Looting the Ancient Egyptian DNA
A few days ago, while on my usual morning commute in the busy streets of Cairo, I heard the radio host speaking about a recent study suggesting that ancient Egyptians came from the Levant and parts of Europe. As fishy as this sounded to me, I didn’t care much to search for that piece of news, well, until it popped up in front of my face from all various sources — and popping it did. I couldn’t stand the smell of dead fish any longer, and that’s when I decided to dig into that matter a little more deeper.
The ancient Egyptians left wonders behind them more than any other civilization in history. Their craftsmanship and discipline is epitomized by the last standing wonder of the world, the Great Pyramids of Giza. There’s even a branch of science, Egyptology, dedicated to studying the wonders of this culture, one that continues to daze us around the world whether through massive exhibitions in famous museums or through rich representation in the media, including frequent Hollywood blockbusters.
That sort of fascination is not something new. More than 200 years ago, around the time of the Napoleonic expedition in Egypt, there was a race between France and Britain to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Ever since the French scholar, Champollion, was able to successfully decipher the Rosetta Stone’s hieroglyphics, Egypt has turned into a Mecca to treasure seekers and glory hunters.That was also about the time when a trend of disowning Egypt of its own treasure started to take place.
This trend began with the foreign excavators duping the unaware locals into letting them leave with the artefacts, as if it was a matter of finders keepers. Then, the matter extended to the levels of authority, to the point that many artefacts — and sometimes even whole temples — were given as a gift by the rulers of Egypt to their foreign counterparts. Egyptians, who were deeply entrenched in the Turkish and Arab cultures back then, didn’t feel particular affiliation with the pharaohs, especially with the negative connotation of the word “pharaoh” in both the Quran and the Bible. And so the trend continued to the modern days, which partly explains the diaspora of Egyptian treasures around the world. Only partly.
The outflux of the artefacts wasn’t always in such a “legalized” way. Since the times of the pharaohs themselves, treasures had been looted inside and outside of Egypt, let alone destroyed. It’s a combination of greed and ignorance that makes someone steals from his own land, and such a case is not rare in Egypt. Many in the world, including many Egyptians, feel a severe disconnection between ancient and modern Egypt, and so, it is not difficult for an Egyptian to feel as foreigner to such treasures as, say, a German; hence, he feels no ownership of it in the first place. In the same sense, the foreigner, as well as the Egyptian, can, for example, both fantasize about whoever built the Pyramids, because, to them, it doesn’t seem like the Egyptians did it.
So who did? According to the popular theories around, it’s got to be aliens…or the Israelites…or a universal civilization…or a race of giants from Yemen…or the blacks from Ethiopia…or the Tartars from as far as Russia…or maybe some divine power. Or, as the latest headlines hint to, people from the Levant and parts of Europe. Because it can’t be the Egyptians, those who are currently struggling to run their own country. I once came across a black-American children’s book about the Pyramids being built by “blacks,” not to mention the small demonstration in front of the King Tut exhibit in the USA chanting “King Tut was black and is still black.” Now, we are shifting towards a whiter future. Apparently, after the world has looted lots of Egyptian treasures out of Egypt, now, it seems, they are looting it out of its DNA as well, albeit implicitly.
The aforementioned study was recently published in the renowned scientific journal, Nature, under the headline “Mummy DNA unravels ancient Egyptians’ ancestry” and the sub-heading “Genetic analysis reveals a close relationship with Middle Easterners, not central Africans.” Compare this to the Verge’s “Mummy DNA shows that the ancients don’t have much in common with modern Egyptians” or the Daily Mail’s “Study of mummies reveals they were Turkish and European” or the Huffington Post’s (Arabic version) “Ancient Egyptians were Turkish and Levantine. So from Where Did Come the Modern Egyptians?”
One might argue, validly enough, that these are not the most respectable sources of information, but, unfortunately, they are among the most popular, and, consequently, they represent the popular mood in a way. Yet, even many respectable news sources like ABC included factual errors in their sub-headings like “Ancient genome from this area contains almost no sub-Saharan DNA that dominates the genetic profile of modern Egyptians” something that is not true when compared to what is presented in the study.
