7 ms·

American Drugs in Egyptian Mummies (2005)

40 points by Petiver 9y ago

zeckalpha 9y ago
> For teaching purposes only, do not review, quote or abstract
pvaldes 9y ago
The history seems speculative, but I'll speculate a little more anyways. Lets suppose that those mummies wheren't fake, is not probable, but lets assume that. Could we theoretically find nicotine in an old egyptian mummy?. In theory is possible. There is one species of Nicotiana native from Africa (Nicotiana africana). The problem is that this plant is a Namibian endemism, in the other coin of Africa. For people mastering the complicated process of embalm a body, with a trading area that extends to the entire Mediterranean sea, and taking a lot of precise steps and hassles to be sucessful, a local plant able to stop insect damage would had been noticed and treasured. We can speculate that the current Namibian populations are relict populations of a much wider distribution area, and that this is another white rhino. Maybe the north populations were wiped by the old Egyptian empire?, then the flower must appear painted somewhere or some obscure text should talk about such treasure. And in any case, there is still the Cocaine issue. There are also some members of the family Erytroxylaceae native from Africa, but If you find three of the most popular drugs when putting a sample of a mummy in a machine, you should suspect that either the mummies were fake, or where real but used later to smuggle drugs, or that the drugs were into the machine previously (the laboratory has been used before for analyze drugs).
- ericd 9y ago
  Could they have gotten the plant you mention via trade?
  - simonh 9y ago
    In theory yes of course, but there is no (other) physical evidence of possible trade between Europe/Africa and the Americas in that period. The possibility that the Phoenecians could have comes up from time to time, but their ships really weren’t well adapted to deep ocean travel.
    - jcranmer 9y ago
      To emphasize the point: the Atlantic Ocean is roughly 3,000 miles from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, or merely 2000 from Ireland to Newfoundland. Crossing the Atlantic means provisioning months of food and water, and being able to tackle navigation without any visible reference points. It also means being able to design ships that can handle stormy conditions, because you're likely to hit a storm in that time. The first ships likely capable of making a crossing are the Chinese junks, followed by Polynesian outrigger canoes. The first European ships capable of making it are probably the Viking longships, which makes pre-Viking contact difficult to conceive, much less a sustained trading pattern. Furthermore, Phoenician ships were predominantly rowed, not sailed, which makes the journey especially hard to believe.
      - chris_va 9y ago
        Or, with the trade winds, about 15 days on anything that can sail/drift downwind. There were similar, well established routes ("just follow the wind") on the Indian Ocean side of Africa done with very small (2-3 people) boats.
        jcranmer 9y ago
        The typical speed of Phoenician ships under favorable winds was about 4.5-6 knots, and these relied heavily on rowing. Without oars, you're looking at 3-4 knots. 4.5 knots is still about 30 days from the Canaries, and keep in mind, that's the shortest time it would have taken you to go west; the eastbound trip would have been travelling at less than a knot (fighting both current and trade winds).
        dvtv75 9y ago
        I came for the crackpot theories, but instead learned something fascinating. Thanks!
  - pvaldes 9y ago
    Namibia was probably too far to have links with old Egypt. The egyptian empire documents show that they were very aware and informed about people living in the current Italy and Greece at north, Irak/Syria at east, and make war with Lybia at west and Sudan at South. They were a bureaucratic society. To cross the central rainforest and the Kalahari desert to trade with South Africa and do not reflect it in their documents seems unlikely to me (but I'm not an expert in this field). This said, finding a wild Nicotiana in Egypt today is a childs game. Nicotiana glauca, an escaped american species appears everywhere in all Mediterranean countries. Could easily slip into any local plant mix aiming to give some good ol' autenthicity to a modern mummy.
    - ericd 9y ago
      I would have figured that it would have been primarily independent traders that handled most long distance trade, and that this wouldn't have been a particularly high volume trade good, so there would be a good chance that the fraction of records we've recovered don't contain any mention. I have very little education in this area, though. Thanks for all the info!
      - cfadvan 9y ago
        The concept of independent traders and a merchant class uncontrolled by a central palace system of government really didn’t emerge until after the Late Bronze Age collapse circa 1170’s BCE. Before that, it was all about central control through the sovereigns, their (hugely extended) families, a system of “gift exchanges” that look a lot like commerce to us today, and control through priesthoods. It just wasn’t an option to get up and be a merchant on an international scale without your god-king giving you the rights at that time.
        ericd 9y ago
        Wow, thanks! That's super interesting. I have to redo some of my mental model of the ancient world.
- cfadvan 9y ago
  Used to smuggle drugs seems by far the most likely. Mummies would have the benefit of being ostensibly fragile, valuable, and repellent to most. That’s a trifecta drug smugglers would hope for, in terms of evading deep inspections.
  - spraak 9y ago
    The readings were however taken from the hair that was washed before testing, indicating ingestion while alive.
    - GW150914 9y ago
      Contamination of the mummy itself seems unlikely, while contamination from the lab or tech seems incredibly likely.
      - spraak 9y ago
        Maybe, but unlikely; other tests were done. > “Since the initial work of Balabanova et. al., other studies have revealed the same drugs (cocaine, nicotine, and hashish) in Egyptian mummies, confirming the original results."
- shams93 9y ago
  It would seem like it would be easier to contaminate with nicotine given the old school habits of smoking everywhere the cocaine is harder to explain because it's not that easy to contaminate with it, back in the old days cocaine unsers injected it, snorting didn't become a thing until the 1970s.
  - shams93 9y ago
    However apparently the use of solvents negates any effect from atmospheric smoke so it appears to be an embalming element.
GW150914 9y ago
