transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeartRadio.

Speaker 2:
[00:12] Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

Speaker 1:
[00:15] And I'm Holly Frey.

Speaker 2:
[00:16] This is time for the latest installment of Unearthed. I feel like I said those words in a weird order, but it's okay, we're gonna power through. If you are brand new to the show, Unearthed is when we talk about things that have been literally or figuratively unearthed over the last few months. So, that's what we're gonna talk about all week long. And today we are gonna talk about medical things, books and letters, some oldest things, and some smells. I did not realize we were gonna have a smells category, and we actually wound up with fewer smells than expected, which is, that's the story for Friday. We will start, as we usually do, with updates to past episodes. We don't actually have that many, this time, comparatively fewer updates than the last several episodes of Unearthed. Also, I don't have any new updates regarding things like the President's House site or the other ongoing issues here in the US with like the field of history and education and those kinds of things that we've been talking about a lot on Unearthed over the last year. A lot of our updates, though, are frequent flyers on Unearthed.

Speaker 1:
[01:36] And we are kicking off those updates with several finds from Pompeii. Researchers have used reflectance transformation imaging to identify 79 previously undetected inscriptions on a corridor that connected Pompeii's theaters to the city's central street via Stabiana. Reflectance transformation imaging captures images under multiple lighting angles, making it possible to see very faint scratches that aren't detectable to the unaided eye.

Speaker 2:
[02:07] This corridor has been studied before. More than 200 inscriptions had already been found there, including various love notes and pleas to the goddess Venus for her favor in matters of the heart. One of the newly discovered inscriptions is on that theme. It starts off with the words, erato loves, and then I don't know how that person was going to finish that inscription.

Speaker 1:
[02:32] Who does erato love? We don't know.

Speaker 2:
[02:34] Great question.

Speaker 1:
[02:35] Or what? It could be kidney pies. We don't know.

Speaker 2:
[02:40] I was thinking pickles for some reason. There's also a sketch of two gladiators fighting. These 79 newly discovered inscriptions add to those more than 200 that have already been found. This is a growing body of knowledge.

Speaker 1:
[02:57] Other researchers have used isotope analysis to examine carbonate deposits in parts of Pompeii's water infrastructure, like their aqueducts, well shafts, and water towers, as well as the pools of public baths. They found that the groundwater in the wells was highly mineralized thanks to the volcanic deposits that they were drilled through. That wouldn't have been very good as drinking water and was mainly used in the baths. But this same research concluded that the bathing water wasn't renewed very often, so it also would not have been very hygienic.

Speaker 2:
[03:32] Yeah, they made comparisons to other Roman Empire cities as having much cleaner baths. Made it sound like Pompeii was just a little behind the times and how clean to keep that water.

Speaker 1:
[03:45] Just a new sense to the word community.

Speaker 2:
[03:47] Yeah, yeah. Lastly, in November of last year, archaeologists from Herculaneum Archaeological Park started work at another site that was also destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. That's Torre del Greco on the coast northwest of Pompeii. In February, they announced that they had excavated a small but very highly decorated room there. The walls of this room have figurative elements and bars of cinnabar red paint against a dark background. And these figurative elements include herons and a golden candelabra.

Speaker 1:
[04:25] The room also contained three highly decorated ciste, which are essentially boxes, and architectural elements that were of very good quality. There is speculation that this room was being used for storage for things that were part of an ongoing construction project when the volcano erupted.

Speaker 2:
[04:44] Having recently helped a friend who bought a new house paint the interior of a bedroom closet, it cracks me up that this probably a closet storage space had very highly decorated walls.

Speaker 1:
[04:57] We could talk about this on Behind the Scenes.

Speaker 2:
[05:00] There can be so many Behind the Scenes conversations this week. Moving on, Stonehenge got its own entire episode of the show back in 2014 when news broke about a lot of new findings there and we realized we did not have an existing Stonehenge episode to update. One of the things we talked about in that episode and probably other installments of Unearthed since then was debate about exactly how the somewhat smaller stones, known as Blue Stones, got to the Stonehenge site. Some of those stones are believed to have been moved from hundreds of miles away. And one hypothesis has been that the stones might have been carried closer to the Stonehenge site by glaciers.

Speaker 1:
[05:47] This research examined microscopic mineral grains found in rivers near Salisbury Plain in southern England. That's where Stonehenge is located. They focused on more than 500 zircon crystals to see if any of them could have been associated with the presence of glaciers. They concluded that they did not, meaning that the bluestones were moved to Salisbury Plain through intentional human effort.

