Are there africans in egypt

Egyptians in Africa were sometimes traders and employers, sometimes conquerors and colonists, sometimes defeated enemies. Physical hindrances to contact must also have affected the potential spread of Egyptian influence. The Sahara at this time had a moister climate and supported a comparatively large and mobile population, which included Negroid and Negro physical types, as did the communities living near modern Khartoum.

Certainly, domesticated animals appear to have spread during this period from Egypt which had derived them from the Near East throughout North Africa, deep into the Sahara and as far south as Khartoum; agriculture was established in Egypt at the same time but spread more slowly. However, there was no comparable spread of Egyptian cultural influence. The typical pottery and artifacts of prehistoric Egypt are not found outside of the Nile valley or south of the Second Cataract, and only along the upper Nile is some influence perceptible.

By contrast, the wares of contemporary Egypt were sometimes painted but rarely incised, while the commonest fabric was plain red polished, often with an added black top. This decorative idea was copied on a small scale in the Khartoum Neolithic and eventually became an important feature of later pottery styles in Lower and Upper Nubia. Literacy, centralized political control, an elaborate religious system, a metal copper, later bronze technology and a developed style in art and monumental architecture were firmly established in Egypt by B.

However, it was just at this time that contact with other parts of Africa became more difficult. The Sahara was arid by B. Even the chief remaining corridor for human movement, the Nile valley, was to a large extent blocked in the south by a vast swamp, the Sudd.

Some scholars therefore doubt that there could have been any significant contact between Egypt and most of Black Africa after B. They suggest that apparent similarities such as the appearance of centralized political structures and divine kingship, which appear in some Black African groups in the first and second millennia A.

Recently however the appearance of iron-working in western Africa has been dated to about B. It can no longer be automatically assumed that the iron-working which appears in central Africa in the early first millennium A.

The controversy will be resolved only by extensive archaeological exploration, which so far has taken place only in the extreme north of the principal contact area, the modern Republic of the Sudan. Upper Nubia, the valley between the Second and Fourth Cataracts, has been less well explored; recent surveys have reached as far as the Third Cataract and a handful of early historical sites have been excavated as far as the Fourth Cataract.

Further south the principal excavated sites are Napatan B. Archaeological coverage is not yet full enough to trace the possible diffusion of Egyptian influence beyond the Sudan in these or earlier times.

However, the accumulation of data over the last sixty years and its continuous reinterpretation have enabled us to study the earliest effects of ancient Egypt on its nearest southern neighbors, who included considerable numbers of Negroid and Negro peoples, and to guess what the effect may have been on more remote Black Africans.

They wanted to know what changes had occurred over time. The youngest was from CE, when the country was ruled from Rome. The ability to acquire genomic data on ancient Egyptians is a dramatic achievement, which opens up new avenues of research.

Researchers in future want to determine exactly when Sub-Saharan African genes seeped into the Egyptian genome and why. Using high-throughput DNA sequencing and cutting-edge authentication techniques, researchers proved they could retrieve reliable DNA from mummies, despite the unforgiving climate and damaging embalming techniques. Philip Perry. Scientists now know on Facebook. Share Were the ancient Egyptians black or white?

Scientists now know on Twitter. Scientists now know on LinkedIn. In this article. For others, it is a point of transit before attempting the dangerous Mediterranean crossing to Europe. In visits to several migrant communities throughout Cairo, at least two dozen sub-Saharan Africans, including four children, told The Associated Press that they have endured racist insults, sexual harassment or other abuses in the past three months. The children said they have had rocks and trash thrown at them as they go to or from school.

There are signs that Egypt is starting to recognize and censure racist crimes. In November, there was a public outcry over a video that went viral showing three Egyptian teenagers bullying a schoolboy from South Sudan. In the aftermath, police detained the teenagers for a day before their families reached a settlement with the family of the South Sudanese boy, John Manuth.

In , a court sentenced to seven years in prison a man who was known to harass refugees and who beat to death a South Sudanese teacher who had worked in a community-run school for refugees in Cairo. Refugees and rights workers say the country still has a long way to go. Reported cases of sexual and gender-based violence against migrants has increased in recent months, according to the IOM.

