Sooo history -- pharaonic DNA

I've been doing a lot of DNA research recently for a bunch of reasons, and at last I started looking up the pharaohs. What I found was a population transition between the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom.

Thutmose III was the father of the line leading to Tutankhamun. We don't have data on Thutmose III, but his successors (who might not have been his descendants, we don't have the data one way or the other) had the R1b Y chromosome subclade (including R1b-M269). R1b is the Siberian subclade which migrated into Anatolia and appears in the Mycenaeans like Agamemnon from the Iliad. It distinguishes them from the Minoans who had the Neolithic J1/J2 subclades. It also distinguishes them from the Chechens of the Caucasus, who have J1 and J2. 

The M269 subclade accompanied diffusion of Indo-European languages across the Middle East and into Europe, but you can't call these pharaohs Indo-Europeans. The R haplogroup originated in the Paleolithic and R1b originated over 10,000 years ago. The real Indo-Europeans originated just over 6,000 years ago. Showing a genetic relationship is not the same thing as ethnic identity.

And ethnic identity involves language. The R1b ancestors of Tutankhamun wholly adopted the native Egyptian language, just like the Hyksos did. Studies of changes in the language like Stauder and Allen ignore influences on Egyptian from Anatolia; scholars of ancient Egyptian are wholly absorbed into the Arabicist/Semitic camp. But it ought to be there. It would be analogous to the way Akkadian changed during Gutian hegemony (the Gutians were the ancestors of the Indo-European Tocharians), losing its gutturals for one thing, such that the scholars convened by Utu-Hengel could not understand the grammar of city king lists compiled under Naram-Sin and his predecessors. Jacobson writes about the evidence of the problem.

UNLESS. Evidence that Middle Kingdom Egyptian had two- and three-letter verbal roots might coordinate with my observations of the true -mi verbs in Classical Greek, which have high-frequency meanings and from that alone, stand to be the oldest verbs. And so eimi, "be", is just a baby step away from Hebrew hayah with the same meaning. Greek didomi, "give", may have affinities with Hebrew titen. Greek oida, found in the Iliad and lately admitted to the ranks of -mi verbs, is a cognate of Hebrew yada. 

My study of Classical Greek rejects tenses in the verb system in favor of aspect. Alan Gardiner's grammar of Egyptian from 1927 describes the language as using imperfective and perfective, although he can't help himself and calls them tenses instead of aspects. (I downloaded his book from Internet Archive and need to go through it in depth.) Hurrian, an Anatolian language, exhibits aspect; it is also ergative and in case you didn't read my Greek thread, there are ergative structures in Thucydides, Xenophon and Herodotus. Ergativity is another subject that neither Gardiner nor the Arabicists would think of discussing, but it would show up as another influence from Anatolia.

The mothers of this line also had DNA primarily found in Europe: Amenhotep III had H2b, associated with the Caucasian Yamna culture which seems to be the ancestor of the NE Anatolian peoples. The others had K, a haplogroup the descendants of which show up in Lola's people from Denmark. Neither H nor K are associated with Arabic peoples and it is hardly likely they would produce a Semitic influence on the Egyptian of the Middle Kingdom -- let alone the substrate in the Old Kingdom.

Before Tutankhamen comes the Hyksos takeover of northern Egypt, while the predecessors of Ahmose who chased them out, still ruled from Memphis south. As Semitic Canaanites, the Hyksos would have had the J1/J2 Neolithic farmer subclades still found in some Lebanese. The "native" Egyptians did not impose some kind of iron curtain; they bought wheat from the Delta to feed pigs. But it's hard to imagine the priests and nobles engaging in trade. The evidence of literate commoners begins with about the 600s BCE with the development of demotic, not in the Middle Kingdom, so traders aren't going to influence Middle Kingdom language much -- and the Old Kingdom not at all. The Semiticists among scholars of ancient Egyptian look more and more wrong.

And then another turnabout. The Ramessids had subclades from the E Y-chromosome haplogroup. This developed in northeastern Africa. It persists among Copts and in Christian Palestinians, suggesting that the latter originated from Coptic Christians. (Muslim Palestinians have the J1/J2 subclades.)

Specifically, the New Kingdom pharaohs had E-M96, a subclade associated with Bantu expansion to the northeast. And again, nobody who examines pre-Greek Egyptian looks at Bantu languages for influence. The best known Bantu language, Swahili, is aspectual.

As for their mothers, the mtDNA of Ramses II is H1b1b1, while Ramses III has E1b1a. Ramses II descended, once again, from the Pontic steppes, while the mother of Ramses III was pure African.

So once again, scholars can only build on what their sources say -- but those sources may be prejudiced or outdated -- or ignored by scholars who are pipelined, which has been a serious problem for centuries. Before we learned that humans originated in Africa, who would ever have studied the Bantu languages seriously -- and who is studying them seriously now? 

The wheel keeps turning. What we thought we knew must forever be re-examined in the light of what we learn, to correct misconceptions.