Cocaine in Ancient Egypt? ⛄️🐪
How could 3,000 year old mummies have traces of cocaine?
How could Egyptian mummies — ranging from 800 to 3,000 years old — have traces of cocaine and tobacco in their hair, skin, and bones? Cocaine and tobacco come from plants that grew only in the still-undiscovered New World and weren’t accessible to Egyptians. Tobacco wasn’t introduced to the Old World until the Arawak tribe gave some to Columbus in 1492.
After scientist Svetlana Balabanova made the strange discovery at the Egyptian Museum in Munich, she tested hundreds more mummies from the Old World. Interestingly, cocaine was found only in the Munich museum’s mummies. Some experts speculated that reckless, cocaine-using archaeologists there had contaminated the bodies. The tobacco, though, was a bigger mystery. A third of the mummies Balabanova studied contained nicotine, and evidence of tobacco had been found in the stomach of King Ramses II and in King Tut’s tomb. But no one can say for sure how it got there.
