NGS (enriched and shotgun) data for 2 individual Egyptian mummies from the 12th Dynasty. Mummies provided by Manchester Museum and originally collected from middle Egypt in 1907. The aim was to look at kinship relationships (maternal and paternal) between them.

The ancient DNA recovery from desiccated remains found in hot and arid environments, such as Egypt, has been a subject of debate and controversy1. This fact, in combination with the scepticism towards the destructive nature of skeletal samples and technological obstacles has limited our ability to bridge the historic knowledge with genetic data, in order to shed light into important aspects of ancient Egyptian history. In that framework, we aim to resolve the kinship of two high – status Egyptian mummies from the 12th Dynasty, who constitute one of the most long-standing questions in Egyptology. Here we show that the two mummies are maternally but probably not paternally related by examining the mitochondrial DNA and the Y-chromosome via next generation sequencing. Single nucleotide polymorphism analysis enabled the kinship identification of the two individuals who were found to share the same maternal but no paternal lineage, contrary to previous hypotheses3,4. The mitochondrial haplotype was defined as M1a1, confirming their African descent, whereas the Y - chromosome haplogroup assignment was unfeasible due to the existence of undocumented variants. Our study adds an interesting piece of information into the under-represented subject of Egyptological kinship and demonstrates the first successful typing of whole mitochondrial genome and partial Y - chromosome in Egyptian mummies, illustrating the potential of DNA recovery from such samples. We anticipate that our study will propel more studies like this using NGS techniques and We believe it will ease, to a certain extent, the scepticism with regards to the destruction of samples when important questions need to be answered.