back to 7000 BCE.

Also, let’s address this awkward attempt at slandering Nubians for “copying Egypt 1000 years later.” The Ta-Seti kingdom—documented as far back as 3800 BCE—preceded Dynastic Egypt. Its rulers were buried in tumulus graves before Narmer united the Nile Valley. So if there was copying, Egypt was not the original, but the remix.

Tom also didn’t know the oldest known mummy is from Southern Libya—not Egypt. Over 1,000 years older than Egypt’s earliest mummies (Fogg et al., 2000). Mummification started deep in Africa. Oops!

You can’t accuse someone of plagiarism when they handed you the pen.

■ Cultural symmetries? Let’s talk art and symbolism.

Egyptian statuary, skin tones, braided wigs, musical instruments, cattle culture, and divine kingship all scream Nile-to-Sahel continuum. Not Danube-to-Delta. The visual canon—from the Gebelein predynastic mummies to the black granite seated statues of Mentuhotep II—show brown and reddish-brown men with clearly African phenotypes, not “olive-skinned Caucasoids.” If your only answer is “skin tone isn’t race,” then congratulations—you’ve finally made a valid point. But unfortunately, you were the one who brought up skin tone.

Also: olive skin is a modern, post-agricultural Eurasian trait with very recent evolutionary origins (see Norton et al. 2007). It’s not how we identify ancient peoples. The earliest Egyptians, like the early Saharan herders, were likely dark-skinned Africans adapted to equatorial sun and life in open plains—just like their genetic cousins across the Sahel and the Green Sahara.

■ So what was Egypt, really?

Egypt was a cultural crescendo of indigenous African innovation—fueled by Nubian, Saharan, and Nile Valley contributions. Its religion tracked the stars using models similar to Sub-Saharan cosmologies. Its economy was based on domesticated African grains and cattle. Its mythology—full of river gods, animal-headed deities, and balance-based cosmology—has more in common with the Dogon than with the Greeks.

So if you’re looking for Middle Eastern roots, you’re welcome to explore influence—but not origin. Just like Rome was influenced by Greece without being Greek, and the United States was influenced by Britain without being English, Egypt was influenced by neighbors but made in Africa, by Africans.

■ Let’s try a thought experiment.

If a civilization arises:

 ● on African soil,

 ● from an African population,

 ● using an African-rooted language,

 ● with African burial, cattle, and agricultural systems,

 ● and was acknowledged by ancient writers (Herodotus, Diodorus) as African…

…then what mental gymnastics are required to say “they were basically just tanned Caucasoids”?

This isn’t scholarship. This is identity laundering with a thesaurus.

■ Finally, let’s tackle the closing jab:

“And if you think only Africans can have brown/beige/olive skin, you’re even more delusional than I thought.”

But nobody said that. Africans aren’t claiming the patent to melanin. We know already the word Sub-Sahara is not a skin colour. The issue is not who can be brown, but who made Egypt. The ancestral DNA, the linguistic lineages, the material culture, and the spiritual cosmologies all triangulate one answer: Black Africans. Not tourists. Not visitors. Not olive-skinned step-cousins. And not a roving band of Euro-Asiatic “Caucasoids” with tomb envy.

Egypt belongs in African history the way Beethoven belongs in European music: foundational, not borrowed.

⸻

TL;DR: You tried to argue that Egyptians weren’t really African—even though they were born in Africa, spoke an African-rooted language, practiced African customs, and shared ancestry with African populations. All while using 19th-century racial terms and 21st-century internet emojis.

The only part that wasn’t African was the argument itself.

#Africa #World #History