About fair-haired mummies - 4th part

Index

1st part: henna, natron and Ramesses II 

2nd part: bog bodies and photo-oxidation 

3rd part: Tarim and Paracas mummies 

4th part: Egypt and Sudan


This fourth part will be devoted to natural mummies and skeletons found in Egypt. I will also add a “bonus mummy” about little-known remains found in Sudan.

In the next (and, hopefully, last 😁) part, we will see the latest techniques for hair melanin and colour analysis and we will review the various hypotheses about chemical processes which, according to researchers, may result in red hair in mummies.




THE GEBELEIN MAN, AKA GINGER

In the second part, speaking of photo-oxidation, I have mentioned the predynastic mummy called Gebelein Man, found in Gebelein (now Naga el-Gherira) in Upper Egypt, 40 km south of Thebes. It was found in 1896, along with five more mummies and it is dated circa 3400 BC.

The six bodies were found in shallow sand graves, along with partial remains of wicker, fur and linen, In the predynastic period, bodies were usually buried naked and sometimes loosely wrapped, and then covered in sand. Thanks to the warm climate, the water in the bodies would quickly evaporate, resulting in a natural mummification.


No genomic analysis has been performed on this mummy, but I don’t know if it is because the DNA is too degraded or for other reasons. I found out that in a study from 2023 by Alexandra Mussauer and colleagues (Genetic study of ancient Egyptian human remains dating from the Predynastic Period to the early Islamic Period (ca. 4000 cal. BCE - 800 cal. CE), 100 individuals were analysed from nine Egyptian archaeological sites, included Gebelein, and 25 mitogenomes were reconstructed. However, it is not clear which ones of the Gebelein mummies were chosen. Mussauer and her team found (unsurprisingly) 

further evidence for shared maternal ancestries between western Eurasian or northern African populations and ancient Egyptians during and after the New Kingdom. In addition, we also found western Eurasian mtDNA haplogroups in individuals dated to periods prior to the New Kingdom.

The same western Eurasian haplogroups were found in Y-DNA (transmitted from father to sons), and in particular a subclade of E1b1b1. 
(Unfortunately, all Alexandra Mussauer’s works on Ancient Egypt are not available on the internet).

In 2018, an analysis was performed on the hair of Ginger and of another mummy (EA 32572, an adult female), but (guess what?) NOT to find out their original colour! The study is Natural mummies from Predynastic Egypt reveal the world's earliest figural tattoos  and it was mostly aimed to study the tattoos still visible on these mummies. Some hairs were removed from the two mummies’ heads and used for radiocarbon dating with accelerator mass spectrometry. Isotope analysis was performed to gather information about the diet.

FAG EL-GAMOUS
Fag el-Gamous was a Christian cemetery located in the Faiyum Governorate, Egypt, dating from the 1st to the 7th century AD, the period of Roman rule in Egypt. It was discovered by a team of archaeologists from Brigham Young University (Utah, USA) in 1980.
As we will see, information about this archaeological site is rather vague.
The first strange thing is that it is not clear how many bodies were found, and in which conditions. Many artcles online talk of “a million mummies”, but according to this article from the Brigham Young University, by 2015 around 1000 mummies had been excavated. On the contrary, this study from 2014 mentions 350,000 individuals. 
In any case, as far as I could understand, not all of the remains were mummies with an exceptional preservation like the Tarim mummies, for example, and in many cases the bodies found were mostly skeletal.
Another strange thing is that there are very few pictures of the finds, especially of those with red and blond hair. The picture below is the only one I could find described as having red hair (source).

Blonds on one side, redheads on the other
As for the red- and blond-haired individuals buried there, this article states: 

Of the 37 adults whose hair was still preserved, the most interesting observation relates to the hair color. There were 4 redheads, 16 blondes, 12 with light or medium brown hair, and only 5 with dark brown or black hair. Of those whose hair was preserved 54% were blondes or redheads, and the percentage grows to 87% when light-brown hair color is added. Such a preponderance of light-colored hair was unexpected, and it will be interesting to see if this trait continues to be exhibited throughout the cemetery.

And this article states: 

While the database is in the early stages, it has already provided some intriguing initial results. Muhlestein said he and the other researchers can use the database to "show us all of the blond burials, and [it shows] they are clustered in one area, or all of the red-headed burials, and [it shows] they're clustered in another area."
These clusters are interesting because they suggest "perhaps we have family areas or genetic groups [in certain areas], but we're still trying to explore that," Muhlestein said.

