The Scorpion I Tomb as a Case Study

1The Scorpion I tomb (U-j) at Abydos in Egypt, dated to ca. 3150 bc, which was excavated by an archaeological team from the German Institute of Archaeology in Cairo in 1988 (Dreyer 1999), provides an excellent example of how a well-provenienced, well-dated, well-excavated, and well-preserved archaeological context holds out good prospects for the recovery of ancient organic materials. The tomb, laid out as a model funerary house (for a scale floor plan, see McGovern et al. 1997, fig. 4; see fig. 59), is one of the earliest and most important tombs of an ancient predynastic Egyptian king, probably named Scorpion (I). The presumed ruler’s identity is based on large, well-drawn images of the desert animal painted on many wavy-handled pottery jars, which likely contained oils or fats (as yet, unanalysed); these “pictographs” may represent some of the earliest known hieroglyphic characters. The king himself (represented by a few bones only, due to robbery in antiquity) had been laid out on a wooden shrine, traces of which were recovered in the largest chamber (fig. 59) of the tomb in its northwest corner, with his ivory hq3 (Egyptian, “ruler”) sceptre at his side. Other chambers of the tomb contained beer jars, bread moulds, and fragments of cedar boxes, perhaps once having held clothes, etc., for his journey into the afterlife.

Figure 59. Scorpion I’s tomb at Abydos, showing one of the chambers filled with wine jars before excavation

2From the perspective of an ancient grape/wine hypothesis, the most important excavated finds were 207 pottery jars of non-Egyptian types, nearly all of which were intact, in the south-eastern two-thirds of chamber 7 and the entirety of chamber 10 on the north-eastern side of the tomb (Hartung 2001). They were stacked in three or four layers from the sand floor to about mid-wall height, one layer above another (McGovern et al. 1997, fig. 5). Depressions in the sand floor of chamber 12 on the south-eastern corner of the structure, together with numerous jar sherds of the same types as those in chambers 7 and 10, show that at least another 150 vessels once covered the floor of this chamber but had been stolen in antiquity. On the assumption that more vessels once existed in the north-western third of chamber 7 and additional jars were piled on top of one another in chamber 12, the three rooms can be estimated to have originally contained as many as 700 jars (fig. 60). Since each jar had a capacity of about 7-8 litres, the jars would have held up to 4500 litres of liquid if full. The question was: What was the liquid that the vessels originally contained?

Figure 60. A “wine cellar for eternity”: peering down at some of the 700 wine jars buried with Scorpion I

3The jars in chambers 7 and 10 were found intact beneath half a metre of sand. Each chamber was surrounded by 0.5 to 1-metre-thick mudbrick walls, approximately 1.5 metre high, and covered by a roof of wooden beams, plastered mudbrick and reed mats, still partly preserved. The tomb had also been buried under a mound of sand. When the roof collapsed into the chambers, sand poured into the latter, creating depressions in the desert.

4The Western Saharan Desert of Upper Egypt, where the Scorpion I tomb is located, receives about 1 millimetre of annual rainfall and has a relative humidity ranging between 30-60 %. Today, rain only penetrates several millimetres into the fine sand, well above the depth at which the well-sealed jars are set, and any moisture quickly evaporates in what is considered to be one of the sunniest spots on Earth. Similar environmental conditions have likely prevailed in this region for the past 5000 years. During the excavation, no moisture or elevated humidity was observed in chambers 7 and 10, and it is unlikely that rain or the water-table ever seeped in. In short, the presumed insulation provided by the sand, mudbrick walls, roof, and mound would have kept the jars relatively cool and dry for millennia and helped to preserve organic materials.

5Yet, as was to be expected, the contents of the jars had evaporated and been replaced by sand over the millennia. Slanted rings of a yellowish crusty residue were revealed on the interiors of many jars, once the sand was poured out (fig. 61). The rings are best explained as “tide-lines” that mark the surface of a liquid. As the presumed liquid inside gradually evaporated, it left behind solids which had been floating on the surface. If a jar had moved, its ring was slanted from the horizontal. Residue had also accumulated on the bases where other solids in the liquid had settled. The argument that the vessels were liquid containers was further substantiated by their narrow mouths and a scattering of small clay sealings around the jars, which had jar rim and string impressions on their backs. It is hypothesised that the jars had once had “lids” made of an organic material, such as leather, that were tied over the jar mouths with string and secured with the sealings. The strings and covers later disintegrated, and the sealings fell to the floor.

