White stuff in jar is ‘most ancient’ solid cheese
CAIRO — A few years ago, a team of archeologists cleaning sand from an ancient Egyptian tomb discovered a group of broken jars, one of them containing a mysterious white substance.
The team had guesses as to what the material might be, but a new analysis published in the journal Analytical Chemistry offers an answer: What they found during that excavation was an approximately 3,200-year-old piece of cheese, one of the oldest solid specimens discovered.
“The archeologists suspected it was food, according to the conservation method and the position ... inside the tomb, but we discovered it was cheese after the first tests,” Enrico Greco, the lead author of the paper and a research assistant at Peking University in Beijing, said.
The tomb in which the cheese was found belonged to Ptahmes, a high-ranking Egyptian official in the 13th century BC and the former mayor of the ancient city of Memphis, according to the paper. His burial site was first unearthed in 1885, but was lost to shifting sands until its rediscovery in 2010.
The ancient cheese, which was sometimes included in the feasts buried alongside wealthy Egyptians, was probably similar in consistency to chèvre, but with a “really, really acidy” bite, according to Paul Kindstedt, a professor at the University of Vermont who studies the chemistry and history of cheese.
“It would be high in moisture, it would be spreadable,” he said. “It would not last long, it would spoil very quickly.”
And while the sample retrieved by Greco’s colleagues may be old, others have discovered traces of ancient cheese or yogurt (the two can be difficult to distinguish) that long predate even the recent finding, Kindstedt said.
“Other groups have done a lot of work with extracting lipid residues, fat residues, from ancient pots going back as far as 7000 BC,” he said.
In fact, in 1942, a team of researchers reported a finding not dissimilar to that of Greco and his colleagues, Kindstedt pointed out. In a journal article, they described finding a substance in ancient Egyptian jars that they suspected to be cheese dating back to 3200 BC. The samples, they wrote, had “no smell and only a dusty taste.”