A team of researchers from the universities of York and Oxford, in the United Kingdom, and Macquarie, in Australia, has discovered that the ancient Egyptians already knew how to perform mummification around 3700 BC. C., about 1,500 years before what was suspected.
Until now, the majority accepted hypothesis held that at the end of the Neolithic and in the predynastic periods, between 4500 and 3100 BC. C., the mummification of the corpses occurred naturally, when they were exposed to the action of heat and the dryness of the environment and the desert sand. Experts believed that the use of resins and other compounds to artificially produce this process dated back, at most, to the time of the Old Kingdom, to 2200 BC. C. approximately.
However, after eleven years of trials, the archaeologists and Egyptologists who signed this new study, published in the journal PLOS ONE , maintain that they have found embalming agents in the linen used to wrap the bodies in the burials of Mostagedda, in Upper Egypt . These are among the oldest in this culture.
Thus, a biochemical analysis, which included chromatographic, mass spectrometry and thermal desertion techniques -the latter allows the volatile organic compounds to be thinned out- revealed the presence in the aforementioned material of pine resin, aromatic extracts of plants, a combination of vegetable oil and animal fats and traces of an oily compound. Together, they have antibacterial properties and contribute to the preservation of tissues . What’s more, they were found in the same proportions as in much more modern mummies, prepared 3,000 years later, at the peak of the Nile civilization.
For the researchers, it constitutes the proof of what would be the first trials of this type of embalming.