In the paper presented by an international team of scientists, led by researchers from the University of Tuebingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, the scientists claim to be the first to successfully extract DNA from Egyptian mummies without contamination from modern DNA, citing discrediting of previous studies, including one regarding King Tut’s mummy’s DNA analysis, due to such contamination. The 90 mummies they studied were all from the same region from middle Egypt and they span around 1,300 years of ancient Egyptian history from the New Kingdom to the Roman Period.
The study itself does not mention any claim about the origins of ancient Egyptians, but the data does indeed seem to suggest higher affinity with ancient and modern Near Easterners and Europeans than with modern Egyptians, citing a slightly larger (around 8% at its maximum) sub-saharan African component in modern Egyptians as the main reason for such distinction, while acknowledging that the genes of those European and Near Eastern societies were largely unaltered over that period when compared to Egyptians, which, to me, is understandable given Egypt’s geographical position as the crossroad of 3 continents.
Nevertheless, there is some shade on the study itself and the way the data was obtained. First, all the mummies were from the same area in Egypt as its author acknowledges, which undermines the integrity of the conclusion as thus the study lacks a scientific control; it also exposes any claim (reciprocated even in the study itself) about the ancient Egyptians in general as a hasty generalization, as the data is certainly not a result of random sampling, hence not representative of the whole ancient population. Second, all DNA was extracted where the mummies are, in Berlin, which, despite the extensive details of how the researchers excluded modern DNA contamination from the mummies, still might cast some doubt on the results, given the conclusion.
The study furtherly provides a very interesting detail: “Genetic continuity between ancient and modern Egyptians cannot be ruled out by our formal test despite this sub-Saharan African influx, while continuity with modern Ethiopians, who carry >60% African lineages, is not supported.” It might seem weird to try to disprove the continuity of an inhabitants of a land like Egypt and suggest replacement, given that its population was always relatively high! Yet I do agree that science should question even the highly unlikely, but what I don’t understand is why such a negative tone? It’s not even clear — nor is it in the scope of the study — why such continuity is contested in the first place!
In accordance with a cited study about the genome of Ethiopians and Egyptians, the researchers acknowledge that the modern Egyptian DNA include 80% of non-African ancestry. The author of the cited study concludes that “the analysis of Ethiopian and Egyptian whole-genome sequence data identifies modern Egyptians as the African population whose genome and haplotype frequency most closely resemble those of non-African populations.” This is a little bit off with respect to National Geographic’s The Genographic Project classification which puts the Eastern African component at just 3% while dedicates a whooping 68% to a distinct Northern African one. Either case, in light of both classifications the conclusions of the original study don’t sound that surprising. After all, Egypt has been at the crossroads of the old world, and it’s normal for its DNA to be more dynamic with the advent of transportation and the spread of religion and trade during the middle ages.
The controversy about the ancient Egyptian genes is nothing new, as it is in the heart of many racial cold wars. The Black Hypothesis is widely pushed to further the influence of blacks upon culture, while what we may call the White hypothesis seems to be advancing under the guise of popular science. Yet the facts remain that ancient Egyptians looked — and sometimes behaved — a lot like modern Egyptians — if their arts are to be believed, that is. This study may indicate that ancient Egyptians had less diverse DNA than modern ones, but it doesn’t answer where those ancients come from. Well, the answer is that they did come from Egypt.
Everyone wants a piece of the ancient Egyptian cake with all its glamour and majesty. In the past, they looted the artefacts out of the land, and today they want to loot the DNA too. Under the influence of the constructed notion of race, truth would take a back seat. It’s our responsibility to distinct real science from popular science by digging deeper into the sources while avoiding catchy headlines and concise articles in which facts are distorted and conclusions are twisted. We need more of the scientific spirit of this study and less of the hype surrounding it — more work, less talk.
Egyptians form a gradient of cultures and origins. And no matter who came to this land or from where, they were integrated into its fabric to expand and enrich this gradient. In such turbulent times, that’s what we need to preserve and reciprocate.
