It has long been known that the practice of mummification of the dead in ancient Egypt was old, but researchers are now uncovering just how long ago it began.
Researchers on Wednesday said a form of mummification was being carried out more than 6,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. Embalming substances contained in funerary textiles from the oldest-known Egyptian cemeteries showed mummy-making from as early as about 4300 BC, they said.
The embalming agents were infused into the linen used to wrap the corpse to provide an antibacterial and protective barrier. Their use was not as elaborate as the process used much later, but came more than 1,500 years earlier than Egyptian mummification had been thought to have started.
Photo: Reuters
There is evidence of mummification from about 2600 BC and evidence of linen that contained resin being used to wrap bodies around 2800 BC, but 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.
“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 researcher 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 study appears in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.
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