Ancient disease discovered in ancient DNA of Egyptian mummy

One of the oldest known cases of the ‘Black Death’ plague has been discovered in the ancient DNA of a 3,290-year-old Egyptian mummy.

The c-virus Yersinia pestisor the bubonic plague, is known for the devastation it wrought on medieval Europe – where the deadly disease wiped out nearly 50 million people between 1346 and 1353 in a historic deadly pandemic.

While teams of archaeologists and geneticists have previously found traces of Y. pestis In the remains of 5,000-year-old human skeletons unearthed in what is now Russia, the new find marks the first discovery of the disease outside Eurasia.

The infected mummy provides new clues to how the deadly plague first spread west and provides “molecular evidence for the presence of plague in ancient Egypt.”

Previous studies in recent decades have found evidence that the bubonic plague spread along trade routes along ancient empires in North Africa before hitting Europe, contradicting previous theories that the plague simply drifted from east to west.

An ancient Egyptian medical text known as the Ebers Papyrus, dated to 1500 BC, describes a ‘Black Death’-like illness that produced ‘a bubo’ of telltale ‘fossilized’ pus.

Then in 2004, British archaeologists found evidence of the disease in millennia-old Nile rats and fleas, indicating the disease was present without proving any human infection.

Although the DNA samples the team in Italy took from the plague-infected mummy showed “an already advanced state of disease progression,” the evidence is only the beginning of an investigation into whether ancient Egypt faced its own “Black Death” had to deal with.

Radiocarbon dating techniques place the ‘Black Death’ infected mummy somewhere around Egypt’s New Kingdom era, between 1686 and 1449 BCE. Above, coffins also dating to the New Kingdom era, excavated last year in the Tuna el Gebel district of Minya, Egypt

“We cannot conclude how widespread the disease was during this period,” the 12-member team explained in their academic conference presentation to the European meeting of the Paleopathology Association.

But as infectious as this mummy was, the interdisciplinary team of archaeologists and viral paleontologists believe it was mummified by hand.

Radiocarbon dating techniques indicate the mummy lived sometime around Egypt’s New Kingdom era, between 1686 and 1449 BC, although she admitted that “its exact provenance in Egypt is unknown.”

The technique measures trace amounts 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 death.

The team’s ancient mummy was an adult male from the collection of the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy, which houses finds from ancient Egypt. New kingdom tombs of Kha and Meritamong other prized specimens and artifacts.

Both the bone tissue and intestinal contents were sampled from the mummy for a type of DNA test known as ‘shotgun metagenomics’ – where unknown samples of genetic material are tested against all known biological organisms it may contain.

Once they had clues to bubonic plague through this method, the samples were processed further, with an emphasis on obtaining ‘genome-wide, low-coverage data from both the human host and the Y. pestis pathogen.’

The team is now using that viral DNA map to investigate how Y. pestis evolved and varied between its time in ancient Egypt, the Middle Ages and modern times.

Above, a computer illustration of the plague bacterium (Yersinia pestis) showing its oval or ‘egg-shaped’ shape using a bipolar staining technique

Above, a close-up of one of the New Kingdom mummies discovered last year, on October 15, 2023, in the Tuna el Gebel district of Minya, Egypt

‘Yersinia pestis the team noted in their presentation, “devastated humanity with three historically documented pandemics.”

And one of those plagues occurred between the era of Egypt’s New Kingdom and the Black Death that struck 14th century Europe.

Historians know it as the Plague of Justinian in the Eastern Roman Empire, which spread across the Mediterranean, Europe and the Near East in the 6th century AD.

China and Mongolia recently had their own confrontation with the bubonic plague in the mid-19th century.

The new research, presented in August, could upend previous research that suggested the plague spread to Europe via Silk Road traders.

Bubonic plague is the most common form of plague and often spreads through the bite of an infected flea. Human-to-human transmission of bubonic plague is rare, with the vector usually being ‘flea-bitten’ animals such as rats and dogs.

The infection severely affects the immune glands called lymph nodes, causing them to swell and become painful and develop into open sores in untreated patients.

People infected with plague usually develop an acute febrile illness with other nonspecific systemic symptoms – such as sudden onset fever, chills, head and body aches, weakness, vomiting and nausea – after an incubation period of one to seven days.

Fortunately, bubonic plague can now be easily treated with antibiotics if not avoided through preventative measures.