The Mummies of Abusir el-Meleq

Abusir el-Meleq served the city of Herakleopolis as a necropolis for nearly four thousand years, from about 3250 BCE to 700 CE, and was known for its cult of Osiris. Otto Rubensohn's excavations of 1902 to 1905 carried its mummies to Germany, where they remain. These two individuals died in the seventh century BCE, at the passage from the Third Intermediate Period to the Late Period. Their nuclear genomes were among the first ever recovered from Egyptian mummies, and they showed the ancient people of the Nile sitting closer to the populations of the Near East than modern Egyptians do; today's Egyptians carry about 8 percent more sub-Saharan African ancestry, gained in the centuries after Rome.

The genome-wide data behind this entry was published in Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods.

Every Ancestry Map includes the free Notable Matches lens: your coordinates are compared to every sequenced member of every catalog entry, and the distance to the closest member is reported, a Euclidean distance in the same 25-dimensional space the Distance lens uses. Because these are a small group of real individuals, not a population average, distances naturally run larger than population distances. That is expected, not a poor result. And one thing is never claimed: a small distance means similar ancestry composition, not that the Mummies of Abusir el-Meleq are your ancestor. See how it looks in the live demo or read about Ancestry Map, the full Global25 report.

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  Who were the Mummies of Abusir el-Meleq?

  The Mummies of Abusir el-Meleq (c. 775-560 BCE, Abusir el-Meleq, Beni Suef, Egypt) are one of the Iconic discoveries entries in our Notable Matches catalog, represented by 2 sequenced ancient genomes published in the study "Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods".

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  What does "matching" the Mummies of Abusir el-Meleq mean?

  Your Global25 coordinates are compared to the entry's sequenced members and the distance to the closest one is reported, a Euclidean distance in the same 25-dimensional reference space the Distance lens uses. A notable entry is one person or one small burial group, not a population average, so distances naturally run larger than population distances.

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  Are they my ancestor?

  No, and no DNA test can show that. A small distance means your genome sits near theirs in a shared reference space: similar ancestry composition, not descent. Ancestrify never claims a notable individual is your ancestor or relative.

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  How do I see my own distance to the Mummies of Abusir el-Meleq?

  Notable Matches is a free lens on every Ancestry Map, never sold separately. Order Ancestry Map, our Global25 analysis (29.99 EUR), and your report ranks your coordinates against the full catalog, with a portrait, dossier and map for every entry. The public demo shows the lens with example data.

The catalog holds every published entry across three tiers. Browse the full Notable Matches directory. Nearby entries:

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