Women and girls are the most effected, but so are vulnerable men and young boys, said Shirley De Leon, a project development officer at the organization. New data obtained with high-throughput sequencing methods have the potential to overcome the methodological and contamination issues surrounding the PCR method and could help settle the debate surrounding ancient Egyptian DNA preservation 8. However, the first high-throughput sequences obtained from ancient Egyptian mummies 12 were not supported by rigorous authenticity and contamination tests.

Here, we provide the first reliable data set obtained from ancient Egyptians using high-throughput DNA sequencing methods and assessing the authenticity of the retrieved ancient DNA via characteristic nucleotide misincorporation patterns 13 , 14 and statistical contamination tests 15 to ensure the ancient origin of our obtained data.

By directly studying ancient DNA from ancient Egyptians, we can test previous hypotheses drawn from analysing modern Egyptian DNA, such as recent admixture from populations with sub-Saharan 16 and non-African ancestries 17 , attributed to trans-Saharan slave trade and the Islamic expansion, respectively. On a more local scale, we aim to study changes and continuities in the genetic makeup of the ancient inhabitants of the Abusir el-Meleq community Fig.

In particular, we seek to determine if the inhabitants of this settlement were affected at the genetic level by foreign conquest and domination, especially during the Ptolemaic —30BCE and Roman 30BCE—CE Periods.

According to the radiocarbon dates Supplementary Data 1 , see also ref. In most cases, non-macerated mummy heads still have much of their soft tissue preserved.

Some of the remains individuals analysed in our study: , , , , have traces of gold leaf near the mouth and the cheekbone, which is characteristic for mummies from the Ptolemaic Period onwards In most cases the brain was removed and the excerebration route was highly likely transnasal, resulting in visible defects on the cribriform plate for the individuals analysed in our study, see Supplementary Data 1. In summary, the excellent bone preservation and the more or less good soft tissue preservation made a wide-ranging analysis possible Recently, various studies were conducted on these remains, including a study on ancient Egyptian embalming resins, two ancient DNA studies and an anthropological examination of the macerated crania 12 , 18 , 19 , While the possibilities of a demographic reconstruction based on anthropological finds are naturally limited—due to incompleteness of the assemblage, the following anthropological observations were made on the assemblage: For a first assessment, computer tomographic scans of 30 mummies with soft tissue preservation were produced to describe sex Supplementary Data 1 , age at death Supplementary Data 1 and the macroscopic health status; the six macerated mummies were examined directly.

It is notable that most of the individuals are early and late adults, and that subadult individuals are underrepresented Supplementary Data 1. Almost all of the teeth show significant dentine exposure up to a total loss of the crown.

This abrasion pattern is likely due to the food and food preparation itself, in particular for a cereal-rich diet containing a high proportion of coarse sandy particles. These particles act to abrade the dental tissues, allowing bacteria to penetrate the interior of the teeth. As a result, carious lesions or periapical processes appear in the analysed individuals Supplementary Data 1 For the DNA analysis we sampled different tissues bone, soft tissue, tooth , macerated and non-macerated, to test for human DNA preservation.

We extracted DNA from mummified human remains and prepared double-stranded Illumina libraries with dual barcodes 22 , We tested different tissues for DNA preservation and applied strict criteria for authenticity on the retrieved mitochondrial and nuclear DNA to establish authentic ancient Egyptian DNA. First, DNA extracts from several tissues that is, bone, teeth, soft tissue and macerated teeth from individuals were screened for the presence of human mitochondrial DNA mtDNA resulting in a total of 2, to , quality filtered mitochondrial reads per sample, and to 4,fold coverage.

For a comparison of different source material soft tissue, bone and teeth ten individuals Supplementary Table 1 were sampled multiple times. Yields of preserved DNA were comparable in bone and teeth but up to ten times lower in soft tissues Fig. Nucleotide misincorporation patterns characteristic for damaged ancient human DNA allowed us to assess the authenticity of the retrieved DNA 13 , Importantly, mtDNA haplotypes were identical for all samples from the same individuals.

Our results thus suggest that DNA damage in Egyptian mummies correlates with tissue type. The protection of bone and teeth by the surrounding soft tissue or the embalmment of soft tissue may have contributed to the observed differences. Using in solution enrichment for 1. In many samples, nuclear DNA damage was relatively low, indicating modern contamination. We sequenced two libraries per sample: one untreated library to assess DNA damage, and one library treated with enzymatic damage repair 27 , which was used for downstream analysis.

