Each week in 2023, God willing, I will do a different century of Egyptian history. This week Saturday I will post “Egypt in 3100 BC” and so on till I reach “Egypt in 2000 AD” on the last Saturday of the year, December 30th. Fingers crossed!
Why Egypt? Because it endlessly fascinates me. Because it has the longest, best known history of any single place (except maybe Mesopotamia). Because it is important to both Western and African history. Because even in Eurocentric Spotlight History it accounts for about 30% of history but never gets that kind of coverage.
Why a century a week? Egyptian history through the Western lens pretty much ends with the death of Cleopatra 2,051 years ago and then treats the previous 3,000 years as a blob, as static and unchanging.
Dates: For dates before -664, which become more uncertain the further back you go, I will follow “The Princeton Dictionary of Ancient Egypt” (2008) by Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson.
Outline (Roman numerals are for dynasties):
- -3200s: hieroglyphics
- -3100s: Dynasty I, Narmer, Horus
- -3000s: paper (papyrus), oven, flail, candle wick, Memphis the capital
- -2900s:
- -2800s: II, dam, chair, book, page numbers, 365-day calendar
- –2700s:
- –2600s: Old Kingdom: III, IV, Imhotep, Step Pyramid, Re-Horus, divine kingship
- -2500s: Great Pyramid of Giza, Sphinx, clear glass, Diary of Merer
- -2400s: V, obelisks, Palermo Stone
- -2300s: VI, Amun
- -2200s:
- -2100s: First Intermediate Period: VII, VIII, IX, X, XI
- -2000s: Middle Kingdom, XI, Thebes is the capital, bronze, alphabet, mechanical lock, saw
- -1900s: XII, Sinuhe, Nubia colonized
- -1800s: Sesostris, Kahun
- -1700s: XIII, XIV
- -1600s: Second Intermediate Period: XV, XVI, XVII, Hyksos rule, chariots, bronze weapons, composite bow, Joseph?
- -1500s: New Kingdom, XVIII, Amun-Re, helmet, armour, clock (water, sun), scissors
- -1400s: Thebes the world’s largest city, Hatshepsut, Tiye, Karnak, Cleopatra’s Needles, Valley of the Kings, Deir el-Medina, rudder
- -1300s: Queen Tiye, Akhenaton, Nefertiti, Amarna, King Tut, Aten, Yahweh
- -1200s: XIX, Ramses II, Jews, Moses?
- -1100s: XX, Sea Peoples, Pi-Ramses the world’s largest city, papyrus exports
- -1000s: Third Intermediate Period, XXI (Tanite), Smendes
- -900s: XXII (Bubastite/Libyan)
- -800s: XXIII (Tanite/Libyan)
- -700s: XXIV, Late Period: XXV (Nubian)
- -600s: XXVI (Saite), Assyrian invasion, Psamtek I, Red Sea canal
- -500s: XXVII (Persian), Cambyses, Aramaic
- -400s: XXVIII, Herodotus
- -300s: XXIX, XXX, XXXI, Ptolemaic (Greek) rule, Ptolemaic Egypt, Alexandria, Greek
- -200s: Serapis, Euclid, Manetho, Library of Alexandria, Lighthouse of Alexandria, Eratosthenes.
- -100s: Rosetta Stone, Alexandria the world’s largest city, Sosigenes
- -000s: Roman rule, Roman Egypt, Cleopatra, Diodorus, Strabo, Philo
- +000s: Coptic Christianity
- +100s: Ptolemy, latitude and longitude, Gospel of Peter
- +200s: Origen, Plotinus
- +300s: St Antony, St Catherine, Arianism, Athanasius, the New Testament as we know it, Egeria, Serapeum closed
- +400s: Byzantine rule: Hypatia dragged from her carriage by Christians, Council of Chalcedon declares Coptic Christianity heretical
- +500s: Justinian, last temple of Isis closed
- +600s: Arab rule, Islam, Arabic
- +700s:
- +800s: Bernard the Wise
- +900s: Fatimid Caliphate, Chinese paper arrives
- +1000s:
- +1100s: Ayyubids, Ben Jonah of Tudela
- +1200s: Mamluks, Abd el-Latif
- +1300s: Ibn Batuta
- +1400s:
- +1500s: Ottoman rule
- +1600s:
- +1700s: Napoleon invades. Rosetta Stone is found.
