 At the UNESCO "Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic script" in Cairo in 1974, the Black hypothesis met with profound disagreement.Nearly all participants concluded that the ancient Egyptian population was indigenous to the Nile Valley, and was made up of people from north and south of the Sahara who were differentiated by their color.In 2017, a genetic study of mummies from northern Egypt (near modern-day Cairo) showed that Ancient Egyptians had the greatest affinity for modern Middle Eastern (Arab, Levantine and Anatolian) populations, and had significantly more affinity with southeastern Europeans than with sub-Saharan Africans.