A workshop used for mummification at Saqqara in Egypt comprises remnants of the substances used to make mummies, revealing many got here from southern Africa or South-East Asia
Humans
1 February 2023
Illustration of the underground embalming workshop in Saqqara in historic Egypt Nikola Nevenov
An underground workshop discovered at an historic Egyptian burial website comprises ceramic vessels with traces of the substances used to make mummies. They embody resins obtained from as far-off as India and South-East Asia, indicating that historic Egyptians engaged in long-distance commerce.
“We could identify a large diversity of substances which were used by the embalmers,” says Maxime Rageot on the University of Tübingen in Germany. “Few of them were locally available.”
The workshop, courting from round 600 BC, was found in 2016 at Saqqara, which was the burial floor of Egyptian royalty and elites for hundreds of years. “It was used as an elite cemetery from the very earliest moment of the Egyptian state,” says Elaine Sullivan on the University of California, Santa Cruz, who wasn’t concerned within the examine.
Close to the pyramid of Unas, archaeologists led by Ramadan Hussein, additionally on the University of Tübingen, discovered two vertical shafts dug into the bottom. One was 13 metres deep and led to the embalming workshop, whereas the opposite was 30 metres deep and led to burial chambers. Hussein died in 2022.
It is the primary Egyptian embalming workshop to be discovered underground, says staff member Susanne Beck on the University of Tübingen. This might have been to maintain the method secret, nevertheless it additionally had the benefit of conserving decaying our bodies cool.
In the workshop, the staff discovered 121 beakers and bowls. Many have been labelled: typically with directions like “to put on his head”, typically with names of embalming substances and typically with administrator titles.
Vessels from the embalming workshop © Saqqara Saite Tombs Project, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
The researchers selected the 9 beakers and 22 bowls with essentially the most legible labels for evaluation. They studied the chemical residues left within the bowls to search out out what substances had been used throughout embalming and mummification.
A number of drugs, together with plant oils, tars, resins and animal fat, have been found. Two examples have been cedar oil and heated beeswax. Many of the substances have been identified for use in mummification, however some have been new.
One new substance was dammar, a gum-like resin obtained from bushes in India and South-East Asia. The title “dammar” is a Malay phrase.
The staff additionally discovered elemi: a pale yellow resin resembling honey that comes from bushes within the rainforests of South Asia and southern Africa.
The dammar and elemi present that Egyptian embalming drove early globalisation, says Philipp Stockhammer at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, one other member of the staff. “You really needed to transport these resins over large distances.” It matches with different proof of long-distance commerce on the time.
The historic Egyptian elite favored unique items as a lot as trendy capitalists, says Sullivan. At instances when the state was highly effective and organised, “we see a great interest in the outside world and in connections to the outside world and bringing those things from the outside world together”.
Stockhammer and Sullivan each say that the substances have been transported by chains of merchants. “The Egyptians don’t have to be going to the eastern side of India themselves,” says Sullivan.
The researchers have been additionally capable of translate two new phrases. Many texts on mummification consult with antiu and sefet. The former had been tentatively translated as “myrrh” or “incense”, and the latter as “a sacred oil”. However, as a result of they have been written on items of pottery with residue inside, it was potential to determine them. It seems antiu is a combination of oils or tars from conifers. Meanwhile, sefet is an unguent – an ointment or lubricant – containing plant components.
Many of the substances had antibacterial and antifungal properties, and have been mixed into elaborate mixtures. For Stockhammer, the complexity of the substances shows “enormous personal knowledge that was accumulated through these centuries of experience of embalming human individuals”.
That matches with textual proof that clergymen tasked with embalming have been essential folks with appreciable ability, says Sullivan. “They would have needed to have a lot of ritual knowledge and a lot of material knowledge,” she says. The physique needed to be preserved bodily and rites needed to be carried out accurately based on the Egyptian faith. It was “both a spiritual and physical practice”.
More on these subjects:
Source: www.newscientist.com