Paleontologists have discovered a new species of hyaenodont in Egypt. Named Bastetodon , the predator was 'fearsome' some 30 million years ago (Credit: Ahmad Morsi)
Rare Egyptian skull sheds light on 'fearsome' new 30-million-year-old leopard-sized predator
The species, known as Bastetodon and named for an Egyptian goddess, had sharp teeth and an incredibly powerful grip
Scientists found the nearly complete skull of a new 30-million-year-old "top apex" predator.
"Just as we were about to conclude our work, a team member spotted something remarkable —a set of large teeth sticking out of the ground," paleontologist Shorouq Al-Ashqar, from Mansoura University and the American University in Cairo, said in a statement.
The "fearsome carnivore" is a new species of ancient Hyaenodonta: a deadly and agile mammal the size of a modern-day leopard.
Known as a Bastetodon, the animal had sharp teeth and a powerful bite to rip into its prey, including the hyraxes, early elephants and hippos, and primates that lived in the former forest of Fayum.
Hyaenodonts hunted in African ecosystems after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Bastetodon was named for the cat-headed Egyptian goddess Bastet, who symbolized protection, pleasure, and good health. It was also an acknowledgment of its cat-like snout and the region where the skull was found.
But, in addition to this remarkable finding, the researchers were able to understand more about a new species discovered more than 120 years ago.
Lead author Shorouq Al-Ashqar. The Bastetodon is named for the cat-headed Egyptian goddess Bastet. Bastet was the sister of Sekhmet, the namesake of the hyaenodont genus Sekhmetops (Credit: Professor Hesham Sallam)
The group Sekhmetops, lion-sized hyaenodonts also discovered in the rocks of the Fayum, had been placed within a European group. Sekhmetops was named to honor the lion-headed goddess of wrath and war.
Now, researchers say it actually belonged to a group of hyaenodonts that originated in Africa, like Bastetodon.
In 2019, paleontologists — including the new study's co-author Dr. Matthew Borths — announced the discovery of hyaenodont fossils in Kenya had revealed a new species larger than a polar bear, named Simbakubwa kutokaafrika.
Changes in climate and tectonics in Africa opened the continent to the relatives of cats and hyenas. Over time, carnivorous hyaenodonts become extinct (Credit: Professor Hesham Sallam)
Relatives spread from Africa in waves and, by 18 million years ago, their relatives were among the largest mammalian meat-eaters to ever walk the planet.
Climate and tectonic shifts in Africa opened the continent to the relatives of modern cats, dogs, and hyenas. And, the carnivorous hyaenodonts went extinct.
"The discovery of Bastetodon is a significant achievement in understanding the diversity and evolution of hyaenodonts and their global distribution," Shorouq noted.
Much-anticipated from the prolific pen of Kara Cooney, the undisputed queen of coffin (re)commodification, this enormous tome is not for the faint-hearted. Introductory chapters gather, reformulate, and re-emphasise arguments Cooney has put forward in a number of other studies, and applies them to the extraordinary dataset of the royal coffins from royal 'mummy caches', principally DB (Deir el-Bahri) 320, but also drawing on evidence from others.
Existing studies detail the historical and iconographic interpretation of these coffins. Cooney instead sets out the socio-economic background, paying close attention to telling details of adaptation. Particularly fascinating is the extent to which she is able to draw on texts from Deir el-Medina – written by the workers who built (and ultimately robbed) the royal tombs.
The main part of the volume (pp.119-433) is composed of two photo essays, which provide the most-detailed and -informative commentary ever published on the craftsmanship of individual coffins found in DB320. Most images are high resolution, but depart from standard catalogue 'glamour shots' to show more indicative details of construction, (re)decoration, and reuse. The lids (and especially the faces) of some of these coffins will be familiar from more populist studies, and some readers may recognise details from the high-quality replicas made for the 1969 Egyptian film Al-Mumiya or The Night of Counting the Years. However, many details have never been published before and offer significant value for further study.
Cooney is honest where observations are subjective or inconclusive, but overall provides a robust challenge to the standard narrative – that the priestly elite of the earlier Third Intermediate Period were simply collecting and reburying their royal forebears to be pious. The reality is much more complex, involving several moves, restorations, and recommodifications, as the author documents in minute detail. The extensive bibliography alone is useful resource for coffin nerds. The result is an insight that goes beyond coffins as pretty artworks, and delves instead into the entanglements between economic viability, materiality, piety, and active competition among wealthy consumers unable to rely on access to the precious raw materials their predecessors enjoyed. Equally, though, these already-ancient coffins were not anciently viewed as museum pieces; they were already imbued with the inherent power of divine ancestors. By re-employing them, later priestly leaders could actively enhance their chances of posthumous deification.
