St Augustine Tower in Old Goa; excavations being carried out at the site and (below) the Georgian delegation at the site

An arm bone retrieved from a dilapidated church complex in Goa is likely to be that of a Georgian queen who had been tortured and killed by a Persian king 400 years ago, say Indian scientists who analysed the DNA extracted from the relic.

The finding is the culmination of a quarter-century-long archaeological search to find the remains of the 17th century Queen Ketevan of Kakheti in eastern Georgia. The queen has been canonised by the Georgian Orthodox Church for not renouncing her religion despite prolonged torture with red-hot pincers, which eventually led to her death in 1624. Persian emperor Shah Abbas I conquered the Georgian kingdom and took the queen, who was the regent of her underage son, prisoner in 1613. His repeated attempts to force Queen Ketevan to embrace Islam met with no success, prompting him to order her torture and subsequent death.

While geneticists led by Kumarasami Thangaraj of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, cannot say for sure whether the remains belonged to her for want of matching evidence, the DNA analysis has offered sufficient genetic proof to establish it belonged to a woman of Georgian origin.

“Since we do not have DNA from any of her maternal relatives, it is difficult for us to say with 100 per cent confidence that the bone belonged to Queen Ketevan,” says Thangaraj. “But, what we can say for sure is that it contains a haplotype (a group of genes) which is absent in India, but present in Georgia and neighbouring regions,” he told KnowHow.

At the same time, there is ample evidence in Portuguese church literature to indicate that two friars belonging to the Augustinian order exhumed some part of the remains of the queen from where she was buried in the Iranian city of Shiraz and brought them to Goa in 1627. According to existing church literature, they were kept in a stone sarcophagus by the second window of a chapel (Chapter Chapel) in the St Augustine convent.

Since 1989, various delegations from Georgia have been working with researchers from the Archaeological Survery of India (ASI) to locate the queen’s relics as most structures within the convent complex collapsed long ago.

Despite the exact location of the queen’s relics being mentioned in Portuguese documents, all efforts to find them were unsuccessful due to difficulties in interpreting the ruined structure, say the authors of the paper that appeared in the journal Mitochondrion last week.

“The search for the elusive relics was going on since 1980, and three different ASI teams have been associated with the project directly or indirectly. However, they have not been able to conclusively identify the location,” says Nizamuddin Taher, an archaeologist with ASI, who is a co-author of the paper.

Interestingly, Taher’s team — which also worked on the site between 2004 and 2009 — was not looking for the relics but conducting studies to clear the debris of the collapsed structures from the St Augustine Complex so that they could understand the ground plan of the convent and enlarge the area for visitors. “Just by chance we came across a tombstone of one Manuel De Sequira near the lateral entrance, which provided a clue to the chapter chapel in which the remains of the Queen were supposed to have been kept after being brought from Shiraz in Iran in 1627,” says Taher.

A cross reference with relevant Portuguese documents helped Taher and his colleagues get information about other tomb stones and stone sarcophagus in the chapel. “This was confirmed through excavations in the next season when we found a lid and other associated remains including a long bone at the site near the second window of the chapel,” he says.

However, the excavation yielded two other bone samples in addition to the long bone, complicating matters further. This forced the ASI scientists to seek the help of Thangaraj and others to undertake a DNA analysis of the samples. The studies indicated that while the long bone belonged to the Georgian Queen, other two samples carried DNA fragments very similar to those found in south Asian people.

“We didn’t have any close relative of the queen to match her DNA with, but the complete absence of the U1b lineage in India (which is quite common and restricted to Caucasus, Near East and Europe region), provides a strong evidence in support of it,” says Gyaneshwer Chaubey, a researcher with Estonian Biocentre in the Estonian city of Tartu and a collaborator who helped compare the genetic sequence with other samples available elsewhere.

“This is for the first time that an analysis of ancient DNA has been carried out in India,” says Thangaraj.

“Working with ancient materials obtained from tropical countries such as India, where humidity causes rapid decomposition is even more difficult. In our study, the excavated skeletal materials were not particularly old (only 400 years as compared to thousands or more years old samples handled by experts) and had been kept in a black box before the collapse of the convent. These conditions aided in extracting DNA successfully from the relic,” says Thangaraj.