His ancestors had lived in the Nile Valley for generations beyond counting.

Some of those ancestors, further back, had come from the east — from the land between the rivers, from populations that had been part of the world’s first urban civilizations before the pyramids of Egypt were imagined.

Those distant ancestors had mixed with the North African population of the Nile Valley and, generation by generation, their descendants had become Egyptian in every sense that mattered.

He died not knowing that his tooth would survive him by four and a half thousand years.