This deep dive into funerary materiality will be especially interesting background for those fortunate to be able to visit the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (NMEC), where many of these coffins and their mummified occupants are displayed. Cooney's book is likely to be a standard reference work for some time to come, and is definitely worth the investment. A follow-up volume on coffins for non-royal occupants is eagerly anticipated.
Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches by Kara Cooney AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO PRESS, 2024 ISBN 978-1-6490-3128-0 HARDBACK, £100
Author, The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration
Few visitors wandering through the mummy galleries at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo have the opportunity—or perhaps the inclination—to smell the aromas wafting off the gilded sarcophagi and elaborately wrapped bodies of ancient Egyptian elites on display in glass cases.
For those who are curious, however, a new study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society has captured and analyzed the scents of nine human mummies in the museum's collections, detecting woody, spicy and herbal notes. Many of the mummies also emanated hints of smoke, mold, flowers and dust, among other odors.
"It was a very special experience—really incredible," says first author Emma Paolin, a chemist at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.
The international research effort is the first systematic odor and chemical analysis of multiple Egyptian mummies from a range of time periods. The remains span the New Kingdom—the height of mummification practice and skill, in the second millennium B.C.E.—to the late Roman period in the third and fourth centuries C.E., when mummification was in decline.
Emma Paolin (left) and Abdelrazek Elnaggar (right) take a sample of the smell of an ancient sarcophagus. Cecilia Bembibre
"It was absolutely mind-boggling that the nine mummies smell so differently," says Matija Strlič, also a chemist at the University of Ljubljana. Strlič, who led the research alongside Ali Abdelhalim, general director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and an archaeologist at Egypt's Ain Shams University, explains that the odors provide hints about the life stories of these mummies, from when they were first prepared to the conservation treatments they underwent after excavation.
The idea of studying mummy odors came to Strlič a few years ago, when he was touring a conservation laboratory and had an opportunity to sniff a mummified body that had recently arrived from an excavation. "It had almost a cosmetic smell—pleasantly sweet and herbal," Strlič recalls. "I had heard anecdotes from conservators who said that many mummies smell pleasant and sweet, if they are in a good state of conservation, or rancid, if they are deteriorating. But this was the first time I experienced it myself."
Scholars of ancient cultures once overlooked smell in their chronicles of the past. But a surge of recent research on odorhistory has sought to better understand the sensory lives of our predecessors. "We know from literary sources of ancient Egypt that a good smell was something extremely important to this culture—and a good-smelling mummy especially so," says Philipp Stockhammer, an archaeologist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich who wasn't involved in the new research.
"I love the idea … because it's sniffing out information of the past, which is amazing," says Barbara Huber, an archaeological chemist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany who also wasn't involved in the study.
Emma Paolin sets up active air sampling with sorbent tubes and pumps. Abdelrazek Elnaggar
Mummification was a sacred—and fragrant—practice for ushering ancient Egyptian elite into the afterlife. For thousands of years, from roughly 2600 B.C.E. until the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 C.E., mummification techniques were passed on largely by word of mouth among specially trained practitioners.
Embalmers had different recipes for preparing and preserving bodies depending on the era; the budget; the level of nobility and gender of the deceased; and the availability of ingredients such as plant resins, oils and other unguents that could preserve and perfume the remains. They probably added unique twists to their recipes as part of a personal style or to honor the characteristics of a particular individual.
In recent years, researchers including Huber and Stockhammer have studied the odor of ancient Egyptian mummies by using a clever but indirect strategy: removing trace residues of embalming materials or mummified remains from ceramic vessels. The scientists then analyze the residues for markers of different plants or embalming ingredients, like cedar oil or myrrh, to predict the different odor notes that might have made up the smell of a freshly prepared mummy.
Stockhammer, for example, led a team that analyzed residues left behind in ceramic vessels from a 2,700-year-old embalming workshop in Saqqara. His team found traces of conifer resins, beeswax, a black tar substance called bitumen and antiseptic oils that were deployed to both preserve bodies and give the dead a venerated—and perfumed—journey into the afterlife. Most of the ingredients came from beyond Egyptian borders, testifying to the existence of extensive ancient trade routes.
Huber, meanwhile, peered a thousand years deeper into the history of Egyptian mummification by scraping residues found in two 3,500-year-old canopic jars. These ancient vessels once held the mummified lungs and liver of a noblewoman named Senetnay, the esteemed wet nurse of the pharaoh Amenhotep II.
Huber's work suggested that the ancient Egyptians traded with Southeast Asia to acquire Pistacia tree resin for mummification a thousand years earlier than previously recorded. Building on her research, Huber worked with a perfumer to develop the "scent of eternity," a recreation of the ancient aroma of the mummification process, which the public had a chance to sniff at the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark in 2023.
