Upper Egypt (, shortened to , , locally: ) is the southern portion of Egypt and is composed of the Nile River valley south of the delta and the 30th parallel North. It thus starts at Beni Suef and stretches down to Lake Nasser (formed by the Aswan High Dam).
Name In ancient Egypt, Upper Egypt was known as tꜣ šmꜣw, literally "the Land of Reeds" or "the Sedgeland", named for the sedges that grow there.
In Arabic, the region is called Sa'id or Sahid, from صعيد meaning "uplands", from the root صعد meaning to go up, ascend, or rise. Inhabitants of Upper Egypt are known as Sa'idis and they generally speak Sa'idi Egyptian Arabic.
In Biblical Hebrew it was known as and in Akkadian it was known as . Both names originate from the Egyptian pꜣ-tꜣ-rsj, meaning "the southern land".
Geography
Upper Egypt is between the Cataracts of the Nile beyond modern-day Aswan, downriver (northward) to the area of El-Ayait,See list of nomes. Maten (Knife land) is the northernmost nome in Upper Egypt on the right bank, while Atef-Pehu (Northern Sycamore land) is the northernmost on the left bank. , originally published in 1876 in German. which places modern-day Cairo in Lower Egypt. The northern (downriver) part of Upper Egypt, between Sohag and El-Ayait, is also known as Middle Egypt.
History
It is believed to have been united by the rulers of the supposed Thinite Confederacy who absorbed their rival city states during the Naqada III period (c. 3200–3000 BC), and its subsequent unification with Lower Egypt ushered in the Early Dynastic period.Brink, Edwin C. M. van den (1992). "The Nile Delta in Transition: 4th.-3rd. Millennium B.C." Proceedings of the Seminar Held in Cairo, 21.-24. October 1990, at the Netherlands Institute of Archaeology and Arabic Studies. E.C.M. van den Brink. . Upper and Lower Egypt became intertwined in the symbolism of pharaonic sovereignty such as the Pschent double crown.Griffith, Francis Llewellyn, A Collection of Hieroglyphs: A Contribution to the History of Egyptian Writing, the Egypt Exploration Fund 1898, p. 56 Upper Egypt remained as a historical region even after the classical period.
Predynastic Egypt
The main city of prehistoric Upper Egypt was Nekhen. The patron deity was the goddess Nekhbet, depicted as a vulture.
By approximately 3600 BC, Neolithic Egyptian societies along the Nile based their culture on the raising of crops and the domestication of animals. Shortly thereafter, Egypt began to grow and increase in complexity. A new and distinctive pottery appeared, related to the Levantine ceramics, and copper implements and ornaments became common. Mesopotamian building techniques became popular, using sun-dried adobe bricks in arches and decorative recessed walls.
These cultural advances paralleled the political unification of towns of the upper Nile River, or Upper Egypt, while the same occurred in the societies of the Nile Delta, or Lower Egypt. This led to warfare between the two new kingdoms. During his reign in Upper Egypt, King Narmer defeated his enemies on the delta and became sole ruler of the two lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, a sovereignty which endured throughout Dynastic Egypt.
Dynastic Egypt
In royal symbolism, Upper Egypt was represented by the tall White Crown Hedjet, the flowering lotus, and the sedge. Its patron deity, Nekhbet, was depicted by the vulture. After unification, the patron deities of Upper and Lower Egypt were represented together as the Two Ladies, to protect all of the ancient Egyptians, just as the two crowns were combined into a single pharaonic diadem.
For most of Egypt's ancient history, Thebes was the administrative center of Upper Egypt. After its devastation by the Assyrians, the importance of Egypt declined. Under the dynasty of the Ptolemies, Ptolemais Hermiou took over the role of the capital city of Upper Egypt.
Medieval Egypt In the eleventh century, large numbers of pastoralists, known as Hilalians, fled Upper Egypt and moved westward into Libya and as far as Tunis. It is believed that degraded grazing conditions in Upper Egypt, associated with the beginning of the Medieval Warm Period, were the root cause of the migration.
20th-century Egypt In twentieth-century Egypt, the title Prince of the Sa'id (meaning Prince of Upper Egypt) was used by the heir apparent to the Egyptian throne.
Although the Kingdom of Egypt was abolished after the Egyptian revolution of 1952, the title continues to be used by Muhammad Ali, Prince of the Sa'id.
Peopling of Upper Egypt
In Upper Egypt, the predynastic Badari culture was followed by the Naqada culture (Amratian),Brace, 1993. Clines and clusters being closely related to the Lower Nubian;Tracy L. Prowse, Nancy C. Lovell. , American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 101, Issue 2, October 1996, pp. 237-246 with some affinities with other northeast African populations, coastal communities from the Maghreb, some tropical African groups, and possibly inhabitants of the Middle East.
