The Egyptians are not Arabs, and both they and the Arabs are aware of this fact. They are Arabic-speaking, and they are Muslim—indeed religion plays a greater part in their lives than it does in those either of the Syrians or the Iraqi.
Robert Morkot wrote in 2005 that "The ancient Egyptians were not 'white' in any European sense, nor were they 'Caucasian'... we can say that the earliest population of ancient Egypt included African people from the upper Nile, African people from the regions of the Sahara and modern Libya, and smaller numbers of people ...
As the graph below shows, only 17 percent of Egyptians are Arabs, while 68 percent of the indigenous population is from North Africa, four percent are from Jewish ancestry, three percent are of East African origins, another three percent from Asia Minor and three percent are South European.
Although Egypt sits in the north of the African continent it is considered by many to be a Middle Eastern country, partly because the main spoken language there is Egyptian Arabic, the main religion is Islam and it is a member of the Arab League.
National Geographic's DNA Analysis Concludes that Egyptians are Only 17% Arab.
The Egyptians are not Arabs, and both they and the Arabs are aware of this fact. They are Arabic-speaking, and they are Muslim—indeed religion plays a greater part in their lives than it does in those either of the Syrians or the Iraqi.
The Arabian Peninsula was the initial site of the out-of-Africa migrations that occurred between 125,000 and 60,000 yr ago, leading to the hypothesis that the first Eurasian populations were established on the Peninsula and that contemporary indigenous Arabs are direct descendants of these ancient peoples.
Who is an Arab? Arab is an ethno-linguistic category, identifying people who speak the Arabic language as their mother tongue (or, in the case of immigrants, for example, whose parents or grandparents spoke Arabic as their native language). Arabic is a Semitic language, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic.
The official language of Egypt is Arabic, and most Egyptians speak one of several vernacular dialects of that language. As is the case in other Arab countries, the spoken vernacular differs greatly from the literary language.
Ancient Egyptians Were Likely To Be Ethnically Diverse
Scholarly research suggests there were many different skin colours across Egypt, including what we now call white, brown and black.
Copts and Egyptians displayed similar levels of European/Middle Eastern ancestry (Copts were estimated to be of 69.54% ± 2.57 European ancestry, and the Egyptians of 70.65% ± 2.47 European ancestry). The study concluded that the Copts and the Egyptians have a common history linked to smaller population sizes.
Modern Egyptians share 8% of their genome with central Africans, far more than ancient ones, according to the study, published in the journal Nature Communications. The influx of sub-Saharan genes only occurred within the last 1,500 years.
After the fall of Rome, Egypt became part of the Byzantine Empire, until it was conquered by the Muslim Arabs in 641 CE. Throughout the Middle Ages, from its conquest by the Islamic Empire in the year 641 until 1517, Egypt was governed as part of a series of Arab Caliphates.
Ancient Egyptian is considered to be a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family, meaning that ancient Egyptian has similarities to Akkadian, Arabic and Hebrew, and is quite different from Indo-European languages like English, French and German.
Arabic was spoken in parts of Egypt such as the Eastern Desert and Sinai before Islam. However, Nile Valley Egyptians slowly adopted Arabic as a written language following the Muslim conquest of Egypt in the seventh century.
The Egyptian Arabic dialect is so diverse and has been influenced by many languages due to the colonization of Egypt by many other peoples, such as the Ottomans, the British, the Greeks, the Romans, and the French.
There are four principal West-Eurasian autosomal DNA components that characterize the populations in the Arab world: the Arabian, Levantine, Coptic and Maghrebi components. The Arabian component is the main autosomal element in the Gulf region. It is most closely associated with local Arabic-speaking populations.
Arab ancestry among Indians
It is estimated that several groups in India have Middle Eastern Arab ancestry. Especially Muslim groups and various populations in western India have at least some Arab ancestry. Genetic analyses show that Arab and other West Asian lineages are quite common in Indians.
People of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) descent are categorized as non-White in many Western countries but counted as White on the US Census.
Arab Americans are Americans of Arab descent. There are Americans with roots in each Arab country, but most originate from Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. There are also substantial communities from Egypt, Yemen and Iraq. The first immigrants arrived in the late 19th century.
Abraham in Islam
Abraham is called Ibrahim by Muslims. They see him as the father of the Arab people as well as the Jewish people through his two sons, Isaac and Ishmael (Isma'il in Arabic).
The Syed, Arain, Thahim, Al-Tamimi, Abbasi, Mashwani, Awan, Alvi, Ansari, Usmani, Poswal, and Farooqui are all Pakistani communities that claim Arab ancestry.
But Morocco is also a member of the Arab League - so officially belongs to both cultural spheres. While the adjective "African" to describe Morocco is a geographical fact, the use of "Arab" has also alienated many Moroccans who do not identify as such.
The Arabs were originally the people of the Arabian desert. Converted to Islam in the 7th century A.D., they conquered the Middle East from the Sassanian and Byzantine empires and established a succession of Arab-Islamic Middle Eastern empires from Spain to Central Asia and from the Caucasus to India.