Who I am · where I’m fromSince 3100 BC
مِصْر
Egypt
Miṣr. Where my family is from, and where I am from before I am from anywhere else. Five thousand years of continuous written record, on one river, in a country that is ninety-five percent uninhabitable desert and has always been a thin green line rather than a shape.
The pyramids are the part everyone knows and they are only the first act. The Egypt my parents left is fourteen centuries of Arabic, Cairo, al-Azhar and the Mamluks; and the bit that actually made it across the ocean into my house is the food.
The DNA87% Egyptian
Everything above this is a country. This is the part of it that is actually me. I took the test half expecting the map to be vague about it, and it came back with a shape I recognised: the valley, the delta and the thin green line, at eighty-seven percent.
- Egypt87%
- Ethiopia & Eritrea5%
- North Africa2%
- Nilotic Peoples1%
- Three more groups5%
The eighty-seven splits almost evenly down the middle (45% from one parent and 42% from the other), which is the least surprising sentence on this page and still the one I like best. The Ethiopia and Eritrea share is the Nile doing what the Nile has always done: the river is a road, and it has been carrying people north for five thousand years.
