Prehistoric embalming secrets revealed

Abstract

For thousands of years, ancient Egyptians carefully mummified the bodies of their dead in readiness for the afterlife. But the origins of the ritual are still shrouded in mystery. A team of chemists and Egyptologists has now carried out the first chemical analysis of embalming compounds from an intact prehistoric mummy, kept at the Egyptian Museum in Turin. The researchers dated it to 3700–3500 B.C., making it the oldest-known embalmed body. The results show that people prepared the Turin mummy centuries before the pharaohs unified the region in about 3100 B.C. to form ancient Egypt. The team’s analysis suggests that long before the founding of what was arguably the world’s first nation-state, the people who lived there shared common cultural practices and imported embalming ingredients from distant lands (J. Archaeol. Sci. 2018, DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2018.07.011). Mummification in ancient Egypt involved removing the corpse’s internal organs, desiccating the body with a mixture