in the twenty first dynasty of the pharaohs three thousands years ago there took place, one night had a temple the funeral of Henut Taui the lady of the two lands compared to the great rulers of egypt, her burial was a modest affair but just like the pharaohs she too was mummified and her body placed in the depths of the desert too in the belief it would give her inmortality and in an unexpected way, it has her momified body waited through out recorded history, the greeks and romans, the dark middle ages, the renaissance and napoleon until in the early.... nineteen century her tomb was plundered the king of babaria bought the ornate sarcophagus with the mummy inside he gave it to a museum in Munich where for another century, Henut Taui laid.. undisturbed then, four years ago, a german scientist doctor specter ball ivanova made a discovery, which was to baffle egyptologists and call into question whole aereas of science, from archeology to chemistry and botany she discovered that the body of Henut Taui contained large quantity of cocaine and nicotine.. the surprise was not just the .deductions. of ... taking drugs but that these drugs come from tabaco and coca plants completely unknown outside the americas until thousands of years later unheard, until .sawil. .ferrari. introduce smoking from the world Or until cocaine... was imported in the victorian era it was seemingly impossible for the ancient egyptians to get hold of these subtances And so began the mistery The mistery of the cocaine mummies It was in Munich, in nineteen ninety two the researches began a huge project to investigate the contents of mummies When as part of the study they wanted to test for drugs, it was no surprise that they turn to toxicologist doctor specter balabanova for help As the inventor of ground breaking new methods of detection of drugs in hair and sweat she was highly respected in the field doctor balavanova took samples from the mummies which she pulvurize and disolve to make a solution As she has done countless of times before, she run the samples through a system which.. uses antibodys to detect the presence of drugs and others... substances Then as a backup.. the samples would put through the GCMS machine.. which can accurately identify substances by determine their moleculal weight As the .graff. emerge with pics showing the drugs were present and as... the printed .sweep up. the anlysis which drugs something seemed to have gone very wrong The first ... positive results of course were a shock form i had not expected to find nicotine and cocaine and that´s what happened; i was absolutely sure... it must be a mistake Balabanova run the test again and again she sent fresh samples to three other labs but the results kept being confirmed the drugs were there So she went ahead and published the paper the reaction was a sharp reminder that sciences it´s a... conservative world I got a pile of letters that.. were almost threatening, insulting.. letters saying that all this was nonsense That i was fantasizing, that it was quite impossible, because it was proved than before columbus this plants were not found anywhere on the world apart from america From toxicologist to anthropologists ... everyone thought the same thing The first thing you think of is that ... this is just mad It´s wrong and there is contamination present making this prove present of some kind but you don´t think that cocaine got actually to be present in an egyptian mummy Yet Balabanova herself had been ... worried about contamination First, she checked all the lab equipment But been a phorensic toxicologist that wasn´t all she did Balabanova had learned her trade working for the police and had been trained on the methods they use to investigate ... a suspicious death She had been told how vitaly it is when an autposy is carried out to know whether the dead person has consumed or been given any drugs or posions And she had also been told that the especial phorensic thecnique exists which confirm that the deceased has consumed the drug and can ruled out contamination at the same time So anxious to ensure that her tests on the mummies were beyound reproach she used this very thechnique It is called ``the hearshot test´´ drugs and other ... substances that were consumed by humans get into the hair protein where they remain for months or after death, forever Hair samples from the body can be washed in alcohol and the washing solution itself being tested If the washing solution is clean but the hair comes of positive then the drug must be inside the hairshot which means the person must had consumed during their lifetime; it´s considered proof against contamination before or after death the hairshot test is accepted if you know you´ve taken your hair sample from this particular individual and and the hairshot is shown to contain the drug, well then it´s proved positive that the person has taken the drug So, it´s accepted in law this put people into prison the hairshot test.. on the bodies of couple in yersey show that two sons had druged them before ... killing them And beside of the ... case, the thechinque has been used in countless others over the last twenty five years Since it also for durg test on addicts, company employees and in sport, to sugest they could produce false results was for Balabanova, unthinkable There is no way that can be mistaken this test, this method is widely accepted and has been used thousands of times It´s results on a genuin , the explanation must laid out .swear. and not in my tests because i´m a hundred percent certain about the results If the fault was not in the test, what else could laid behind the impossibility of mummies containing drugs from the plants coca and tabaco from a continent not discovered over a thousand years after the end of the egiptian civilization In search of an explanation, we went to one of the Uk´s former experts on mummies, a person who has expend years rummaging around the bodies of ancient egyptians Rosaly David When i was first informed that cocaine had been founded in egyptian mummies i was absolutely stunned, that seemed quite impossible, that shouldn´t be the case Sceptical of Balabanova results Rosaly David decided to get some samples from her own mummies and had them tested specially for ... What are we going to do is to provide tissue samples and hair samples from a number of mummies in the matches of museum collections I should be very surprise to found they have cocaine It would be a while before the results came back from the lab Rosaly David´s motive was not an independent check on Balabanova´s methods she also wanted to run the same tests but on different mummies For she had more than one idea about how balabanova could had got a misleading result I think there were two ideas which sprang inmediately to mind, one was That possibly something in the tests could give a false result and the second was that possibly the mummies that had been tested were not truly ancient egyptian that they could be sime of this false relatively modern mummies, with traces of cocaine could be in those individuals What rosalie david had been refering to, happened in egypt in victorian times It was a crucial operation to supply the antique dealers of .. When nineteen century travelers began to descend on egypt in search of mummies and other valuables the dealers might not always have the genuin article available And so, threcrudely mummified body of a recent ly dead egyptian might be procured instead for a shriveled corpse will greatly increase the value of the genuin but empty sarcophagus Sometimes, collectors would buy only limbs or other mummified spare parts These are doubly suspected for the trade in fake mummies particulary severed heads and limbs hasn´t even old origin Eating the flesh of mummies was a common sixteen century practice in europe People believed that mummies contained black tar called .vigegeum. and so thought how they made from the ground bodies will cure various illnesses This is the very origin of the word mummy, from the persian .fobiteum mumia
What's really interesting about this is that we have no idea how the Pharaohs got their hands on cocaine, since it doesn't grow anywhere near Egypt and there's no trace of it being traded outside of the Americas until the time of Columbus
Contaminated in modern times may be?