Jars contained fish, fruit and beeswax balm to sustain the tomb’s residents in the afterlife.
This papyrus from from the tomb shows Kha and his wife Merit worshipping the lord of the afterlife, Osiris.More than 3,400 years after two ancient Egyptians were laid to rest, the jars of food left to nourish their eternal souls still smell sweet. A team of analytical chemists and archaeologists has analysed these scents to help identify the jars’ contents. The study shows how the archaeology of smell can enrich our understanding of the past — and perhaps make museum visits more immersive.
Unusually for the time, the archaeologist who discovered the tomb resisted the temptation to unwrap the mummies or peer inside the sealed amphorae, jars and jugs there, even after they were transferred to the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy. The contents of many of these vessels are still a mystery, although there are some clues, says Degano. “From talking with the curators, we knew there were some fruity aromas in the display cases,” she says.
This isn’t the first time that scent compounds have revealed important information about ancient Egypt. In 2014, researchers extracted volatile molecules from linen bandages that are between 6,300 and 5,000 years old that were used to wrap bodies in some of the earliest known Egyptian cemeteries Odour analysis is still an underexplored area of archaeology, says Stephen Buckley, an archaeologist and analytical chemist at the University of York, UK, who was involved in the 2014 study. “Volatiles have been ignored by archaeologists because of an assumption they would have disappeared from artefacts,” he says. But “if you want to understand the ancient Egyptians, you really want to go into that world of smell”.
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