- +1800s: cotton exports, Suez Canal, British rule.
- +1900s: King Tut’s tomb found, Aswan Dam (end of annual flooding), Nasser, US vassal state, Sadat, Mubarak
– Abagond, 2023.
See also:
- Egypt
- tropes
- Spotlight History
- Temple of Linken – the US viewed through an archaeological lens
- human history, the last 6,000 years
- biggest cities in history
- US vassal state
544
Abagond 
Are you sure you’re up to it? I recall a number of such plans you announced but never started or finished. Take one step at a time, no need for such big plans.
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Interesting and nice but Im tired of being depend on religious people esp Christians giving us their warped interpretation of world and esp African history.
This is just legacy pathology ,whereas I can actual see actual africans talk about our history.
So I appreciate the time I have spent here and the things I’ve learned.
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Cleopatra wasn’t black, anymore than Ian Smith was. Egypt could have been a part of Western civilization, if not for the conquest of Egypt by the followers of the false prophet Mahomet (war be upon him).
As for the ancient Egyptians, they weren’t black like you, nor were they white like me. They were the same light brown color that modern Egyptians are, more or less. We have ancient Egyptian DNA which confirms this.
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abagond, once again I mysteriously find myself agreeing with gro jo here. Until a couple days ago, you hadn’t had a really substantive post (not dealing with, e.g., a song you liked) since The Mythic Past (supposedly inspired by yours truly) 7 months ago. Yet you’re taking it upon yourself to do posts on a hard subject that will require significant research, which you’d have to do basically every week with no breaks. I wouldn’t mind the posts on ancient Egypt, but they probably wouldn’t be something I’d be excited to comment on (other than shooting down the idea that most rulers of Egypt in its ancient heyday were full on SSA genetically). I’m much more worried about the current trajectory of the world. So if these posts would stop you from doing anything on current issues, I wouldn’t be a fan of that. Maybe consolidate some of these and aim for one post a month, schedule permitting.
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@gro jo, @biff:
I am only going to do one of these posts a week. And yes, the schedule might turn out to be too aggressive, but I am going to at least follow the sequence.
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” I wouldn’t mind the posts on ancient Egypt, but they probably wouldn’t be something I’d be excited to comment on (other than shooting down the idea that most rulers of Egypt in its ancient heyday were full on SSA genetically).”
All SSA are genetically identical? The Sahara was/is an impassable barrier? No SSA types to be found in Egypt and its neighbors? What’s you explanation for The Tashwinat Mummy? If most rulers weren’t full SSA genetically, how many were and how many were, in part, SSA genetically?
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gro jo
Mostafa Hefny, A dark-skinned Egyptian immigrant is suing the federal government to change his racial classification from white to black.
“Mostafa Hefny said the classification, based solely on his country of origin, has kept him from seeking jobs, grants, scholarships and loans as a member of a minority group.
He said that even though he is from Egypt, his ancestry is from the ancient black kingdom of Nubia, now part of modern Egypt and Sudan. Hefny said his hair is kinkier, his complexion darker and his features more African than blacks such as Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer and retired Gen. Colin L. Powell”
Please explain why Egyptians, regardless, of skin color are classified as ‘white’? He isn’t a SSA, since Egypt is NSA
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Pharonic Egypt stretches over the course of 3000 years. That is a very long time, long enough for there to be significant shifts in ethnic populations. Especially among the royalty, who we know intermarried with non-Egyptian royal houses as part of alliances and treaties. Even before the first dynasty, Egyptians were in contact with other civilizations in Mesopotamia and Canaan.
