I guessed quite a few of these ingredients because I work with beeswax, tree resins and plant oils in the wood shop, particularly when doing instruments.
I was surprised about the bitumen and its origin story (floating blobs in the dead sea). That stuff looks like bitumen but I did not expect that they had petroleum products so long ago.
I use lots of materials in my craft that were once used by the ancient Egyptians. Beeswax, linseed oil, hide glue, propolis were all used for at least 4000 years successfully. It breaks my heart to know that we abandoned these traditional materials less than a hundred years ago and replaced it with plastic crap, which seems unlikely to stand the test of time.
Bitumen has been used for over 70,000 years as an adhesive (and somewhat less for waterproofing), actually; the first use of it was by Neanderthals found in Syria.
And it is still used today. I painted the bottom of my boat with black bituminous paint. Wonderful stuff, and it has some pretty unique properties that surprised me while I watched it weather for the first few years.
Bitumen really is a wonderful thing, I'm surprised how few people know about it or use it.
If you've ever got to protect steel outdoors or underwater, I 100% recommend it as the simple, low-cost, high quality option. I would recommend one of the more modern mixtures like Epifanes Black Bottom, of which €15 will get you a liter (8-10m2 of one layer), €50 will get you four liters, just throw it over clean or dirty steel with a standard roller or brush and you're done. Make sure to do minimum 2 (ideally 3) layers, check that it's not collecting (large drips or puddles anywhere will take months to harden!), and put it on generously - you'll be rewarded with one of the best low-tech coatings money can buy.
Oh, and I just remembered bitumen tape - somewhere around $10-$20 will get you a large roll of the best tape on the planet (Commonly sold as bitumen roof tape at Home Depot.) Definitely not as versatile as duct tape, but it will stick to _absolutely everything_ no matter how oily, wet, dirty, etc. and save your butt in the craziest situations, I've used it to stop a boat from sinking and to stop a leak spraying everywhere. You can use it for everything from a leaky roof to a leaky sink to a pipe spraying wildly. Keep in mind, as it is a petroleum product it needs to be around 5-10C (40-50F) to be flexible and sticky enough. (You can also use this in the opposite way in your favor, use ice cubes to cool it down to make it less of a sticky mess.)
Anyone else have any other favorite bitumen products or related things that I'm missing?
Patroleum products were used by indigenous peoples around the world. Going back in time would be pretty wild -- you could just walk around the Dakotas and pick up nuggets of gold; in otherwise pristine environments, you'd find waterways contaminated by oil seeps. Northern indigenous peoples found uses for the oil, but not the gold.
Thankfully, hide glue is still readily available. There may have been some limited experimentation with modern glue in stringed instruments, but pretty much everybody is still using hide glue today.
No, beeswax, linseed oils, pine resin are not plastic. They can be used instead of plastic in many applications but they're still renewable and bio-degradable materials.
Bitumen is a crude oil product, and quite nasty material indeed. But it's not really what I was referring to here.
Plastic is very durable but it's quite brittle. A plastic bucket for example can break quite easily and needs to be disposed of responsibly or it'll stay around forever ruining the environment.
Plastics just means a specific set of properties not what it’s specifically made from or can it be biodegradable.
Depending on the exact chemical reaction makeup these could very well be considered plastics.
Plastics date back around 3500 years with the earliest plastics being made form egg proteins and other animal sources, Shellac which can and is formed into plastic materials has been used for at least 3000 years and in Middle Ages Europe plastics were made by treating horns and making translucent and transparent plastics form them:
One of the first modern plastics was cellulose nitrate which was used as an ivory replacement and was made by dissolving cotton in nitric acid and mixing it with vegetable oil, the solution can then be poured into molds to create the final shape or made into billets that could be machined or carved.
Apparently, cellulose nitrate is also known as Nitrocellulose, and it's pretty explosive stuff; wrt replacing ivory billiards balls:
"The invention enjoyed a brief popularity, but the Hyatt balls were extremely flammable, and sometimes portions of the outer shell would explode upon impact. An owner of a billiard saloon in Colorado wrote to Hyatt about the explosive tendencies, saying that he did not mind very much personally but for the fact that every man in his saloon immediately pulled a gun at the sound."
It is, however the addition of vegetable oil makes it mostly inert, but other products like celluloids (film made from cellulose nitrate) which don’t explode are still quite flammable.
Polymerized linseed oil ("Danish oil") is definitely a kind of plastic.
It just isn't made with a petrochemical.
Linseed oil is awesome stuff though. Currently working on some wooden skis, some with woven flax instead of fiberglass and some with linseed varnish & pine tar bases.
I think what's being argued about here is mainly the different between polymerized resins and other natural products, and petroleum-derived polymers. Both are 'plastic' because 'plastic' is a term that derives from the nature of the product, not its idendity.
