He did not know that.

There was no concept of genetic ancestry in Old Kingdom Egypt — no understanding of DNA or genomics or population history.

He understood himself through the categories that mattered in his world: his community, his family, his social position, his relationship to the gods and to the pharaoh who embodied divine order on earth.

His genome is a kind of memory that he did not know he was carrying — a biological record of connections reaching back millennia before his birth, preserved in the molecular structure of his teeth and bones, waiting for science to develop the tools to read it.

The reading, finally completed in 2025, connects him to the ancient world in ways that historians had suspected but could not confirm.