Also, the royal family didn’t remain the same for those three thousand years. There were dynasties overthrown and new dynasties established; there were conquests and interregnums. And there was a steady influx of people from other lands (war captives, merchants, immigrants, etc.) into Egypt.
To the best of my knowledge, there has to date not been a single sequencing of DNA from the Old Kingdom era. There have been exactly two mummies from the Middle Kingdom whose DNA has been studied. The majority of the data so far comes from the DNA of individuals who lived during or after the New Kingdom period. And only a couple hundred individuals have been tested in total. This is rather like scientists two thousand years from now taking DNA samples from 19th-century graveyards in Louisiana and saying the results describe the people who lived there as far back as 900 CE.
I used to argue that Cleopatra was not Black because she was a Ptolemy, a family originally from Macedonia. (From what we know of her family line, she appears to have been at least part Persian as well as Macedonian Greek.) I also used to argue that Americans tended to fixate on Cleopatra simply because she’s the only Egyptian queen most Americans have ever heard of, and they don’t generally know that her family were invaders from outside of Egypt. I used to say that Cleopatra wasn’t African, but other truly Egyptian women like Hatshepsut quite possibly were Black.
I’m no longer so confident about Cleopatra. The fact remains that we don’t know for sure who her mother was. We don’t have Cleopatra’s mummy or her DNA to test. The Ptolemy dynasty did adopt the pharonic custom of incestuous marriage, but the pharaohs also had numerous wives and concubines. She may well have been part Nubian for all we know.
Ultimately, though, if we found out tomorrow that Cleopatra had blonde hair, blue eyes, and lily-white skin, this would tell us nothing about the racial background and phenotypic appearance of Hatshepsut or Nefertiti or Meresankh or Sobekneferu, because Cleopatra was from a European family, not an Egyptian one.
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Paul Kruger, the Nubians?
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gro jo, I don’t know the answers to your questions. I would imagine there was intermarriage with SSA taking place, but don’t know to what extent and when. I had not even heard of the Tashwinat mummy, but a quick google search pulled up the following site: https://www.snexplores.org/article/dna-african-mummies-tie-these-folk-middle-easterners
It begins as follows: “Ancient mummies are yielding a new treasure — DNA. The genetic material unwrapped from 90 of these preserved bodies in Egypt, a part of North Africa, show their family roots extend seemingly to the Middle East. They appear to have far less in common with ancient peoples throughout most of the rest of Africa.
What this means, researchers now say, is that the ancient Egyptians had relatives in what is now the Middle East, and possibly Europe.”
Biblical accounts from the Old Testament seem to indicate it was tied closely to the ancient Middle East, and that is currently still the case obviously. It’s good to follow the evidence where it goes, but it seems there are efforts taking place to “blackwash” Egypt for reasons other than historical accuracy. In common parlance (not approved by the politically correct), this is the “We Wuz Kangz” phenomenon. Anyway, I’m not interested in having an extended discussion about it. I’d rather work with you to spread awareness about the crazy situation in Ukraine, where the possibility of a nuclear escalation seems to be completely ignored by the leaders of the West.
Re: Mostafa Hefny, it’s hard to blame him. The current classification regime makes little sense in many cases, especially when people are allowed to identify as just about anything these days, including other species. If Elizabeth Warren can get promoted at Harvard because of her supposed ~1/1000 Native American ancestors, any White presenting kid who does a gene test that comes back 1% Iberian Peninsula ancestry should be identifying as Hispanic.
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The article Biff linked to says:
“The mummies date from 1388 B.C. to A.D. 426.”
To translate, that means the research window of this DNA study doesn’t even start until halfway into the New Kingdom era. It then goes through the Ptolemy dynasty (which was Macedonian Greek, not Egyptian), through the fall of the Ptolemies to the Roman Empire, and ends in the era where Egypt was under the domination of the Byzantine Greeks.