Speaker 2:
[06:12] We also have an update on the natural mummy popularly known as Ötzi the Iceman, who lived sometime between 3350 and 3105 BCE. Previous hosts of the show did an episode on Ötzi back in 2012, and it seems like he has been on almost every episode of Unearthed! According to a pre-print paper that was published at the end of last year, Ötzi was probably infected with a cancer-causing strain of the human papilloma virus known as HPV-16. According to this research, the Östişim man probably was infected with this as well. The Östişim man is the name used for a 45,000-year-old fossil remains. It's not many, it's not like a whole mummified body like with Ötzi, a smaller set of remains that was found in Siberia. This means that HPV has existed essentially for all of human history.

Speaker 1:
[07:13] One hypothesis for how HPV made its way into human beings was that it first infected Neanderthals and was passed to humans through interbreeding. The Östişim man has Neanderthal DNA in his lineage. That doesn't conclusively confirm that hypothesis, but it means that it is at least possible. Since this is a pre-print paper, as Tracy mentioned, it has not yet been through peer review.

Speaker 2:
[07:39] Moving on, in our last installment of Unearthed, we talked about a gold Tudor-era pendant that was in the shape of a heart that had come up on a previous episode of Unearthed as well. At that point, this Tudor heart was on display at the British Museum, and the museum was trying to raise 3.5 million pounds, or about $4.7 million to purchase it. That fundraising effort was successful, and it was announced in February that this pendant will be staying in the museum.

Speaker 1:
[08:10] And lastly, in March, newspapers started covering a report from the University of East Anglia about research into King Harold's journey to the Battle of Hastings. That's long been described as a 200-mile march, but medieval history professor Tom License argues that it's a misunderstanding of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that Harold's ships, quote, came home, which has been interpreted as Harold having dismissed them back to all of their original home ports. But according to License, the word home meant the fleet's home base in London, and Harold continued to use the fleet from there.

Speaker 2:
[08:51] So this press release just came out on March 20th, just a couple of weeks before we are recording this, and he was scheduled to present on this research at a conference four days after that. He also has a book on Harold that is coming out in August, so that's not really available for people to read yet. So at this point, it's really early for historians to thoroughly respond to these arguments, but there's already been some controversy with other historians noting that this entire interpretation, at least in terms of what's publicly available when we were working on this installment of Unearthed, it all basically hinges on the interpretation of one word.

Speaker 1:
[09:33] Next, we're going to move on to some medical things. Research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science has examined a mass grave associated with the plague of Justinian that started in the sixth century. The burial site was in the hippodrome of the city of Jerosh in what's now Jordan.

Speaker 2:
[09:51] According to DNA research conducted on the remains that were buried there, this burial site did represent the dead from a single event. It was not people who died in a community over a long period of time. The team studied DNA from the teeth of these plague victims and found that they were demographically very diverse, suggesting that this disease struck the whole population It did not really differentiate with people's social status or age or sex. This is the first known Mediterranean mass grave associated with the plague of Justinian.

Speaker 1:
[10:27] Research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports has examined the contents of a 1900-year-old glass vial called an unguetarium, which was found in a tomb in Western Turkey. They identified fecal biomarkers as well as an organic compound known as carvacrol, which was found in essential oils from herbs. The conclusion, this was feces mixed with thyme, probably to disguise the smell. Medical preparations made from feces are described by the Roman physician Galen and in the work of Pliny the Elder. This is the first direct physical evidence for these kinds of remedies being used in the Greco-Roman era.

Speaker 2:
[11:10] And in our last medical find, Neanderthals may have used birch bark tar for medicinal purposes, and that tar might have been effective. We do know that Neanderthals made birch tar. There's archaeological evidence of this going back almost 200,000 years. And there are also indigenous methods of making birch tar that go back thousands of years and have survived until today. So not associated with the Neanderthals, but ancient uses of birch tar.

Speaker 1:
[11:41] Researchers used three different techniques to produce tar from two species of birch, downy birch and silver birch. Then they tested these batches of tar against two pathogens, Staphylococcus aureus and E coli. And the birch tar was effective against Staphylococcus aureus, but not against E coli. And one method seemed less effective than the others. Burning downy birch material and letting the tar condense onto a fireproof stone didn't produce much tar. And what little tar there was, was not effective against anything.

