SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA—Egyptologist Jana Jones and her colleagues have discovered that mummification was practiced in Egypt more than 6,000 years ago, or some 1,500 years earlier than previously thought. Experts had assumed that before about 2200 B.C. all mummification in Egypt was due to natural dessication. But when Jones and her colleagues studied funerary wrappings from late Neolithic cemeteries in Upper Egypt that had been scientifically excavated, they found traces of traditional Egyptian embalming agents like pine resin, plant gum, and natural petroleum. They also occured in similar proportions to ingredients that were used 3,000 years later during the heyday of Pharaonic mummification. “The antibacterial properties of some of these ingredients and the localised soft-tissue preservation that they would have afforded lead us to conclude that these represent the very beginnings of experimentation that would evolve into the mummification practice of the Pharaonic period,” said University of York researcher Stephen Buckley, the study's co-leader, in a Macquarie University press release.
