Archaeologists Find 3,200-Year-Old Cheese in an Egyptian Tomb

Archaeologists Find 3,200-Year-Old Cheese in an Egyptian TombImageScientists from the University of Catania and Cairo University found a “solidified whitish mass” in a jar, left, in an Egyptian tomb. The substance turned out to be a 3,200-year-old piece of cheese, among the oldest ever discovered.CreditUniversity of Catania and Cairo UniversityA few years ago, a team of archaeologists 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 archaeologists suspected it was food, according to the conservation method and the position of the finding 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 in an email.The tomb in which the cheese was found belonged to Ptahmes, a high-ranking Egyptian official in the 13th century B.C. 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.other symptoms that can reoccur or never go away at all.A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Item Found in Tomb In Egypt Is Cheese