Speaker 2:
[12:18] So this of course is not definitive proof that Neanderthals were using birch tar medicinally, but there is archeological evidence suggesting that Neanderthals used plants medicinally. So we know they used plants for medicine. We know they made birch tar. It's at least in the realm of possibility that they used birch tar as medicine. We'll take a quick sponsor break and then come back for some books and letters. We will pick up this installment of Unearthed with some books and letters. Ostraca are bits of pottery that were often used, sort of like note paper, in Ancient Egypt. An excavation at Othribus in Lower Egypt has unearthed 13,000 ostraca, bringing the total number of them found at that site to 43,000. So many pieces of pottery used like post-it notes, basically. People lived at this site for more than 1,000 years, and it was also home to a necropolis and a temple complex. So the ostraca that have been found here really range in age. They are from as early as the 3rd century BCE to as late as the 11th century CE.

Speaker 1:
[13:39] They also represent a number of languages. The oldest fragments are tax receipts written in Demotic script, which was used for both business and literary purposes. There are also fragments with writing in Arabic, Greek, Hieratic, and Coptic as well as Hieroglyphics. There are also lots of pottery fragments at the site that have nothing written on them. Together, this group of fragments are helping scholars understand how life in Athrobis changed over the many centuries that it was occupied.

Speaker 2:
[14:12] Moving on, I don't include a ton of like many years overdue library book stories in Unearthed, because after a while, they start to sound really repetitive. Unless there's something really special about the book, it can seem like the same exact story over and over. This one, though, it has another layer. A copy of Harry the Dirty Dog that had been checked out by a little boy was due back at the Chantilly Regional Library in Virginia in 1989. It did not get turned back in. And now, as an adult, this man found the book on a shelf while he was looking for something to read to his own son while visiting his parents.

Speaker 1:
[14:56] That shelf that he found the book on was not in Virginia, though. It wasn't even in the United States. It was in Greece. His parents were diplomats, and after leaving the Washington, DC area, they went back to Greece and then to Syria, Japan and the Netherlands before going back to Greece once again. And that book apparently went with them. Harry the Dirty Dog has now been turned back in to the library, and it looks like it is in very good condition, especially considering that it went through multiple international moves. I feel like this book is better traveled than many people I know.

Speaker 2:
[15:30] Yeah, they took very good care of it also. I feel like books that have been sitting quietly on my shelves have had more wear than this book seems to. Next, back in the 1930s, archaeologists found remnants of Roman-era writing tablets at a site in what's now Tangerin-Borgloon, Belgium. Additional tablets were discovered in 2013. It brought the total number of tablets to 85. When these tablets were originally used back in the Roman era, they had a thin coating of wax on them, and then people used a sharp stylus to write on the wax. They were reusable. People could remove that wax layer and put down a new layer to write something else. When these were unearthed, the wax was gone, and it did not look like there was any kind of legible writing left on the wood.

Speaker 1:
[16:28] These tablets were rediscovered in a museum collection in 2020, and deciphering them was an extremely challenging process. At this point, the wood is completely dried out, so it could be hard to distinguish intentionally made marks from just natural variations in the wood. The wax layer that was used on these tablets was so thin, so it was easy for a stylist to go through it and mark the wood underneath. Some of the tablets contained legal documents, and this seemed to be done intentionally to make the text more permanent. But in more informal documents, that wasn't necessarily true, so the marks made through the wax just weren't always consistent. And since the tablets were reusable, there were overlapping markings from different lines of text. Many of the tablets had been broken in half and thrown into a well, apparently an intentional attempt to make them illegible. I don't know why I love that detail. This is like tearing up a paper, but you have to break it.

Speaker 2:
[17:30] Yeah, those were like the legal contracts that weren't valid anymore, that would have been put through a shredder, but nope, they were broken in half and thrown down a well. Looking at these became kind of an early pandemic era project for people. They spent a lot of time looking at all these writing tablets through magnifying glasses and microscopes lit from multiple directions. The team used high-resolution photographs and other imaging technologies as well, and they were able to find legible text on about half of these tablets. As Holly just said, a lot of the ones that had been intentionally broken and thrown into the well, those had contained things like legal contracts, other official documents, but other tablets which were found in a heap, more like in a midden, a place that people just threw their refuse. Those included things like student writing exercises and a draft of an inscription for a statue of Emperor Caricella.

