Egypt has a long and involved demographic history. This is partly due to the territory's geographical location at the crossroads of several major cultural areas: North Africa, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Sahara and Sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, Egypt has experienced several invasions and being part of many regional empires during its long history, including by the Canaanites, the Ancient Libyans, the Assyrians, the Kushites (a Nubian civilization), the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs.
However, invasions mostly involved the governing elite class and did not have a significant impact on the majority of the Egyptian population.Stokes, J. (Ed.). (2009). Encyclopedia of the peoples of Africa and the Middle East (Vols. 1–2). Facts On File. Other scholars have suggested there may have been a gradual period of demographic change from Syria-Palestine, via the eastern Delta region."Anthropological studies suggest that the predynastic population included a mixture of racial types (Negroid, Mediterranean and European), but it is the question of the skeletal evidence at the beginning of the pharaonic period that has proven to be the most controversial over the years. Whereas the anthropological evidence from this date was once interpreted, by Bryan Emery and others, as the rapid conquest of Egypt from the east whose remains were racially distinct from the indigenous Egyptians, it is now argued by some scholars that there may have been a much slower period of demographic change, probably involving the gradual infiltration of a different physical type from Syria-Palestine, via the eastern Delta".
Neolithic and Predynastic periods
Around 8000 BCE, the Sahara had a wet phase, the Neolithic Subpluvial (Holocene Wet Phase). There is very little evidence of human occupation of the Egyptian Nile Valley during the Early and Middle Holocene periods. This may be due to problems in site preservation. The Middle Nile Valley (Nubia) had population settlements attested by occupational sequence since the Pleistocene and the Holocene. People from the surrounding areas moved into the Sahara, and evidence suggests that the populations of the Nile Valley reduced in size. Several scholars have argued that the origins of the Egyptian civilisation derived from pastoral communities which emerged in both the Egyptian and northern Sudanese regions of the Nile Valley in the 5th millennium BCE.
According to historian Donald Redford, the period from 9000 to 6000 BC had left very little in the way of archaeological evidence. Around 6000 BC, Neolithic settlements appear all over Egypt. Some studies based on morphological, genetic, and archaeological data have attributed these settlements to migrants from the Fertile Crescent in the Near East returning during the Egyptian and North African Neolithic, bringing agriculture to the region.
However, other scholars have disputed this view and cited linguistic, biological anthropological, archaeological"There is no evidence, no archaeological signal, for a mass migration (settler colonization)" into Egypt from southwest Asia at the time of the writing. Core Egyptian culture was well established. A total peopling of Egypt at this time from the Near East would have meant the mass migration of Semitic speakers. The ancient Egyptian language - using the usual academic language taxonomy - is a branch within Afroasiatic with one member (not counting place of origin/urheimat is within Africa, using standard linguistic criteria based on the locale of greatest diversity, deepest branches, and least moves accounting for its five or six branches or seven, if Ongota is counted". and genetic data"P2 (PN2) marker, within the E haplogroup, connects the predominant Y chromosome lineage found in Africa overall after the modern human left Africa. P2/M215-55 is found from the Horn of Africa up through the Nile Valley and west to the Maghreb, and P2/V38/M2 is predominant in most of infra-Saharan tropical Africa". which does not support the hypothesis of a mass migration from the Levantine during the prehistoric period. According to historian William Stiebling and archaeologist Susan N. Helft, this view posits that the ancient Egyptians are the same original population group as Nubians and other Saharan populations, with some genetic input from Arabian, Levantine, North African, and Indo-European groups who have known to have settled in Egypt during its long history. On the other hand, Stiebling and Helft acknowledge that the genetic studies of North African populations generally suggest a big influx of Near Eastern populations during the Neolithic Period or earlier. They also added that there have only been a few studies on ancient Egyptian DNA to clarify these issues.
Historian Christopher Ehret, cited genetic evidence which had identified the Horn of Africa as a source of a genetic marker "M35/215" Y-chromosome lineage for a significant population component which moved north from that region into Egypt and the Levant. Ehret argued that this genetic distribution paralleled the spread of the Afrasian language family with the movement of people from the Horn of Africa into Egypt and added a new demic component to the existing population of Egypt 17,000 years ago. According to UNESCO scholar, Alain Anselin, accumulated research over three decades had confirmed the migration of peoples from the Sahara and southerly African regions into the early Nile Valley.
Predynastic Egypt is conventionally said to begin about 6000 BCE. Between 5300 and 3500 BCE. the wet phase declined and increasing aridity pushed the Saharan peoples into locations with reliable water, such as oases and the Nile Valley. The mid-Holocene droughts drove refuges from the Southern Levant and the Eastern Sahara into Egypt, where they mixed with indigenous Nilotes, desert herders, cultivators and hunters upon forming settlement communities.