Three out of 40 samples fulfilling these criteria had acceptable nuclear contamination rates: Two samples from the Pre-Ptolemaic Periods New Kingdom to Late Period had 5. As shown below, to rule out any impact of potential contamination on our results, we analysed the three samples separately or replicated results using only the least contaminated sample. To test for genetic differentiation and homogeneity we compared haplogroup composition, calculated F ST -statistics 28 and applied a test for population continuity 29 Supplementary Table 2 , Supplementary Data 3,4 on mitochondrial genome data from the three ancient and two modern-day populations from Egypt and Ethiopia, published by Pagani and colleagues 17 , including modern Egyptian and modern Ethiopian samples Fig.

We observe highly similar haplogroup profiles between the three ancient groups Fig. To further test genetic affinities and shared ancestry with modern-day African and West Eurasian populations we performed a principal component analysis PCA based on haplogroup frequencies and Multidimensional Scaling of pairwise genetic distances.

We find that all three ancient Egyptian groups cluster together Fig. Both analyses reveal higher affinities with modern populations from the Near East and the Levant compared to modern Egyptians Fig. The affinity to the Middle East finds further support by the Y-chromosome haplogroups of the three individuals for which genome-wide data was obtained, two of which could be assigned to the Middle-Eastern haplogroup J, and one to haplogroup E1b1b1 common in North Africa Supplementary Table 3.

Vertical bars indicate the ages of the analysed 90 mitochondrial genomes three samples with genome-wide data highlighted in red. Note that the values on y axis are given in female effective population size times generation time and were rescaled by The finding of a continuous population through time allowed us to estimate the effective population size N e from directly radiocarbon-dated mitochondrial genomes using BEAST Our results show similar values of effective population size in the different ancient time periods with an average value of between ca.

This is important as it is the first time that such estimates can be contrasted with reported historic Egyptian census numbers from the neighbouring Fayum in the early Ptolemaic Period, which had a reported total population size of 85,—95, inhabitants On the nuclear level we merged the SNP data of our three ancient individuals with 2, modern individuals 34 , 35 and ancient genomes 36 and performed PCA on the joined data set.

We found the ancient Egyptian samples falling distinct from modern Egyptians, and closer towards Near Eastern and European samples Fig. In contrast, modern Egyptians are shifted towards sub-Saharan African populations.

In contrast, a substantially larger sub-Saharan African component, found primarily in West-African Yoruba, is seen in modern Egyptians compared to the ancient samples. We used outgroup f 3 -statistics 38 Fig. We find that ancient Egyptians are most closely related to Neolithic and Bronze Age samples in the Levant, as well as to Neolithic Anatolian and European populations Fig.

When comparing this pattern with modern Egyptians, we find that the ancient Egyptians are more closely related to all modern and ancient European populations that we tested Fig. By computing f 3 -statistics 38 , we determined whether modern Egyptians could be modelled as a mixture of ancient Egyptian and other populations. Our results point towards sub-Saharan African populations as the missing component Fig. Finally, we used two methods to estimate the fractions of sub-Saharan African ancestry in ancient and modern Egyptians.

We then used ALDER 40 to estimate the time of a putative pulse-like admixture event, which was estimated to have occurred 24 generations ago years ago , consistent with previous results from Henn and colleagues The most negative Z -scores indicate the most likely source populations. Finally, we analysed several functionally relevant SNPs in sample JK, which had low contamination and relatively high coverage. This individual had a derived allele at the SLC24A5 locus, which contributes to lighter skin pigmentation and was shown to be at high frequency in Neolithic Anatolia 41 , consistent with the ancestral affinity shown above.

This study demonstrates that the challenges of ancient DNA work on Egyptian mummies can be overcome with enrichment strategies followed by high-throughput DNA sequencing. More specifically, it can supplement and serve as a corrective to archaeological and literary data that are often unevenly distributed across time, space and important constituents of social difference such as gender and class as well as modern genetic data from contemporary populations that may not be fully representative of past populations.

