Saturday, April 02, 2022

Ancient smells reveal secrets of Egyptian tomb

Amazing stuff!

"... Unusually for the time, the archaeologist who discovered the tomb [in 1906]  resisted the temptation to unwrap the mummies or peer inside the sealed amphorae, jars and jugs there, even after they were transferred to the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy. The contents of many of these vessels are still a mystery ...
[researchers] placed various artefacts — including sealed jars and open cups laden with the rotten remains of ancient food — inside plastic bags for several days to collect some of the volatile molecules they still release. Then the team used a mass spectrometer to identify the components of the aromas from each sample. They found aldehydes and long-chain hydrocarbons, indicative of beeswax; trimethylamine, associated with dried fish; and other aldehydes common in fruits. ...
This isn’t the first time that scent compounds have revealed important information about ancient Egypt. In 2014, researchers extracted volatile molecules from linen bandages that are between 6,300 and 5,000 years old that were used to wrap bodies in some of the earliest known Egyptian cemeteries. The molecules confirmed the presence of embalming agents with antibacterial properties, showing that Egyptians were experimenting with mummification some 1,500 years earlier than had been thought. ...
Odour analysis is still an underexplored area of archaeology ... “Volatiles have been ignored by archaeologists because of an assumption they would have disappeared from artefacts"

Ancient smells reveal secrets of Egyptian tomb Jars contained fish, fruit and beeswax balm to sustain the tomb’s residents in the afterlife.

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