UNTIL I BEGAN THINKING AND writing about mummies, I had never seen any of Hollywood’s famous mummy movies. Like most other North American teenagers in the sixties, I had loved horror films, the cheesier the better, and rarely passed up a chance to watch the mayhem wreaked by werewolves, vampires, and catwomen. But though I loved the gothic gloom of these movies, so at odds with my own sunny suburban upbringing, I had never had the pleasure of seeing Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney Jr. rise from the dead and trudge wearily across the screen in something suspiciously resembling torn bedsheets. One day, I happened to mention this to my neighbor Neil, who is an artist and a film buff, and he quickly offered to remedy my ignorance. Neil collects old horror movies. So every second night or so for two weeks, I curled up on my sofa and watched mummy movies.
For the most part, the old Universal Picture films were entertaining, although to my more jaded adult eyes, they were rather lacking in real horror. But what struck me most while watching them was the curious way in which Hollywood screenwriters had chosen to flesh out the Mummy’s character. For all his extraordinary powers—his lethal hugs and his bizarre ability to chase down and corner far more agile victims—the Mummy was a creature trapped in the machinations of the living, a superhuman who was pathetically vulnerable. His Achilles’ heel was a chemical one. Larger than life though he was, the Mummy was mad for an invention of Hollywood’s screenwriters: tana leaves. The bandaged monster needed three of these leaves to keep his heart beating, nine to animate the rest of his body, and even the slightest whiff of the stuff seemed to send him reeling for more. On the silver screen, the Mummy was a junkie.
His insatiable hunger for tana was a simple plot device, but it reminded me of a new branch of mummy research. For many decades, anthropologists had wondered about when human beings first began consuming potent narcotic plants and the circumstances under which this had occurred. Had Mediterranean farmers first dabbled with opium for its medicinal powers, or had they smoked it as a drowsy pleasure? Had Inca rulers reserved coca leaves for themselves, or had they distributed them freely to their subjects in order to work them harder? Was drug addiction an affliction only of the modern world or was it also a social problem in the past? These were fascinating questions, but no one really knew how to get at the answers. The only existing evidence was circumstantial. Archaeologists in Greece, for example, had unearthed ancient jars shaped like the pods of the opium poppy, while Egyptologists had discovered wall paintings of Egyptian nobles clasping bouquets of narcotic plants. Even Tutankhamen, the famous boy king with the sleepy eyes, had been depicted holding opium poppies and mandrake, a source of the narcotic scopolamine. Impressed by this, one Spanish researcher theorized that Tutankhamen was an addled addict held in thrall by his pusher, the ambitious prime minister who sought control of Egypt.
Wall paintings and pottery styles are clearly open to interpretation. The early potters who worked clay into poppy shapes may have merely meant to copy one of nature’s more beautiful designs, nothing more. The Egyptian artists who decorated tomb walls with paintings of narcotic plants may have been innocently unaware of their powers. What archaeologists and Egyptologists needed was hard proof of ancient drug use, something irrefutable, something that they could even have taken to court, if they had chosen to do so. What they eventually turned to was something that had long lain under their eyes in museums around the world: the fine hair of mummies.
IN THE EARLY 1950s, a team of American dermatologists stumbled across something unexpected while studying the side effects of phenobarbital. A popular sedative and depressant that acted indiscriminantly upon the central nervous system, phenobarbital was frequently prescribed to quell and control the seizures of severe epileptics. But the drug had several worrying drawbacks. It was highly addictive. It could induce hallucinations and extreme agitation. And it sometimes painfully affected the skin, producing patchworks of scaly rashes. While examining these latter effects in guinea pigs, the dermatologists noticed that trace amounts of the phenobarbital they injected into the rodents ended up in the animals’ hair. As blood from the circulatory system flowed around the living roots of hair, minute quantities of phenobarbital permeated the shafts. When the hair grew outward and died, the shaft trapped the drug molecules like insects in fossil amber. Each hair became a tiny, complete document of drug use over time.
