SORRY, THE INHABITANTS OF GURNA ARE NOT RELATED TO THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS – AND THEIR GENETIC STRUCTURE PROVES THAT

Old Gurna

Many in the world claim to be the direct descendants of the Pharaonic race. I have heard this claim from people in West Africa (Senegalese), Sudan, America (Afro-Americans) and even in UK (Afro-Carri beans in Bristol). In Egypt it is all over the place – Arabs, Turks and Berber have joined the fashion, and this claim intensified after 9 11 as they try to distant themselves from an Arab connection. It amounts to cultural appropriation of the worst type – appropriation, that’s theft and usurpation, of identity and historical lineage and heritage. It’s akin to the attempt by the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (now North Macedonia) appropriating the Macedonian identity and heritage that belongs to Greece and the Greeks. In like manner, any claims by these peoples is a cultural appropriation of the Pharaonic identity and heritage that belongs only to the Copts.

One of the many peoples in Egypt who claim common ancestry with the Ancient Egyptians are the Gurnawis, that’s the inhabitants of the village in Upper Egypt known as Gurna (قُرنَّه),[1] which lies in the western bank of the Nile, opposite Luxor. The Gurnawi live over an rich archaeological area close to the Valley of the Kings, where the great Pharaohs of the New Kingdom built monuments such as the Ramesseum, Deir al Bahri and Medinet Habu. The village of Old Gurna was established close to the Temple of Seti I. In the 1940/1950s, the Service of Antiquities moved them to a newly built village – now called New Gurna, all in an attempt to clear the Gurnawis out of the chapels and sepulchres of the Theban nobles.[2] They also live in another nearby village called Sheikh ‘Abd al Gurna (عبد القرنة), close to the Ramesseum.

Gurna was not known in the past and has no Coptic etymology as many old villages and towns in Egypt have. In fact the first time that it is mentioned in any document was in 1668.[3] All travellers and archaeologists knew them as grave-robbers; and it is for this more than anything that they were moved away, but not too much, in the 1940/1950s to New Gurna.[4]

They used to attribute their origin to the Berber tribes of the Libyan Desert and the Maqareb, and they were known to have shared a common race with other Berber tribes that belonged to the larger group of the tribe of Kaszas (قصاص), who with the larger Hawwara tribe started to swallow up Upper Egypt, starting from the fifteenth century. Thus the great Swiss traveller Jean Louis Burckhardt, who visited Egypt in 1812 – 1817, mentions the inhabitants of “Giurne” in the context of his note about Hawwara, telling us about their common Berber origin.

The Hamams[5] were not quiet possessors of Upper Egypt even after the Mamelouks had made peace with them. They were exposed on the northern side to continual attacks from the Libyan Bedouin tribes of Tarhoun, Amaym, Djahame, Rabaya, and others, who dwell in the desert west of Siout and in the plain towards Beni Ady, and many accounts of battles fought between them and the Howara are still related. On the south, the tribe of Kaszas (قصاص) who people the country on the west banks from Thebes to near Esne, and to whom belong the inhabitants of Gourne, Orment, and Reheygat (all celebrated for their bold plundering enterprises) were their determined enemies; although both these and the Howara report that they have the same origin from Barbary.[6]

It is clearly that up to that time the Gurnawis were not interested in attaching themselves to Ancient Egypt – they, in fact, were destroying the antiquities of Ancient Egypt. However, with the rise of Western tourism to Egypt in the 1840/1850s and the interest the Europeans and American showed in Ancient Egypt, the Gurnawis started propagating the myth that they are descendants of the Ancient Egyptians. Whenever a tourist now visits Luxor, he is taken, willingly or unwillingly, to the village of Gurna and its shops that display Egyptian artifacts that are sold at exorbitant prices, and are made to visit workshops that claim to still retain the old skills, inherited from father to son. All of course is a lie – and many in that part of the world experience an immediate allergic reaction to honesty and truth. Ask the inhabitants of Aswan.