Speaker 1:
[18:34] In the words of the abstract of a book that was published detailing all of this, quote, the tablets not only provide concrete information about religious, judicial and administrative practices, but they also enhance our understanding of the complex processes of Romanization and Latinization in the Northwestern Civitates and Municipia of the Roman Empire.

Speaker 2:
[18:57] Moving on. British infantryman, Shadrach Byfield, was the author of A Narrative of a Light Company Soldier's Service that was published in England in 1840, and it recounted his experiences fighting in the War of 1812, including the amputation of his forearm after being hit by a musket ball. This book, it's long been known. Not a surprise. Byfield has been a source for historians writing about the British military, or the War of 1812, or the Great Lakes region where he fought. But a Cambridge University historian has unearthed another book by Byfield in the Western Reserve Historical Society's library in Cleveland, Ohio. This one was called History and Conversion of a British Soldier, and it was published in 1851. The copy in the Historical Society Library is the only one known to have survived until today. My understanding is like this was in the library catalog, like they knew the book was in the library, but nobody had made the connection to the fact that this was the same person and that he had written another book. The whole book has been transcribed and published as an open access document at the University of Cambridge Libraries and Archives website, and it's very different from his earlier memoir. It's focused more on information about his life that we did not know before, including what his life was like after he returned to England.

Speaker 1:
[20:31] Researchers working with Paleolithic objects dating back to between 34,000 and 45,000 years ago have concluded that they contain a precursor to written language. These objects were mostly found in caves in what is now Germany, and they're covered in repeating sequences of notches, dots, and crosses. The objects are made of materials like mammoth tusk, and they date back tens of thousands of years before the earliest known writing systems of cuneiform and hieroglyphics. They also predate the precursors to either of those systems.

Speaker 2:
[21:06] So researchers weren't trying to decode or decipher these markings. They were measuring the signs and looking for patterns in them. And after analyzing more than 3000 signs on 260 objects, they concluded that the patterns of markings had a similar level of information density to the earliest proto-cuneiform tablets found in Mesopotamia. It's also clear that these markings were not meant to represent the sounds of a spoken language, since the repetitions involved do not follow the same patterns that known languages do. This suggests that the precursors to written languages may have been developing a lot earlier than was previously thought.

Speaker 1:
[21:51] Alterations made to a 3300-year-old papyrus are being described as having fixed a mistake with whiteout. The papyrus scroll is a copy of the Book of the Dead that was made for a scribe named Ramos. It was being prepared for a museum exhibit when curators realized that the body of a jackal-headed god had been made to look thinner by adding a line of white paint to the sides of its body and parts of its legs. Researchers used a 3D digital microscope to figure out what kinds of pigments were used in this white paint and found that it had a different makeup from the white paint used in other parts of the papyrus. It also contains some flecks of yellow paint, which would have helped it blend into the color of the papyrus at the time it was originally painted.

Speaker 2:
[22:37] Yeah, it does not look that blended today.

Speaker 1:
[22:41] Little photo retouching. Maybe this jackal-headed god was very vain.

Speaker 2:
[22:48] Yeah, the way the pigments and the papyrus have each aged, it does not really look blended today, but it would have been a much closer match at the time. Moving on, a researcher from the French National Center for Scientific Research, or CNRS, has found a page from the Archimedes Palimpsest that was believed to have been lost. The Palimpsest is a 10th-century Greek manuscript containing multiple treatises by Archimedes, who lived in the 3rd century BCE. So some of the texts that are included in this Palimpsest are very rare. In the 13th century, part of the manuscript was erased, so the parchment that it was written on could be reused. That was a very common practice. The manuscript also changed hands several times after its leaves were photographed in 1906, and at some point, three of the leaves that were documented in those photographs disappeared.

Speaker 1:
[23:49] The rediscovered page is one of those missing leaves. It contains part of Archimedes' treatise on the sphere and the cylinder. One side is partly legible, even with prayers having been written over it. The other has been obscured by a forged illumination of the Prophet Daniel that was most likely added sometime in the 20th century when a dealer was attempting to increase that page's value. Ongoing research is planned for this leaf to try to reveal the text underneath this illumination.

Speaker 2:
[24:22] When I started reading about this, I kept reading about how there was this illumination of Daniel added sometime in the 20th century, and I was like, why? Why would somebody be doing that? And then I found the additional detail trying to increase its value to sell it by putting a forgery on there.

