In 1992, a German scientist made a discovery which was to upset whole areas of scientific study from history and archeology to chemistry and botany. Dr. Svetlana Balabanova, a forensic specialist, was performing tissue tests on an Egyptian mummy, part of a German museum collection, The mummified remains were of a woman named Henu-Taui who had died over 3000 years ago. Amazingly, the tests revealed that her body contained large quantities of cocaine and nicotine. Dr. Balabanova had regularly used the same testing methods to convict people of drug consumption but she had not expected to find nicotine e and coca in an Ancient Egyptian mummy. It is generally accepted that these two plants, native to the Americas did not exist on other continent prior to European exploration.
Dr. Balabanova repeated the tests then sent out fresh samples to three other labs. When the results came back positive she published a Parr with two other scientists. If Balabanova was shocked by the results of her tests she was even more shocked at the hostile response to her publication. He received may insulting letters, accusing her of fraud.
There were tow explanations that came immediately to mind. One was that something in the test s could have given a false result. The second was that the mummies tested were not truly Ancient Egyptian. Perhaps they were relatively modern bodies, containing traces of cocaine. Dr. Balabanova then examined tissue from 134 naturally preserved bodies over a thousand years old discovered in an excavated cemetery in the Sudan. About a third of them tested positive for nicotine or cocaine.
But something had happened even earlier which should have initiated serious discussion. In 1976 the mummified remains of Ramses ll arrived in Paris for repaint work. Dr. Michelle Lescot of the Natural History Museum was looking at sections of bandages and within the fibers found a was tobacco. Fearing that she had made some mistake she repeated her tests again and again with the same result every time: a New World plant had been found on an Old World mummy. The results caused a sensation in Europe. East it possible that piece of tobacco had been dropped by chance from the pipe of some forgotten archaeologist? Dr. Lescot responded to this charge of contamination by carefully extracting new samples from the abdomen, with the entire process recorded on film. These samples. which could no be 'droppings', were then tested. Once again they were shown to be tobacco. The discovery of tobacco fragments in the mummified body of Ramses ll should have had a profound influence upon our whole understanding of the relationship between Ancient Egypt and America but this piece of evidence was simply ignored. It raised too many questions and was too far outside of commonly accepted scientific views.
So now the question had returned. Could Ancient Egyptian trade have stretched all the way across the Atlantic Ocean? This was an idea so unbelievable it could only be considered after all the other possibilities had been eliminated. Could Egyptians have obtained imports from a place thousands of miles away, from a continent supposedly hot discovered until thousands of years later? Was it possible that coca - a plant fro South America had found its way to Egypt 3,000 years ago? If the cocaine found in mummies could not be explained by contamination, or fake mummies or by Egyptian plants containing it , there appeared to be another interesting possibility: a trade route with links all the way to the Americas.
The Egyptians did make great efforts to obtain incense and other valuable plants used in religious ceremonies and herbal medicines, but to the majority of archeologists, the idea is hardly worth talking about. Professor John Baines, an Egyptologist from Oxford University states: 'I don't think it is at all likely that there was an ancient trade network that included America. The essential problem with any such idea is that there are no artefacts ...found either in Europe or in America.' But other experts aren't so sure. Professor Martin Bernal, an historian, from Cornell University says, 'We're getting more and more evidence of world trade at an earlier stage. You have the Chinese silk definitely arriving in Egypt by 1000 BC.' IN his opinion, it is arrogance on the part of modern people to believe that a transoceanic trading network could only have been set up in recent times.
The discoveries in the mummies from Egypt and Sudan have challenged conventional beliefs. It is no longer possible to exclude the hypothesis of transoceanic trade in ancients items. The tale of Henu Taui and the story of Ramses ll show that, in science, facts can be rejected if they don't fit with our beliefs, while what is believed to be proven, may actually be uncertain. It is understandable then, how a story of a scientist, a few mummies and some routine tests, could upset whole areas of knowledge we thought we could take fro granted.
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