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DNA test confirms two mysterious 'brother mummies' had different fathers
A long-believed speculation turned out false after a recent DNA test that revealed the 4000-year-old mummies from Egypt were actually related on the mother side with two different fathers. These popular mummies were nicknamed as "Two Brothers" by the officials at the museum in which they were kept.
The DNA test revealed that the mummies belonged to two men from the elite class of Egypt who was named "Khnum-Nakht" and "Nakht-Ankh". They were actually born of the same mother but had a different father which makes them half-brothers. The study was conducted by researchers from the University of Manchester by the use of DNA sequencing.
Konstantina Drosou, a researcher from the University of Manchester said that the journey to obtain the results of this test was very exhausting but it finally delivered the accurate result. A small but highly significant piece of ancient history was added to the puzzle behind Egypt's ancestry. Ancient DNA tracing has numerous implications while enabling the study of our past and ancestors.
Also at Science News and Newsweek.
The kinship of two 12th Dynasty mummies revealed by ancient DNA sequencing (DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.12.025) (DX)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @10:10PM
The pharaohs routinely married their sisters (usually half-sisters), to keep the royal line pure. Oddly enough, it would seem that this practice of incest even extended down to the common people, though unequivocal evidence for it outside of the pharaoh's family is rare before the Roman period. Plenty of evidence for incestuous marriages among commoners may have come to light only in the Roman era because of the Romans' famous penchant for meticulous record keeping. How common the practice really was among the ordinary people in previous periods of Egyptian history is hard to say. It was not unheard of in Pharaonic times, but it may have begun to be really common during the Ptolemaic period, because the Ptolemies themselves did it a lot.
https://cnersundergraduatejournal.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/incest_in_ancient_egypt_revised_.pdf [wordpress.com]
The fact that the ancient Egyptian words for "sister" and "brother" were also used to denote husbands, wives, and lovers further muddies the issue.