Speaker 1:
[24:40] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[24:41] Our last book find is more book adjacent. In February, repair work on the floor of St. Peter and Paul Church in the Netherlands led to the discovery of human remains. Work is underway to try to confirm whether these are the remains of Childe de Bate de Casemore, Count D'Artagnan. Inspiration for the character D'Artagnan in the novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. We got an email about this from a listener who was embarrassed to admit that they did not realize that D'Artagnan was a real person. Do not feel bad, neither did I, really. Athos, Porthos and Aramis were all fictionalized versions of real people, too.

Speaker 1:
[25:25] The historical D'Artagnan died when a musket ball struck him in the throat during the Franco-Dutch War in 1673. The remains that were discovered in the church had a musket ball lodged in the chest area. A coin from 1660 was found in the grave as well. Perhaps we will have an update on this one at some point in the future.

Speaker 2:
[25:47] For now, we'll have a quick sponsor break. A whole lot of discoveries in the last few months have all been described as the first or oldest known. And so we are going to talk about a few of them. First, the oldest known arrow poison in the world has been found on a 60,000 year old quartz arrowhead from a rock shelter in South Africa. This poison is plant-based. It's from a plant known as boafenidistia or gift bull. This plant still grows in the region. It is also nicknamed the Bushman's poison bulb. It is a flowering plant with narrow leaves that form a fan-like shape.

Speaker 1:
[26:41] This research has been a joint project involving scientists from both South Africa and Sweden. It's the oldest direct evidence of the use of arrow poison, and it also provides evidence that bows and arrows were being used in Southern Africa much longer ago than was previously thought. Similar poisons have also been found on 250-year-old arrows that were in Swedish collections. Those had been purchased by Swedish travelers to South Africa.

Speaker 2:
[27:10] Next, research in the journal Science Advances has reported on the oldest known intentional cremation in Africa. This is a pyre that was built about 9,500 years ago at the base of Mount Hora in what's now Malawi. And it was used to cremate the body of a woman before that body had started to decompose. There is evidence of burned bodies from much farther back in the archaeological record up to 40,000 years ago, but not of intentionally built pyres.

Speaker 1:
[27:45] This is also one of only a very few known pyres that would have been associated with a hunter-gatherer culture. Cremation practices continue to be rare among most hunter-gatherer cultures today because creating a funeral pyre requires a lot of labor, time, and fuel. This specific pyre probably required about 30 kilograms of deadwood and grass. Analysis of the ash sediments and bone fragments also suggests someone tended to the fire, disturbing it and adding more fuel over time.

Speaker 2:
[28:20] Next, researchers working on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia believe they have found the oldest known rock art in the world. The cave is on the island of Muna, which is a satellite island on the southern edge of Sulawesi, and there is a fragmentary hand stencil that is at least 67,800 years old. The partial stencil was modified to make it look kind of like a claw, and it is surrounded by more recent artwork.

Speaker 1:
[28:52] This island has come up on Unearthed before, including in 2024, when the same researchers found a painting of three people surrounding a pig. That painting was an estimated 51,000 years old and was believed to be the oldest figurative art in the world when it was discovered. This suggests that the people who were living on the island tens of thousands of years ago had an artistically rich culture.

Speaker 2:
[29:19] Archaeologists have re-examined a copper alloy object that was found in Egypt in the 1920s, which at the time was described as an awl. New research suggests that it is really Egypt's oldest rotary drill, dating back to the fourth millennium BCE. This conclusion comes from examining the object under magnification, which revealed that it was used with a rotary motion rather than to just punch through things.

Speaker 1:
[29:47] That earlier description of the drill also noted that it was attached to some leather thong. These researchers have concluded that this leather thong was part of a bow string that was used to power the drill. All of this suggests that people in Egypt were using these types of drills much earlier than was previously thought.

Speaker 2:
[30:07] Next, elk hide from a cave in Oregon, sown with a strip of cord, may be the world's oldest sown material. This find dates back about 12,000 years, and other items found in the cave include fiber cordage, pieces of hide and bone needles. There were also some components that were used to make wooden traps and some projectile points. It's not clear what the sown elk hide was used for, but it could have been clothing or maybe some type of a bag.

