Chemists at the University of Bristol have produced the most detailed chemical portrait yet of what ancient Egyptian embalmers put on and inside the dead. The findings land on one of the strangest chapters in Western medicine. From the twelfth century into the modern era, European physicians prescribed powdered human mummy as a drug, and apothecaries stocked it long after anyone had a good reason to believe it worked. The Bristol work answers, compound by compound, what those patients were swallowing.
The study, published this year in the Journal of Archaeological Science, analyzed the air around fragments of balm and bandage taken from 19 mummies spanning 3200 BC to AD 395. The team identified 81 distinct volatile organic compounds and sorted them into four families tied to specific embalming ingredients: fats and oils, beeswax, plant resins, and bitumen.