Taking that claim at its face value, a group of researchers did a mitochondrial DNA sequence diversity in the population of Gurna. The results were published in Annals of Human Genetics in 2003 under the title, “Mitochondrial DNA Sequence Diversity in a Sedentary Population from Egypt”.[7] On the subjects for this study, the researchers write:

On the subjects of this study, the 58 subjects for this study were volunteers and maternally unrelated. All maternal grandmothers of these individuals were born in Upper Egypt, and for the majority (34 individuals) grandmothers were born in Gurna near Luxor. Gurna individuals hold an ancient cultural oral tradition that they consider as coming from ancient Egypt, and the inhabitants are sedentary people and quite isolated from recent influence (as compared to those of a large metropolis).

The researchers included in their study:

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No. of individuals	Location
34	Gurna
32	Upper Egypt, in places other than Gurna
24	Individuals whose the researchers of the current study included
8	Individuals from Krings et al (1999) study
Other individuals from other studies were also included for comparison, including individuals from: –          Egypt, Nubia and Sudan[8] –          Kenya[9] –          Berber[10] –          Palestine, Syria, Turkey and Bedouins from Saudi Arabia[11]

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The researchers extracted DNA from hair roots of the control region, and the DNA was amplified by PCR and then sequencing was carried out. The mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) were classified within haplogroups.

The researchers were struck by the strong similarity between the Gurwani and the Ethiopian population (the two populations were not statistically significant) in the frequency of the haplogroups L1, L2 and M, but also in other groups, as in the following table:

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Haplogroup	Ethiopian population[12]	Gurna population
All L1 and L2	24.7%	20.6%
M	30.3%	17.6%
I, J, K, all L1 and L2[13]	55.4%	41.2%
H, T, U, V, W and X	24.3%	38.2%

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Thus, the Gurwanis were close to the Ethiopian population. They, however, were not isolated from all other neighbouring populations. Their gene pool does consist of a combination of Near Eastern and sub-Saharan gene pools, but also include an East African specific component which characterise it from other populations included in the study, except the Ethiopian population. The Ethiopian gene pool, as in Passarini et al (1998), was found to be similar to that of the Gurwanis: they also show a combination of Near Eastern and sub-Saharan gene pools, but also include an East African specific component.

The researchers, therefore, conclude that “The result of this study point to a genetic structure of the Gurna population similar to that of the Ethiopian one”.

This dispels then the myth propagated by the Gurnawis that they are descendants of the Ancient Egyptians. It settles the question once and for all. The attempts at cultural appropriation by usurping what is historically the right of the Copts – the real descendants of the Ancient Egyptians – must now stop, at least from the Gurwanis.

Nothing genetically wrong with the Gurnawis or the Ethiopians. What we criticise here is the attempt at cultural appropriation of what belongs to the Copts. This must be understood.

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[1] Also written Qurna, Quorna, Qurneh, Gourne, Kurna.

[2] Christine Desroches-Boblecourt, Tutankhamen (Penguin Books, 1971), p. 30.

[3] Mentioned by two Catholic missionaries who visited Egypt then, Protais and Charles François de’Orléans.

[4] Tutankhamen, p. 30.

[5] The leading Hawwara family. For more on the Hawwara, read: Dioscorus Boles, How the Hawwara tribe of Upper Egypt enslaved the Copts (July 25, 2020).

[6] Jean Louis Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia (Published by the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa, London, 1819), p. 532.

[7] A. Stevanovitch et al, Mitochondrial DNA Sequence Diversity in a Sedentary Population from Egypt. Annals of Human Genetics (2003), 68, 23-39.

[8] Krings et al, 1999.

[9] Watson et al, 1996; Horai & Hayaska, 1990.

[10] Corte-Real et al, 1996; Pinto et al, 1996.

[11] Richards et al, 2000.

[12] This data was taken from Passarino et al, 1998.

[13] Here, L1 and L2 have different restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP).