Mystery of the Cocaine Mummies
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We live in a world telling us how to think and what to believe. Our knowledge and understandings of how the world works are rather fixed. New information is often filtered to support specific and limited perspectives. New so-called discoveries enforce such perspectives and solidify incorrect notions and narrow our mind to greater possibilities. True breakthroughs have been ridiculed, hidden, and destroyed... until now.
However, once in a while, truly groundbreaking discoveries are made by those brave pioneers free of rigid notions or preconceived expectations. Their life's research often threatens the widely accepted mainstream beliefs, which people are reluctant to reconsider. However, these astounding breakthroughs usually go unnoticed as the ruling orthodoxy in science and history subject them to outright mockery rather than reasonable discussions because a structure built on lies atop of lies is very complex and contradicts itself.
One example of such theory that could potentially be truth-changing but is regarded as unacceptable by conservative academics is the proposed idea that the transoceanic contact between the Old World and the New World took place centuries before Christopher Columbus made his historic journey to the Americas in the 15th century.
For years, evidence has been continuously growing in support of the proposal that people of the Old World have traveled to the America's way before Columbus set foot on the continent’s ground. For one, evidence surfaced backing up the theory that the Vikings arrived in the land of the Americas around 1,000 years ago. Some even suggest that that the Chinese had voyaged into the New World as early as 1420 before Columbus managed to do the same in 1492.
But the most surprising claim of them all is the proposed hypothesis that the ancient Egyptians were actually way ahead of everyone else in establishing contact with the Americas, having purportedly done so around 1,000 B.C.
Theory of Trans-Oceanic Contact Between Ancient Egypt & The Americas
Previously, it was widely believed that the ancient Egyptians possessed limited ability to sail the open seas at great distances and were only capable of traveling along and across the Nile River. However, recent evidence, such as those found in ancient crafts and cargo containers, suggest that the Egyptians of that time did possess adequate knowledge when it comes traveling in open waters, particularly the Red Sea.
According to an article written by Paul Darin of The Epoch Times, there is even an unverified theory which purports that the ancient Egyptians have managed to embark on transoceanic journeys that reached as far as the American Southwest. The story of this claim goes back to 1909 when two Smithsonian-supported explorers S.A. Jordan and G.E. Kincaid uncovered a network of caves in the Grand Canyon’s Marble Region. Inside these caves, they supposedly found several artifacts reminiscent to objects that have been confirmed to have come from ancient Egypt, including some tablets with engraved Hieroglyphics. The two explorers’ accounts of the experience were published back in April 1909 in the Arizona Gazette, but the Smithsonian Institution claims to possess no records of any kind that corroborate the alleged discovery of Egyptian artifacts in any part of the American Southwest.
But perhaps the most compelling evidence in support of the theory that the ancient Egyptians established contact with the New World centuries earlier than the Vikings or Columbus can be found in the exhumed mummified remains from Egypt.
The Mummified Remains of Ramses II
Orthodox history tells us that the nicotine from tobacco and cocaine from the coca plant were unknown to the ancient Egyptians as they could only be found in the Americas around the existence of their civilization. Moreover, exportation of the tobacco and coca plants overseas supposedly didn’t take place until the Victorian era in the 19th century. However, evidence gathered from the remains of ancient Egyptian mummies tell a very different story.
On September 16, 1976, the mummified remains of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, who ruled the Egyptians more than 3,000 years ago, was brought to the Museum of Mankind in Paris, France. A team of scientists was given the task of repairing the damage to the pharaoh’s body and to prevent further deterioration of his remains. One of the scientists involved with the project was Dr. Michelle Lescot, who worked for the Natural History Museum in Paris. In examining the mummified body of Ramses II, Dr. Lescot was given samples of the fragments found stuck within the fibers of the mummy’s bandages. After analyzing the fragments, she found that they were actually fragments of plants. When she studied the sample under a microscope, she made a stunning discovery – the fragments were from a tobacco plant.
Traces of what was supposedly a New World plant were found on an ancient mummy from the Old World. This led some people to ask how the deceased body of a 3000-year-old Egyptian ruler managed to get a hold of fragments of a tobacco plant when mainstream history insists that there was no way that ancient Egypt had established transoceanic trade relations with the people in the Americas during that time. In short, how on earth did Ramses II get his hands on some tobacco?
