The mummies WERE tested to see if they were actually ancient Egyptians, Brumar, and samples were also taken from other ancients, and they also had tobacco and cocaine in their systems. If you simply enjoy being a skeptic that is fine, but you seem in this case to be unable to digest material that is not already part of your belief system, and you misrepresented the information in the video, as you well know from reading the transcript that the large traffic in fake mummies was irrelevant. There was a long discussion in the documentary about intercontinental trading among ancient cultures, including the trading of tobacco and cocaine, and the possibility of tobacco varieties being grown in other parts of the world as well as the Americas, which I personally consider slightly less likely.
<<ROSALIE DAVID - Keeper of Egyptology, Manchester Museum:
"From the documentation and the research which has been carried out on the Munich mummies it seems evident that they are
probably genuine because they have packages of viscera inside, some with wax images of the gods on them and also the state
of mummification itself is very good. I would say that the detatched heads we can't comment on, but the complete bodies
probably are genuine."
NARRATOR:
And if that wasn't enough, it turned out that the results from the Munich mummies were not the only evidence from the dead.
The anthropologists who originally ordered the tests didn't continue the project. But Balabanova, alongside her normal
research into the metabolism of drugs started requesting samples of other ancient human remains from universities. And it was
then that she got more results from Egypt.
She tested tissue from 134 naturally preserved bodies from an excavated cemetery in the Sudan, once part of the Egyptian
empire. Although from a later period, the bodies were still many centuries before Columbus discovered the Americas. About a
third of them tested positive for nicotine and cocaine.
Balabanova was mystified by the presence of cocaine in Africa but thought she might have a way of explaining the nicotine. As
well as Egypt and the Sudan, she tested bodies from China, Germany and Austria, spanning a period from 3700BC to
1100AD. A percentage of bodies from all these other regions also contained nicotine.
[Graph showing presence of nicotine: Percentage of bodies with positive result - Egypt:89% Sudan:90% China:62.5%
Germany:34% Austria 100%] >> |
