A limestone jar containing the stays of inner organs taken from the physique of Senetnay, an historic Egyptian girl
Christian Tepper/Museum August Kestner, Hannover
Eternity smells like a concoction of beeswax, bitumen, plant oil and tree resin. That’s based on researchers who’ve simply analysed the substances used to embalm an historic Egyptian noblewoman – Senetnay – who died about 3500 years in the past.
Sniffing out the merchandise used throughout mummification not solely helps us higher perceive how the traditional Egyptians handled their lifeless, but in addition what commerce routes they relied on to entry uncommon substances.
Senetnay is alleged to have nursed Amenhotep II, a pharaoh of historic Egypt’s 18th dynasty – a dynasty that additionally included well-known rulers Tutankhamun and Hatshepsut. Senetnay was buried within the Valley of the Kings close to the traditional city of Thebes, the modern-day metropolis of Luxor.
Barbara Huber on the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany and her colleagues used state-of-the-art analytical know-how — equivalent to gasoline chromatography-mass spectrometry — to unpack the chemical composition of the balm residue present in two of the jars that held Senetnay’s organs through the mummification course of.
That is essentially the most advanced mummification balm discovered from this era in historic Egyptian historical past, based on Huber, and the scent extracted from it’s so refined that she dubbed it “the scent of eternity”.
“The dominant scent, I might say, is like this robust pine-like woody scent of the conifers. However then it’s additionally a bit bit intermingled with a sweeter undertone of the beeswax,” she says. “After which we now have this type of robust smoky scent of the bitumen. It’s a bit bit like freshly laid tar on a avenue.”
However it’s the tree resins, particularly, that Huber’s crew. Their evaluation suggests the balm most likely contained resin from larch timber. It could even have contained resin from pistachio timber, or maybe a so-called dammar gum.
These three substances aren’t naturally present in Egypt, as larches and pistachios primarily develop within the northern Mediterranean, and dammar comes from timber that develop in South-East Asian forests. This means that historic Egyptians had been importing items by way of far-reaching commerce routes at an earlier date than researchers had beforehand thought. As an example, a examine revealed earlier this yr additionally discovered dammar in a mummification balm utilized in historic Egypt, however Senetnay’s mummy predates that instance by a thousand years.
“If the substances are what they are saying they’re, it suggests a way more related world than we would in any other case have thought,” says Sean Coughlin on the Czech Academy of Sciences, who was not concerned within the examine. “We’d marvel what gear, expertise, and concepts would have traveled with them alongside the commerce routes.”
Huber has unanswered questions on whether or not these balms had been chosen for particular causes — maybe as a result of they work as antimicrobials or pesticides. She additionally wonders whether or not totally different organs had been mummified utilizing totally different balms, as her preliminary knowledge suggests, and if this was an intentional selection that carried some significance.
“Knowledge for embalming supplies for the 18th dynasty are missing, so this can be a very welcome addition to the corpus of data,” says Kate Fulcher, who previously analysed embalming materials on the British Museum and was not concerned within the examine.
“We don’t know a lot, or something actually, about who carried out the ceremony and what was mentioned,” Fulcher says. “This seems to have been secret or managed data and we don’t have any writing about it.”
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