What Dr. Lescot discovered generated a lot of buzz in Europe at the time, but the interest was not loud enough to gain traction in the United States. It was met with fierce criticism from experts of orthodox thinking, with some dismissing the female scientist’s discovery as a mistake due to possible “contamination” of the samples gathered. And although Dr. Lescot managed to replicate her findings with new samples from the abdomen of Ramses II’s body, the evidence she presented that supported the existence of a transatlantic relationship between ancient Egypt and the Americas was eventually regarded as inconsequential by the conventional members of the academic community.
The Mummy of Henut Taui: The Lady of the Two Lands
The interesting detection of tobacco traces on the remains of Pharaoh Ramses II would have completely been forgotten had it not been for another accidental and similar discovery involving several ancient Egyptian mummies sixteen years later.
It was in 1992 when Dr. Svetla Balabanova, a toxicologist from the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Ulm, Germany examined the mummified remains of Henut Taui, a priestess who lived sometime in 1000 B.C. during the reign of the 21st Dynasty of ancient Egypt. The body of the priestess along with several other mummies was subjected to the same testing methods applied in modern times to prove drug consumption. To Dr. Balabanova’s astonishment, Henut Taui’s mummified body along with those of other mummies showed traces of nicotine and cocaine, particularly in their hair.
To make sure that she wasn't wrong about her findings, Dr. Balabanova had the tests repeated, and sent samples to three more labs. When they confirmed that her initial discovery was accurate, she published her findings with two of her colleagues. However, the forensic scientist’s publication was met with acrimonious reception. People called her a fraud and accused her of fabricating or misinterpreting the actual results of her research on Henut Taui’s body. On the other hand, a sizeable portion of those who read her work and believed in the credibility of her findings used her research as proof that there was contact between the ancient Egyptians from the Old World and the pre-Columbian people in the Americas.
Dr. Balabanova’s findings went on to be investigated by Dr. Rosalie David, who worked as the keeper of Egyptology at the Manchester Museum. Her efforts to research the mystery behind the cocaine mummies confirmed that Balabanova’s findings were not compromised and that the mummies that were studied, including Henut Taui’s mummified remains, were genuine Egyptians mummies of ancient origin.
However, despite the corroboration of a skeptic like David, mainstream scholars continue to remain skeptical of Balabanova’s discovery of cocaine and nicotine in the mummified bodies of ancient Egyptians. Their refusal to accept her findings also stems from the fact that others have also attempted to replicate the toxicologist’s detection of cocaine from the samples of Egyptian mummies but failed to produce similar results successfully. While some accept the results of Balabanova’s study, they insist the cocaine and nicotine can be explained by the mummification methods implemented at the time. For example, plants containing atropine alkaloid may have been used in the mummification of the bodies and these plants “necrochemically” changed over time to resemble the compounds present in tobacco and coca plants.
From how things are going at present, the jury is still out on whether or not the cocaine mummies will be universally regarded as sufficient proof to validate the theory that there was transoceanic contact between the ancient Egyptians from the Old World and the pre-Columbian people in the Americas three thousand years ago. Academic scholars and scientists are still caught in a seemingly-perpetual tug of war on this issue, and it doesn’t look like either side will be backing down anytime soon.
But perhaps the discourse involving the cocaine mummies is no longer just a matter of whether the findings of Dr. Lescot and Dr. Balabanova are accurate and valid. Instead, perhaps it is the implication of their research that could be the bigger concern. If we accept the fact that natives living in pre-Columbian America were not primitive savages but instead established trans-Atlantic contact and maintained trade relations with distant civilizations, then we might completely reconstruct our world history that justified the oppression and forced occupation of the pre-Columbian native Americans.
Sources:
http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/Articles/Curse%20of%20the%20Cocaine%20Mummies.html
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/mystery-cocaine-mummies/
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/358318-curious-history-ancient-egyptians-may-have-traded-with-the-new-world/?photo=2
http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/did-ancient-egyptians-trade-nicotine-and-cocaine-new-world-001025?nopaging=1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henut_Taui
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/ethnic/mummy.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact_theories#Claims_of_Egyptian_coca_and_tobacco
