The Egyptians began surprisingly early, embalmed their dead, a study shows. Accordingly, the tradition developed already more than a thousand years earlier than previously thought – at the end of the Neolithic period

Before the Egyptians began to embalm their dead, they left the desert sand work. The hot, dry earth deprived the corpses quickly the liquid: The fabric could not decay, the meat was preserved. In the late Neolithic and predynastic period, 4500 to 3100 years before our era, this was the usual way of mummification – was believed previously.
Now researchers have found evidence that the Egyptians long before nachhalfen the natural processes with pastes embalming- and thought over a thousand years earlier than previously. The oldest evidence came earlier from the year 2200 BC.

The study, published in the journal “PLoS One”, based on eleven years of research on the mummies from the cemetery of Mostagedda in Upper Egypt. He is considered one of the oldest known cemeteries on the Nile. In the linen cloths with which the mummies were wrapped, the team found to Jana Jones of Australia’s Macquarie University traces of complex mixtures. “I have long been fascinated by the early and cryptic reports on the methods by which the dead were reportedly treated in the cemeteries of Badari and Mostagedda,” says Jones.

Back in 2002 they had examined samples of grave textiles from the necropolis, spread over museums across the UK since the 1930s. Under the microscope, they discovered together with her colleague Ron Oldfield resins which should probably serve for preservation. But to what substances it was exactly, she could not determine. Just as some colleagues from the chemistry that tried on the samples. The mysterious paste apparently consisted of ingredients that occur so infrequently that they are not mentioned in the current literature.

Mummy Returns:The same recipe over thousands of years

So they asked Stephen Buckley of the University of York in England for help. Buckley specializes in organic compounds in archaeological contexts. He examined the tissue samples using a combination of biochemical analyzes. At the end he was able to identify the substances with which the Egyptians preserved their dead: pine resin, an aromatic plant extract, vegetable gum, a natural petroleum source and a plant or animal fat.

Accordingly, the Egyptians were little experiment – because basically these are exactly the same substances with which they have embalmed their dead even 3000 years later. “Leave the antibacterial properties of some of these substances and the local preservation of tissue that cause them, suggest that they represent the beginning of an experimental phase, which developed in the pharaonic period for mummification,” Buckley interprets his results. “The amazing thing is,” he adds, “that they were used here in exactly the same proportions as the embalmers they mixed together well, as their art had reached its climax.”

It is also noteworthy that not a single spade had to be engraved in the earth for this research. Jones and her colleagues studied only museum collections. “This shows the great potential of the material deposited in the Museum collections,” says Thomas Higham of Oxford University, who dated the pieces of cloth soaked in the Einbalsamierungspaste. “It can not divulge much new information about the archaeological past. Using new scientific methods we have him can obtain valuable information about the early history of Egyptian again.”

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