A study, published in the journal “Nature”, benefited from the discovery in 2016 of a workshop of the 7th and life before our active era in Saqqara, south of Cairo.
by Pierre Barthélémy
In ancient Egypt, dying was only a step. However, to access eternal life, it was better to cross it. Not only did the dead saw his soul judged by the gods, but it was also necessary that his carnal envelope was protected from decomposition and destruction because the Egyptians believed that a damaged body represented an obstacle to reach the beyond. Hence the recourse, for those who had the means, to the sophisticated art of the embakingrs and their balms, oils and other ointments, whose ingredients remained until today.
The secret is dissipated thanks to an international study published Wednesday 1
prevent putrefaction
It took ten weeks to mummification. Accompanied by ritual acts, this process consisted in drying out the corpse using Natron (a natural sodium carbonate), to avoid it, to remove the brain through the nose, to treat the skin thanks to different Mixtures, then to swaddle it in strips also coated with substances. All, coupled with the extremely dry climate of Egypt which promotes the preservation of bodies, prevented putrefaction.
To unravel the chemical recipes used by ancient preparers, the authors of the study of nature have benefited from the discovery of an exceptional HMAR workshop, in activity at the VII e and vi e centuries before our era. Discovery made in 2016 on the great necropolis of Saqqarah (Memphis region, south of Cairo).
Why exceptional? On the one hand because this workshop, partly underground, was linked to a cemetery dug 30 meters deep, and above all because, in a cache, the containers used by the embalmers, which included both Inscriptions on substances and instructions for their use – for example “put on the head”. Scientists have selected around thirty of these pottery, mainly cups and bowls whose “label” was the most readable.
analysis of the substances found
Leaders in the prehistory and archaeoscience department of the University of Tübingen (Germany), Maxime Rageot is the first author of the article. He explained to the world that, apart from a few drips, the residues of the mixtures used by the embalmers “were generally not visible to the naked eye but they were trapped in the clay matrix of the pottery. We therefore abraged the surface of these ceramics to recover substances and analyze them “. The French researcher underlines “the incredible preservation of these products over time, which makes it possible to detect very volatile molecules from essential oils and to go very far in the identification of raw materials”.
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