This statement was later echoed by other online articles, like this one.

Faiyum Governorate on the map of Egypt

The elusive DNA analyses
According to this study, in 2013 the BYU began “ tissue sampling and DNA analysis of the estimated 150,000 burials at the ancient Fag el Gamous cemetery”, but I couldn’t find any publication with the results of these analyses. For example, in this recently-published article by Kerry Muhlestein (director for the excavation project) we read: 

… the analysis and publishing work will begin more intensely. The creation of a database will allow for more sophisticated research, and it will yield a tremendous amount of information about the lives and deaths of the people who lived in this part of Egypt during the Greco-Roman era. […] Once the burial database is finished, we anticipate that a great deal more research will be possible. We hope that we will be able to see patterns that yield insights into the lives of all those who lived in the Fayoum. Years of research, analysis, and publishing lie ahead.

So, apparently, the genomic analyses either have not been performed yet or have not been published.
The strange thing is that in Muhlestein’s curriculum vitae there is this entry: “Burials in the Fag el-Gamous Necropolis – C14 and DNA Analyses,” (refereed). Presented at the Bioarchaeology of Ancient Egypt and the International Symposium of Animals in Egypt, sponsored by the American University of Cairo, held January, 2019.”
So, it seems that in 2019 the results were available.
However, in this 2010 article we read that Dr Paul Evans, a BYU professor of microbiology,

compared the skeletons' cranial features and drilled tiny holes in the teeth to extract DNA samples for genetic testing.
He searched for genetic signals of in-migration to determine whether a Christian population moved in or whether native Egyptians converted to the faith. Evans says the findings are consistent with both possibilities.

It seems that DNA results (or, at least, a part of them) were available already in 2010. The same article states that “Hair types run the gamut from blond to black and straight to curly.”


A study on the hair from Fag el-Gamous
But, obviously, not on the colour!
The study is from 2002 (Morphological characteristics of hair of Egyptian mummies compared with hair from US Caucasoids, Mediterranean workers and Chinese, by Ball and colleagues) and aimed to study the morphology of the hair of individuals from Fag el-Gamous, in order to determine more about their origins. Basically, they took hair samples from workers at the excavations and called these samples “Mediterranean”. Then, they took hair samples from people from the city of Provo, Utah, and called these samples “Caucasoid” and, lastly, took hair samples from Chinese people. All these samples were compared with samples taken from 26 mummies. The result is that 

The mummy hair most resembled Caucasoid hair in terms of size, but most resembled Mediterranean hair in terms of shape. Female hair and male hair from individuals of the same racial type were generally significantly different in parameters of size, but not significantly different in parameters of shape.

As far as I could understand, with “size” they mean the diameter of the hair shaft and of the medulla, while with “shape” they mean not only straight/wavy/curly, but also fibres’ direction and shape (round/oval).
In any case, no reference to colour.

The image above comes from the paper by Dr Janet Davey Is ancestry, not natron, an explanation for fair haired children in Greco-Roman Egypt? (we mentioned it in first part of this article), where she referred to the hair of three fair-haired mummies from Egypt. Unfortunately, the provenance of the mummies in unknown, but they date back to the Greco-Roman Period (332 BC – c.395 AD). The paper features two more photos, which means that fair-haired Egyptian mummies are not uncommon and they have been known for more than one century (the three mummies from this paper were acquired by the British Museum in 1898).



ANTINOPOLIS
The city of Antinopolis was founded by Roman emperor Hadrian in 130 AD on the east bank of the Nile.
The most important excavations took place thanks to French archaeologist Albert Gayet (1856 - 1916), known as the "archaeologist of Antinoöpolis". His excavations have revealed mummies, grave goods and thousands of fabrics, as well as a large cemetery, the burial place of numerous Coptic Christians.

In the 2017 study The Luscious Locks of Lust: Hair and the Construction of Gender in Egypt from Clement to the Fātimids (by Christina Thérèse Rooijakkers) we read: 

Most of the mummies from Antinoöpolis have brown, reddish or even bright blond hair. It was originally believed that some of the women had dyed their hair with henna, but in a recent analysis of the hair of a number of mummies no dye or bleaching agents were found. […] It is very likely that the reddish brown or even blond colour has rather been caused by the degradation of the eumelanin pigment (black/brown) in favour of pheomelanin.

