The mystery behind the 4000-year-old 'Two Brothers' mummies has been solved!
| Updated: Jan 18, 2018, 13:15 IST
Have you heard about the 'Two Brothers' mummies? Well, for all of you not in the know, the mummies date back to 1800 BC. It was also reported that the two mummies have different fathers but are actually half-brothers and have the same mother. This, scientists have found using next-generation DNA sequencing. The Two Brothers mummies are among the best-known human remains in the Egyptology collection and can be found at the Manchester Museum in the UK.
The pairs joint burial site, dubbed The Tomb of The Two Brothers, was discovered at Deir Rifeh, a village 402 kilometres south of Cairo and ever since their discovery in 1907 there has been some debate among Egyptologists whether the two were actually related at all. Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the coffins indicated that both men were the sons of an unnamed local governor and had mothers with the same name, Khnum-aa. It was then the men became known as the Two Brothers. When the complete contents of the tomb were shipped to Manchester in 1908 and the mummies of both men were unwrapped by the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, her team concluded that the skeletal morphologies were quite different, suggesting an absence of a family relationship. Based on the contemporary inscriptional evidence, it was proposed that one of the Brothers was adopted.
However, analysis now showed that both Nakht-Ankh and Khnum-Nakht belonged to mitochondrial haplotype M1a1, suggesting a maternal relationship. The study indicated that Nakht-Ankh and Khnum-Nakht had different fathers, and were thus very likely to have been half-brothers. The study, which appears in the Journal of Archaeological Science, is the first to successfully use the typing of both mitochondrial and Y chromosomal DNA in Egyptian mummies.
The pairs joint burial site, dubbed The Tomb of The Two Brothers, was discovered at Deir Rifeh, a village 402 kilometres south of Cairo and ever since their discovery in 1907 there has been some debate among Egyptologists whether the two were actually related at all. Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the coffins indicated that both men were the sons of an unnamed local governor and had mothers with the same name, Khnum-aa. It was then the men became known as the Two Brothers. When the complete contents of the tomb were shipped to Manchester in 1908 and the mummies of both men were unwrapped by the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, her team concluded that the skeletal morphologies were quite different, suggesting an absence of a family relationship. Based on the contemporary inscriptional evidence, it was proposed that one of the Brothers was adopted.
However, analysis now showed that both Nakht-Ankh and Khnum-Nakht belonged to mitochondrial haplotype M1a1, suggesting a maternal relationship. The study indicated that Nakht-Ankh and Khnum-Nakht had different fathers, and were thus very likely to have been half-brothers. The study, which appears in the Journal of Archaeological Science, is the first to successfully use the typing of both mitochondrial and Y chromosomal DNA in Egyptian mummies.