The archaeological site Abusir el-Meleq was inhabited from at least BCE until about CE and was of great religious significance because of its active cult to Osiris, the god of the dead, which made it an attractive burial site for centuries 2. Written sources indicate that by the third century BCE Abusir el-Meleq was at the centre of a wider region that comprised the northern part of the Herakleopolites province, and had close ties with the Fayum and the Memphite provinces, involving the transport of wheat, cattle-breeding, bee-keeping and quarrying In the early Roman Period, the site appears to have been the main centre in its own district Later, in the Roman Period, many veterans of the Roman army—who, initially at least, were not Egyptian but people from disparate cultural backgrounds—settled in the Fayum area after the completion of their service, and formed social relations and intermarried with local populations Importantly, there is evidence for foreign influence at Abusir el-Meleq.

Taken together with the multitude of Greek papyri that were written at the site, this evidence strongly suggests that at least some inhabitants of Abusir el-Meleq were literate in, and able to speak, Greek However, a general issue concerning the site is that several details of the context of the individuals analysed in this study were lost over time. All of the material was excavated by Rubensohn in the early twentieth century, whose main interest was to obtain literary papyri from cartonnage rather than to excavate human remains Furthermore, many of his excavation diaries and notes were destroyed during the Second World War However, the finds nevertheless hold much promise for a long-term study of population dynamics in ancient Egypt.

Abusir el-Meleq is arguably one of the few sites in Egypt, for which such a vast number of individuals with such an extensive chronological spread are available for ancient DNA analysis. The widespread mummification treatments in the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods in particular, leading to a decline in standards and costs 48 and the generally modest appearance of many burials further supports this assessment. By comparing ancient individuals from Abusir el-Meleq with modern Egyptian reference populations, we found an influx of sub-Saharan African ancestry after the Roman Period, which corroborates the findings by Henn and colleagues Further investigation would be needed to link this influx to particular historic processes.

Possible causal factors include increased mobility down the Nile and increased long-distance commerce between sub-Saharan Africa and Egypt Trans-Saharan slave trade may have been particularly important as it moved between 6 and 7 million sub-Saharan slaves to Northern Africa over a span of some 1, years, reaching its high point in the nineteenth century However, we note that all our genetic data were obtained from a single site in Middle Egypt and may not be representative for all of ancient Egypt.

It is possible that populations in the south of Egypt were more closely related to those of Nubia and had a higher sub-Saharan genetic component, in which case the argument for an influx of sub-Saharan ancestries after the Roman Period might only be partially valid and have to be nuanced.

Throughout Pharaonic history there was intense interaction between Egypt and Nubia, ranging from trade to conquest and colonialism, and there is compelling evidence for ethnic complexity within households with Egyptian men marrying Nubian women and vice versa 51 , 52 , Clearly, more genetic studies on ancient human remains from southern Egypt and Sudan are needed before apodictic statements can be made.

The ancient DNA data revealed a high level of affinity between the ancient inhabitants of Abusir el-Meleq and modern populations from the Near East and the Levant. Our data seem to indicate close admixture and affinity at a much earlier date, which is unsurprising given the long and complex connections between Egypt and the Middle East. These connections date back to Prehistory and occurred at a variety of scales, including overland and maritime commerce, diplomacy, immigration, invasion and deportation Especially from the second millennium BCE onwards, there were intense, historically- and archaeologically documented contacts, including the large-scale immigration of Canaanite populations, known as the Hyksos, into Lower Egypt, whose origins lie in the Middle Bronze Age Levant It is possible that the genetic impact of Greek and Roman immigration was more pronounced in the north-western Delta and the Fayum, where most Greek and Roman settlement concentrated 43 , 55 , or among the higher classes of Egyptian society Under Ptolemaic and Roman rule, ethnic descent was crucial to belonging to an elite group and afforded a privileged position in society Such policies are likely to have affected the intermarriage of Romans and non-Romans to a degree Additional genetic studies on ancient human remains from Egypt are needed with extensive geographical, social and chronological spread in order to expand our current picture in variety, accuracy and detail.

However, our results revise previous scepticism towards the DNA preservation in ancient Egyptian mummies due to climate conditions or mummification procedures 8.

In addition, the surface of the bone or tissue samples was removed and the teeth were sampled from inside of the tooth pulp. A silica purification protocol was applied as described in ref. Extraction and library blanks were treated accordingly. All samples were enriched for human mitochondrial DNA via bead capture hybridization as detailed elsewhere All reads with a mapping quality of at least 30 were kept for the subsequent analysis.

Duplicate reads have been removed using DeDup v0. Mitochondrial haplogroups have been determined using HaploGrep 2 ref. Further details of the analysis parameters can be found in Supplementary Note 3.