So, again, the usual mantra of eumelanin degradation that no-one ever demonstrated.
As for the analysis she mentions (that found no dye or bleaching agents), it was performed by Witold Nowik in 2013: Cheveux et couvre-chefs textiles: caractérisation des colorants. Nowik took 39 samples from dyed textiles and 9 hair samples (but I couldn’t find their colour), and analysed them with high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) in order to detect artificial or natural dyes on textiles or on hair.
The result is that only on textiles natural dyes have been found, while on hair samples no dye or degradation products have been found.
Now, the HPLC is one of those techniques that allows the identification of eumelanin and phaeomelanin in hair (as you can read in this study by melanin experts Shosuke Ito and Kazumasa Wakamatsu), but, again, in this case it was not used in that way.
We don’t know if in those 9 samples there were also red or blond hair, but since they were going to perform HPCL, they could well take a red and a blond sample and analyse the melanin content.


The golden mummy of Dunkerque

The mummy above has been found in Antinopolis by Albert Gayet in 1906 and is now in Dunkerque. It is a female, around 20 years of age when she died, and is called Ounnout (the Astrologer), because she was probably a priestess. The mummy, dated 2nd century AD, is covered with gold and lies on a bed of sycomore leaves and shells (more info here).

As you can read in this article, in 2015 hairs were taken from the mummy for analysis. Researchers found out that they were very degraded and fragile, and then they concluded Ounnout’s hair became blond because of proteines’ degradation due to UVA and UVB radiations and visible radiation (D'autre part, leur couleur jaune est liée à une dégradation des protéines des cheveux par une exposition aux rayons ultraviolets A et B, et aux rayons visibles.)
However, if you read the original study from 2013 (Hair surface and mechanical properties of Copt mummies from Antinopolis), you won’t find any test aiming to find out the original hair colour. The stated objective of the paper is to study hair surface morphology/topography, cuticle condition, mechanical properties and preservation differences among mummies (samples were taken from 11 mummies), so how can researchers know that Ounnout’s hair became blond due to UV radiations?
In the first part of this article, talking of photo-oxidation, we saw that, if a body remains under the sun so long that its hair changes colour, that body will never become a mummy, because it will be destroyed by atmospheric agents, wild animals, fungi, bacteria, ecc. This mummy is so well-preserved I doubt it has ever been exposed to atmospheric agents.
As if this were not enough, here you can see Ounnout’s museum ID, which reads, about its hair: "red, turned blond because of depigmentation".
So, basically, these people, without performing any colour analysis, managed to find out not only that this woman had red hair, but also that it became blond because depigmentation. They are indeed astrologers! 😂

source

In 2016, a new analysis was performed on the mummy using its hair, as you can read in Datation par le carbone 14 et restes humains. Une étude de cas : la momie dorée de Dunkerque.
Researchers took 66mg of hairs from the mummy and 45mg of hairs found on the leaves bed, with the aim of radiocarbon dating. No analysis of hair colour.


Red-haired heads from the Louvre

D.1909.55.3

D.1909.55.4

These two mummified heads kept at the Louvre were found in Antinopolis and, just like Ounnout, date back to the Roman period.
The first one (D.1909.55.4) is a female and the second (D.1909.55.4) a male.
In the description of the first one you can read: “Cheveux roux teints au henné?” that is “Red hair dyed with henna?”, while in the description of the second one you can read: “Cheveux roux teints au henné”, “Red hair dyed with henna”.
So, we see the usual pattern: they have all these archaeological red and blond hair and, instead of performing analyses to find out the original colour, make up improbable theories about photo-oxidation, eumelanin degradation and henna.



SEMNA SOUTH, NUBIA (SUDAN)
Semna was a fortified area established on the west bank of the Nile at the southern end of a series of fortresses founded during the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt (1985–1795 BC) in the area of Lower Nubia (Sudan), near the border with Egypt. There are three forts at Semna: Semna West (Semna Gharb), Semna East (Semna Sherq, also called Kummeh or Kumma), and Semna South (Semna Gubli).

