> While alot of Western Egyptologists are most
> concerned with royalty the bias is essentially to
> study the hegemony of the king. For a native East
> African, perhaps we can recognize certain nuances
> about the structure of society and hereditary
> roles that do not resonate as readily for
> Westerners? In other words, there are common
> threads of inheritance
> still passed down amongst the Hadendoa, the Beja
> and Western Desert Indigene that mirror those of
> ancient ancestors.

That's really interesting. Matrilinear cultures are fairly rare.

However, the fact that such cultures are from East Africa does *not* mean that the Ancient Egyptians also had a matrilinear culture. We know they did not, and that is not because of a Western or patrilinear bias, but because they themselves *say* they did not.