MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Ancient Egyptians wrote down the directions for making mummies, but they did so in hieroglyphics. So archaeologists are searching for more clues with chemistry. NPR's Pien Huang reports.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, prominent citizens who died were brought to an embalmer.
RICARDA GERICKE: There, they cleaned the body and put it into salt.
HUANG: Ricarda Gericke is a research fellow and Egyptologist at Marburg University in Germany. She says the goal was to achieve eternal life.
GERICKE: They put also some raisins, oils everywhere on the body to preserve it and also that the smell was godlike.
HUANG: Which raises the question, what exactly is a godlike smell?
RAPHAEL REHER: I mean, you probably know the smell of pines. There's also supposedly a lot of aromatic plants in it.
HUANG: That's Raphael Reher, a chemist and pharmacist at Marburg University. He usually works in modern drug discovery but teamed up with his university colleagues to look at the chemical makeup of mummified human remains. He says the fact that they're still around is remarkable.
REHER: Three thousand years afterwards, they're still there. If you look at a cemetery, like, 30 years after you buried a body there, it's gone to earth.
HUANG: These long-lasting relics caught the eye of people in the Middle Ages and beyond who consumed mummified human remains for supposed medicinal properties. Gericke, the researcher, says they were considered a substitute for bitumen, a petroleum product said to cure coughs, snakebites and other ills.
GERICKE: They used those mummies because they were everywhere in Egypt at that time.
HUANG: And it was cheaper than actual bitumen, which did not show up in the mummy medicine products, found as powders in storage jars and historical collections that the researchers tested. Separately, they tested the wrappings around a 3,000-year-old mummified head from ancient Egypt and found aloe plant extracts, which they didn't expect.
GERICKE: It was not really clear where aloe comes from.
HUANG: Aloe plants are common now, but they weren't in ancient Egypt. They likely came from far-off trade. This discovery, thanks to chemistry, may have cracked the code on a mysterious hieroglyph.
GERICKE: Maybe we can translate (speaking ancient Egyptian), which was not very sure beforehand, now as aloe.
HUANG: The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Anne Austin is an Egyptologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She's not affiliated with the paper but says they take a strong approach.
ANNE AUSTIN: So it's famously difficult to identify what materials were used in mummification. The texts say they used this kind of plant, but we don't know what we would call the same plant.
HUANG: She says they've shown that combining experts in ancient texts with those in modern chemistry can help unravel mysteries of the past. Pien Huang, NPR News.
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