Culture

The New Kingdom era unearthed in Tuna el Gebel district of Minya

December, 28, 2024-05:07

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The New Kingdom era unearthed in Tuna el Gebel district of Minya



Radiocarbon-dating techniques place the mummy as having lived somewhere around Egypt's New Kingdom era, between 1686-1449 BC, although they admitted that 'its exact provenance within Egypt is unknown.' The technique measures traces of carbon atom isotopes in once living tissue, specifically the radioactive version of carbon, carbon-14. Animals absorb carbon-14 when they breathe, but slowly lose it all as the centuries pass after their death.



The team's ancient mummy was an adult male, sourced from the collection of the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy, which is home to finds from ancient Egypt's New Kingdom Tombs of Kha and Merit, among other valued specimens and artifacts.Both bone tissue and intestinal content were sampled from the mummy for a kind of DNA testing known as 'shotgun metagenomics' — which tests unknown samples of genetic material for any and all of the known biological organisms it may contain.
Once they had clues of bubonic plague from this method, the samples were further processed focusing on getting 'low coverage genome-wide data of both the human host and the Y. pestis pathogen.'The team is now using that viral DNA map to explore how Y. pestis evolved and varied between its time in ancient Egypt, the middle Ages and the modern day.