It provides a different kind of evidence about a different kind of person — not the elite whose texts have survived, but the ordinary person whose genetic material has survived instead.

The genome cannot tell us what he thought or believed, but it can tell us something about his biological connections to the broader world — connections that the texts would not have recorded because they were not the kind of connections that elite Egyptians thought worth documenting.

The ancient Near Eastern connectivity visible in NUE001’s genome is consistent with a picture of Old Kingdom Egypt that historians have assembled from multiple lines of evidence: a civilization deeply embedded in a broader connected world, trading with and influenced by neighbors to the east and north, absorbing people and ideas from multiple directions while maintaining a distinctive cultural identity that was unmistakably and profoundly Egyptian.

The texts of the Old Kingdom record the campaigns of the pharaoh Sneferu against the Libyans to the west and the Nubians to the south; the trade expeditions to Byblos in Lebanon for cedar; the mining operations in the Sinai for turquoise and copper.