Figure 61. The interior of wine jar no. 7/50 from Scorpion I’s tomb (Hartung 2001, cat. no. 389, 189, pl. 58 and 94)

6An indication of the original contents of jars as having been fermented grape juice (i.e. wine) was already suggested by the recovery of numerous raisins from many of them, together with grape seeds and skins. However, the number of raisins per jar was low, suggesting that the liquid contents had been filtered but not finely, perhaps to further extract the aromatic and bittering compounds of the grapes.

7Several jars contained a single desiccated fig, which had been sliced horizontally into sections was centrally perforated which, in some examples, contained remnants of preserved string. If the wine hypothesis were to be sustained by our analyses, this finding would be the only instance of a chemically confirmed fig-flavoured wine from antiquity. It appears possible that the figs might have been hung from the mouth of the vessel into the liquid. By slicing them up to create a larger surface area, they might have served better as sweetening agents, for special flavouring, or to provide additional yeast for fermentation. A less pragmatic, but perhaps no less compelling, reason for such a wine was a 3rd millennium bc Old Kingdom Pyramid Text (§112c-d) that reads: “The king shall make his meal from figs and wine which are in the garden of the god.” By having a wine laced with figs, Scorpion I would have been assured of a fully sanctified meal in the afterlife.

8The inferences of the jars having once contained a grape wine, based on archaeological observations, archaeobotanical finds, and textual sources, were further corroborated by our chemical analyses of the tide-line residues inside three jars (nos. 7/18, 10/22 and 10/115) excavated from undisturbed areas of chambers 7 and 10. We began by testing the yellowish residues inside three jars using our standard, albeit at the time, low-level battery of analyses viz., Fourier-transform infrared spectrometry (FT-IR), HPLC (high-performance liquid chromatography), and a Feigl spot test in search of biomarkers for possible natural products. We demanded that the results of all three independent methods agreed with one another, otherwise our hypothetical identification (s) would be disproven (McGovern 2019a; McGovern et al. 1997; McGovern et al. 2001). The tests uniformly showed the presence of tartaric acid/tartrate, further corroborating the initial hypothesis that the vessels had indeed contained a grape product, most likely wine. This result was subsequently confirmed by state-of-the-art liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) (McGovern et al. 2009).

9Since tartaric acid/tartrate only occurs in large amounts in the Eurasian grape (Vitis vinifera) in the Middle East, it is the fingerprint compound for a grape product there. When expressed as a liquid, as was clearly indicated by the narrow mouths of the jars and where the residues had collected on their interiors, grapes readily ferment to wine in a warm climate. Numerous clay sealings found in the vicinity of the jars showed that the mouths of the jars had once been covered, probably by leather that since disintegrated, to keep out oxygen and prevent the wine from oxidising to vinegar. Our inferences were borne out by the addition of a tree sap preservative, and the archaeobotanical recovery of grape remains from inside many of the jars (infra).

10The combined evidence left little doubt that the 700 jars in the Scorpion I had once contained grape wine. One could argue that some of the jars might have been filled with other contents, especially since only a very small percentage of jars in the corpus had been chemically tested. The archaeological context in which all the jars were found together with their interiors showing little or no variations in material content (e.g. comparable tide-lines and archaeobotanical findings), however, suggested otherwise.

11Yet, other questions remained pertaining to whether the jars had once contained what would be the earliest chemically attested wine for Egypt to date. Most troublesome was the fact that the royal Egyptian winemaking industry was not established in the Nile Delta until several hundred years after Scorpion I, around 3000 bc. Moreover, wild grapevine (V. vinifera sylvestris) never grew in the arid climate of Egypt. Thus, if the wine contained in the jars was indeed wild grape wine, then it had been imported from elsewhere.

12A clue to the jars’ contents—a deductive test of the grape/wine hypothesis—was their unusual shapes, decorations, and manufacturing details, which were foreign to Egypt. The best parallels were from sites in the Jordan Valley, near the Dead Sea, and in the vicinity of Gaza along the Mediterranean, the closest settled area in the southern Levant to Egypt where, at that time, a wine industry already existed and had for half a millennium or more (McGovern 2019a). This inference was confirmed by neutron activation analysis (NAA) (McGovern et al. 2001).

13Many other analyses were carried out on the residues, including identifying ancient DNA of the ancestor wine yeast responsible for the fermentation of the grape juice into wine (Cavalieri et al. 2003) and herbal additives of Levantine origin (McGovern et al. 2009). The botanicals, which go readily into solution in an alcoholic medium such as wine that can be readily applied to the skin or be drunk, likely provide the earliest chemical evidence for a medicinal preparation from ancient Egypt (McGovern et al. 2010; McGovern 2019b).