In a one-page article appearing in Naturwissenschaften, German scientist Svetla Balabanova (1992) and two of her colleagues reported findings of cocaine, hashish and nicotine in Egyptian mummies. The findings were immediately identified as improbable on the grounds that two of the substances were known to be derived only from American plants - cocaine from Erythroxylon coca, and nicotine from Nicotiana tabacum. The suggestion that such compounds could have found their way to Egypt before Columbus' discovery of America seemed patently impossible. Meanwhile contamination or even a prank/hoax is quite likely. In fact if a lab tech had a big night and didn’t wash their hands properly, or one of their own hairs contaminated the sample, there you have it. Contrary to popular perception, one outlier result isn’t a breakthrough, replication is key.
- mabbo 9y ago
  > one outlier result > Of the nine mummies evaluated, all showed signs of cocaine and hashish Tetrahydrocannabinol), whereas all but one sampled positive for nicotine. While I'm not saying you're incorrect- contamination seems so likely that I'd start investigating if this lab put anyone in prison over these sorts of tests- the article clearly says there were nine different mummies tested.
  - GW150914 9y ago
    I don’t mean one test, I mean one set of findings from the same source. Even if we’re to believe some ancient traveler made it to the Americas and back, they would have had a hell of a time finding those three things in the (likely one unplanned) trip. Besides, cocaine is the result of modern chemistry! Tripanone is the base alkaloid, from which cocaine is derived. So not only would these people have had to identify the narcotic value of cannabis, tobacco and coca, they’d have to figure out how to press hashish, and process large amounts of coca leaves for tripanone, and then process that into cocaine base. In practice getting significant quantities of cocaine from coca without the intermediate chemistry isn’t feasible. No.
    - spraak 9y ago
      It's not all or nothing. These resources were most likely disparate and funneled from various sources until they reached Egypt. You think a grocery store needs to grow it's own wheat? The complexity is what you're not seeing.
anoncoward778 9y ago
Maybe just maybe, what "Egyptologist" have been telling you all these years....has been garbage.
walrus01 9y ago
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co... Most are sketchy at best, or have been proven spurious.
dzdt 9y ago
The article "Rameses II and the tobacco beetle" (PC Buckland, E Panagiotakopulu Antiquity, 2001) has a more probable take. In the century-plus these mummies were in museums, they were subjected to various insecticide treatments. Among these was almost surely nicotine applied as an insecticide. Cocaine may have been introduced similarly or accidentally in this timespan. 19th century and early 20th century museums did not document anything and had by modern standards extremely poor conservation approaches. [1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.490.846&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.490...
- stinos 9y ago
  Accprding to other articles and some comments here, nictoine could only be in hair if it was ingested and cannot get there by external application, if I understand it correctly. That, plus there being 9 different mummies from different museums, at least does raise some questions about the insecticide treatment theory.
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    I don't know the historical context of those mummies, but if they correspond to a wide range of historical time periods, it increases the likelihood that the explanation is contamination. A wider time period would imply that the contact would have been more sustained, which makes it harder to explain why there's no other evidence of contact.
    - api 9y ago
      Where did mesoamerican people get the idea for pyramids? It's possible that it is just a logical easy to build structure, but I've always wondered. There are other similarities too. I seem to recall an attempt to cross the Atlantic with modern replicas of Egyptian style vessels but I don't recall if it was successful.
      - johnnyOnTheSpot 9y ago
daodedickinson 9y ago
Weird that my first guess isn't considered, that it could be from a now extinct plant, perhaps harvested to extinction like the abortifacient plant used in ancient Rome or destroyed in after the plant drew the ire of someone powerful. Or maybe the plant is still out there. Unlikely to be related, but possibly, Tramadol was thought to be naturally produced by a root in Cameroon but then found to be in high levels in the soil, water, and other plants because people and their animals were consuming high quantities.
daddosi 9y ago
If you look at the ways these substances are transported today it seems prety obvious people would find a way shortly after first introduction. Even if death is more likely than succes people will do it. You can also spend any amount of money trying to stop the drug trade without accomplishing it. iow the real story is probably weirder than we can imagine.
macawfish 9y ago
Why is it so hard for some people of European descent to believe that non-European people may have crossed oceans in non-European ways, without Europeans ever hearing about it? For goodness sake, look at the pyramids. European people still aren't totally sure how those things were built. There are theories, but you don't know what's possible/impossible. Essentially that's what's going on in this conversation. By the way: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/02/did-chinese-civilization-come-from-ancient-egypt-archeological-debate-at-heart-of-china-national-identity/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/02/did-chinese-civilization... And: https://www.nature.com/news/mummy-dna-unravels-ancient-egyptians-ancestry-1.22069 https://www.nature.com/news/mummy-dna-unravels-ancient-egypt... For the record, I'm someone of various European ancestries, but I'm not hung up on some kind of European superiority complex. "Consider the Earth's history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history."
- jcranmer 9y ago
  > Why is it so hard for some people of European descent to believe that non-European people may have crossed oceans in non-European ways, without Europeans ever hearing about it? For goodness sake, look at the pyramids. European people still aren't totally sure how those things were built. There are theories, but you don't know what's possible/impossible. Well, saying that Norte Chico gave the Ancient Egyptians a hand with skycrane techniques is pretty impossible. There's a wide gap between "we're not sure what the answer is" and "this wild theory is equally well-supported by the evidence." I gave some details in another comment, but the shipbuilding technology simply didn't exist before around 700 or so to cross the Atlantic Ocean--not in Europe, nor in the Americas (It did exist in Asia, but the Polynesian expansion and experience strongly limits the space for Asian trans-Pacific contact). That creates a very strong prior against pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact, one that requires more persuasive evidence than "I can interpret this as a New World relic in the Old World." The only theory that comes close to meeting that standard is the Polynesian contact theory.
  - throwaway413 9y ago
    > simply didn't exist before around 700 or so You say that with such certainty as if you were there.

