Arthur Kemp’s Blog

Despite the refusal of the Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, to release any DNA results which might indicate the racial ancestry of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, the leaked results reveal that King Tut’s DNA is a 99.6 percent match with Western European Y chromosomes.

The DNA test results were inadvertently revealed on a Discovery Channel TV documentary filmed with Hawass’s permission — but it seems as if the Egyptian failed to spot the giveaway part of the documentary which revealed the test results.

Hawass previously announced that he would not release the racial DNA results of Egyptian mummies — obviously because he feared the consequences of such a revelation.

On the Discovery Channel broadcast, which can be seen on the Discovery Channel website here, or if they pull it, on YouTube here, at approximately 1:53 into the video, the camera pans over a printout of DNA test results from King Tut.

Firstly, here is a brief explanation of the results visible in the video. It is a list of what is called Short Tandem Repeats (STRs).

STRs are repeated DNA sequences which are “short repeat units” whose characteristics make them especially suitable for human identification.

These STR values for 17 markers visible in the video are as follows:
DYS 19 – 14 (? not clear)
DYS 385a – 11
DYS 385b – 14
DYS 389i – 13
DYS 389ii – 30
DYS 390 – 24
DYS 391 – 11
DYS 392 – 13
DYS 393 – 13
DYS 437 – 14 (? not clear)
DYS 438 – 12
DYS 439 – 10
DYS 448 – 19
DYS 456 – 15
DYS 458 – 16
DYS 635 – 23
YGATAH4 – 11

What does this mean? Fortunately, a genius by the name of Whit Athey provides the key to this list. Mr Athey is a retired physicist whose working career was primarily at the Food and Drug Administration where he was chief of one of the medical device labs.

Mr Athey received his doctorate in physics and biochemistry at Tufts University, and undergraduate (engineering) and masters (math) degrees at Auburn University. For several years during the 1980s, he also taught one course each semester in the electrical engineering department of the University of Maryland. Besides his interest in genetic genealogy, he is an amateur astronomer and has his own small observatory near his home in Brookeville, MD.

He also runs a very valuable website called the “Haplogroup Predictor” which allows users to input STR data and generate the haplogroup which marks those STR data.

For those who want to know what a haplogroup is, here is a “simple” definition: a haplogroup is a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor with a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) mutation.

Still none the wiser? Damn these scientists.

Ok, let’s try it this way: a haplotype is a combination of multiple specific locations of a gene or DNA sequence on a chromosome.

Haplogroups are assigned letters of the alphabet, and refinements consist of additional number and letter combinations, for example R1b or R1b1. Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA haplogroups have different haplogroup designations. In essence, haplogroups give an inisight into ancestral origins dating back thousands of years.

By entering all the STR data inadvertently shown on the Discovery video, a 99.6 percent fit with the R1b haplogroup is revealed.

The significance is, of course, that R1b is the most common Y-chromosome haplogroup in Europe reaching its highest concentrations in Ireland, Scotland, western England and the European Atlantic seaboard — in other words, European through and through.

So much for the Afro-centrists and others who have derided the very obvious northwestern European appearance of a large number of the pharonic mummies. It seems like March of the Titans was right after all…

One would not have thought it possible, but it seems that Egypt has yet much to reveal from antiquity: Egyptian archaeologists have just unveiled a 4,000-year-old “missing pyramid” that is believed to have been discovered by an archaeologist almost 200 years ago and never seen again.

Egypt’s antiquities chief, Zahi Hawass (most famous, in my mind, for forbidding DNA testing on all of the most famous Egyptian mummies — which would silence the Afro-centric loons who claim ancient Egypt was black), said the pyramid appears to have been built by King Menkauhor, a pharaoh who ruled for only eight years (original relief alongside).

In 1842, German archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius mentioned it among his finds at Saqqara, referring to it as number 29 and calling it the “Headless Pyramid” because only its base remains. But the desert sands covered the discovery, and no archaeologist since has been able to find Menkauhor’s resting place.

The pyramid’s base — or the superstructure as archeologists call it — was found after a 25-foot-high mound of sand was removed over the past year and a half by Hawass’ team.

He said the style of the pyramid indicates it was from the Fifth Dynasty, a period that began in 2465 B.C. and ended in 2325 B.C. That would put it about two centuries after the completion of the Great Pyramid of Giza, believed to have been finished in 2500 B.C.

Another proof of its date, Hawass says, was the discovery inside the pyramid of a gray granite lid of a sarcophagus, of the type used at that time.

The rectangular base, at the bottom of a 15 foot-deep pit dug out by workers, gives little indication of how imposing the pyramid might have once been. Heaps of huge rocks, many still partially covered in sand and dust, mark the pyramid’s walls and entrance, and a burial chamber was discovered inside.

Archaeologists have not found a cartouche — a pharaoh’s name in hieroglyphs — of the pyramid’s owner. But Hawass said that based on the estimated date of the pyramid he was convinced it belonged to Menkauhor.

Work continues at the site, where Hawass said he expected to unearth “subsidiary” pyramids around Menkauhor’s main one, and hoped to find inscriptions there to back up his claim.

The sprawling archaeological site at Saqqara is most famous for the Step Pyramid of King Djoser — the oldest of Egypt’s over 100 pyramids, built in the 27th century BC. Although archaeologists have been exploring Egypt for some 200 years, Hawass says only a third of what lies underground in Saqqara has been discovered.