The Cocaine Mummies

[cuauhtemoc]

Maybe some of you have seen this documentary on the Discovery Channel or whatever. I first saw it a couple of years ago I think and they re-run it every once in a while, so this is hardly breaking news, but…

Researchers have evidently established the presence of cocaine in mummified corpses in Egypt and Sudan that date back to before Columbus landed in America. Since cocaine is only known to have been cultivated in South America at that time, some people speculate that there may have been an ancient trans-Atlantic trade route.

Then of course the token skeptic comes on and says that there is nothing to any of this, the mummy samples were contaminated by grave-robbers and there was never cocaine anywhere in Africa until the sixteenth century, and anyone who believes that there was is a heretic and an irresponsible scientist and a traitor to archeologists everywhere and just who the hell do they think they are anyway?

Anyone with vast knowledge on this subject care to comment? Do we have to start thinking about the possibility of rewriting every history and archeology textbook in existence, or is this just another crackpot theory?

[porcupine]

Welcome to the boards. I did a search and found this http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=48345

[justwannano]

I saw a Discovery channel show that found coca leaves in the mouthes of mummies. Only the mummies were from the mountains of Peru.

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

As far as I can tell, everything that Google turns up in relation to “cocaine mummies Egypt” relates to the same two transcripts. Here’s a transcript from a 1996 BBC TV broadcast of the video “The Curse of the Cocaine Mummies”. This same transcript keeps popping up on all the websites.
http://www.uiowa.edu/~anthro/webcourse/lost/coctrans.htm

Then four years ago a German scientist, Dr Svetla Balabanova, made a discovery which was to baffle Egyptologists, and call into question whole areas of science and archeology to chemistry and botany.

She discovered that the body of Henut Taui contained large quantities of cocaine and nicotine. The surprise was not just that the ancient Egyptians had taken drugs, but that these drugs come from tobacco and coca, plants completly unknown outside the Americas, unheard of until Sir Walter Raleigh introduced smoking from the New World, or until cocaine was imported in the Victorian era.

It was seemingly impossible for the ancient Egyptians to get hold of these substances. And so began the mystery…

This piece of writing http://www.netspace.net.au/~newdawn/47b.htm keeps popping up, too.

Contact: The Curse of the Cocaine Mummies
By RAND & ROSE FLEM-ATH
In the movie, Contact, Jodie Foster plays an astronomer who establishes communication with a civilisation beyond our solar system. In a recent television program, The Curse of the Cocaine Mummies, a different, but equally fascinating, contact is established between ancient Egypt and ancient Peru. A German forensic scientist busted the Egyptian mummy Ramses II for possession of cocaine. Cocaine, as most people know, grows only in the Andes. How did Ramses II get his dope?

I dunno.

[SpinneZiege]

The way I remember the Discovery Channel special, they found marijuana in the mummies, THC in their systems. It wouldn’t be all that surprising, since cannabis sativa grows and has grown all over the world.