40 points by Petiver 9y ago

> For teaching purposes only, do not review, quote or abstract

The history seems speculative, but I'll speculate a little more anyways. Lets suppose that those mummies wheren't fake, is not probable, but lets assume that. Could we theoretically find nicotine in an old egyptian mummy?. In theory is possible. There is one species of Nicotiana native from Africa (Nicotiana africana). The problem is that this plant is a Namibian endemism, in the other coin of Africa. For people mastering the complicated process of embalm a body, with a trading area that extends to the entire Mediterranean sea, and taking a lot of precise steps and hassles to be sucessful, a local plant able to stop insect damage would had been noticed and treasured. We can speculate that the current Namibian populations are relict populations of a much wider distribution area, and that this is another white rhino. Maybe the north populations were wiped by the old Egyptian empire?, then the flower must appear painted somewhere or some obscure text should talk about such treasure. And in any case, there is still the Cocaine issue. There are also some members of the family Erytroxylaceae native from Africa, but If you find three of the most popular drugs when putting a sample of a mummy in a machine, you should suspect that either the mummies were fake, or where real but used later to smuggle drugs, or that the drugs were into the machine previously (the laboratory has been used before for analyze drugs).

ericd 9y ago
Could they have gotten the plant you mention via trade?
- simonh 9y ago
  In theory yes of course, but there is no (other) physical evidence of possible trade between Europe/Africa and the Americas in that period. The possibility that the Phoenecians could have comes up from time to time, but their ships really weren’t well adapted to deep ocean travel.
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    To emphasize the point: the Atlantic Ocean is roughly 3,000 miles from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, or merely 2000 from Ireland to Newfoundland. Crossing the Atlantic means provisioning months of food and water, and being able to tackle navigation without any visible reference points. It also means being able to design ships that can handle stormy conditions, because you're likely to hit a storm in that time. The first ships likely capable of making a crossing are the Chinese junks, followed by Polynesian outrigger canoes. The first European ships capable of making it are probably the Viking longships, which makes pre-Viking contact difficult to conceive, much less a sustained trading pattern. Furthermore, Phoenician ships were predominantly rowed, not sailed, which makes the journey especially hard to believe.
    - chris_va 9y ago
      Or, with the trade winds, about 15 days on anything that can sail/drift downwind. There were similar, well established routes ("just follow the wind") on the Indian Ocean side of Africa done with very small (2-3 people) boats.
      - jcranmer 9y ago
        The typical speed of Phoenician ships under favorable winds was about 4.5-6 knots, and these relied heavily on rowing. Without oars, you're looking at 3-4 knots. 4.5 knots is still about 30 days from the Canaries, and keep in mind, that's the shortest time it would have taken you to go west; the eastbound trip would have been travelling at less than a knot (fighting both current and trade winds).
        dvtv75 9y ago
        I came for the crackpot theories, but instead learned something fascinating. Thanks!
- pvaldes 9y ago
  Namibia was probably too far to have links with old Egypt. The egyptian empire documents show that they were very aware and informed about people living in the current Italy and Greece at north, Irak/Syria at east, and make war with Lybia at west and Sudan at South. They were a bureaucratic society. To cross the central rainforest and the Kalahari desert to trade with South Africa and do not reflect it in their documents seems unlikely to me (but I'm not an expert in this field). This said, finding a wild Nicotiana in Egypt today is a childs game. Nicotiana glauca, an escaped american species appears everywhere in all Mediterranean countries. Could easily slip into any local plant mix aiming to give some good ol' autenthicity to a modern mummy.
  - ericd 9y ago