From around 4800 to 4300 BCE, the Merimde culture, known from the typesite Merimde Beni-Salame, flourished in Lower Egypt.Josef Eiwanger: Merimde Beni-salame, In: Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt. Compiled and edited by Kathryn A. Bard. London/New York 1999, p. 501–505 Later, Lower Egypt was also the home of the Buto Maadi culture, best known from the site at Maadi near Cairo.Jürgen Seeher. Ma'adi and Wadi Digla. in: Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt. Compiled and edited by Kathryn A. Bard. London/New York 1999, 455–458 In Upper Egypt, the predynastic Badari culture was followed by the Naqada culture (Amratian).Brace, 1993. Clines and clusters Recent archaeological data compiled has identified Tasian and Badarian Nile Valley sites as peripheral networks of earlier African cultures that featured the movement of Badarian, Saharan, Nubian, and Nilotic populations.
Around 3000 BCE, the wet phase of the Sahara came to an end. The Saharan populations retreated to the south towards the Sahel, and east in the direction of the Nile Valley. It was these populations, in addition to Neolithic farmers from the Near East, that likely played a role in the formation of the Egyptian state as they brought their food crops, sheep, goats, and cattle to the Nile Valley.
Archaeological data and sources for population origin
Located in the extreme north-east corner of Africa, ancient Egyptian society was at a crossroads between the African and Near Eastern regions. Early Egyptologists noted the increased novelty and seemingly rapid change in Predynastic pottery and noted trade contacts between ancient Egypt and the Middle East.Hoffman. "Egypt before the pharaohs: the prehistoric foundations of Egyptian civilization", pp. 267Redford, Egypt, Israel, p. 17. Fekri Hassan and Edwin et al. point to mutual influence from both inner Africa as well as the Levant.
Excavations from Nabta Playa, located in Nubia about 100 km west of Abu Simbel, suggest that the Neolithic inhabitants of the region were migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa. There is some speculation that this culture is likely to have been the predecessor of the Egyptians, based on cultural similarities and social complexity which is thought to be reflective of the Old Kingdom of Egypt.Ancient Astronomy in Africa In addition, there is evidence that sheep and goats were introduced into the Nabta Playa from Western Asia about 8,000 years ago.
The discoveries made at a cemetery at Qustul in Nubia lead Bruce Williams to suggest in 1980 the possibility that Egypt's monarchy originated near Qustul in Nubia. This theory has been directly contradicted by more recent discoveries at Abydos in Upper Egypt which prove that the Egyptian monarchy predates the tombs at Qustul.The Birth of an Ancient African Kingdom: Kush and Her Myth of the State in the First Millennium BC Issue 4 of Cahier de recherches de l'Institut de papyrologie et d'égyptologie de Lille: Supplément, Institut de Papyrologie et d'Egyptologie Lille, By László Török, p. 98, University of Michigan; Wegner, J. W. 1996. Interaction between the Nubian A-Group and Predynastic Egypt: The Significance of the Qustul Incense Burner. In T. Celenko, Ed., Egypt in Africa: 98–100. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art/Indiana University Press. The archaeological cemeteries at Qustul are no longer available for excavations since the flooding of Lake Nasser. Focusing on the A-Group culture (3500–2800 BCE), Michinori asserted in 2000 that external influence from Nubia on the formation of Ancient Egypt in the pre-dynastic period to the dynasty period predates influence from eastern Mesopotamia. According to him, chiefs of the same cultural level as Upper Egyptian powers existed in Lower Nubia and exhibited pharaonic iconography before the unification of Egypt.
Christopher Ehret, S.O. Y. Keita, and Paul Newman have also argued that archaeological evidence does not support a spread of migrating Neolithic farmers from Asia into northern Africa, but rather a gradual incorporation of animal husbandry into indigenous foraging cultures.
Egyptian archaeologist, Fekri Hassan, (2002) indicated that the construction of monumental megalithic tombs and tumuli in the Saharan region of Niger and the Eastern Sahara which developed, as early as 4700 BCE, may have served as antecedents for the mastabas and pyramids of ancient Egypt. p.17 - "During Predynastic Egypt, tumuli were present at various locations (e.g., Naqada, Helwan). The appearance of megalithic monumental tombs and tumuli in the Nigerian Sahara as early as 4700 BC, and presumably much earlier in the Eastern Sahara (Wendorf et al., 1992/3), clearly predates the construction of Egyptian mastabas and pyramids by a very long time. Such structures might have been the precursors of Egyptian pyramids and monumental architecture. It is noteworthy that tumuli appear in Egypt in several localities, such as at Nagada and Helwan, during Predynastic times (Hassan, 1988)." Hassan also identified the presence of several tumuli sites in predynastic Egypt regions such as Naqadah and Helwan.
British Egyptologist, Toby Wilkinson, has cited the iconography on rock art in the Eastern Desert region as depicting what he interpreted to be among the earliest representations of the royal crowns and suggested the Red Crown could have originated in the southern Nile Valley.