The team published their findings, but in the polite bobby-sox era of the 1950s the paper passed without much notice. A quarter century later, however, after the “Electric Kool-Aid acid test,” Woodstock, and the war on drugs, chemists were mesmerized by the implications. Law enforcement agencies and Fortune 500 companies were clamoring for ways of screening job applicants and checking employees for pot smoking, cocaine addiction, and heroin injection. Hair promised to be revealing: a two-inch-long strand could potentially chart five months of personal drug history. A vial of urine, on the other hand, could reveal only what had taken place in the previous few days. So toxicologists began working on protocols for testing strands of hair. By 1999, hair testing had become big business. Parole officers were testing parolees, hospitals were checking staff, banks were examining guards, and vice squads were running samples from suspects. Indeed, hair helped convict Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington, D.C., of cocaine possession. “The drug test is moving from the bathroom to the barber shop,” trumpeted U.S. News and World Report.
Such high-profile drug busts seemed a world away from the closeted discipline of Egyptology. But in the early 1990s, an energetic young physical anthropologist at the University of Munich got very interested in testing the ancient dead for drugs. Franz Parsche had spent several years hovering over bodies exhumed from a Roman-era cemetery in the eastern Nile Delta, investigating everything from their mummification methods to the trace elements that resided in the hardened plaque on their teeth. While baring these intimate secrets, he had become intensely curious about ancient drug use. Under the reign of the pharaohs, Egyptian traders had bartered avidly for seeds of Cannabis sativa. Their Asian neighbors prized the plant for its hempen fibers, and the Egyptians seem to have taken a similar interest. They retted the stems and twisted the fibers into sturdy ropes and ground the plant to make a soothing eyewash, a treatment they recorded in medical papyri. But the Egyptians made little mention of other parts of C. sativa—the flowering tops and leaves that yielded marijuana or the dark resins that produced hashish.
Parsche wondered about all of this. While studying Egyptian mummies in Munich with colleague Wolfgang Pirsig, he began casting around for ways of giving the ancient dead drug tests, an inquiry that led him to hair testing. Hair, after all, is one of the body’s most enduring tissues. Few bacteria possess the enzymes needed to break down its primary protein, alpha-carotene. As a result, many mummies are crowned in curls, braids, or neatly combed hair; even skeletons occasionally sport a few grotesque locks, a melancholy reminder that whitened bone had once been sheathed in flesh and blood. But finding drugs in modern hair was no guarantee of success with ancient strands. Parsche wondered whether chemicals like tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary alkaloid in marijuana and hashish, could survive in the hair shaft for centuries, even millennia. So he and Pirsig contacted one of Germany’s foremost specialists in hair testing, Svetlana Balabanova.
A toxicologist and endocrinologist at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Ulm, Germany, Balabanova had worked closely with German police forces, publishing widely on her successes in detecting hashish, cocaine, methadone, caffeine, and nicotine in human hair. Moreover, she had research interests far beyond her own narrow speciality. Possessed of immense self-confidence, she relished social history and anthropology and was in the midst of writing a popular book on the cultural significance of human hair, from the carved coiffeurs of the famous Venus figurines of Paleolithic Europe to the gelled spikes of punk rockers in EU times. Solid and thickset in her early sixties, with a long oval face, high Slavic cheekbones, soft hazel eyes, and dark chestnut brown hair pulled back from her face, Balabanova, a Bulgarian refugee, is no ordinary scientist.
She didn’t know whether drug molecules could survive for millennia in human hair, but she thought it possible. A few years earlier, an American colleague had discerned traces of an opiate in a hair snipped from the famous nineteenth-century Romantic poet John Keats. Keats had been an opium eater. But it was one thing for an opiate to linger in a tress preserved with loving care by an admirer for a century and a half. It was quite another for a narcotic or stimulant to persist in locks exposed to the elements in a desert tomb for millennia. Balabanova was game, however, to try testing for them. She has a restless, inquiring mind and an appetite for scientific adventures. “To find something new,” she explained to me, “is always tempting.”