    I would have figured that it would have been primarily independent traders that handled most long distance trade, and that this wouldn't have been a particularly high volume trade good, so there would be a good chance that the fraction of records we've recovered don't contain any mention. I have very little education in this area, though. Thanks for all the info!
    - cfadvan 9y ago
      The concept of independent traders and a merchant class uncontrolled by a central palace system of government really didn’t emerge until after the Late Bronze Age collapse circa 1170’s BCE. Before that, it was all about central control through the sovereigns, their (hugely extended) families, a system of “gift exchanges” that look a lot like commerce to us today, and control through priesthoods. It just wasn’t an option to get up and be a merchant on an international scale without your god-king giving you the rights at that time.
      - ericd 9y ago
        Wow, thanks! That's super interesting. I have to redo some of my mental model of the ancient world.
cfadvan 9y ago
Used to smuggle drugs seems by far the most likely. Mummies would have the benefit of being ostensibly fragile, valuable, and repellent to most. That’s a trifecta drug smugglers would hope for, in terms of evading deep inspections.
- spraak 9y ago
  The readings were however taken from the hair that was washed before testing, indicating ingestion while alive.
  - GW150914 9y ago
    Contamination of the mummy itself seems unlikely, while contamination from the lab or tech seems incredibly likely.
    - spraak 9y ago
      Maybe, but unlikely; other tests were done. > “Since the initial work of Balabanova et. al., other studies have revealed the same drugs (cocaine, nicotine, and hashish) in Egyptian mummies, confirming the original results."
shams93 9y ago
It would seem like it would be easier to contaminate with nicotine given the old school habits of smoking everywhere the cocaine is harder to explain because it's not that easy to contaminate with it, back in the old days cocaine unsers injected it, snorting didn't become a thing until the 1970s.
- shams93 9y ago
  However apparently the use of solvents negates any effect from atmospheric smoke so it appears to be an embalming element.

GW150914 9y ago

In a one-page article appearing in Naturwissenschaften, German scientist Svetla Balabanova (1992) and two of her colleagues reported findings of cocaine, hashish and nicotine in Egyptian mummies. The findings were immediately identified as improbable on the grounds that two of the substances were known to be derived only from American plants - cocaine from Erythroxylon coca, and nicotine from Nicotiana tabacum. The suggestion that such compounds could have found their way to Egypt before Columbus' discovery of America seemed patently impossible. Meanwhile contamination or even a prank/hoax is quite likely. In fact if a lab tech had a big night and didn’t wash their hands properly, or one of their own hairs contaminated the sample, there you have it. Contrary to popular perception, one outlier result isn’t a breakthrough, replication is key.

mabbo 9y ago
> one outlier result > Of the nine mummies evaluated, all showed signs of cocaine and hashish Tetrahydrocannabinol), whereas all but one sampled positive for nicotine. While I'm not saying you're incorrect- contamination seems so likely that I'd start investigating if this lab put anyone in prison over these sorts of tests- the article clearly says there were nine different mummies tested.
- GW150914 9y ago
  I don’t mean one test, I mean one set of findings from the same source. Even if we’re to believe some ancient traveler made it to the Americas and back, they would have had a hell of a time finding those three things in the (likely one unplanned) trip. Besides, cocaine is the result of modern chemistry! Tripanone is the base alkaloid, from which cocaine is derived. So not only would these people have had to identify the narcotic value of cannabis, tobacco and coca, they’d have to figure out how to press hashish, and process large amounts of coca leaves for tripanone, and then process that into cocaine base. In practice getting significant quantities of cocaine from coca without the intermediate chemistry isn’t feasible. No.
  - spraak 9y ago
    It's not all or nothing. These resources were most likely disparate and funneled from various sources until they reached Egypt. You think a grocery store needs to grow it's own wheat? The complexity is what you're not seeing.

