In an embalming workshop dating back 2,600 years, archaeologists have found raw materials such as natural bitumen, tree gum, oil, and fat that the ancient Egyptians used to preserve corpses and prepare them for life after death.

Scientists say that the materials used for embalming in Egypt, at least in this workshop, were the product of a global supply chain that relied on trade with the Mediterranean Sea, the rest of Africa, and perhaps even Asian lands in cases such as antifungal and antibacterial materials.

Mahmoud Baget, a biochemist at the National Research Center in Cairo and a member of the research team, said: “The fact that the Egyptians went to such lengths to obtain these special natural products and import them from distant countries means that they needed these substances. “And they weren’t just trying them as a trial and error… They knew about microbiology.”

This workshop was discovered for the first time in 2016 in the excavations carried out in the area of “Saqara”, the burial place of the dead of Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt, and near the pyramid of Onas and the step pyramid of Djoser.

The workshop yielded more than 100 vessels, including pottery cups and clay bowls, some of which had labels explaining how the contents were used in the embalming process: “to put on the head” or “to perfume the body.” , or “to protect the liver”.

Using these containers, scientists can chemically analyze the particles inside and thus try to reconstruct their original content. The result obtained is a very important window into the outcome of a mummy-making process.

Stuart Tyson Smith, an Egyptologist at the University of California, says about this: “We have many texts that refer to embalming, but this archaeological discovery gives us a view that we do not get from the texts; In fact, we are witnessing a physical process to preserve the body physically.

Researchers think that the natural bitumen found in the workshop came from the Dead Sea. The gum of juniper and cypress trees has also been seen in this place. The most interesting thing for the scientists was that the embalmers used gum from a branch of a dicotyledonous tree called Dubalmyogan, which grows in the forests of India and Southeast Asia.

“The embalming industry was one of the foundations of early globalization because to get the raw materials you really needed to get these gums from very far away from Southeast Asia,” says Philipp W. Stockhammer, an archaeologist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and one of the researchers of the study. Ship to Egypt. This would not have been possible without the existence of a trade network that stretched from present-day South India to the North of the Persian Gulf and finally to Egypt.”

While a handful of embalming manuals have so far been the only means scientists have to understand the complex and mysterious 70-day process of drying and preserving corpses, scientists say new workshop discoveries challenge a number of long-held hypotheses about ancient Egypt.

For example, for a long time, the word “antiu” (antiu) in old texts was thought to mean “Mecca myrrh” gum, which is obtained from a species of thorny shrub. However, the remains of a mixture of animal fat, oil, bitumen and gum from two types of cypress trees can be seen in the five containers that were seen in this workshop with the label of the same word.

“The composition of ‘Antio’ is actually not what we expect,” says Sophie Scheudet, an Egyptologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, who has studied embalming manuals dating back to 1450 BC. The question is why this discrepancy was found? One option is that a mistake has been made in reading the texts. “It is also possible that there was something unique about the vessels in this workshop, or that the materials used – even the word itself – have evolved over time.”