Thus encouraged, Parsche and Pirsig began collecting mummy hair. With permission from Munich museum authorities, they obtained locks from more than eighty Egyptian and Peruvian mummies, which ranged in age from five hundred to three thousand years old. Parsche and Balabanova agreed that they would test all the samples for three drugs: THC, cocaine, and nicotine. These seemed logical choices. Both tobacco and coca were New World plants that the ancient Peruvians had known well; mourners often tucked bags of tobacco and coca leaves into shrouds as gifts for the next world. Tests for tobacco might also shed light on an earlier brouhaha. In 1975, French scientists had recovered bits of brown leaves that looked suspiciously like tobacco from the abdomen of one of Egypt’s greatest pharoahs, Ramses II. Under the microscope, the cells closely resembled those of tobacco, and chemical tests revealed molecules of three drugs, one of which was nicotine. Intriguingly, the French team also found tiny beetle carapaces in the linen bandages. They belonged to Lasioderma serricorne, the aptly named cigarette beetle, which dines on stored tobacco leaves and other dried plant materials. Egyptologists had dismissed these finds, however, suggesting that early pipe-smoking excavators and museum curators had merely spilled tobacco from their pouches on the body.
So to be thorough, Balabanova decided to test all of the Munich mummy samples for each of these drugs. Washing the samples with distilled water and ethanol, she pulverized the hairs with a steel ball and chemically released the molecules remaining in their shafts. Then she added antibodies, tagged with a telltale isotope, to the solution, in a technique known as radioimmunoassay. Antibodies are molecules that the human immune system makes to neutralize and disarm potentially harmful foreign substances in the body. They are a specific system of defense. A cocaine antibody, for example, will only target and react with cocaine molecules, seeking them out with eerie accuracy. To determine whether the antibodies had locked on to their targets in the hair samples, Balabanova measured the isotopes with an instrument resembling a Geiger counter.
She tallied the number of positives for each drug. Then, to be certain of the results, she ran a different test on each sample. Known as gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, this type of analysis is often used to identify components in an unknown mixture. To run the procedure, Balabanova once again pulverized tiny samples of the hair and chemically released the molecules within them. Then she injected the resulting fluid by syringe into a long narrow tube in an ovenlike instrument. As the temperature rose inside, the components in the fluid each vaporized according to their own level of volatility, and this created a distinctive fingerprint for the solution. Balabanova then compared these fingerprints to those known for cocaine, nicotine, and THC.
She was deeply puzzled by the results. The Egyptian hair contained not only THC, but also cocaine and nicotine. The Peruvian hair disclosed cocaine, nicotine, and minute traces of THC. This seemed all wrong, for how could the Egyptians and the ancient Peruvians, separated by thousands of miles of uncharted ocean, obtain drugs from one another so far back in the distant past? The youngest Egyptian mummy had died 1,600 years ago, a millennium before Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain to the West Indies, thus charting the first trade routes across the Atlantic. Admittedly, there were a few researchers, such as the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyderdahl, who had speculated about earlier ocean crossings, but on the whole the scientific community considered these theorists to be cranks and loose cannons.
Balabanova ran the samples again. “I retested the positives three to four times.” Each time she expected to turn up some mistake, some source of contamination, but she didn’t. Thinking that the problem could lay with the samples themselves, she acquired hair from natural mummies recently excavated from the Sayala region of northern Sudan, which had once been part of Roman Egypt. Nearly 80 percent of these bodies scored positive for cocaine and nicotine. No matter what Balabanova did, it seemed, the results were still the same.