Mainstream scholars have situated the ethnicity and the origins of predynastic, southern Egypt as a foundational community primarily in northeast Africa which included the Sudan, tropical Africa and the Sahara whilst recognising the population variability that became characteristic of the pharaonic period."There is now a sufficient body of evidence from modern studies of skeletal remains to indicate that the ancient Egyptians, especially southern Egyptians, exhibited physical characteristics that are within the range of variation for ancient and modern indigenous peoples of the Sahara and tropical Africa. The distribution of population characteristics seems to follow a clinal pattern from south to north, which may be explained by natural selection as well as gene flow between neighboring populations. In general, the inhabitants of Upper Egypt and Nubia had the greatest biological affinity to people of the Sahara and more southerly areas.”“The data clearly suggests that the population in southern Egypt became more diverse as the society more complex (Keita 1992). Egyptian society seems never to have been “closed”, and it is hard to believe that the modal phenotype could have remain unchanged, especially if social and sexual collection were operating. However, it is important to emphasize that, while the biology changed with increasing local social complexity, the ethnicity of Niloto-Saharo-Sudanese origins did not change. The cultural morays, ritual formulae, and symbols used in writing, as far as can be ascertained, remained true to their southern origins”.p.85–“The physical anthropological findings from the major burial sites of those founding locales of ancient Egypt in the millennium BCE, notably El-Badari as well as Naqada, show no demographic indebtedness to the Levant. They reveal instead a population with cranial and dental features with closest parallels of those of other longtime populations of the surrounding areas of northeastern Africa, such as Nubia and the northern Horn of Africa. Members of this population did not come from somewhere else but were descendants of the long-term inhabitants of these portions of Africa going back many millennia.”p.355 - “The importance of iconographic sources was emphasized in the main. Säve-Söderbergh and Leclant stressed that the links indicated by cave paintings between the vast expanses of the Sahara and the banks of the Nile nodded to a migration of peoples of the Sahara and groups from the South to the valley –something confirmed by research over the last thirty years. Diop set out to return Egypt to its southern African hinterland by systematically using Pharaonic statues and art to support his point of view. Although a debate on the north-south orientation of a ‘civilizing’ wave of peoples in the valley had prevailed up to that point, the avalanche of new data now made this idea redundant, suggesting instead the image of a growing and unifying political movement in the valley from south to north that repositioned its starting point back in time: in Upper Egypt, digs at the Uj tomb of King Scorpion at the Abydos necropolis push back the origin of the first Horus back to circa 3250 BCE, and the resumption of excavations at Nekhen led to the exhumation of the famous ‘Elephant Kings’ of Hierakonpolis (Nekhen) which have no inscriptions and date back even further to circa 3700 BCE.” p.356 - “It quantified the key impact of sub-Saharan populations and found a clear link between the Siwi and the peoples of North-East Africa. We could continue with work by Zakrzewski on the predynastic population of Nekhen, investigations by Crubezy which traced the boundaries of the ancient Khoisan settlement to Upper Egypt, where its faint traces remain identifiable, and Keita’s work, as the most groundbreaking.”'p.356 - “Hence the work by Cerny’s team highlighting the close links between the peoples of Upper Egypt, North Cameroon and Ethiopia – the Cameroon people living in the Mandara mountains speaking Chadic languages, and the Ethiopians speaking Kushitic languages, prior to Ge’ez being spread throughout the region during the Aksumite period. This broadens the linguistic debate to include language families that had been little studied or used in comparisons that have long focused on the East.” Pharaonic Egypt featured a physical gradation across the regional populations, with Upper Egyptians having shared more biological affinities with Sudanese and southernly African populations, whereas Lower Egyptians had closer genetic links with Levantine and Mediterranean populations."Southern Egypt and Nubia are geographically co-extensive, with populations grading into each other. The absorption of Qustul’s people would have reinforced this. There is biological overlap of these populations in origin, but ongoing admixture is also apparent."
Position of international scholarship
In the view of Egyptian scholar and editor of UNESCO General History of Africa Volume II (1981), Gamal Mokhtar, Upper Egypt and Nubia held "similar ethnic composition" with comparable material culture. Mokhtar described a notable difference between the communities with Upper Egyptians having adopted a system of writing earlier due to the exigencies of the Nile Valley whilst their Nubian counterparts were more reticent due to their higher reliance on mobile, stock-raising as an expressed feature of their economy.
UNESCO International Scientific Committee Chair for GHA and archaeologist, Augustin Holl, stated that Egypt was situated in an intersection between Africa and Eurasia but affirmed "Egypt is African" with a "fluctuating distribution of African and Eurasian populations depending on historical circumstances".