Upper Egypt
Upper Egypt 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.
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 to the area of El-Ayait, which places modern-day Cairo in Lower Egypt. The northern 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, and its subsequent unification with Lower Egypt ushered in the Early Dynastic period. Upper and Lower Egypt became intertwined in the symbolism of pharaonic sovereignty such as the Pschent double crown. 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 the twentieth-century Egypt, the title Prince of the Sa'id 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, being closely related to the Lower Nubian; 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. 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.
Position of international scholarship
In the view of Egyptian scholar and editor of UNESCO General History of Africa Volume II, 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".
In a chapter review of UNESCO General History of Africa Volume II by anthropologist and Egyptologist, Alain Anselin, the traditional historical view of a “wave of civilizing peoples” from the north to the south had been displaced by the weight of recent evidence in favour of a unifying movement from south to north. He stated that recent research accumulated over three decades had confirmed the migration of peoples from the Sahara and regions south of Egypt to the Nile Valley. This research had also situated Upper Egypt as the origin of pharaonic unification. Anselin argued that this aligned with the position of the late Cheikh Anta Diop, who had attempted to "restore Egypt to its southern African hinterland". Anselin referenced a range of specialist studies presented at a triennial conference in 2005 which he stated was a continuation of the 1974 recommendations. This included a genetic study which quantified the "key impact" of Sub-Saharan populations and showed that the early pre-dynastic population of the Berber people of the Siwa Oasis in north-western Egypt had close demographic links with people of North-East Africa. He further described the value of other studies such as a Crubezy study 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", and that Cerny had identified close genetic and linguistic links between the peoples of Upper Egypt, North Cameroon and Ethiopia.
Biological anthropological data
According to bioarchaeologist Nancy Lovell, the morphology of ancient Egyptian skeletons gives strong evidence that: "In general, the inhabitants of Upper Egypt and Nubia had the greatest biological affinity to people of the Sahara and more southerly areas", but exhibited local variation in an African context. S. O. Y. Keita, a biological anthropologist also reviewed studies on the biological affinities of the Ancient Egyptian population and characterised the skeletal morphologies of predynastic southern Egyptians as a "Saharo-tropical African variant". Keita also added that it is important to emphasize that whilst Egyptian society became more socially complex and biologically varied, the "ethnicity of the 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."The early megalithic complex of Nabta Playa located in the Aswan Museum, Upper Egypt has exhibited close resemblances to Sub-Saharan and Sahelian ceremonial centres including structures found in Ethiopia, Senegal, regions north to Morocco and West Africa. Anthropological studies have indicated linkages to Sub-Saharan and North African populations.
A 1992 study conducted by S.O.Y. Keita on First Dynasty crania from the royal tombs in Abydos, noted the predominant pattern was "Southern" or a "tropical African variant", which had affinities with Kerma Kushites. The general results demonstrate greater affinity with Upper Nile Valley groups, but also suggest clear change from earlier craniometric trends. The gene flow and movement of northern officials to the important southern city may explain the findings.
A 2002 study had found that Tasian dental markers were shown to similar be Sub-Saharan Africans and some also to North Africans. According to the researchers, it is possible that the population may have been a mix of both groups, but the sample size was concluded to be too small to make definitive statements.
In 2005, Keita examined Badarian crania from predynastic upper Egypt in comparison to various European and tropical African crania. He found that the predynastic Badarian series clustered much closer with the tropical African series. The comparative samples were selected based on "Brace et al.'s comments on the affinities of an upper Egyptian/Nubian epipalaeolithic series".
In 2008, Keita found the early predynastic groups in Southern Egypt which included Badarian skeletal samples, were similar to Nile-Valley remains from areas to the south and north of Upper Egypt. Overall, the dynastic Egyptians showed much closer affinities with these particular Northeast African populations. In his comparison to the various Egyptian series, Greeks, Somali/Horn, and Italians were used. He also concluded that more material was needed to make a firm conclusion about the relationship between the early Holocene Nile valley populations and later ancient Egyptians.
An anthropological study by Eric Crubézy on a Adaïma predynastic cemetery from 3700 CE, contained 6,000 skeletons, found affinities with a southerly African population. According to the study, 25% of the sampled children's teeth had "Bushmen" upper canines typical of people from Khoi-San which "confirmed the African origin of the Adamia population."
Shomarka Keita reported that a 2005 study on mummified remains found that "some Theban nobles had a histology which indicated notably dark skin".
Anthropologist Alain Anselin found the distribution of linguistic, archaeological data to be consistent with initial genetic findings on Upper Egyptian population in Gurna which had a remnant of high M1 haplogroup and sub-Saharan affinities. This has been interpreted to suggest that the current population structure of Egypt may be the result of neighbouring influences on the ancestral population. Anselin also suggested that the combination of historical genetics and recent archaeological excavations in the Western Desert could contribute to the peopling of Egypt for which Saharan affinities had been identified in a previous, interdisciplinary review.
In 2018, Godde assessed population relationships in the Nile Valley by comparing crania from 18 Egyptian and Nubian groups, spanning from Lower Egypt to Lower Nubia across 7,400 years. Overall, the results showed that the Mesolithic Nubian sample had a greater similarity with Naqada Egyptians. Similarly, Lower Nubian and Upper Egyptian samples clustered together. However, the Lower Egyptian samples formed a homogeneous unit, and there was a north–south gradient in the data set.
In 2020, Godde analysed a series of crania, including two Egyptian, a series of A-Group Nubians and a Bronze Age series from Lachish, Palestine. The two pre-dynastic series had strongest affinities, followed by closeness between the Nagada and the Nubian series. Further, the Nubian A-Group plotted nearer to the Egyptians and the Lachish sample placed more closely to Naqada than Badari. According to Godde the spatial-temporal model applied to the pattern of biological distances explains the more distant relationship of Badari to Lachish than Naqada to Lachish as gene flow will cause populations to become more similar over time.