Paleogenetics have completely restored and deciphered the DNA of almost a hundred ancient Egyptian mummies of people who lived in different historical eras, from the Middle Kingdom to the times of the rule of Rome, according to an article published in the journal Nature Communications.
“The fact that DNA can survive to this day in such conditions has always caused skepticism in us. Egypt's hot climate, high humidity levels in many tombs, and the chemicals used for mummification all contribute to DNA destruction and make the chances of keeping DNA fragments minimal,”says Johannes Krause, a renowned paleogeneticist at the University of Tübingen, Germany).
Mummy secrets
Over the past ten years, scientists have made many breakthroughs in restoring the DNA of long-dead people, "resurrecting" the genomes of Neanderthals, Denisovans, Cro-Magnons from scraps of the genetic code in their bones. In addition to this, leading geneticists and archaeologists, including Krause himself, have recovered and studied the DNA of many famous mummies - the Alpine "ice man" Yotzi, as well as the oldest mummies on Earth from the Chinchorro culture in Chile.
The DNA of these mummies helped scientists to reveal many secrets of the migrations of peoples in Europe and America, to understand what people got sick and from what they died in the distant past, and whether their descendants exist today. For example, the closest descendants of Yotzi today live in Sardinia, and the mummy of the Inca girl helped scientists uncover a previously unknown population of Indians in Peru, which was almost completely destroyed by the conquistadors during the conquest of South America.
Scientists at the University of Tübingen are working to extract DNA from the remains of the ancient Egyptians. Photo: Johannes Krause
Ancient Egyptian mummies, as Krause notes, have never actually undergone such an analysis for two reasons: the conditions of their "preparation" and burial do not contribute to the preservation of DNA, and most of the known mummies are hopelessly contaminated with foreign DNA due to improper handling in the 19th and 20th centuries. Therefore, in the best case, scientists knew only a few scraps of ancient Egyptian DNA, and the genetic secrets of the Egyptians remained inaccessible for study.
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For this reason, Krause and his colleagues had to spend an enormous amount of time searching for mummies that were not touched by the hands of archaeologists and, at the same time, retained enough DNA scraps in themselves for the genome to be fully restored.
Eternity of egypt
Scientists managed to find such mummies in the town of Abusir el-Melek on the banks of the Nile in central Egypt. It was a center of pilgrimage and worship for Osiris, the god of fertility and the Nile, and a popular burial place for nobles and officials from Memphis and other major cities of Ancient Egypt, as well as less wealthy people.
Over 150 mummies were buried here during the Middle Kingdom and in later historical periods. The genomes of 90 of them were only partially read, and only three mummies contained enough genetic material to completely restore DNA.
This, according to Krause, was quite enough to trace how the population of Ancient Egypt changed over time, how it was influenced by various events of that period, for example, the invasion of the "Sea Peoples" in the era of Ramses II or the ancient Romans and Macedonians in antiquity …
In total, as the sets of small mutations in the DNA of mummies show, about 300 thousand people lived in central Egypt at that time, and the population of this region remained almost unchanged throughout this period, which indicates its high stability.
As Krause and his colleagues note, the ancient Egyptians were related to the peoples living in the Levant, and were also close to the first inhabitants of Europe and the Anatolian Peninsula. Interestingly, the invasions of foreigners actually did not affect the life of the ancient Egyptians in any way and did not lead to large-scale genetic restructuring until the time of the fall of the Roman Empire.
Their modern descendants, the Coptic Egyptians, are very different in this respect from their ancestors - their DNA contains eight percent more genes inherited from populations of people from southern Africa. Why this happened, scientists do not yet know, but they believe that migration processes intensified after the fall of ancient empires, when people from the central regions of Africa began to move northward, populating the fertile Nile Valley and its delta.
One of the reasons for these migrations, as scientists suggest, could be the slave trade, which reached its peak during the Arab and Ottoman rule, but unambiguous conclusions can only be drawn after analyzing the DNA of people who lived in Egypt at that time.
