Discovered 3,400-year-old food jars in the Egyptian tombs

The results of scent analysis from ancient jars in Egyptian tombs revealed that they used to contain beeswax, dried fruit and fish for the dead.

The tomb painting depicts Kha and Merit worshiping the god of the afterlife, Osiris.

More than 3,400 years after the two ancient Egyptians were laid to rest, the food vessels used to nourish their eternal souls are still smelling good. A team of chemists and archaeologists analyzed these odors to identify the ingredients in the jar, Nature reported on April 1. The new study was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The discovery of the intact tomb of architect Kha and his wife, Merit, in the cemetery of Deir el-Medina near Luxor in 1906 is a remarkable milestone for Egyptologists. Their mausoleum is the most complete non-royal tomb ever found in Egypt, revealing important information about how high-status people were treated after death.

It was strange at the time that the archaeologist who discovered the tomb did not open the mummy or examine the inside of the sealed jars and jars, even after they were moved to the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy. What was inside many of the vases is still a mystery and there are only a few clues. "When we talked to museum curators, we were told there was a slight fruity smell in the vases," said Ilaria Degano, an analytical chemist at the University of Pisa in Italy.

Degano and his colleagues placed a variety of artifacts, including sealed pots and uncovered ancient decomposing food cups, in plastic bags for several days to collect the volatile molecules that rose up. The team then used mass spectrometers to determine the scent composition of each sample.

They found long-chain aldehydes and hydrocarbons - markers of beeswax, trimethylamine associated with dried fish and other aldehydes commonly found in fruit. "Two-thirds of the artifacts yielded results. It was a pleasant surprise," Degano shared.

One of the flasks was analyzed using a mass spectrometer.

The new discovery will serve for a larger project. The goal of the project was to reanalyze the mausoleum and create a more comprehensive picture of the burial customs for non-royal people during the period of Kha and Merit's death, some 70 years before Tutankhamun ascended the throne.

This isn't the first time scents have revealed important information about ancient Egypt. In 2014, researchers extracted volatile molecules from cloth bandages dating back 5,000 to 6,300 years used to wrap remains in several ancient Egyptian cemeteries. This helps confirm the presence of embalming agents with antibacterial properties, suggesting that the Egyptians experimented with mummification 1,500 years earlier than scientists thought.

Smell analysis is an unexplored area of ​​archeology, according to Stephen Buckley, an archaeologist and analytical chemist at York University (UK) who was part of the 2014 research team. through volatiles because you think they'll disappear from the artifacts. But if you want to understand the ancient Egyptians, you'll really want to dive into the world of scent," he said.