Excavations in Semna South took place in 1956-1957 and 1966-1968.
The cemetery to the north of the fort contained approximately 560 graves (over 800 individuals) of which about 494 were from the Meroitic period (4th century BC – 4th century AD), 50 from the X-Group/Ballana culture period (4th – 6th century AD), and 16 from the Christian period (550 – 1500 AD). The Meroitic period through the Christian period is a span of approximately 2,000 years, which indicates that the fort was used for an extended period of time.
In 1978, Dr Daniel Bruce Hrdy published the study Analysis of hair samples of mummies from Semna South (Sudanese Nubia) (free download here) where he examined 76 hair samples from Semna South, using the techniques available at the time. I quote from the abstract:

However, the cuticular structure and the lack of fluorescence of the cortex indicate that the low humidity and non-alkaline conditions preserved the physical and chemical properties of the hair well. Pigmentation, even allowing for oxidation of melanin, showed a higher proportion of lighter samples than is currently associated with the Nubian area. Hair form analysis showed medium diameter and scale count; the curling variables were intermediate between European and African samples.

Now, here it is important to understand that Hrdy did observe oxidation of the cuticule and of keratin protein, but he didn’t make any test to verify if melanin oxidation took place as well, and if melanin oxidation resulted in red hair. When he writes “even allowing for oxidation of melanin”, he is simply drawing an inference based on the literture of the time, and that’s why he cites the 1963 work by Brothwell and Spearman The Hair of Earlier Peoples (in Science in archaeology; a comprehensive survey of progress and research, pages 427–436). I quote again “As Brothwell and Spearman (‘63) point out, reddish-brown ancient hair is usually the result of partial oxidation of the melanin pigment.”
Brothwell and Spearman's work was a pioneering comparative study of archaeological hair, based, among other things, on microscopic observations and pigmentation characteristics, but it lacked the spectroscopic and molecular techniques that would be used today to directly demonstrate melanin oxidation. As a matter of fact, the only evidence they bring for melanin oxidation is the usual hydrogen peroxide (that is, hair bleaching) that we have already met in the second part of this article, but obviously mummies’ hair did not came in contact with hydrogen peroxide.

The table above is featured in Hrdy’s paper and needs to be read in the right way.
Hrdy took 76 hair samples: 56 from Meroitic individuals, 15 from the X-Group and 5 from Christian individuals, and graded them according to the Fischer-Saller scale for hair colours. 
As you can see, the first part (on the left) goes from blond to black, while the second part (on the right) is about red. The two parts are not mutually exclusive, which means that a sample can be classified in both parts.


Hrdy writes: “Twenty-six percent (29% of the Meroitic, 13% of the Xgroup) of the total sample had some red pigmentation, and 10.5% (8.9 Meroitic, 13% Xgroup) had “blond” pigmentation.”
However, the “red” part is not to be interpreted as if the 26% of the samples had actual red hair, but rather “some red pigmentation”, like, for example, reddish shades on brown hair (that’s why the two parts are not mutually exclusive).
As for blond hair, Hrdy writes: 

However, the large number of blond hairs that are not associated with the cuticular damage that bleaching produces, probably points to a significantly lighter-haired population than is now present in the Nubian region. Brothwell and Spearman (’63) noted genuinely blond ancient Egyptian samples using reflectance spectrophotometry. Blondism, especially in young children, is common in many dark-haired populations (e.g., Australian, Melanesian), and is still found in some Nubian villages (J. Zabkar, personal communication). Only one sample (M197) showed cuticular damage and irregularities definitely consistent with bleaching, although bleaching could not be ruled out in some of the blond samples.

As for the DNA, I couldn’t find any genomic analysis on individuals from Semna South, although the human remains have been used in many researches, mostly about diseases and injuries (as you can read here).
A DNA analysis was performed on 66 individuals from another site in Nubia, Kulubnarti (dated 650-1000 AD). The 2021 study Social stratification without genetic differentiation at the site of Kulubnarti in Christian Period Nubia showed that the population of Kulubnarti had 42.5% Nilotic-related DNA and 57.5% West Eurasian-related DNA (the latter mostly through female lineage). The team concluded that the present-day Nubian people are not direct descendants of the people of Kulubnarti, attesting to additional genetic input since the Christian Period.
However, we don’t know if these results can be transferred to Semna South.