Speaker 1:
[30:39] There have been some complexities to the study of these objects. Cougar Mountain Cave, where they were found, was excavated by an amateur archaeologist who self-published a book on his findings in 1958. When he died about 40 years ago, the excavated objects were then transferred to a museum. The authors of the paper in the journal Science Advances describe his provenance reporting as incomplete. So they had to sample nearly all of the fiber and wooden items in the collection for radiocarbon dating.

Speaker 2:
[31:13] Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has described the earliest known hand-held wooden tools. One is a piece of alder trunk that was probably used as a digging tool, and the other is a very small piece of wood that might have been used to make other tools from stone, sort of something that helped shape the stone. These were found at a site in Greece that also included butchered elephant remains, and they're approximately 430,000 years old. That is about 40,000 years older than the previous oldest hand-held wooden tools.

Speaker 1:
[31:51] A fragment of bone discovered in Southern England back in the 1990s is now believed to be Europe's earliest known elephant bone tool. It dates back roughly 500,000 years, and it's roughly triangular in shape. It wasn't until it was examined with recent 3D scanning technologies that people were able to see marks that showed that it had been intentionally shaped. It was most likely used as a hammer.

Speaker 2:
[32:18] There are much older elephant bone tools from other parts of the world. The oldest known anywhere in the world was found in Tanzania and is about 1.5 million years old. This is the oldest in Europe. Part of this has to do with the time it took for humanity to migrate beyond Africa into these parts of Europe.

Speaker 1:
[32:41] A single find in Anatolia is two oldest things. It's Anatolia's oldest indigo dyed textile and the oldest use of now bending or single needle knitting. This piece dates back to between 1915 and 1745 BCE. And it is not just the oldest, but also the only example of now bending or now binding, depending on how you like it, that's ever found in the region. It was found in a space that looks like it was a weaving workshop. There were also spindle whorls, loom weights and needles there. The presence of sophisticated textiles and the use of the color blue suggests that this workshop was making luxury textiles for the very wealthy.

Speaker 2:
[33:26] And our last oldest thing, an archivist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which I learned while working on this, people pronounce as Hui, may have found the world's oldest recording of a whale song. Back in 1949, Hui researchers used a gray autograph, which was usually used for taking dictation to record underwater sounds in the ocean near Bermuda. At the time, they really didn't know what they were hearing on these recordings, and so they ultimately ended up just marked as fish noises. Archivist Ashley Jester was digitizing these fish noises back in 2025 and recognized the whale song. It has now been identified as coming from a humpback whale.

Speaker 1:
[34:14] This recording was made on March 7, 1949, and lucky you, you can listen to it on Hooey's YouTube channel.

Speaker 2:
[34:23] To close out part one of this installment of Unearthed, we have three finds related to smells. Some of them are also kind of updates, so it's like we're circling back to the start of the episode. A year ago, we talked about research that focused on the smells of Egyptian mummies, which had the potential to pinpoint substances that had been used in mummification rituals without doing invasive testing on the mummies. This work that we talked about earlier involved both chemical analysis and a panel of human beings who smelled the mummies. In March, a new paper was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science that was based on this same basic idea of mummy smells. It analyzed volatile organic compounds that were being given off by mummies, including ones associated with particular smells, to work out the ingredients in the balms that these mummies were mummified with.

Speaker 1:
[35:23] Researchers used a pair of techniques to do this. Using headspace solid phase microextraction, they captured volatile gases from the air around the mummies. Then they created profiles of the organic compounds involved through a process called gas chromatography slash quadruple time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Don't ask me to tell you what that is. But they conducted these tests on 35 samples from 19 different mummies.

Speaker 2:
[35:52] One of the press releases that I read about this only had acronyms. And so I was like, what does that stand for, though? The ingredients that they identified using these techniques fell into four main groups, fats and oils, beeswax, plant resins, and bitumen. These ingredients appeared in different proportions that changed over time. For example, later recipes tended to be more complex, and they tended to have more resins and bitumen, which would have been more expensive ingredients than the fats and oils or the beeswax. Sometimes different recipes were also used to mummify different parts of the same body.

Speaker 1:
[36:35] At least you allay person's ear. The chemical analysis involved with this sounds a bit more complex than what we talked about last year, but it was still described as suitable for initial work. Further study on these mummies could still require the use of physical samples for analysis.

Speaker 2:
[36:54] Museums have also started using chemistry to recreate scents from history. In 2023, we talked about the recreation of scents from the mummification process, a popular thing to be working with smells. And that was planned for use in an exhibition at the Mosgaard Museum in Denmark. That planned project did happen. The scent was ultimately called the scent of the afterlife, and museum visitors were able to experience it through a scent-diffusing station. A scented card with the same scent was also used as part of visitor tours at Museum August Kestner in Hanover.

