You must have heard about it, the controversy over the origins of the ancient Egyptians has recently been renewed after the entertainment network "Netflix" showed on its platform the promotional advertisement for a documentary chronicling the life of "Cleopatra", the surprise that the film depicted the Egyptian queen of Greek origins with black skin, and the Egyptians came in the same film with black skin as well, which ignited a controversy about the matter, not only in Egypt but in the whole world.
Some accused the platform of falsifying history to support the "Afrocentrism" movement, while others saw the heroine of the film as similar to Egyptians, especially the people of the south, while Greek newspapers came out with headlines such as: "It seems that Netflix forgot that Cleopatra is Greek", so what is the truth between all these claims?
In fact, the ancient Egyptian civilization was one of the most intriguing civilizations since the discovery of its symbols until the present day, and the origin from which the ancient Egyptians descended has always been the path of wide controversy among scientists, writers and researchers, and since the seventies of the last century the belief that they are sub-Saharan Africans has emerged, but the results of recent research in this scope challenge this theory.
The first DNA of an "Egyptian mummy"
Located at the crossroads of the continents of the ancient world, Egypt has been an ideal area for studying population dynamics and their documented interactions with ancient civilizations in Africa, Asia and Europe. But the complex political history of the ancient Egyptian empire has led ancient scholars to believe that foreigners may have contributed genetically to the DNA of the local population, as a result of frequent mixing through the ages.
Egypt suffered in the first millennium BC from foreign domination, and was invaded by Assyrians, Nubians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, and this resulted in an increase in the number of foreigners living within its borders, which made scientists confused when determining the genetic origin of the ancient Egyptian, and unable to determine the genetic impact of all these "foreign invasions" on the DNA of the Egyptians.
Unfortunately, until recently, the issue of researching the genetic origins of Egyptians was not possible, as the hot desert climate, high humidity inside the tombs, in addition to the chemicals used in mummification, are all factors that led to the destruction of the genetic material of ancient Egyptian mummies, which made scientists for decades unable to analyze the DNA of samples, until they discovered the fact that although the soft tissues of the mummies contained almost no DNA, the bones and teeth were teeming with genetic material.
In 2010, a scientific team was able to extract DNA and examine bone samples of Egyptian mummies. (Getty Images)
Indeed, in 2010, a scientific team was able to extract DNA and examine bone samples of four Egyptian mummies. Albert Zink, one of the study's authors and a bioanthropologist at the Yorke Research Institute for Mummies Studies in Bolzano, Italy, said the discovery finally proved to everyone that there was DNA preserved inside the mummified mummies.
The study used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis, an analysis that amplifies small fragments of RNA, to help read a short sequence of DNA. The analysis was already able to efficiently extract targeted DNA fragments from the mummies, but the study could not reliably differentiate between ancient DNA and modern contamination.
Mummies dating back 1300,<> years
After Albert Zink and his team succeeded in extracting DNA from the bones of ancient mummies, 2017 brought a revolutionary new event that gave scientists the opportunity to study ancient DNA, settle the debate about the origins of ancient Egyptians and rewrite ancient Egyptian history using genetic data.
The event is a study led by Johannes Kraus, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Human History in Germany, which used new methods for reading DNA extensions, in which Krauss and his team were able to separate the recent contamination from the sample in question. This meant separating the first relatively pure sample of ancient DNA, and reading its genetic information for the first time in the history of studies of Egyptian mummies.
"When you touch a bone, your hands on the bone are likely to leave more DNA than what is inside it," Krauss told CNN, adding that this is what he means when he talks about contamination of old DNA samples. For the researchers, this was a big problem that they could not solve for a long time, so that they could show whether the DNA was old or new through its chemical properties, and thus the results of the samples in question became more reliable.
Krauss tells how he and his team succeeded in extracting 166 samples from the bones of the head of 151 Egyptian mummies belonging to the area of "Abu Sir Al-Malaq", a village belonging to the governorate of Beni Suef and contains a group of tombs belonging to predynastic times, the Old Kingdom era and some tombs of the New Kingdom, as this area was dedicated to the worship of the god Osiris, the god of the dead For the ancient Egyptians, making it one of the most famous burial places for centuries.