Almost two thousand years in scope, during all of which time Egypt was a magnet for people from around the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Near East due to its economic power and its educational institutions. As the article itself points out:
“The new analysis reveals genetic ties to Greece and the Middle East. This is not a huge surprise since Egypt was a center of travel and trade at that time.”
This DNA study is the one from 2017 that far too often was reported in the non-scientific press as definitively answering the question of who the Ancient Egyptians were, when the study actually tells us nothing about the Old Kingdom or the Middle Kingdom eras, nor anything about the people who lived in other parts of Egypt than the one town studied. (This specific article does, to its credit, briefly mention that fact: “Even so, the researchers point out that people from just one site can’t be counted on to reflect all of ancient Egypt’s people.”)
This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about in my comment upthread. Scientists are only just beginning to study the ancient DNA of mummies. There is a paucity of data, a mere drop in the bucket, a couple hundred mummies so far — of which the majority come from only one town. We don’t have a wide array of data from throughout the land of Ancient Egypt. We have absolutely no data from the first thousand years of the Ancient Egyptian empire. Yet ever since the results of this 2017 study were released, it’s been touted as proof that all the Ancient Egyptians had no Black African genetics whatsoever.
Meanwhile, the Tashwinat mummy is an entirely different situation, the earliest known mummy that was intentionally embalmed — using the same basic techniques that were later practiced and refined during the Pharonic Egyptian era. Its significance is the discovery that these embalming techniques were known and practiced much earlier (approximately one thousand years earlier!) than archeologists originally believed.
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“Meanwhile, the Tashwinat mummy is an entirely different situation, the earliest known mummy that was intentionally embalmed — using the same basic techniques that were later practiced and refined during the Pharonic Egyptian era. Its significance is the discovery that these embalming techniques were known and practiced much earlier (approximately one thousand years earlier!) than archeologists originally believed.”
My point was that the mummy was classified as “Negroid”.
“Significance
Antonio Ascenzi, a pathologist, believes that Uan Muhuggiag and the surrounding area became inhabited around 10,000 BP by Negroid peoples, who followed the monsoon north.[17] It has been suggested that some time later, around 7000 BP, people from Mesopotamia and the Middle East arrived, introducing pastoralism to the region.[3] There is strong evidence that domestic livestock, principally cattle, played an important role in the lives of the inhabitants of Uan Muhuggiag. This is supported by the number of cattle bones found at the site, as well as evidence of a cattle cult and ritual sacrifice at a location in the Messak plateau, just 60 miles away.[3]
The Tashwinat Mummy found at Uan Muhuggiag was one thousand years older than the oldest known Egyptian mummy. Its sophisticated form of evisceration indicates a highly advanced society.[16] Some scholars argue that the sub-Saharan African population living there could have had an influence on the process of mummification used in Ancient Egypt a thousand years later.
Considerable debate also exists about whether the rock art found at Uan Muhuggiag along with the two mummies, signify that the shelter was a burial place or otherwise sacred. Mori was a strong advocate of this theory and believed that the site was a place where a cult of the dead took place.[2] ”
If Ascenzi is correct, Ancient Egypt was influenced by a genetically SSA population long before the rise of Ancient Egypt that inhabited Libya, an NSA territory. That means you are in no position to debunk any claims about the rulers of Ancient Egypt being SSA or relatives thereof.
As for Mr. Mostafa Hefny, his plight is due to USA’s attempt to whitewash Egypt for the purpose of claiming Whites “Wuz Kangz”, a common practice. Deep in the heart of SSA, White Wuz Kangz claimed they built Great Zimbabwe. “The ancient city of Great Zimbabwe was an engineering wonder. But archaeologists credited it to Phoenicians, Babylonians, Arabians – anyone but the Africans who actually built it.”