The black goo is bitumen, or tar. It is the binder used in road asphalt and was a common pitch used to seal boat hulls. The article focuses on the ritualistic aspect but doesn’t focus on the functional reasons. Sealing the mummified remains from the elements, sealing in the gasses and smells from mummification/decomposition, and gluing the sarcophagus seem like reasonable functional explanations.
Some statues are also covered with pitch so maybe it was also used as a theft deterrent. The pitch covered statues are the best evidence that the pitch was ritualistic rather than functional, in my opinion.
I love the clash of deeply detailed language like "we vaporized the samples and used ‘Gas Chromatography – Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS)’ and separated the molecules" with them using 'black goo' as a term.
I am fascinated that the goo wasn't just a random choice for mummification but apparently had spiritual/cultural significance. Never knew too much about Egyptian culture but this being a sort of 'regeneration' symbol, perhaps tied into some sort of afterlife beliefs, that's amazing.
> I love the clash of deeply detailed language like "we vaporized the samples and used ‘Gas Chromatography – Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS)’ and separated the molecules" with them using 'black goo' as a term.
I would argue that 'black goo' is the most deeply detailed and technical term that could be used for such a substance. I think we can both agree that one cannot argue that it is not black. Now read the following definition of goo:
Noun. Any semi-solid or liquid substance; especially one that is sticky, gummy or slippery; frequently of vague or unknown composition, or a bodily fluid.
Can you think of any more precise and technical term for such a substance? :-)
> it appears that the goo was a ritually important anointing fluid used for a range of purposes, all relating to the burial of the deceased and their transformation into Osiris.
It's worth noting that the color black signifies manifestation in Hermetic thought. The "first stuff" upon which everything is made. Think of statues of the Black Virgin (Mary, and before that Isis).
Blackness signifies how we should be if we want to be alchemically changed into a higher state. Open palms, receptive, like a mirror reflecting divinity.
Some records suggest that people in Azerbaijan were taking crude oil baths as early as 6th century.
I can't say what's true but it seems to make sense that people were fascinated by a liquid pouring from the ground. Just like when plutonium was first discovered it was used for health.
> Just like when plutonium was first discovered it was used for health
[citation needed] because this doesn't really seem to be the case. Although apparently there were eventually some plutonium based pacemakers in the 70s, plutonium itself was first produced in the 40s but I couldn't really find how it was used for health except for some highly unethical studies done on radiation.
The Ancient Egyptians mummified bodies for over 2000 years, surely they must have inspected ancient mummified bodies, even if religiously taboo, maybe when grave robbers broke into a tomb, and adapted their practices accordingly.
I don't doubt that there's been scientific research into the best way to mummify a body; they wouldn't have done all of the steps on a whim / guess. But we're talking about a tradition spanning hundreds, if not thousands of years here. Mummification or otherwise preserving a body goes back a long time - the oldest form of intentional mummification goes back to 5000 BC, or 7000 years ago (according to wikipedia), so even then they had developed a tradition and the knowledge of preserving a body already.
To put things in perspective we are closer time-wise to Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt than he was to the building of the Great Pyramids. Ancient Egyptian culture was immensely old, even at that time, and was basically continuous for the whole period.
I remember reading somewhere that Alexander the Great was so impressed by the (by then already ruinous) Tower of Babel, that he ordered it to be demolished and re-built. He died before the construction was completed, though.
I remember feeling surprised (although I shouldn't have been!) when I learned that ancient Rome had their own historians studying ancient history, but who didn't consider themselves to be ancient history.
To a modern person that would make sense yes, but the Egyptians were extraordinarily conservative, as the duration of their culture attests, and ancient people in general were, by our standards, shockingly incurious scientifically.
I'm confused here. I asked the question of how people know it was taboo for ancient Egyptians. I didn't expect a question instead of an answer because I'm not proposing any side.
Maybe people are just going off assumptions and commenting on that basis but I'm generally curious what proof people have. Specifically, when it comes to such a culture finding the energy of attempting at storing the body and for their view on the afterlife requiring it as a necessity. I have no reason to assume such a culture wouldn't find inspecting graves to some degree as taboo and for any benefits of continuing the process they seemed to care about.
I don’t think it’s arbitrary. Despite being from similar times, burials occurred decades or even centuries apart. The recipe likely evolved based on experimentation and availability of ingredients.
Let me guess, another ancient artifact stolen by the british museum. It rightfully belongs to the Egyptian goverment... similarly the Elginian marbles belong to Greece.
here is a proposal to procure some of this liquid and drink it
"we need to drink the red liquid from the cursed dark sarcophagus in the form of some sort of carbonated energy drink so we can assume its powers and finally die"
I was surprised about the bitumen and its origin story (floating blobs in the dead sea). That stuff looks like bitumen but I did not expect that they had petroleum products so long ago.
I use lots of materials in my craft that were once used by the ancient Egyptians. Beeswax, linseed oil, hide glue, propolis were all used for at least 4000 years successfully. It breaks my heart to know that we abandoned these traditional materials less than a hundred years ago and replaced it with plastic crap, which seems unlikely to stand the test of time.