Mummy DNA Reveals Origins Of Ancient Egyptians May Stem From Biblical Roots

Scientists have decoded the genome of ancient Egyptians based on the DNA taken from Egyptian mummies. The results support the Biblical narrative that the First Egyptian Dynasty descended from the Biblical Ham, the son of Noah, as described in the Book of Genesis.

The findings of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications. The work was led by researchers from the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. The mummies were discovered in Abusir-el Meleq, Middle Egypt. They were the closest genetic relatives of Neolithic and Bronze Age populations from Anatolia, Near East and Eastern Mediterranean Europeans, according to CNN.

Based on the Bible, Mizrayim, who was the son of Ham, settled in Egypt. Meanwhile, Ham's other son Cush settled in Africa. They founded two distinct and separate nations and did not share a common heritage. In the scientific theory, it indicates that the origins of Egypt and Africa were the same, according to Breaking Israel News.

In the new study of the DNA of discovered mummies, the scientists sampled 151 mummies from Abusir el-Meleq. These samples dated 1,300 years of ancient Egyptian history from about 1388 BCE to 426 CE. They gathered 90 samples of mitochondrial DNA and three samples of genomes, the total of an organism's DNA.

The results indicate that ancient Egyptians were more closely related to populations from the Near East and Southwest Asia. It was previously thought that they come from northern Africa.

Johannes Krause, the lead author of the study from the Max Planck Institute, said that they found ancient Egyptians look very Near Eastern and have almost zero sub-Saharan African ancestries. He further said that the ancient Egyptians were more closely related to Europeans than they are to modern-day Egyptians. The study also suggests that the African influence on Egyptians entered the gene pool after the Roman period.