 
 
 
in the twenty first dynasty of the pharaohs
three thousands years ago
there took place, one night
had a temple
the funeral
of Henut Taui
the lady of the two lands
compared to the great rulers of egypt, her burial
was a modest affair
but just like the pharaohs
she too was mummified
and her body placed in the depths of the desert too
in the belief it would give her inmortality
and in an unexpected way, it has
her momified body waited
through out recorded history, the
greeks and romans,
the dark middle ages, the renaissance
and napoleon
until in the early....
nineteen century her tomb was plundered
the king of babaria bought the ornate sarcophagus
with the mummy inside
he gave it to a museum in Munich
where for another century, Henut Taui laid..
undisturbed
then, four years ago, a german scientist
doctor specter ball ivanova
made a discovery, which was to baffle egyptologists
and call into question whole aereas
of science, from archeology to chemistry
and botany
she discovered that the body of Henut Taui
contained large quantity of cocaine
and nicotine..
the surprise was not just the .deductions. of ...
taking drugs
but that these drugs come from tabaco and coca
plants completely unknown outside the americas
until thousands of years later
unheard, until .sawil. .ferrari. introduce smoking from the
world
Or until cocaine...
was imported in the victorian era
it was seemingly impossible for the
ancient egyptians to get  hold of these subtances
And so began the mistery
The  mistery
of the cocaine mummies
It was in Munich, in nineteen ninety two
the researches began a huge project
to investigate the contents of mummies
When as part of the study they wanted to test for
drugs,  it was no surprise that they turn to
toxicologist doctor specter balabanova
for help
As the inventor of ground breaking new methods
of detection of drugs in hair and sweat
she was highly respected in the field
doctor balavanova took samples from the mummies
which she pulvurize and disolve
to make a solution
As she has done countless of times before,
she run the samples through a system which..
uses antibodys to detect the presence of drugs and  others...
substances
Then as a backup..
the samples would put through the GCMS machine..
which can accurately identify
substances by determine their moleculal weight
As the .graff. emerge with pics showing the drugs
were present and as...
the printed .sweep up.  the anlysis which drugs
something seemed to have gone very wrong
The first ...
positive results of course were a shock form
i had not expected to find nicotine and cocaine
and that´s what happened; i was absolutely sure...
it must be a mistake
 
Balabanova run the test again and again
she sent fresh samples to three other labs
but the results kept being confirmed
the drugs were there
So she went ahead and published the paper
the reaction was a sharp reminder that sciences it´s a...
conservative world
 
I got a pile of letters that..
were almost threatening, insulting..
letters saying that all this was nonsense
That i was fantasizing,
that it was quite impossible,
because it was proved
than before columbus this plants were not found
anywhere on the world apart from america
 
 
From toxicologist to anthropologists ...
everyone thought the same thing
The first thing you think of is that ...
this is just mad
It´s wrong
and there is contamination present
making this prove present of some kind
but you don´t think that cocaine
got actually to be present in an egyptian mummy
Yet Balabanova herself had been ...
worried about contamination
First, she checked all the lab equipment
But been a phorensic toxicologist
that wasn´t all she did
Balabanova had learned her trade working for the police
and had been trained
on the methods they use to investigate ...
a suspicious death
She had been told how vitaly it is when an autposy
is carried out to know whether the
dead person has consumed or
been given any drugs or posions
 
And she had also been told that the especial
phorensic thecnique exists which confirm
that the deceased has consumed the drug
and can ruled out contamination at the same time
So anxious to ensure that her
tests on the mummies were beyound reproach
she used this very thechnique
It is called ``the hearshot test´´
drugs and other  ...
substances that were consumed by humans
get into the hair protein where they remain for months
or after death, forever
Hair samples from the body can be washed in alcohol
and the washing solution  itself  being tested
If the washing solution is clean but
the hair comes of positive then
the drug must be inside the hairshot
which means the person must had consumed
during their lifetime; it´s considered
proof against contamination before
or after death
the hairshot test is accepted
if you know you´ve taken your hair sample
from this particular individual and
and the hairshot
is shown to contain the drug, well then
it´s proved positive that the person has taken the drug
So, it´s accepted in law
this put people into prison
the hairshot test..
on the bodies of couple in yersey show that
two sons had druged them before ...
killing them
And beside of the ... case, the thechinque has
been used in countless others over the last twenty five years
Since it also for durg test
on addicts, company employees and in
sport, to sugest they could
produce false results was for Balabanova,
unthinkable
There is no
way that can be mistaken this test, this method
is widely accepted and has been used thousands
of times
It´s  results on a genuin , the explanation
must laid out .swear. and not in
my tests because i´m a hundred percent certain
about the results
If the fault was not in the test,
what else could laid behind the impossibility
of mummies containing drugs
from the plants coca and tabaco
from a continent not discovered over a
thousand years after the end
of the egiptian civilization
In search of an explanation, we
went to one of the Uk´s former experts
on mummies, a person who
has expend years rummaging around
the bodies of ancient egyptians
Rosaly David
When i was first informed that cocaine had been founded in
egyptian mummies
i was absolutely stunned, that seemed quite
impossible, that shouldn´t be the case
Sceptical of Balabanova results
Rosaly David decided to get some samples from her own
mummies and had them tested specially
for ...
What are we going to do is to provide
tissue samples and hair samples from
a
number of mummies in the  matches of museum collections
I should be very surprise to found they have cocaine
 
 
 
It would be a while before the results came back from the lab
Rosaly David´s motive
was not an independent
check on Balabanova´s methods
she also wanted to run the same tests but on different
mummies
 
For she had more than one idea about
how balabanova could had got a misleading result
I think there were two ideas which sprang inmediately to mind,
one was
That possibly something in the tests
could give a false result
and the second was
that possibly the mummies that had been tested
were not truly ancient egyptian
that they could be sime of this false
relatively modern mummies, with traces of cocaine
could be in those individuals
What rosalie david had been refering to, happened
in egypt in victorian times
It was a crucial operation to supply the
antique dealers of ..
 
 
When nineteen century
travelers began to descend on egypt
in search of mummies and other valuables
the dealers might not always
have the genuin article available
And so,
threcrudely mummified body of a recent ly dead egyptian
might be procured instead for a
shriveled corpse will
greatly increase the value of the genuin
but empty sarcophagus
 
Sometimes, collectors would buy only limbs
or other mummified spare parts
These are doubly suspected
for the trade in fake mummies
particulary severed heads and limbs
hasn´t even old origin
Eating
the flesh of mummies was a common sixteen century
practice in  europe
People believed that mummies contained black tar
called .vigegeum. and so thought
how they made from the ground bodies
will cure various illnesses
This is the very origin of the word mummy,
from the persian .fobiteum mumia
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
