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Ancient Egyptian coffins and mystery of ‘black goo’
- planetis 6y agoLet me guess, another ancient artifact stolen by the british museum. It rightfully belongs to the Egyptian goverment... similarly the Elginian marbles belong to Greece.
- teruakohatu 6y agoThe Ancient Egyptians mummified bodies for over 2000 years, surely they must have inspected ancient mummified bodies, even if religiously taboo, maybe when grave robbers broke into a tomb, and adapted their practices accordingly.
- abellerose 6y agoHow do people know it was taboo for them?
- Jon_Lowtek 6y agoWhy is it not taboo any more?
- abellerose 6y agoI'm confused here. I asked the question of how people know it was taboo for ancient Egyptians. I didn't expect a question instead of an answer because I'm not proposing any side. Maybe people are just going off assumptions and commenting on that basis but I'm generally curious what proof people have. Specifically, when it comes to such a culture finding the energy of attempting at storing the body and for their view on the afterlife requiring it as a necessity. I have no reason to assume such a culture wouldn't find inspecting graves to some degree as taboo and for any benefits of continuing the process they seemed to care about.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI don't doubt that there's been scientific research into the best way to mummify a body; they wouldn't have done all of the steps on a whim / guess. But we're talking about a tradition spanning hundreds, if not thousands of years here. Mummification or otherwise preserving a body goes back a long time - the oldest form of intentional mummification goes back to 5000 BC, or 7000 years ago (according to wikipedia), so even then they had developed a tradition and the knowledge of preserving a body already.
- throwaway2048 6y agoTo put things in perspective we are closer time-wise to Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt than he was to the building of the Great Pyramids. Ancient Egyptian culture was immensely old, even at that time, and was basically continuous for the whole period.
- lqet 6y agoI remember reading somewhere that Alexander the Great was so impressed by the (by then already ruinous) Tower of Babel, that he ordered it to be demolished and re-built. He died before the construction was completed, though. Edit: here is a source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etemenanki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etemenanki
- phonypc 6y agoThe figure I usually see used for that comparison is Julius Caesar or Cleopatra. I think Alexander is a little too old for it to be quite true.
- jbay808 6y agoI remember feeling surprised (although I shouldn't have been!) when I learned that ancient Rome had their own historians studying ancient history, but who didn't consider themselves to be ancient history.
- tragomaskhalos 6y agoTo a modern person that would make sense yes, but the Egyptians were extraordinarily conservative, as the duration of their culture attests, and ancient people in general were, by our standards, shockingly incurious scientifically.
- vncecartersknee 6y agox-files theme intensifies
- raindropm 6y agoor Prometheus. Seriously, never touch anything that looks like black goo, especially in ancient setting.
- sgt 6y agoI was thinking Stargate!
- gottareply2020 6y agoIndeed
- wkearney99 6y agoI see what you did there.
- m463 6y agoWouldn't that more accurately be grey goo? :)
- ggm 6y agoIf they had said mastic I would have been there like a shot. Mastic and gum-arabic were used extensively in the ancient world.
- TheGallopedHigh 6y agoMastica(sp?) is still chewed today in Greece as some kind of chewing gum. I wonder if the word “masticate” zcomes from this ie vice versa
- Udik 6y ago> I wonder if the word “masticate” zcomes from this ie vice versa It does, the plant's resin is named after the Greek verb meaning "to chew".
- twic 6y agoIt's also used to flavour a kind of festive brioche: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsoureki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsoureki And liqueur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastika https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastika Etymologically, it looks like the root word means "chew", and i would guess that mastikha is named for that, rather than vice versa: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BC%CE%B1%CF%83%CF%84%CE%B9%CF%87%CE%AC%CF%89 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BC%CE%B1%CF%83%CF%84%CE%B...
- ConsiderCrying 6y agoI love the clash of deeply detailed language like "we vaporized the samples and used ‘Gas Chromatography – Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS)’ and separated the molecules" with them using 'black goo' as a term. I am fascinated that the goo wasn't just a random choice for mummification but apparently had spiritual/cultural significance. Never knew too much about Egyptian culture but this being a sort of 'regeneration' symbol, perhaps tied into some sort of afterlife beliefs, that's amazing.
- Digit-Al 6y ago> I love the clash of deeply detailed language like "we vaporized the samples and used ‘Gas Chromatography – Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS)’ and separated the molecules" with them using 'black goo' as a term. I would argue that 'black goo' is the most deeply detailed and technical term that could be used for such a substance. I think we can both agree that one cannot argue that it is not black. Now read the following definition of goo: Noun. Any semi-solid or liquid substance; especially one that is sticky, gummy or slippery; frequently of vague or unknown composition, or a bodily fluid. Can you think of any more precise and technical term for such a substance? :-)
- Intermernet 6y agoNot precise or technical, but from an evocative perspective, I like the term "Necroplasm".