Other researchers would have been strongly tempted to file away such data, in the interests of their scientific reputation. But Balabanova refused. She was convinced she was onto something important and she loathed the thought of suppressing a truth. When she was a child in Sofia, her father, a writer whom she admired deeply, had stood up and repeatedly criticized the Communist Party. When the Communists rode to power after the Second World War, he was arrested and imprisoned. Destitute, her family fled to Czechoslovakia, and when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, Balabanova packed her bags once again and fled to Germany. She couldn’t and wouldn’t stay in Czechoslovakia. “I was raised to say the truth,” she recalled. “It’s a question of life philosophy, I suppose. There are people who just follow and there are people who choose their own paths, irrespective of the criticism.”
So she and Parsche published the findings. But they kept strictly to the facts in their papers. In their letter to the editor in The Lancet, for example, they offered no explanation for how these drugs had come to be where they were, nor did they so much as allude to an ancient transcontinental trade. But readers of The Lancet had little trouble connecting the dots. They could see all too clearly where the work was heading. “Was Thor Heyerdahl right about Egyptians going to South America,” wrote one exuberant reader, “and did they come back bearing tobacco and coca? Was there already an international trade in drugs, with hashish exchanged for cocaine and tobacco? Were there already drug barons?”
Newspaper and magazine editors rubbed their hands with glee, writing riveting headlines such as “Toke like an Egyptian” and assigning illustrations of mummies smoking joints and shooting up. At Channel Four in England, producers began hastily researching a new documentary, The Mystery of the Cocaine Mummies. But in cooler scientific and scholarly circles, there was little but disbelief. “It is very unlikely that tobacco has an alternative history, because I think we would have heard about it,” observed Sandra Knapp, a botanist at the Natural History Museum in London, in front of TV cameras. “Drugs like tobacco rarely disappear or are kept secret for long.” Oxford University Egyptologist John Baines was similarly incredulous when approached by the Channel Four crew. “The idea that the Egyptians were traveling to America is, overall, absurd. I don’t know of anyone who is professionally employed as an Egyptologist, anthropologist, or archaeologist who seriously believes in any of these possibilities.”
I FIRST CAUGHT wind of the controversy at the Mummy Congress. I had missed both the Channel Four documentary, which portrayed Balabanova’s findings in a favorable light, and the sensational articles, but I heard a great deal about them over cocktails in Arica. No one knew exactly what to think about Balabanova’s findings or how she had come by such results, and this confusion was exacerbated by her absence. The German chemist had yet to attend a Mummy Congress to present her controversial findings. Despite all the gossip, however, I decided to keep an open mind. I knew the ancient Egyptians were not the nautical incompetents that many made them out to be. A few years earlier, while writing about the ancient frankincense trade in the Middle East, I had discovered how intrepid the builders of the pyramids could be when they hankered for luxuries.
Some 3,900 years ago, for example, the Egyptian pharoah Sesostris I conceived a magnificent plan for a sailing expedition to obtain the precious golden-yellow resin, frankincense. Sesostris’s subjects were in love with frankincense. They burned small chunks of it for incense and charred and ground it to make black kohl for eyeliner. But frankincense was frustratingly rare. The trees that yielded the tiny resinous teardrops did not grow anywhere in Sesostris’s realm. Instead, the finest quality came from a region that the Egyptians called Punt, and which some leading authorities on the frankincense trade now believe is Oman, along the eastern Arabian coast. From there, the much prized resin traveled north overland, trading hand to hand to Palestine and Egypt.
Sesostris, a shrewd businessman, wanted to cut out some of the middlemen. He ordered his vizier to construct a fleet of wooden boats sturdy enough to travel the often stormy Red Sea. At the town of Koptos along the Nile, the vizier put a small army of Egyptian laborers to work, and after months of sawing and cutting and planing, they finished the new fleet, all but for the stone anchors. Then the vizier instructed his men to take the ships apart, piece by piece. When the new fleet had been reduced to tons of cedar planks, he ordered his men to prepare for a long journey to the Red Sea coast. They packed the ships in pieces across nearly seventy miles of austere desert and over mountain passes. On the coast, the vizier ordered them to reassemble the boats and find local craftsmen to carve quarter-ton blocks of local stone into anchors. This they did. Then they set sail for Arabia.
