أبو صير الملق), also Abusir el-Melek - a town and archaeological site in Egypt, located in Beni Suef (Arabic: بني سويف, romanized: Baniswēf) is the capital city of the Beni Suef Governorate in Egypt an important agricultural trade centre on the west bank of the Nile river, the city is located 110 km (70 miles) south of Cairo.
In addition to inner and outer coffins, these include finger rings, amulets, musical instruments, headrests, faience vessels and small female and male sculptures dating from the period of the 25-26th Dynasty.
Written sources show that by the third century BCE Abusir el-Meleq was at the center of a wider region that comprised the northern part of the Herakleopolites nome, and had close ties with the Fayum and the Memphite provinces involving cattle-breeding, the transport of wheat, bee-keeping and quarrying.
Abusir el-Meleq's proximity to, and close ties with the Fayum led to substantial growth in its population during the first hundred years of Ptolemaic rule, presumably as a result of Greek immigration.
[2][3] A study published in 2017 by Schuenemann et al. extracted DNA from 151 Egyptian mummies, whose remains were recovered from Abusir el-Meleq in Middle Egypt.
The ancient Egyptian individuals in their own dataset possessed highly similar mtDNA haplogroup profiles, and cluster together, supporting genetic continuity across the 1,300-year transect.
[3] The analyses revealed higher affinities with Near Eastern and European populations compared to modern Egyptians, likely due to the 8% increase in the African component.
[5] Verena Schuenemann and the authors of this study suggest a high level of genetic interaction with the Near East since ancient times, probably going back to Prehistoric Egypt although the oldest mummies at the site were from the New Kingdom: "Our data seem to indicate close admixture and affinity at a much earlier date, which is unsurprising given the long and complex connections between Egypt and the Middle East.
He also drew attention to the fact that the authors draw inference on migrations in line with their Bayesian statistical approach rather than integrate other data into their explanations about the population history.
[10] In 2023, Christopher Ehret argued that the conclusions of the 2017 study were based on insufficiently small sample sizes, and that the authors had a biased interpretation of the genetic data.