Senetnay, an Egyptian noblewoman who lived around 1450 BC and who nursed Pharaoh Amenhotep II, was a woman with a privileged social status. This is the conclusion reached by a group of German scientists after analyzing two of the containers in which the Egyptian embalmers stored the mummified viscera of the nurse. The remains of balsam adhered to the base of these vessels, apparently empty, have revealed an extremely complex preparation for the time, in which up to six ingredients were used, some of them exotic and unusual.
The containers, called canopic jars and intended to contain Senetnay's viscera, were found in 1900 by Egyptologist Howard Carter near the Egyptian city of Luxor. Unearthed from the Valley of the Kings, a necropolis reserved almost exclusively for pharaohs and powerful nobles of the time, two of them traveled through Egypt and Europe until settling, in 1935, in the August Kestner Museum, in Hannover, Germany. Now, 123 years after the find, a team has identified the ingredients of the salve contained in the jars.
The study, led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, in Germany, and published this Thursday in Science Communications, has been able to extract information from the residues accumulated at the base of the vessels that, unlike the organs and the balm , which have been lost, has endured over time.
"Over millennia, organic substances undergo various chemical changes due to environmental factors, microbial activity and the inherent instability of certain molecules," explains Barbara Huber, an archaeologist at Max Planck and co-author of the study, in an email. In other words, the molecules found by her and her team do not correspond to the original ingredients that made up the balm, but to degraded remains of them.
“Essentially we work with fragments, remains of what once was. The challenge consists in correctly interpreting these fragments to deduce the original composition”, continues the expert. “It's pretty much like putting together a puzzle where you don't have the picture box and some pieces have faded,” she continues.
The tests revealed that both vessels had contained beeswax, vegetable oils, bitumen and coniferous resins -the group of trees to which the pine is a part-, in addition to other substances that could not be specified. For example, the glasses contain traces of animal fats that could have been an ingredient in the salve, but whose presence could also be due to the decomposition of the stored human organs themselves. They also found coumarin and benzoic acid, two compounds common to a wide range of plants, so narrowing down their origin is an impossible task.
The analysis left a third doubt. The composition of both containers was quite similar, but the one that stored the lungs of the noblewoman contained two substances that the scientists did not detect in the one from the liver. His hypothesis is that the embalmers might have used different mixtures to store each organ, but the difference could be because each vessel was preserved differently.
Of what there is no doubt is that the embalming of the noblewoman is the most complex of which there is evidence in such an early period. "While there are other balms of similar complexity from later periods, Senetnay's stands out as one of the most intricate ever identified," Huber notes.
The mixture of up to six ingredients in one of the containers, and the fact that some of them, like the coniferous resins, came from abroad (these trees were not found in Egypt), reveal that Senetnay was not just any noblewoman. The researchers point out in the article that her findings show that the noblewoman "seems to have received special treatment" and that she "was a highly valued member of Pharaoh's retinue" Amenhotep II.
Chemical analysis alone is insufficient to guarantee such a condition, outlines Frank Rühli, director of the Institute for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. Even so, the expert, who has not participated in the study, agrees in an email with the researchers' hypothesis, since other lines of evidence had pointed to similar conclusions. Senetnay's tomb, located in a royal necropolis, and its title of "King's Ornament", confirm the pharaoh's special deference to his former nurse.
The study of the composition of canopic jars is a new and little explored field. That is why any publication about them, "especially from this geographical origin, is valuable," says Rühli. The Max Planck researchers have shown how these analyzes make it possible to reconstruct social aspects of the time in which the mummified individual lived. The Swiss expert also adds that they can be key "to gain knowledge about the recovery of ancient DNA."
