The Mystery of the Cocaine Mummies

New World drugs in ancient Egypt?

In 1992 a short report was issued in the German Naturwissenschaften entitled ‘The First Identification of Drugs in Egyptian Mummies’. Using less words than many modern journal introductions, the authors presented some radioimmunoassay and chromatography results which seemed to suggest that several Egyptian mummies had detectable levels of THC, nicotine and cocaine in their systems. On the face of it this seemed absurd, how could ancient Egyptian royalty have gotten hold of a South American drug? For the next few decades this became a topic of feverish speculation - what if there were older connections between the Old and New Worlds? How would goods have been transported from the Americas to the Mediterranean?

The Occurrence of Cocaine in Egyptian Mummies. (2016) Dominique Görlitz

The roots of this controversy actually date back to the 1970’s, when a reexamination of the abdominal cavity of Ramesses II (1303 BC – 1213 BC) seemed to return fragments of tobacco leaf. The researcher who presented this shocking result, Michèle (Layer-)Lescot, was working at the Museum of Natural History in Paris at the time and provoked an angry response from the Egyptian authorities with his enthusiasm. They refused to allow radiocarbon dating, sparking rumour of a cover-up.

Notes and replies began to fly back and forth in the journals, and several researchers attempted to get access to the mummies used for the 1992 report. The German team, led by Svetlana Balabanova, prevented the British Egyptologist Ann Rosalie David from testing the individuals. Instead she went back to Manchester and promptly tested any she could get her hands on, which turned up more results for nicotine and tobacco. The critics were not impressed with this, since tobacco was a well known insecticide during the 1800’s, and many damaged mummies were sprayed or soaked with a number of chemicals to prevent insect, mould and other damage to the specimens. Ramesses himself had been moved an unknown number of times and had been rediscovered in 1886 in a simple wooden coffin by the Director of the Antiquities Service. Added to this the casual habit of smoking indoors well into the 20th century likely made the nicotine and tobacco a simple contaminant, rather than evidence of trans-Atlantic voyaging.

This did not deter Balabanova and others, who set out to test all the world’s mummies in search of answers. The Germans managed to test naturally desiccated bodies from Guangxi, China, and again found nicotine and other metabolites of nicotine consumption. In 1995 two more researchers examined an Egyptian mummy from around 950 BC, and found that the individual had died from internal bleeding caused by a lung parasite. They also presented chemical analysis for traces of THC, nicotine and again - cocaine. Not only this but their tests showed the drugs were concentrated in different organs, THC in the lungs, and nicotine/cocaine in the liver and intestines, solidifying the hypothesis that they consumed these drugs while alive!

Presence of drugs in different tissues of an Egyptian mummy Franz Parsche, Andreas Nerlich (1995)

The criticisms of this work were mostly based on two points - firstly contamination or the introduction of the compounds more recently, and secondly that we have no evidence of such oceanic voyaging during those time periods. The latter seemed both a strong and weak argument to the researchers, and helped spur confirmation that native nicotine-producing plants were used in Eurasia deep into prehistory.

Several enormous reviews were conducted into the literature and evidence for pre-Columbian contact, which we will examine in another article. Suffice to say that many lines of evidence do exist, including that around 100 plant cultivars are known to have crossed the Pacific and Atlantic prior to 1492. Many of these have been found in India, which has helped develop discussions around the role of Austronesian traders moving goods from the Pacific to Africa. One well established example includes cloves discovered in Terqa, Syria, dated to 1721 BC, which demonstrates a very old and sophisticated maritime road from the Spice Islands to the Levant.

Oceanic Migration Paths, Sequence, Timing and Range of Prehistoric Migration in the Pacific and Indian Ocean (2010) Pearce & Pearce

In the pantry of a small private house in Terqa, belonging to a land agent, Puzurum, a handful of cloves was found with other spices in a pottery jar. These cloves can only have come from the Spice Islands, for until the 16th century AD, the five tiny island of Tenate, Tidore, Mutir, Machian and Bachian, which lie off the west coast of Halmahera, were the sole source of cloves. That cloves were being used for cooking by a middle-class family in Syria in 1721 BC suggests that by this date spice trading to Syria was well established and was probably far older

-Oceanic Migration Paths, Sequence, Timing and Range of Prehistoric Migration in the Pacific and Indian Oceans (2010) Pearce & Pearce

The case of the cocaine mummies seems to have come to a pause after the 2009 publication of results from 8 sampled mummies. The Reiss-Engelhorn Museum in Germany hosted around 70 mummies from around the world as part of a huge multi-disciplinary project. A selection of these turned up nothing but nicotine from three South American individuals, although its not clear reading the paper whether they re-tested any of the original sample sets. They also only tested their hair, rather than looking at individual organs and tissues as others have. The question still remains then, did cocaine reach Egypt around 1200 BC?

We can consider this little article something of a primer for a larger investigation into trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific ocean voyaging, including the movements of people, plants, diseases, insects, crops, domesticated animals, technologies and customs. I will leave you with a teaser from Stephen Oppenheimer’s 1998 book, Eden in the east, the drowned continent of Southeast Asia:

There is one distinctly Austronesian trait that appears in the early ‘Ubaid [Mesopotamian] ceramics found under, and in graves let into, the silt layer at Ur. This is the tattooing of the female figurines....There are paint marks and implants of clay pellets around the shoulders, suggestive of tattooing and skin scarification. Tattooing is a widespread Austronesian practice, but skin scarification has a more limited distribution in Oceania. The inhabitants of the Middle Sepik area on the north coast of New Guinea still practice this custom. Although these people do not speak an Austronesian tongue, they have extensive cultural borrowings. In some villages patterned scarification of the shoulders and torso is performed as an initiation rite and imitates the teeth marks of crocodiles. The resulting raised, patterned oval keloid scars resemble those of the ‘Ubaid figurines.

Woolley noted with surprise the nature of the graves in which these figurines were found. Rectangular in shape, the base of the grave was carpeted in deliberately shattered pottery. The bodies were extended, unlike later burials and were also powdered in red haematite (iron ore). One body had an extra lump of red haematite and another statuette had its face painted bright red. A bracelet of shell beads was found around one wrist. The custom of painting extended bodies with haematite is also seen in wooden box burials from Niah Cave in Borneo. The earliest date for these box burials is 3800 BC…