These earlier studies were "fantastic, really exciting research" for understanding embalming practices and how mummies might have smelled during funerary ceremonies, Strlič says, but they didn't incorporate odor analysis of smells taken directly off of mummified bodies today.
Strlič was also keen capture these mummy odors as a way of informing conservators whether a mummy needs preservation treatment, akin to how modern medical researchers are learning to diagnose diseases such as cancer from a person's body odor or breath. In the case of a mummy, the odor of mold might be an early warning sign that fungi is growing deep within the textile before it becomes visible on the outside of the wrapped body, Strlič says.
To capture and analyze the odor of the nine mummies, the team emulated a technique used by perfumers to collect the aroma of rare flowers or other odors in the wild: gently vacuuming a scent into a cartridge. The cartridge contains a polymer material that traps odor molecules that are later released for chemical analysis.
The researchers initially planned to capture only the odors trapped in mummy display cases, "but when we arrived in Cairo, the museum curators gave us the possibility to put our odor sampling device inside the sarcophagus," says Paolin. One such sarcophagus belonged to a noblewoman named Ir-Aset-Udjat, whose coffin was ornately decorated with images and text that granted her food and drink in the afterlife.
Sampling of the microbial air quality surrounding the sarcophagi with the sedimentation method Emma Paolin
Other scent sources included the air above more recently excavated mummies in the museum's archive, as well as those in long-term storage. The team also collected large bags of aromatic air around the mummies so that a panel of people from Egypt and Europe could use their noses to identify top notes of the smells, similar to what is done nowadays for fine wines or whiskeys.
Paolin and her colleagues detected dozens of odorous chemicals in the mummy aromas, which they organized into four possible categories. The first was molecules from embalming ingredients such as oils, waxes and unguents. Other categories included odors from plant oils used by contemporary museum conservators to preserve mummies from degradation and smells from toxic synthetic pesticides such as naphthalene (present in moth balls), which were used in the past to shield mummies from deterioration but have since been discontinued to protect the health of conservators and the public. Finally, the team recorded a fourth category of odors that likely originated from microbial degradation triggered or exacerbated by the mummies' excavation.
A big challenge for the team was the fact that many of the mummy odors fit into more than one aroma category, Strlič says. For example, the scent of some of the mummies included a compound called nonanal, which smells like a combination of wax and orange peel. This odor could have come from the original mummification process, or it could be a product of biodegradation.
Likewise, the pine-tinged aroma of a molecule called alpha-pinene "could either be a contemporary pesticide or … a remaining compound of an essential oil used in the past," Strlič says.
Stockhammer says he's disappointed that Strlič's team couldn't categorically pin down the origins of all of the odors emanating off the mummies or conclusively distinguish what came from original embalming ingredients versus oils from a later treatment. But he adds that he is very excited by the study's approach to capturing smells directly off of archaeological objects, which holds potential for a field he refers to as "archaeology of the senses."
Strlič believes that some of the mummy smells can be directly attributed to specific sources—for instance, the almond-woody scent of furfural, which likely comes from linen wrappings or the wooden sarcophagi that house mummy remains. The researchers detected furfural wafting off mummies that hadn't been treated by preservation oils, and furfural is an aromatic component in the odor profile of old linen and wood.
Passive sampling using a solid phase microextraction fiber of air within a sarcophagus Emma Paolin
"We were very happy there were not any smells of rot related to [human bodies]," Strlič says, "because this would obviously indicate that the storage environment is not very good."
Strlič emphasizes that the "ethics of working with human bodies was [of] absolutely paramount concern for us." Currently, he says, no codified ethical guidelines exist for the handling of Egyptian mummified bodies in heritage science, so the team focused on several goals, including respecting local Egyptian customs for working with human remains and avoiding any permanent damage to the mummies.
Overall, "the mummies that were fairly recently excavated had more interesting notes," Strlič says, "much more earth-like, warmer and softer smells."
He adds, "Being able to do these analyses on a freshly excavated mummified body would be a very different experience, both sensorily and analytically."
The team is now working to recreate mummy scents so that museum visitors in Egypt and Slovenia can have the opportunity to sniff the unguents used in embalming or the odor of aging wooden sarcophagi—aromas that are otherwise trapped in time or within a museum case.
"Odors are a valuable part of cultural heritage," Strlič says. "We want to be able to communicate the experience of those odors to the public."
The scientists recorded dozens of scents, which they broke down into four categories, including embalming ingredients and odors from plant oils used by modern museum conservators.
The American Research Center in Egypt, Northern California chapter, and the UC Berkeley Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures invite you to attend a Zoom lecture by Dr. Kara Cooney, UCLA:
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