When the fleet returned, it carried frankincense and many other treasures. The vizier’s representative, Ameni, ordered the men to dismantle the ships. The vessels couldn’t be left behind for thieves. The stone anchors were too heavy, however, to haul back across the desert. So Ameni made a shrine of the anchors above the harbor on the Red Sea and had the walls inscribed with an account of the journey, which archaeologists found in the 1970s. Then Ameni and his men carried their ships back in pieces across the sweltering Eastern Desert, like a line of straggling ants. “So you can just imagine this spectacle with the Bedouin looking out and seeing these people marching by with boat pieces,” marveled Juris Zarins, an archaeologist at the Southwest Missouri State University and a leading researcher on the ancient frankincense trade, in our conversations. “People have always been told that the Egyptians did not know how to sail. Well, that’s just baloney.”
But could they have voyaged all the way across the Atlantic to South America? A few enthusiasts think it possible. In his global wanderings, Thor Heyerdahl observed certain resemblances between the ancient cultures of the Americas and of the Nile. Both, noted Heyerdahl in his best-selling 1970 book The Ra Expeditions, had quarried stone for giant stepped pyramids, written in hieroglyphics and constructed paved roads. In all likelihood, suggested Heyderdahl, the Egyptians had brought these ideas with them when they sailed to the Americas a millennia ago in their reed boats. To test this contention, the athletic Norwegian and his colleagues built a reed boat similar to those depicted in Egyptian temple carvings and dubbed it Ra, after the Egyptian sun god who created both divinities and humankind. Then Heyerdahl’s crew filled it with supplies and sailed it from Morocco across the Atlantic, until the craft sank just short of the West Indies.
Heyderdahl’s voyage made for a thrilling adventure yarn, but stripped of its romantic appeal and adrenaline, The Ra Expeditions offered little proof that the Egyptians had ever undertaken such a perilous journey. It was one thing, after all, to sail in a leisurely way down the coast of the Red Sea, as Sesostris’s men did in search of a known and prized commodity. It was quite another to head off across the Mediterranean and over the Atlantic to an unknown world of uncertain value. There were simply no Egyptian records of an exotic trade in coca and tobacco and no tomb or temple paintings of the plants themselves—a curious omission among a people so fond of recording the details of their triumphs. When Egyptian traders in the reign of Queen Hapshetsut returned from their voyages joyfully bearing entire myrrh trees, the jubilant monarch had images of these exotic shrubs and their bearers carved along the walls of her own temple.
Moreover, there was little trace of any ancient transatlantic voyages. Archaeologists had never turned up convincing evidence of ancient Egyptians in major ports of call along the proposed Mediterranean route, particularly in Spain, the jumping-off point across the Atlantic. Nor had they unearthed any clear signs of an Egyptian presence in the Americas. Stepped pyramids and hieroglyphical writing each had a long history of independent development in both Egypt and the Americas. The paved roads of the Inca were constructed in a different manner from those of the Egyptians. “Ancient trade between the Andes and Egypt cannot seriously be envisaged,” observed Baines. “Nothing points toward it. The Roman empire, with its vastly greater resources and knowledge of geography, had no awareness of the Americas. To posit that an earlier and more distant civilization would have had it is most implausible.”
But Balabanova refuses to budge from her position and her intransigence has become something of an embarrassment in anthropological and Egyptological circles. Indeed some researchers, such as Eugen Strouhal, a prominent Czech paleopathologist who works extensively in Egypt and who coauthored a paper with Balabanova, seemed ready to wash their hands of the whole matter. “I cannot say anything about reliability of the results concerning several compounds [nicotine, cocaine etc.] she found,” noted Strouhal in an e-mail, “and I have no comments to her interpretations, being no specialist in the field of drugs.” And Balabanova’s closest colleague, Franz Parsche, was unable to rally to her defense. He died in an accident in 1995.
