Psychedelic traces found on mug from ancient Egypt

Something in the printout caught Branko van Oppen de Ruiter’s eye. He was at home in the Netherlands, working remotely for his new employer, the Tampa Museum of Art, which had named him a curator of Greek and Roman exhibits. The coronavirus had delayed his move to Florida, so he did what he could studying the museum’s collections from afar.

That was when he noticed, on a list of the museum’s holdings, a cup from the second century BC bearing the face of Bes, a notoriously ugly ancient Egyptian god who was fond of revelry. There was an identical cup in the Allard Pierson museum of antiquities in Amsterdam, where van Oppen had previously worked. “That fascinated me,” he said in an interview.

An Egyptian mug from the second century BC at the Tampa Museum of Art that was found to have traces of hallucinogenic plants.Credit: The New York Times

Archaeologists and chemists analysed the mug and found a big surprise: it contained traces of hallucinogenic plants. As they and van Oppen wrote last month in Scientific Reports, the mug offered the first chemical evidence that ancient Egyptians ingested hallucinogenic substances, possibly as part of a fertility rite.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence that civilizations in and around the Mediterranean region were just as aware of hallucinogens’ unique properties as their Mesoamerican counterparts. Recent studies have found that the Greeks and Romans may have also ingested plants with psychedelic properties, either to reach elevated spiritual states or as part of medical treatment.

In ancient Egyptian lore, the god Bes was responsible for fertility and had a penchant for mischief. “He’s a beer drinker and a hell-raiser,” a demon who just might answer a supplicant’s prayers, van Oppen said. “There are so many contradictions embodied in Bes.”

There are about 15 identical Bes cups in museum collections around the world, each one showing the god’s face on the body of the vessel. Such objects, made from moulds, may have had widespread use in ancient societies, including for rituals, experts said.

“There’s been a great deal of speculation about the Bes vases and what they were used for,” said Bob Bianchi, chief curator of the Ancient Egyptian Museum in Tokyo who was not involved in the research. He said it was “plausible” that the Egyptians used the mugs for psychedelic rituals.

Egyptians were fond of beer, and written evidence suggests they were aware that some plants had hallucinogenic properties. “They knew what their environment contained,” Bianchi said. But never before has there been evidence that Egyptians ingested those plants.

After van Oppen flagged the Bes cup, the news reached Davide Tanasi, a digital archaeologist at the University of South Florida, also in Tampa. Tanasi and his colleagues used chemical and genetic methods to identify organic residue that had been absorbed by the ceramic vessel.

That analysis yielded evidence of two plants known to have hallucinogenic properties: Syrian rue and the blue water lily. The Bes mug also showed traces of “a fermented alcoholic liquid derived from fruit” and flavoured with pine nuts, honey and licorice.

Researchers used chemical and genetic methods to identify substances on the ceramic vessel.Credit: The New York Times

The potion was most likely to have needed all the flavour masking it could get. Most striking of all to Tanasi was the presence of several human bodily fluids, including breast milk and blood. Their presence “really shows you that this is a magical potion”, he said, as opposed to a more narrowly medicinal one. (Because Tanasi is confident that the concoction was mixed in a dedicated vessel only for special occasions, he does not believe the mug was also used for mundane purposes.)

They also found traces of African spider flower, which some ancient societies believed could help a woman’s fertility and labour. But African spider flower and Syrian rue can also cause abortions. For now, researchers can only speculate about what the psychedelic Bes rites entailed, and to what end.

Tanasi and van Oppen both believe the Bes mug played a role in “incubation” rituals, in which people — most likely women hoping to become pregnant — would have gone to a priest and drunk from the mug, which has a volume of 125 millilitres, or about three shots. They could have then experienced vivid visions before falling asleep.

Childbirth was much more dangerous in antiquity, van Oppen said. “The entire experience of pregnancy was one of intense anxiety,” he said. People may have put their faith in a fickle god — and his strange brew.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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