Het oude Egypte kende wel meer geheimen.The first tear in the fabric of the dogma came on the 16th of September 1976 when the mummified remains of Ramses II arrived at the Museum of Mankind in Paris. To repair the damage to the mummy, a scientific team was assembled which included Dr. Michelle Lescot of the Natural History Museum (Paris). She received fragments from the bandages and found a plant fragment ensnared within the fibres. When she looked at it under a microscope she was amazed to discover that the plant was tobacco. Fearing that she had made some mistake she repeated her tests again and again with the same result every time: a New World plant had been found on an Old World mummy. The results, little known in North America, caused a sensation in Europe.
Professor Nasri Isk-ander, the Chief Curator at the Cairo Museum thought he had an explanation. As an avid pipe smoker he argued that “maybe a piece of tobacco dropped by haphazard” from the pipe of some forgotten archaeologist. Dr. Lescot responded to this charge of “contamination” by carefully extracting new samples from Ramses II’s abdomen, all the while having others photograph the process. These samples which could not possibly be “droppings” were then tested and once again were established to be tobacco.
The discovery of tobacco fragments in the mummified body of Ramses II should have had a profound influence upon our whole understanding of the relationship between ancient Egypt and America but this piece of evidence was simply ignored. Then, sixteen years later, again quite by accident, more evidence emerged. In 1992, toxicologist, Dr. Svetla Balabanova of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Ulm (Germany) tested the ancient Egyptian mummified remains of Henut-Tawy, Lady of the Two Lands. The results came as a “shock” to this scientist who regularly used the identical testing methods to convict people of drug consumption. She had not expected to find nicotine and cocaine in an ancient Egyptian mummy. She repeated the tests and sent out fresh samples to three other labs. When the results came back positive she published a paper with two other scientists. (Balabanova, S., F. Parsche and W. Pirsig, “First Identification of Drugs in Egyptian Mummies”, Naturwissenschaften 79, 358 (1992) Springer-Verlag 1992.)