anoncoward778 9y ago

Maybe just maybe, what "Egyptologist" have been telling you all these years....has been garbage.

walrus01 9y ago

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co... Most are sketchy at best, or have been proven spurious.

dzdt 9y ago

The article "Rameses II and the tobacco beetle" (PC Buckland, E Panagiotakopulu Antiquity, 2001) has a more probable take. In the century-plus these mummies were in museums, they were subjected to various insecticide treatments. Among these was almost surely nicotine applied as an insecticide. Cocaine may have been introduced similarly or accidentally in this timespan. 19th century and early 20th century museums did not document anything and had by modern standards extremely poor conservation approaches. [1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.490.846&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.490...

stinos 9y ago
Accprding to other articles and some comments here, nictoine could only be in hair if it was ingested and cannot get there by external application, if I understand it correctly. That, plus there being 9 different mummies from different museums, at least does raise some questions about the insecticide treatment theory.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  I don't know the historical context of those mummies, but if they correspond to a wide range of historical time periods, it increases the likelihood that the explanation is contamination. A wider time period would imply that the contact would have been more sustained, which makes it harder to explain why there's no other evidence of contact.
  - api 9y ago
    Where did mesoamerican people get the idea for pyramids? It's possible that it is just a logical easy to build structure, but I've always wondered. There are other similarities too. I seem to recall an attempt to cross the Atlantic with modern replicas of Egyptian style vessels but I don't recall if it was successful.
    - johnnyOnTheSpot 9y ago

daodedickinson 9y ago

Weird that my first guess isn't considered, that it could be from a now extinct plant, perhaps harvested to extinction like the abortifacient plant used in ancient Rome or destroyed in after the plant drew the ire of someone powerful. Or maybe the plant is still out there. Unlikely to be related, but possibly, Tramadol was thought to be naturally produced by a root in Cameroon but then found to be in high levels in the soil, water, and other plants because people and their animals were consuming high quantities.

daddosi 9y ago

If you look at the ways these substances are transported today it seems prety obvious people would find a way shortly after first introduction. Even if death is more likely than succes people will do it. You can also spend any amount of money trying to stop the drug trade without accomplishing it. iow the real story is probably weirder than we can imagine.

macawfish 9y ago

Why is it so hard for some people of European descent to believe that non-European people may have crossed oceans in non-European ways, without Europeans ever hearing about it? For goodness sake, look at the pyramids. European people still aren't totally sure how those things were built. There are theories, but you don't know what's possible/impossible. Essentially that's what's going on in this conversation. By the way: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/02/did-chinese-civilization-come-from-ancient-egypt-archeological-debate-at-heart-of-china-national-identity/ http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/02/did-chinese-civilization... And: https://www.nature.com/news/mummy-dna-unravels-ancient-egyptians-ancestry-1.22069 https://www.nature.com/news/mummy-dna-unravels-ancient-egypt... For the record, I'm someone of various European ancestries, but I'm not hung up on some kind of European superiority complex. "Consider the Earth's history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history."

jcranmer 9y ago
> Why is it so hard for some people of European descent to believe that non-European people may have crossed oceans in non-European ways, without Europeans ever hearing about it? For goodness sake, look at the pyramids. European people still aren't totally sure how those things were built. There are theories, but you don't know what's possible/impossible. Well, saying that Norte Chico gave the Ancient Egyptians a hand with skycrane techniques is pretty impossible. There's a wide gap between "we're not sure what the answer is" and "this wild theory is equally well-supported by the evidence." I gave some details in another comment, but the shipbuilding technology simply didn't exist before around 700 or so to cross the Atlantic Ocean--not in Europe, nor in the Americas (It did exist in Asia, but the Polynesian expansion and experience strongly limits the space for Asian trans-Pacific contact). That creates a very strong prior against pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact, one that requires more persuasive evidence than "I can interpret this as a New World relic in the Old World." The only theory that comes close to meeting that standard is the Polynesian contact theory.
- throwaway413 9y ago
  > simply didn't exist before around 700 or so You say that with such certainty as if you were there.