14Our chemical analyses also showed that Scorpion I’s wine had been resinated with pine and probably terebinth tree saps, based on characteristic diterpenoid and triterpenoid compounds (unsaturated and cyclic hydrocarbons). In our experience, almost without exception, a tree sap was added to ancient wine throughout the Near East and elsewhere, most likely because they have antioxidant properties that prevent wine from turning to vinegar, or failing that, they cover up off-aromas and off-tastes.

15The case study of Scorpion I’s grape wine illustrates how organic residue analyses are best performed to achieve the most meaningful results (see McGovern, Hall 2015, for specifics and recommendations). Working hypotheses (in this instance, a “wine hypothesis”), drawing upon as many relevant disciplines as possible to derive the maximum information from a very limited database, are key to this highly interdisciplinary field, which is a branch of biomolecular archaeology.

16Archaeological, chemical, and archaeobotanical analytical techniques and data are most important for effectively developing and testing such hypotheses, but zoological, geological and other natural science approaches, as well as ancient textual, artistic and more recent ethnohistorical and ethnographic evidence, also need to be taken into account. Thus, documentary sources and artistic depictions, especially those which are contemporaneous with the mute, non-textual archaeological data, can help to “flesh out” what is otherwise equivocal from the latter scientific data alone. Because alcoholic beverages are central to nearly every culture on the planet, they can be highly conservative through time.

17Archaeologically, the goal is to obtain as many relevant samples for the proposed hypothesis as possible from the best preserved and dated contexts, which have been subjected to the least degradation and disturbance by later natural processes and human handling, including washing and conservation treatment. Chemically, molecular biomarkers of natural products need to be defined and identified by the best and most appropriate techniques, together with bioinformatics searches and assessment of degradation. With ever-improving techniques and new data, previously analysed samples need to be retested and hypotheses possibly reformulated.

18A corollary of a highly probabilistic discipline is that absolute certainty or refutation of a posited working hypothesis of archaeological significance at least one that is at a higher level of abstraction, such as a social activity, technology or ideology, as opposed to the chemical or physical identification of a specific material or chemical compound is unattainable. Unlike the hard sciences, past archaeological events cannot be fully replicated by experiments in the present. So-called “experimental archaeology”, a branch of ethnoarchaeology, in which various possible ancient scenarios are tested for their viability is of explanatory value but is often quite limited.

19It should be noted that earthenware pottery and other porous ceramic materials are the ideal for absorbing and preserving ancient organics, especially liquids with polar compounds like grape wine. The ionic forces of aluminosilicate clays, for example, can retain the ancient compounds intact, depending upon their stability and susceptibility to possible displacement by extraneous ground water, until they are extracted by modern solvents. Acid baths to remove carbonates, which has been a common practice in archaeology, is also detrimental to the preservation of ancient organics.

20Reconstructing ancient viniculture’s history and technology is a single example of how ancient organic residue analysis, when buttressed by as solid a methodological, theoretical and experimental foundation as possible, promises to shed new light on a host of biocultural developments that have made humans the organisms and cultures that we are today. With that knowledge, we can move more confidently into the future. Most of what we are as humans is organic—our houses, our clothes, our bodies, etc.—and we now have the analytical tools to recover and identify and interpret ancient organic remains.

21We stand at the beginning of a process of discovery in which we can find out much more about ourselves and our past world, including our bodies and brains, the micro-biomes that surround and inhabit us, our languages and social systems, diets and economies, trade routes which brought peoples and their organic commodities and ideologies together, how we domesticated plants and animals, developed medicines, innovated in music, dance, theatre, and the arts generally—the possibilities are endless. This knowledge may well lead to new taste sensations, alternative medicines, a better understanding of our shared biological and cultural heritages, and much else. But such advances will require chemistry, archaeology, and ancillary natural, historical, and social sciences working together in a joint appreciation and application of rigorous theory, methodology, and data collection. Optimistically, we might envision a “new history of humankind” eventually being written.

22A guide to the practical considerations that one should keep in mind in carrying out an organic residue study is posted on my homepage: https://www.penn.museum/sites/ biomoleculararchaeology/.

23The proposed approach is generally applicable to archaeological sites, artifacts and ecofacts, and residues world-wide for any time period. It is particularly applicable to humankind’s homeland—Africa and specifically to Egypt in its northeast corner, which lies at the gateway to the eastern Mediterranean and the continent of Asia.