Secrets to making mummies revealed in ancient urns

For the ancient Egyptians, mummification was a spiritual process imbued with deep meaning. Ancient texts show it took 70 days, with carefully defined rituals and invocations, to prepare the deceased for an eternal afterlife. It also required specialized skills, long lists of ingredients, and a professional class of embalmers steeped in religious and chemical knowledge. But what went into—or was smeared on, brushed over, and wrapped around—the mummified bodies themselves has been mostly guesswork on the part of modern scholars. “There’s almost no textual evidence,” says Philipp Stockhammer , an archaeologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. “How this worked, how the substances were mixed, how they were named—this wasn’t known.” That changes with a study Stockhammer and his colleagues published this week in Nature . By identifying residues from labeled jars found in an ancient Egyptian mummification workshop, the researchers were able to show the process involved complex chemistry and exotic ingredients, including resins sourced from a continent away. “You can actually look into the vessels and see what’s still inside,” says Barbara Huber , an archaeological scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology who was not involved with the research. The new evidence emerged from a 2700-year-old (664 B.C.E.–525 B.C.E.) burial complex south of Cairo called Saqqara. In 2016, Univ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research