Chemical Traces in a 2,700-Year-Old Skull Point to Aloe in Egyptian Embalming

Researchers at the University of Marburg in Germany have found molecular traces of Aloe-derived compounds in a mummified human head dated to roughly 2,700 years ago, along with a second, much more recent sample: an 18th-century pharmaceutical preparation made from ground Egyptian mummy material. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, mark the first time Aloe has been chemically identified in material connected to ancient Egyptian embalming, rather than inferred from ambiguous text alone.

The team, led by doctoral candidate Tim Berger and senior authors Tanja Pommerening and Raphael Reher, screened 24 objects pulled from university and museum collections: mummified body parts, wrapping bandages, embalming residues, two mummified skulls, and historical medicinal products sold for centuries under the label "Mumia vera aegyptiaca." Using untargeted metabolomics, a technique that can sort through hundreds of chemical signals in a degraded sample at once, the researchers matched compounds related to aloin and aloeresin — chemical fingerprints specific to the genus Aloe — in two of the 24 items, according to a university announcement of the findings. One was a mummified skull held in Marburg's own Zoological Collection, radiocarbon-dated to between 918 and 827 B.C. The other was the 18th-century Mumia vera specimen, originally sold by the Löwen-Apotheke pharmacy in Offenbach am Main and now held at the German Pharmacy Museum in Heidelberg.

A Narrow but Specific Signal

The numbers matter here because the finding is deliberately modest. Aloe-linked compounds turned up in only two of the 24 samples tested, and the researchers are explicit that this does not establish aloe as a routine embalming ingredient across ancient Egypt. In one sample, the chemical signal matched an authentic aloeresin A reference standard closely enough to rule out a related, often-confused substance: agarwood, derived from the genus Aquilaria, which historically also went by the name "aloe" in some trade and medical texts, according to coverage by Daily News Egypt. Distinguishing the two matters because conflating them has muddied interpretations of ancient recipes for more than a century.

The team also re-examined an ancient Egyptian phrase, nḥ-jm.j — roughly "life is within it" — that appears in embalming contexts in surviving texts and describes a substance tied to a plant from a foreign coastal region. The researchers propose it may refer to aloe or an aloe-derived extract, while cautioning that the phrase has been translated multiple ways over the decades and that physical evidence for aloe cultivation or trade in ancient Egypt remains thin on its own.

A Term Egyptologists Have Argued Over for Years

Embalming chemistry has drawn renewed scientific attention in the past few years, following a 2023 analysis of residue-labeled jars from a workshop at Saqqara that mapped out resins, fats, and plant oils used in mummification. The Marburg study approaches the same broad question — what, chemically, went into these recipes — from a different angle, pairing lab chemistry directly with the historical pharmacy trade in Mumia vera, a remedy manufactured from embalmed remains and sold across Europe into the 19th century for ailments ranging from bruising to epilepsy. Because later Mumia vera preparations sometimes included added ingredients, the Marburg team's detection of aloe compounds in both an ancient skull and a much later pharmacy product raises, without resolving, the question of how far back the association between aloe and mummified remains actually extends.

The study's reach extends past the chemistry bench into museum recordkeeping. Using the same untargeted metabolomics data combined with machine-learning comparison, the researchers found that one of the mummified heads in the Marburg collection shares a close chemical profile with a separately catalogued, unprovenanced powder sample — suggesting a historical link between the two items that no surviving paperwork documents. For curators managing collections of human remains with incomplete acquisition records, chemistry of this kind offers one of few tools available for reconstructing where specimens came from and how they relate to one another.

An Unplanned Detour Into Virology

A side experiment in the same paper tested whether the old Mumia vera extract retained any biological activity. In cell culture, it showed a modest protective effect against damage caused by several influenza strains, though its principal isolated compound, 7-oxodehydroabietic acid, did not reproduce that effect on its own when tested in isolation — meaning whatever protective activity exists likely depends on a mixture of compounds rather than a single active ingredient. The authors are careful to frame this as a laboratory curiosity rather than evidence that the historical remedy had real therapeutic value.

"We know that embalming was a complicated, multistage process involving resins, fats and other materials," said Tim Berger, the study's co-lead author, describing why pinning down any single ingredient's role requires painstaking, sample-by-sample chemical work rather than relying on historical texts alone.

Pommerening, who studies the history of pharmacy and medicine at Marburg, said the new findings suggest the long-assumed association between aloe and mummy-derived medicine "may have deeper historical roots" than previously documented — a cautious framing that reflects how little direct physical evidence has existed until now to connect the ancient embalming tradition to the plant.

Caveats and the Road Ahead

The researchers flag several open questions. Laboratory controls argue against contamination introduced during recent handling or storage, but the possibility cannot be fully excluded given how many hands and collections the objects have passed through over roughly two centuries of museum custody. The identification points to the Aloe genus broadly rather than a specific species, and the ancient Egyptian term the team links to aloe has no single settled translation among Egyptologists. The authors describe their next steps as expanding the sample set to more collections and applying the same metabolomics-plus-machine-learning approach to help resolve unprovenanced holdings elsewhere, a methodological contribution that may outlast the specific aloe finding itself.