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meanwhile after yeas of experience and no textbooks Im constructing my second mobile shelter/ home for less than 500 dollars.
In addition to my own home which I build ,own – pay no rent for as long as it lasts and I am in possession.
I can rent another unit i build or sell it or both as well as convert it to various types of stores
I can understand and even have a passing interest in the details of a ancient society thousands of years ago as well as the ideas about the phenotype of the population.
but i find it more interesting how some black people today act the same way some black people acted back then.
there are numerous black people today that regularly make big and small contributions to society i.e civilization
some will be famous and some never historically recorded
And many are just like my mother and father ,some of my sisters and brothers and quite a few of no direct relation other than phenotype who did not have the capacity for self reflection restraint discipline insight – whatever it is that causes me to not give up on myself and embrace the lies and ignorance of the dominant society.
they are your poor your criminals and your sick and handclapped even for even in sickness and injury most extreme some humans still have strength intelligence power and dignity and others NOT.
So as i make my contributions first of to myself ,and watch the advance of technology and human evolution
i think our greatest achievement will be when we learn to love ourselves and each other honestly so that we all may live in peace and happiness.
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gro jo and Solitaire:
Thanks for the info. As I said, I don’t have all the answers here and I’m not looking to make this into a long back and forth based on speculation, especially since abagond is threatening to have a new Egypt post every week. The Tashwinat mummy is intriguing, though being found in the Southwest corner of current Libya, means it is pretty close to SSA, so the mummy being black should not be too shocking. It’s certainly possible that it was connected to the later civilization(s) that set up the first Egyptian kingdoms.
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Biff wrote:
“The Tashwinat mummy is intriguing, though being found in the Southwest corner of current Libya, means it is pretty close to SSA, so the mummy being black should not be too shocking.”
I don’t know if the term Sub-Saharan Africa(n) is accurate or useful when discussing the Tashwinat child, who would have been alive during the most recent Green Sahara wave of the environmental cycle, when the Sahara was not a desert but a lush savanna teeming with wildlife, with numerous rivers and lakes (the dried beds of which have been revealed lying under the sand by modern satellite photography).
“Sub-Saharan Africa” immediately suggests to the mind the current geographical demarcation and imposes that upon a neolithic world where the landscape and the environment actually were drastically different.
While the Sahara has never been impassable, in its present stage of the environmental cycle it is a formidable barrier to casual migration and habitation — but it wasn’t then, not in the least. The Tashwinat child didn’t live in a world where the Sahara Desert existed, much less created some type of geographic boundary that Black people supposedly rarely crossed. The Tashwinat child was not a “Sub-Saharan African” but a Black person who lived in the savanna that then flourished where the desert is now.
I realize some of the articles that have been quoted in this thread so far use the term SSA, and perhaps it will be impossible to discard the term entirely in this discussion. But I wanted to point out that this is an anachronistic usage which lends itself to a false understanding of the world and its peoples at that time.
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Biff, I see that you’re basically in agreement with m assessment of the situation.
1) SSA types existed in Egypt and its neighbors for as long as Egypt existed.
2) The Sahara didn’t prevent contact between northern or southern Africa.
Solitaire, since we are having this discussion in the 21st century, SSA and NSA don’t cause any confusion as far as I can tell.
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@ Gro Jo
Look at what Biff said:
“being found in the Southwest corner of current Libya, means it is pretty close to SSA, so the mummy being black should not be too shocking”
Biff certainly implies that if a Black mummy was found in the north of current Libya, far away from Sub-Saharan Africa, then it would be shocking. That’s because he’s assuming Black people in the Neolithic didn’t populate the Sahara savanna. He’s assuming Black people in the Neolithic weren’t on the northern coast of the African continent or living at the Nile delta. Because they’re “Sub-Saharan Africans” and that’s where he relegates them to geographically.
