Traces of aloe found in a 2,700-year-old Egyptian mummy, a first for embalming research

Researchers have found chemical traces of aloe in a 2,700-year-old Egyptian mummy, the first molecular identification of aloe in ancient Egyptian embalming materials, Philipps-Universität Marburg said on 27 October. The study is published in PNAS.

A skull from a university zoological collection

The mummified head is held in the Zoological Collection of Marburg University and was radiocarbon-dated to the 8th century BCE. It was one of 24 objects from university and museum collections that the team analyzed. Plant compounds associated with aloe turned up in two of them: the Marburg skull and an 18th-century preparation sold as “Mumia vera aegyptiaca,” a medicine once made from mummies.

The researchers used untargeted metabolomics, a method that captures a broad chemical fingerprint of a sample, with computational and machine-learning tools to annotate the molecular patterns. The compounds pointed to products from aloe, not from agarwood, another candidate.

Old texts, new chemistry

The team, led by Professor Tanja Pommerening, head of Germany's only Institute for the History of Pharmacy and Medicine, and Professor Raphael Reher of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Biology and Biotechnology, combined the chemistry with historical sources. An ancient Egyptian term may refer to aloe or an aloe exudate, though its identity is not confirmed, and medieval medical texts link aloe to mummy medicine, a connection that had been assumed to come from biblical passages.

The findings suggest that medieval mummy medicine may have deeper historical roots than previously thought. The analysis also showed strong similarities between the Marburg head and a powder sample at the German Pharmacy Museum in Heidelberg, hinting at a shared origin that collection records do not show.

“This finding is significant for research for two reasons.” — Prof. Dr. Tanja Pommerening, Marburg University

Careful conclusions

The authors caution that the result does not mean aloe was widely used in mummification. Historical mummy-medicine preparations varied a lot, and several contained compounds from aged conifer resins. One extract showed a moderate protective effect against influenza virus damage in cell culture, but its main compound did not reproduce the effect, and the study does not show the remedy worked in people. More stories about the past are collected under cultural heritage.