The result: distinct traces of several biomarkers for opium, such as noscapine, hydrocotarnine, morphine, thebaine, and papaverine. That’s consistent with an earlier identification of opiate residues found in several Egyptian alabaster vessels and Cypriot juglets excavated from a merchant’s tomb south of Cairo, dating back to the New Kingdom (16th to 11th century BCE).
The authors think these twin findings warrant a reassessment of prior assumptions about Egyptian alabaster vessels, many of which they believe could also have traces of ancient opiates. A good starting point, they suggest, is a set of vessels excavated from Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 by archaeologist Howard Carter. Many of those vessels have the same sticky dark brown organic residues. There was an early attempt to chemically analyze those residues in 1933 by Albert Lucas, who simply didn’t have the necessary technology to identify the compounds, although he was able to determine that the residues were not unguents or perfumes. Nobody has attempted to analyze the residues since.