- dekhn 6y ago"black goo" is the standard organic chemistry term for the nasty crap at the bottom of your apparatus after doing a reaction.
- exDM69 6y agoI guessed quite a few of these ingredients because I work with beeswax, tree resins and plant oils in the wood shop, particularly when doing instruments. I was surprised about the bitumen and its origin story (floating blobs in the dead sea). That stuff looks like bitumen but I did not expect that they had petroleum products so long ago. I use lots of materials in my craft that were once used by the ancient Egyptians. Beeswax, linseed oil, hide glue, propolis were all used for at least 4000 years successfully. It breaks my heart to know that we abandoned these traditional materials less than a hundred years ago and replaced it with plastic crap, which seems unlikely to stand the test of time.
- brailsafe 6y agoDon't those materials basically amount to plastic? The products we have now are definitely crap, but they sure as hell last a long time.
- exDM69 6y agoNo, beeswax, linseed oils, pine resin are not plastic. They can be used instead of plastic in many applications but they're still renewable and bio-degradable materials. Bitumen is a crude oil product, and quite nasty material indeed. But it's not really what I was referring to here. Plastic is very durable but it's quite brittle. A plastic bucket for example can break quite easily and needs to be disposed of responsibly or it'll stay around forever ruining the environment.
- dogma1138 6y agoPlastics just means a specific set of properties not what it’s specifically made from or can it be biodegradable. Depending on the exact chemical reaction makeup these could very well be considered plastics. Plastics date back around 3500 years with the earliest plastics being made form egg proteins and other animal sources, Shellac which can and is formed into plastic materials has been used for at least 3000 years and in Middle Ages Europe plastics were made by treating horns and making translucent and transparent plastics form them: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/queenslib.wordpress.com/2017/05/04/front-horn-window/amp/ https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/queenslib.wordpress.com/2017/... One of the first modern plastics was cellulose nitrate which was used as an ivory replacement and was made by dissolving cotton in nitric acid and mixing it with vegetable oil, the solution can then be poured into molds to create the final shape or made into billets that could be machined or carved.
- trelonid 6y ago>The exact ingredients vary from one coffin to the next, but the goo was always made from some of these ingredients what I understand is that they didn't measure the ingredients, but rather put how much they thought was good
- claviska 6y agoI don’t think it’s arbitrary. Despite being from similar times, burials occurred decades or even centuries apart. The recipe likely evolved based on experimentation and availability of ingredients.
- sradman 6y agoThe black goo is bitumen, or tar. It is the binder used in road asphalt and was a common pitch used to seal boat hulls. The article focuses on the ritualistic aspect but doesn’t focus on the functional reasons. Sealing the mummified remains from the elements, sealing in the gasses and smells from mummification/decomposition, and gluing the sarcophagus seem like reasonable functional explanations. Some statues are also covered with pitch so maybe it was also used as a theft deterrent. The pitch covered statues are the best evidence that the pitch was ritualistic rather than functional, in my opinion.
- romaaeterna 6y agoIndoor or outdoor statues? Stone eventually suffers from the elements if it left outside.
- duskwuff 6y agoIndoor, I guess? These statues were found in tombs -- they weren't made to be displayed.
- aszantu 6y agotldr: plant oil, animal fat, tree resin, beeswax and bitumen
- DagAgren 6y agoIs it maybe a little bit weird to be doing research on old corpses that were just dragged out of their graves in a foreign country?
- bagpuss 6y agohere is a proposal to procure some of this liquid and drink it "we need to drink the red liquid from the cursed dark sarcophagus in the form of some sort of carbonated energy drink so we can assume its powers and finally die" https://www.change.org/p/let-people-drink-the-red-liquid-from-the-dark-sarcophagus https://www.change.org/p/let-people-drink-the-red-liquid-fro...
- INTPenis 6y agoSome records suggest that people in Azerbaijan were taking crude oil baths as early as 6th century. I can't say what's true but it seems to make sense that people were fascinated by a liquid pouring from the ground. Just like when plutonium was first discovered it was used for health.
- lgl 6y ago> Just like when plutonium was first discovered it was used for health [citation needed] because this doesn't really seem to be the case. Although apparently there were eventually some plutonium based pacemakers in the 70s, plutonium itself was first produced in the 40s but I couldn't really find how it was used for health except for some highly unethical studies done on radiation.
- pfdietz 6y agoYou're thinking of radium, not plutonium.
- olah_1 6y ago> it appears that the goo was a ritually important anointing fluid used for a range of purposes, all relating to the burial of the deceased and their transformation into Osiris. It's worth noting that the color black signifies manifestation in Hermetic thought. The "first stuff" upon which everything is made. Think of statues of the Black Virgin (Mary, and before that Isis). Blackness signifies how we should be if we want to be alchemically changed into a higher state. Open palms, receptive, like a mirror reflecting divinity. Super interesting topic imo.