Balabanova’s confidence is unshaken, however. Others might seek to destroy her scientific credibility, but chemistry, she reasons, has demonstrated beyond doubt that the Egyptians acquired tobacco and cocaine and that South Americans dabbled with hashish. The German toxicologist remains convinced that her findings represent an absolute truth. Others have to be mistaken. “At the beginning, when something new comes up, there’s always a negative reaction,” she told me, “and that’s exactly what has happened. Later people will accept it more readily.”
IN HIS LABORATORY in Ada, Oklahoma, Larry Cartmell was deeply puzzled by Balabanova’s findings. He desperately wanted to get to the bottom of them. A pathologist at Valley View Hospital in Ada, Cartmell had been testing ancient hair since 1990. Indeed, he was the first person to detect drugs in mummies, although neither Parsche nor Balabanova were aware of this fact when they began their work. In 1991, Cartmell identified cocaine in the hair of South American mummies and immediately rushed his paper into print in a small Oklahoma medical journal. He feared—rightly, as it turned out—that someone else would beat him to the punch if he waited for acceptance by a prominent national or international journal. Since then, Cartmell has fallen in love with his brainchild: he hated to see hair testing thrown into disrepute by two arrivistes from Germany.
A burly man with a round florid face, sheepish grin, and the kind of brash loudness that invariably causes heads to turn, Cartmell has spent most of his life on the outside looking in. Growing up on a dusty prairie farm in Oklahoma, just a decade after half the state had blown away during the windstorms of the Depression, he had often fantasized about the glory of discovering lost cities in the South American Andes or digging gold in Troy or Mycenae. At university, he considered becoming an archaeologist, but while mopping floors in a part-time job, he ran into an unemployed archaeologist down on his luck. Cartmell had had his fill of hard times: he applied for medical school soon after. Becoming a pathologist didn’t put an end to his childhood fancies, however, it just put them on ice for a while. In his forties, he began sopping up television documentaries on Stonehenge, Easter Island, and the Great Pyramids, and paying his own way to volunteer on digs during his summer holidays.
One year, he headed down to Arica with an Earthwatch group. Art Aufderheide and his wife, Mary, were there and Cartmell spent a week with them, helping to dissect mummies. When he got home, Cartmell began casting around for a way to make his own mark as a mummy expert. He hit upon hair testing. With samples that Aufderheide supplied from his collection of South American mummy tissue, Cartmell tested for cocaine. One-quarter of the samples proved positive. To be sure of the findings, he submitted his samples to hair-testing specialists in two other labs. They confirmed the findings, and South American archaeologists welcomed them. Cartmell’s study supported what many Andeanists had long suspected about the widespread use of cocaine in prehistoric South America. On the strength of this work, Cartmell became a regular at mummy congresses and paleopathology meetings. With his irrepressible sense of humor, his midwestern warmth, and his hunger to be liked and accepted, he was often the life of the party. “I really enjoy working with these people,” he told me. “They are the same people I would see on the Discovery Channel. And it’s good to be able to get up there and give a paper with one of those guys.”
When Cartmell first heard about Balabanova’s results from the Egyptian mummies, he found them hard to credit. Quite apart from the issue of transatlantic travel, the pathologist was frankly skeptical about the findings from a hair-testing point of view. “She was finding levels of drugs in everything she tested, you know—hashish, cocaine, and nicotine,” he observed witheringly. “Everyone must have gone around stoned. I don’t see how they could ever have built the ships to have gotten over to the Americas. Do you know what would happen if I reported those kinds of findings on modern cases and tried to take that to court?”