Speaker 1:
[37:32] And lastly, we're going back to Pompeii. And something else that could have gone in the updates section. Research published in the journal Antiquity has examined what incense used in Pompeii was made of. A lot of incense burners had been unearthed at Pompeii, but most of them don't still have ash residues associated with the burning of incense.

Speaker 2:
[37:54] That's not the case with the two burners that were part of this study, one of which is described as a cup. It looks sort of like a goblet. The other is described as a hemispherical bowl decorated with three human figures around the rim. The team took tiny samples of the ash from each of these sensors. The cup contained charred bits of woody plants like oak and laurel, which may have been meant to honor the gods Jupiter and Apollo. The bowl contained plants and some material that might have come from grapes that was possibly in the form of either vinegar or wine. There are some bits of material in there also that may have been frankincense, which is made of tree sap. This contributes to knowledge about religious and ritual practices in Pompeii and about trading networks, since some of the aromatic substances would have come from Africa or Asia.

Speaker 1:
[38:54] We are going to talk about more stuff next time, but right now, do you want to talk about Listener Mail?

Speaker 2:
[39:00] I do. I have a Listener Mail from Stacey. Stacey wrote, Hi Holly and Tracy, long time listener, first time emailer. I wanted to thank you both for your work on the podcast. It's the one I'm always recommending to people, but I'm finally writing to specifically thank you for the recent episode on Elizabeth Bisland because it pushed me to get off my petoot and finally read the biography of Lafcadio Hearn that I randomly bought in Little Tokyo years ago, but have left languishing far too long. The book is called The Outsider, The Life and Work of Lafcadio Hearn, The Man Who Introduced Voodoo, Creole Cooking, and Japanese Ghosts to the World. I know you two love a long title, so I wanted to write it all down. Personally, I think the life of Lafcadio Hearn is indeed interesting enough to merit its own episode, but I'm only halfway through the book and I had to share some of the other connections that I find interesting. When Hearn was working as a reporter in Cincinnati in the 1870s, he covered a couple of gruesome murders. And guess who helped him out with the woodcut illustrations to accompany his stories? Frank Duveneck. I recognized his name and searched online to confirm that he was indeed the previous podcast subject. Of further interest to me is another connection in my suggestion for a future episode. When Hearn was apparently a big fan of writer ETA. Hoffman, who wrote, among other things, the novella from which Tchaikovsky adapted The Nutcracker. I myself am a big fan of Canadian writer Robertson Davies, who once made ETA. Hoffman a character in one of his novels. He was stuck in limbo, having to watch modern day artists adapt one of his untapped works into a new opera. Anyway, at the time I discovered Robertson Davies. There was no internet, and I assumed ETA. Hoffman was a made up character. It was only later that I learned he was an actual person, a gothic fantasy and horror author who lived in the 18th century. As far as I can tell, it makes perfect sense that Lafcadio Hearn was a Hoffman fan. Anyway, I was tickled by these connections and wanted to thank you for giving me the incentive I needed to actually pick up the Lafcadio Hearn biography and begin reading. I was delighted when I heard him mention in the Elizabeth Bisland episode and got to experience the most fleeting of human emotions, the brief false impression that I was a smarty pants for having heard of Lafcadio Hearn previously. Thank you for the work you do for my pet tax. I am including pics of our kitties. Billy Bones, sweet black kitty. Moxie, the one by the knitted frog dissection. And Leia, our three legged wonder kitty appropriately sitting on the millennium falcon rug. Thank you again and keep up the good work. Thank you, Stacey, for this great email and for great cat pictures. I always love pictures of black kitties. They are great. This last one looks a little sleepy. And the knitted, the knitted dissected frog is also very fun in the background of one of the pictures. Thank you again, Stacey, for this. I am delighted that you got to read this biography. ETA. Hoffman came up in our episode on The Nutcracker, and I don't remember if I really learned much about him, aside from the fact that he had written that novella. Now I'm more curious. So, if you would like to send us a note, we're at History Podcasts at iheartradio.com. And if you would like to see our show notes that includes an innumerable number of articles for our episodes of Unearthed, that is at our website, missinhistory.com. And you can subscribe to the show on the IHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.