Tut's Tipple
Everyone knows that Tutankhamun was buried with a tomb-full of amazing treasures - golden shrines and death masks, alabaster vases and canopic chests, ebony canes and statues, and so the list goes on and on. As you might expect, the most valuable treasures were actually placed on the young king's body - spells to guide him through the afterlife and two iron daggers.
The tomb contained a variety of real bronze weapons, wooden bows and arrows and leopard-skin shields; it also contained ceremonial weapons made out of gold, which may look magnificent but is hardly the stuff to hold an edge! However the most valuable of all Tut's treasures may well have been these iron daggers. Value is usually a measure of scarcity: one thinks of the imperial crown made of aluminium, at that time the rarest and most expensive metal in the world. A couple of years after the emperor appeared swanking around in his light-weight crown someone invented the electrolytic method for making aluminium, turning it into the cheapest metal - and the crown suddenly lost its value and now resides in a museum!
In Tut's day iron was virtually unknown and the metal for his daggers may well have come from meteorites and been beaten into shape, which would account for the value he placed on them.
Similar considerations may have applied to the choice of wine for the royal post-mortem cellar. The boy-king went into the afterlife well provided with alcohol, both in the form of beer and also jars of wine. Recently Rosa Lamuela-Raventos and her colleagues from the University of Barcelona used modern methods to investigate the contents of these jars.
Of course by now there was no wine left in the jars - the porous nature of clay jars and the dry heat in the Valley of the Kings had seen to that - but there was a good deal of residue remaining inside the jars and Lamuela_Raventos was able to take a few scrapings from six of the jars and subject them to liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. As expected, all contained tartaric acid, one of the natural ingredients of grape juice.
Much more surprising was the fact that only one of the six jars contained syringic acid, a chemical which is found in the skin of red grapes and which gives red wine its colour. As there was no previous evidence of white wine in Egypt until the 3rd century AD, the discovery has given historians a puzzle.
Modern wine-makers have been known to remove red grape skins in order to produce white wine from red grapes, but while the picture of near-naked concubines peeling grapes for their lord and master may be a favourite fantasy of some, the thought of this being done on an industrial scale for the wine industry is a fantasy too far. The only realistic source for the white wine in Tut's tomb is white grapes.
It is a common fallacy to confuse absence of evidence with evidence for absence, but as the white wine in Tut's tomb shows, just because you have no records of white wine does not mean that white wine did not exist. All it shows is that we have not yet found records of white wine!
I need hardly point out that the same principle can be applied in many others areas when interpreting ancient history. We have not found evidence that Abraham did not exist, but that does not prove that Abraham did not exist; it merely proves that we haven't found the evidence yet.
Of course this can be a dangerous principle to apply. The believer in UFOs may claim that just because we have not found evidence that aliens built the pyramids does not mean that aliens did not, in fact, build the pyramids. In terms of strict logic, that is absolutely true - but we reject the idea on other, quite adequate grounds: we do have ample evidence that human Egyptians built the pyramids and the presence of little green men from Mars among the workforce is inherently unlikely.
The same cannot be said about Abraham or King David or most other Biblical characters. The stories about these men fit in with what we know about the times in which they lived, evidence has been found for other individuals mentioned in the stories, the discovery of a tablet naming them would merely be the final confirmation of their already likely existence.
© Kendall K. Down 2009