The heads of mummies had already been removed from the bodies at the beginning of the twentieth century and were divided into two groups, the first preserved at the University of Tübingen in Germany, and the second placed in the Berlin Museum; from there scientists obtained their samples. Scientists then dated the heads of the mummies with radiocarbon, and found that their history extends back to 1300 years of the Egyptian civilization, which means that these mummies were a witness to ancient Egyptian history during many foreign invasions, and even witnessed the merger of the Egyptians with the Greek empires first and then the Romans.
According to researchers, the oldest mummies date back to the New Kingdom, specifically in 1388 BC, when Egypt was at the height of its power and glory. The smallest dates back to 426 AD, when the country was under Roman rule. The researchers took these samples to a laboratory in Germany, where they began sterilizing the room and then placed the samples under ultraviolet light for an hour to sterilize them. From there they were able to sequence the DNA of 90 Egyptian mummies.
Genetic sequence of the ancient Egyptian
Scientists discovered that the human genome of the ancient Egyptians corresponded to the DNA of the ancient and modern inhabitants of the Near East, especially the Levant and the countries of the Mediterranean basin. (Reuters)
Scientists extracted the mummies' DNA from genetic material preserved within the mitochondria, the energy-producing areas within the cell. The crisis that faced the research team at the time was that the mitochondria carried DNA that was transmitted from mother to child only, while completely ignoring the father's DNA, and therefore they were unable to extract the entire nuclear genome of both parents, whose samples could only be extracted from three mummies, each dated for a different period of time.
Krauss' team compared the DNA they extracted from the mitochondria as well as the entire nuclear genome of the three mummies, with the sequence of the human genome of the inhabitants of ancient and modern Africa and the Near East, and the results came as a real surprise, as scientists discovered that the human genome of the ancient Egyptians corresponds to the DNA of the inhabitants of the ancient and modern Near East, especially the Levant region, and the countries of the Mediterranean basin, from Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. Moreover, the study revealed that the genes of the mummies remained remarkably consistent even after the great invasions of empires, i.e. they changed only by a small percentage.
These samples covered the reign of Alexander the Great, the Ptolemaic era, and part of the Roman rule of Egypt, but the genetic factors of the "Abu Sir Al-Malaq" society remained the same without major transformations, which means that the population remained for centuries relatively unaffected by the foreign invasion, which made researchers speculate that there may have been strict social rules or legal obstacles known to the ancient Egyptian that prevented him from marrying or mixing with foreigners, which played a role in this genetic stagnation.
Contemporary Egyptian and African Genes
The study showed that the human genome of modern Egyptians shares genes with Central Africans by up to 8 percent, which is much larger than their ancient ancestors. (Shutterstock)
Despite the widespread claims of some members of the Pan African movement that the ancient Egyptians were Africans who were invaded by foreign Greeks, Romans and Arabs and changed the population dynamics, recent genetic studies prove the opposite. Indeed, a recent study published in the journal Nature revealed that modern Egyptians originally shared much more with sub-Saharan Africans than their ancient Egyptian ancestors, who were more closely associated with the ancient peoples of the Near East.
The study showed that the human genome of modern Egyptians shares genes with the Central African population by up to 8%, which is much larger than their ancient ancestors; sub-Saharan African genes began flowing among the Egyptian people about 1500,<> years ago, which the researchers attributed to the increasing trade between the two peoples along the Nile River at that time.
However, there is, of course, the possibility that these samples are not representative of all of ancient Egypt, as all the genetic data obtained by the researchers came from a single site in Middle Egypt, and the genetic makeup of the population may vary as we head towards the interior closer to southern Africa, something that scientists will work to uncover in the future.
Currently, researchers want to determine exactly when sub-Saharan African genes began to leak into the Egyptian genome, and they want to know the origins of the ancient Egyptians themselves, and to do so they have to identify the oldest DNA, going back in time much further, specifically prehistory.