Examination of an ancient alabaster vase in the Yale Peabody Museum's Babylonian Collection has revealed traces of opiates, providing the clearest evidence to date of broad opium use in ancient Egyptian society, according to a new study by the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program (YAPP).
The finding suggests that similar ancient Egyptian alabaster vessels - all made of calcite mined from the same quarries in Egypt - including several exquisite examples discovered in the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun - could also contain traces of ancient opiates, said Andrew J. Koh, YAPP's principal investigator and the study's lead author.
"Our findings combined with prior research indicate that opium use was more than accidental or sporadic in ancient Egyptian cultures and surrounding lands and was, to some degree, a fixture of daily life," said Koh, a research scientist at the Yale Peabody Museum. "We think it's possible, if not probable, that alabaster jars found in King Tut's tomb contained opium as part of an ancient tradition of opiate use that we are only now beginning to understand."
The study, published in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology, is coauthored by Agnete W. Lassen, associate curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, and Alison M. Crandall, YAPP's lab manager.
The alabaster vase is inscribed in four ancient languages - Akkadian, Elamite, Persian, and Egyptian - to Xerxes I, who ruled the Achaemenid Empire from 486 to 465 BCE. Based in Persia, the empire at its height included Egypt as well as Mesopotamia, the Levant, Anatolia, and parts of Eastern Arabia and Central Asia.
