Ancient Secrets Unveiled: The 5,600-Year-Old Mummy’s Embalming Recipe Could Rewrite Egypt’s History
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Believed to be around 5,600 years old, the Turin mummy was originally thought to be a preservation anomaly. Fred was believed to have been naturally preserved by the extreme desert heat.
However, the study examined the remains of the mummy and discovered that not only had the mummy actually been embalmed by humans, but he had been preserved using a recipe similar to the ones used 2,500 years later on pharaohs and noblemen like King Tut during Egypt’s peak mummification period, according to Live Science.
The study’s co-author, Jana Jones, an Egyptologist at Australia’s Macquarie University, previously explored fragments of clothing from mummy funeral wrappings from around the same time as Fred but from a different location and found evidence that hinted at mummy embalming.
However, those hints were not enough to convince skeptics that embalming was actually taking place because they had only clothes to examine and no actual bodies. So, to prove their theory, they needed a body — and they turned to Fred to help them gather definitive proof.
Raffaella Bianucci, University of Turin
Jones and her team used a variety of tests to examine the linen fragments from the Turin mummy’s torso and wrist as well as a woven basket that was buried with his remains to figure out the exact components of the embalming salve. What they discovered turned out to be a groundbreaking find.
The salve consisted of a plant oil base that was then combined with plant gum or sugars, heated conifer resin, and aromatic plant extracts. The components were extremely similar to the salves used thousands of years later, suggesting that Ancient Egyptian embalming practices had been established far earlier than previously thought.
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