Cartmell wanted to see if he could replicate her findings. To do so, however, he needed a stock of ancient Egyptian hair samples, preferably from the very same mummies that Balabanova had sampled. He sent a letter to the German toxicologist, suggesting that they swap hair samples. He never heard back from her. Balabanova later told me she never received the letter.
Cartmell was undeterred, however: he had another opportunity. Art Aufderheide had invited him to Egypt to collect samples there, and Cartmell happily accepted. Obtaining a box crammed with tiny plastic bags, the Oklahoma pathologist wasted little time getting down to work. On his days off, he tested the ancient hair samples for cocaine and nicotine, as well as opium—a drug that some Egyptologists suspected was part of the ancient Egyptian pharmacopeia. Like Balabanova, Cartmell searched for drugs using specially marked antibodies and by vaporizing samples to obtain their molecular fingerprints. But he also took additional steps. He rinsed each hair sample at the outset with distilled water and kept the liquid to check for contaminants.
The pathologist found no trace at all of cocaine. Nor was there any sign of opium. But nicotine was a very different matter. Nearly three-quarters of the mummies came back positive for the drug. Cartmell was stunned. He had never really expected to corroborate Balabanova’s findings and he was no believer in transcontinental trade. The results bothered him enormously. Where, he wondered, had the Egyptians gotten the nicotine?
NICOTIANA TABACUM, OR common tobacco, is an emerald wonder. The largest varieties can transform fields into miniforests, with stalks up to six feet in height and leaves the size of small kites. The smallest are miniatures by comparison, boasting leaves only a little longer than the human index finger. Centuries of plant breeding have adapted N. tabacum to an impressive variety of climates, from Indonesia to Canada and from Yugoslavia to Cameroon. And centuries of experimentation with curing have produced flavors as diverse as the dark smoothness of a Havana cigar and the light briskness of a pack of Virginia Slims. But N. tabacum is not the world’s only source of nicotine. Chemical studies have shown that the drug infuses the leaves of more than fifty other species in the nightshade family.
This family has its roots deep in the Americas. But a University of Munich researcher recently uncovered a family member growing in southern Africa—Nicotiana africana. In our conversations, Balabanova, who is now retired, suggested that this species, or perhaps an extinct sibling, could once have grown across a much broader region of Africa. In the eighteenth century, she explained, a Swedish botanist, I. P. Forskal, catalogued the flora of Egypt. He observed how the Egyptians grew imported tobacco in their fields and described patches of wild tobacco he had seen growing from the Red Sea coast to Libya. Balabanova believed that such wild tobacco dated back to the time of the pharoahs and was employed by Egyptian embalmers as part of an unguent to preserve the bodies of the dead. Tobacco possesses antibacterial properties. Botanists such as Sandy Knapp found these ideas extremely dubious, however. The Swedish botanist Forskal made his observations two centuries after Europeans introduced tobacco to the Old World. Moreover, it seemed unlikely to her that the African species of tobacco had ever grown in Egypt. “It’s a narrow endemic in Namibia—deep in the desert—and is known from only a few populations,” she explained. “It does indeed have nicotine, but seems a bit of a long shot.”
There was, however, another, simpler explanation, one that Cartmell eventually came across in his reading. It was very possible that the Egyptians had eaten nicotine. Contrary to what one might think, this is an easy thing to do, as researchers at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States discovered a few years back. While conducting blood tests on a large group of Americans, the CDC team noticed that the vast majority of results came back positive for nicotine, even though many people in the study neither smoked nor associated with smokers. Perplexed, the team began checking into other possible sources for the drug. There are many. Mandrake, a narcotic and medicinal plant, possesses nicotine in spades. Moreover, tomatoes, potatoes, green peppers, and several other comestibles from the nightshade family also possess microscopic quantities. Diners who ate them accumulated the drug in minute quantities—rarely more than 2 nanograms per milligram of hair. The highest reading for the mummies of Dahkleh was 2.1 nanograms; most were considerably lower. Cartmell now believes the Egyptians consumed nicotine in this way. He has begun working with an ethnobotanist to track down all the nicotine-spiked plants that may have grown at Dahkleh.
