Organic Wines, Vintage 3000 B.C.

 Residues from ancient wine jars discovered in the tomb of Scorpion I, one of Egypt’s first pharaohs, were found to be laced with herbs and tree resins and may be the earliest example of medicinal wine, according to scientists.

Archaeochemist Patrick McGovern, one of the researchers, said tests from some of the 700 wine jars in the ancient tomb date to about 3100 B.C. and clearly show the Pharaoh was thinking organic.

Early Egyptians “were living in a world without modern synthetic medicines and they were very aware of the benefits that natural additives can have — especially if dissolved into an alcoholic medium, like wine or beer,” said McGovern in an article on nationalgeographic.com.

Tests also detected tree resin, which was added to wine as a preservative and for medicinal purposes. This practice was previously thought to have begun around 1850 B.C., but with these recent findings, the date is now “push[ed]…back another 1,500 years,” according to McGovern.

The wines from Scorpion’s tomb were brought in from the Jordan River valley, as Epyptian vineyards were not yet established. Discovery of this “winery” is one of several from ancient Egypt, China and elsewhere that point to the extended use of medicinals in ancient cultures, said the NGN article.

“Over thousands of years humans were searching their environment and trying to find natural medicinal materials,” said McGovern, who is with the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology.

McGovern’s team, collaborating with researchers at Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center, is using biomolecular analysis to unlock the wine’s medicinal secrets for use in modern medical remedies.

“We’re trying to rediscover why ancient people thought these particular herbs were medically useful,” he said, “and seeing if they are effective for the treatment of cancer or other modern diseases.”

Scorpion I’s tomb was first excavated in the early 1900s by a team of German archaeologists led by Gunter Dreyer. Scorpion, who was so named by Dreyer because of the arachnid’s insignia, was thought to be buried in the oldest tomb known at the royal cemetery of Abydos, writes Ottar Vendel, Egyptologist.

“The grave goods found within were remarkable and a big surprise for the excavators,” writes Vendel on nemo.nu, “as images of scorpions in royal fashion and lots of jars imported from northern Palestine 1000 km to the northeast possibly to have contained wine.”