Egyptian ethnicity is very complicated owing to the country’s position as one of the most historically contested parts of the world.
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One of the first major civilizations emerged here along the River Nile in the early third millennium BCE. During the first millennium, the country was conquered and colonized successively by the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, creating a mixed-ethnic environment. In northern Egypt, the city of Alexandria became a cosmopolitan center that attracted large Greek, Roman, Armenian, Jewish, and Berber populations. In the seventh century Egypt was conquered as part of the Arab expansion out of Arabia and in due course became a cosmopolitan Islamic country that attracted Arabs, Persians, Syrians, Kurds, Turks, and others for centuries to come. Egyptian identity is a complicated thing today.
Egypt also has some distinct geographical divisions, with Christian Copts and people of Nubian or Sudanese descent making up a significant minority in the south. The Berbers of the Siwa Oasis in the far west of Egypt and the Beja people of the Eastern Desert south towards Sudan and Eritrea are additional small ethnic minorities within Egypt.[1]
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Egyptian history
Egypt is a country with a long and complex history, which has always had the River Nile at the heart of it. It was along the lower stretches of this immense river that the first Egyptian kings or pharaohs began building the pyramids in ancient times. The Great Pyramid of Giza dates to the twenty-sixth century BCE. It was in the middle of the second millennium BCE, a period known as the New Kingdom Period in Egyptian history, that Pharaonic Egypt reached its peak under rulers like Thutmose III and Rameses II who conquered parts of northern Sudan, eastern Libya, and much of the Levant.[2]
From the early first millennium BCE Egypt came under foreign domination, conquered by the Assyrians, Persians, and Greeks in the seventh, sixth, and fourth centuries BCE respectively. It was the Greeks who really transformed Egypt, with a new city being built on the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Nile River Delta christened Alexandria after Alexander the Great. From here the Greek Ptolemaic Dynasty governed Egypt for the next three centuries, with extensive Greek colonization of Lower Egypt and Alexandria’s emergence as a global center of learning. In due course, the Romans conquered Egypt at the end of the first century BCE, but it remained a Hellenized city with extensive Greek, Jewish, Armenian, and Roman communities.
Egypt remained under the control of the Eastern Roman Empire (better known as the Byzantine Empire) even after the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century CE. But it couldn’t resist the rapid expansion of the Arab Caliphate in the middle of the seventh century after Muhammad’s followers burst out of the Arabian Desert and conquered a vast empire stretching from Morocco and Spain in the west to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east. The Arab conquest transformed Egypt demographically, culturally, religiously, and pretty much in every other way imaginable.
People of Arab descent became the predominant political power and Arabic was adopted as the language of government and business. Islam conquered the country in terms of its religion, and Arabic architecture and learning became dominant in Egypt after centuries of Greco-Roman cultural influence.[3] The late medieval period witnessed further changes, with the rise of the Mameluke Sultanate in Cairo and its subsequent replacement by the Ottoman Turks as the descendants of Osman, the founder of the empire, built a new Islamic empire which dominated the entirety of the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Ottomans were still nominally in charge of Egypt in the nineteenth century when the British, who by then were technologically and militarily much more powerful than the Turks, arrived to try to take control of a region that offered a faster route to the British Raj in India from Europe. The subsequent construction of the Suez Canal in the 1860s ensured that Britain was determined to maintain control of Egypt in the long run. Even after Egypt became independent in 1922, the British maintained control of the Suez Canal Zone. The Egyptian Revolution of 1952 led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, however, ushered in the modern, fully autonomous state of Egypt, one which today is looking to emerge as a regional power.[4]
Egyptian culture
Egyptian culture reflects its complex history. On the one hand, the country’s identity is in many ways wrapped up in its ancient past, with Pharaonic Egypt, the pyramids, and ancient gods like Horus and Ra being national symbols of Egyptian identity. In part owing to the country’s tourist industry, one will find ancient Egyptian imagery in most parts of Egypt today.
Modern Egyptian culture has been profoundly shaped by the Arab conquests of the seventh century and the development of an Islamic culture. Approximately 90% of the country’s people are Muslims, with Sunni Muslims in the majority, albeit with a sizable minority of Coptic Christians. Because of this religious makeup, Egypt’s culture is reflective of a Middle Eastern Muslim country with Friday prayers, Islamic religious festivals, and other aspects of Islam directing the rhythms of society.[5]
Egyptian languages
Arabic is the official language of Egypt, with the Egyptian colloquial form known as Masri spoken widely. This has incorporated elements of Coptic, Turkish, and even French and Italian influences over the centuries in line with Egypt’s eclectic history. In the south of the country, the Nobiin language is spoken amongst the Nubian people there. Coptic remains in use within the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt’s Coptic Christians, but this mix of Greek and other influences is used entirely for liturgical practices at religious services and is not a functional language within day-to-day life in Egyptian society.
Because of the size of the tourism and hospitality industries, millions of people in Egypt speak a Western language, with English and French being widely spoken in the major cities and towns. One will also come across Egyptian hieroglyphics, the ancient pictographic language of Pharaonic Egypt, wherever one goes in Egypt as the country tries to promote its ancient past. Interestingly, it only became possible to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics in the early nineteenth century after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone during Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign to try to conquer Egypt in 1798. This is a large stone monument that was originally carved in the second century BCE, translating hieroglyphics into ancient Greek, the discovery of which paved the way for the development of modern Egyptology, the study of the country’s ancient culture.[6]
Explore more about Egyptian ethnicity
- MyHeritage DNA at MyHeritage
- Tutankhamun’s Family Tree Revealed at MyHeritage Blog
- Ethnicities around the world at MyHeritage
- What Is My Ethnicity? How MyHeritage Estimates Ethnicities at MyHeritage Knowledge Base
- Where's My Ethnicity?!: Why An Ethnicity Might Not Show Up In Your DNA (and How To Find Evidence Of It Anyway) at MyHeritage Knowledge Base
References
- ↑ People. Encyclopedia Britannica
- ↑ Ancient Egyptian Culture. World History
- ↑ How the Arabs gained control of Egypt. University of Leiden
- ↑ Britain in Egypt. University of Cambridge
- ↑ Egypt's "Living culture", past and present. Wall Street Journal
- ↑ What Language Is Spoken In Egypt? Babbel Magazine