Balabanova’s cocaine findings did not lend themselves to such a simple solution, however. The two principal sources for cocaine today are Erythroxylum coca and Erythroxylum novogranatense. Both of these small evergreen shrubs are currently grown in many parts of the world, including Africa and Southeast Asia, but they originated in the moist tropical forests of the eastern Andes in Peru and Bolivia, where indigenous people long prized the leaves for their ability to allay altitude sickness, exhaustion, and hunger. Plant collectors have found other Erythroxylum species in the tropical forests of Madagascar, but none of these possesses leaves spiked with concentrated amounts of cocaine. Nor have ethnobotanists come across any contemporary accounts of medicinal plants in Africa that produced cocaine’s telltale stimulant effects. Balabanova does not see this as a problem. “It is possible that a similar plant was growing in Africa that actually contained cocaine,” she insists. “Or, since commerce also existed at that time transcontinentally, we believe that maybe the cocaine was imported into the country.”
Few botanists, Egyptologists, or archaeologists share her faith, however. Some wonder openly if her results owe more to flaws in hair-testing technology than to fact. “It struck me that these days there must be a lot of convictions of people for possessing substances they had not in fact had,” observed Egyptologist John Baines. Indeed, this may be the case: several recent studies show that human hair readily sops up environmental contaminants, giving false positives. Stated simply, someone who stands in a room where others are smoking a drug such as cocaine can absorb sufficient quantities to give a positive hair reading. Moreover, the tresses of African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians sponge up more external contaminants than do those of Caucasians, leading to a pronounced racial bias. Eight African-Americans have recently filed complaints of racial discrimination after failing hair tests required for admission to the Chicago Police Academy. All eight claim to have been drug-free.
Could external contamination account for the drugs in ancient Egyptian hair? In the nineteenth century, many Egyptologists worked with tobacco pipes cupped in their hands, and a few undoubtedly dabbled in cocaine, as it was once a popular and legal drug in Europe. This may account for Balabanova’s findings, but it doesn’t explain Cartmell’s discovery of nicotine. The Oklahoma pathologist searched deliberately for external contaminants. After rinsing the Dahkleh samples with distilled water, he tested the liquid for the presence of drugs. He detected none. Moreover, his tests turned up a specific kind of nicotine—that which had been partially broken down after undergoing metabolism in human cells.
It is certainly possible that a cocaine-smoking or -injecting researcher tainted the odd mummy, but none of the experts really believe that it happened very often. So, in the absence of any other compelling explanation, it now seems likely that Bolobanova’s findings were thrown off by conditions that few other hair testers have to contend with. When Egyptian embalmers smoothed handfuls of spices, oils, and plant resins on the flesh of the dead, they anointed the body and its tresses with a complex chemical cocktail that mummy experts have yet to describe, much less fully understand. Conventional hair tests were never designed to deal with such concoctions, nor were they intended to deal with an immense, almost unfathomable span of time. Over centuries and millennia of entombment, compounds in these concoctions could have easily broken down, yielding substances that could readily pass for cocaine today.
For all the resemblance a mummy bears to a living person, for all its serene appearance of sleep, an ancient preserved body has been transformed radically by its millennia-long slumber. Appearances, as we all know, can be deceiving, and this is particularly true of mummies, perhaps because we so wish to be deceived in this way. We are desperate to stop the inevitable railway engine of time in its tracks, to dodge the inevitable unraveling of the world. And we cloak the ancient dead in our own wishes for immortality. I have to remind myself continually of this each time I look at an exquisitely preserved human being, and I do so by repeating a phrase that Aufderheide often used as he worked in the Egyptian desert. It was a kind of mantra with him. “A mummy,” he said time and time again, was little more than a “half-rotten soup of protein.”