I understand that SSA and NSA are convenient shorthands, and I’m not taking issue with you. I am taking issue with what I do believe is a confused usage on Biff’s part as explained above, and I did want to post a general reminder about how anachronistic language can sometimes be problematic.
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Do you really imagine that Biff is going to abandon his beliefs because of anachronistic language? If he gets comfort from his White people “wuz kangz” fantasy, I say, let him. The fact that he admits he isn’t able to disprove that Egypt was influenced by SSA types or that they lived in NSA is enough of a concession from someone like him.
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@ Gro Jo
“Do you really imagine that Biff is going to abandon his beliefs because of anachronistic language?”
No, I don’t. Notice that I don’t even address him: Biff wrote, not @Biff. It’s for the lurkers, to clarify things for people reading along.
There’s a real tendency for people to muddy the historical waters by projecting backwards. I struggle with it myself; a good example from a few years ago was when Abagond was trying to explain to me about how oral tradition and apostolic lineage were way more important in the early Christian church than the written word, and that my modern conceptualization of the essential nature of the Bible, the written scripture, didn’t exist for them.
Heck, most students have tons of difficulty keeping Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt straight because we in the modern world are so accustomed to thinking of “up” as North.
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You all just have to look at the Sahara Rock Paintings; the beauty of our African ancestors, is that they left art everywhere they settled. Africa and Art go hand in hand. Conclusion, North Africans were always Negroid, up until the Barbary slave trade, which is a very recent episode.
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To Solitaire:
FWIW looking at photographs of people from Luxor (Formerly Thebes / Wasat the capital of Egypt for much of the middle and new kingdoms and close to Valley of the Kings) could not be construed as white or the stereotypical American idea of an Arab.
https://www.google.com/search?q=luxor+people&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwjo17_qoIX9AhXvFt4AHawtAgQQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=luxor&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQARgAMgQIABBDMgcIABCxAxBDMgcIABCxAxBDMggIABCABBCxAzIICAAQgAQQsQMyCggAELEDEIMBEEMyBAgAEEMyBQgAEIAEMggIABCABBCxAzIFCAAQgAQ6BggAEAcQHjoICAAQCBAHEB5QmBNYzBtg-iZoAHAAeACAAWGIAdwCkgEBNJgBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1nwAEB&sclient=img&ei=rDvjY-jRKu-t-LYPrNuIIA&bih=877&biw=1920
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From the tomb of Seti I from approximately 3300 years ago:
Origins of people portrayed from left to right:
Libyan, Nubia, Asiatic (From the Levant), and Egyptian.
I am going to go out on a limb and say if the Egyptian guy were on a US college campus today he would not be accused of cultural appropriation for wearing what would appear to be corn rows.
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Huh, the guy from the Levant is wearing tassels at the hem of his garment. That’s really intriguing (in reference to a past discussion about Leviticus).
The Libyan appears to be covered in tattoos.
Take away the shoulder strap, etc., and the Nubian’s garment is almost identical to the Egyptian’s.
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Here is another version of the tomb painting in which the Asiatics and Egyptians both appear to be darker:
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Let me try that again:
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“Here is another version of the tomb painting in which the Asiatics and Egyptians both appear to be darker…”
FWIW Apparently both are interpretations of pretty damaged mural – albeit presumably the portrayal of the Egyptian’s skin tone should be essentially the same as the many other examples within the tomb of Egyptians going about their tasks.
Here’s one with left to right A Nubian, Egyptian, Libyan, and an Assyrian with the skin gradient getting lighter as one goes from left to right In this it would appear the Libyan’s skin tone matches the one in your example).
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2281eaf0a5978eff8c8424c5059f2810
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@ Lemmy
Thanks for posting a link to the original artwork on the wall. Pity that it’s in such bad shape.
But yeah, I think the main point is whichever image you go by, in all of them the Egyptian is definitely darker than what would be considered “White” now, and sure looks like he’s wearing his hair either in braids or short dreadlocks.
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