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 Researchers on Wednesday said a form of mummification was being
carried out there more than six thousand years ago, much earlier
than previously thought. They said embalming substances contained in
funerary textiles from the oldest-known Egyptian cemeteries showed
mummy-making from as early as about 4300 BC.
The embalming agents were infused into the linen used to wrap the
corpse to provide an antibacterial and protective barrier. It was
not as elaborate as the process used much later on the bodies of
powerful pharaohs and other elites as well as many ordinary
Egyptians, but came more than 1,500 years earlier than Egyptian
mummification had been thought to have started.
There is evidence of mummification involving remains from around
2600 BC of Queen Hetepheres, mother of Khufu, the pharaoh who
commissioned the Great Pyramid at Giza outside Cairo. There also is
evidence of linen that contained resin being used to wrap bodies
around 2800 BC.
The researchers were amazed to find that the plant, animal and
mineral components used in preparing the mummies at the cemeteries
in Mostagedda in central Egypt were essentially the same embalming
"recipe" used thousands of years later at the pinnacle of the
ancient Egyptian civilization.
"I was surprised that the prehistoric Egyptians, who lived in a
tribal society 1,000 years before the invention of writing, were
already in possession of the empirical science that would later
become true mummification," said one of the researchers, Jana Jones,
an Egyptologist at Macquarie University in Australia.
Biochemical analysis identified the components from funerary
textiles retrieved from the cemeteries during excavations in the
1920s and 1930s and held in Britain's Bolton Museum. The "recipe"
consisted of a plant oil or animal fat base, with smaller amounts of
a pine resin, an aromatic plant extract, a plant gum and petroleum.
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"The ancient Egyptians believed the survival of the body after death
was necessary in order to 'live again' in the afterlife and become
immortal. Without the preserved body, this was not possible," said
Stephen Buckley, an archaeological chemist at Britain's University
of York who led the scientific research.
Jones said mummification demanded rare and costly ingredients, some
from distant lands. Pine resin in the Mostagedda textiles may have
come from southeastern Turkey, many hundreds of miles away.
The practice of mummification reached its peak during the era known
as the New Kingdom, between about 1550 BC and 1000 BC, when powerful
pharaohs reigned including Ramses II and Thutmose III, as well as
the "boy king" Tutankhamun, better known as "King Tut."
It largely stopped with Christianity's influence around AD 400. Some
Christians continued it in some form until it ended completely with
the arrival of Arabs spreading the new religion of Islam in AD 642.
The study appears in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.
(Reporting by Will Dunham, editing by G Crosse)
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