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WHATPHArAoHTuTAnkHAMEndrAnk
In 1323 b.c.e., Tutankhamen, the young king—pharaoh—of Egypt,
died. In keeping with the traditions of the time, skilled technicians used
chemicals to preserve his body for the afterlife. They buried him, along
with adequate supplies and a number of precious possessions he would
enjoy in his presumed life after death, in an arid valley near the Nile
River. There the mummy lay undisturbed—except for perhaps a few
hasty and failed attempts by tomb robbers—until the British archae-
ologist Howard Carter (1874-1939) and his workers dug into the tomb
in 1922. Unlike most of Tutankhamen's fellow kings, many of whose
tombs lie in the same valley (known as the Valley of the Kings), the
tomb of Tutankhamen was relatively intact. Carter and his team uncov-
ered many valuable artifacts, including the pharaoh's mummy.
As pharaoh, Tutankhamen would probably have had the choicest
diet. Archaeologists have discovered that kings and the wealthiest Egyp-
tians drank much wine, the production of which from grapes is pictured
on tomb walls dating from 4,500 years ago. Wine was important for per-
haps a number of reasons, but one of its advantages is that the alcohol
tends to kill microorganisms. People in ancient cultures did not know
about bacteria, but they did seem to realize that it is a bad idea to drink
water that comes from areas where the human population density was
high. Without sanitation, waste matter often contaminated water sources
around big cities, resulting in bacterial infestation. Not until governments
began instituting strict sanitation measures in the late 19th century could
safe, clean potable (drinking) water be found in big cities.
Scientists have debated about what type of wine Egyptians drank.
Two major classes of wine are red and white (the distinction being in
the type of grape, and whether the skin is also used); archaeological
chemists have found residues scraped from ancient jars that contain
tartaric acid, which is common only in grapes, but have generally been
unable to determine the type of wine.
Several jars in Tutankhamen's tomb were labeled “Wine of the
House-of-Tutankhamen,” although the fluid had evaporated long ago.
Maria Rosa Guasch-Jané and her colleagues at the University of Barce-
lona in Spain recently used sensitive techniques to examine the residues
in some of these wine jars. In addition to mass spectrometry, discussed
earlier, the researchers used liquid chromatography. This technique
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