White wine turns up in King Tutankhamen's tomb Updated 5/29/2006 4:04 PM ET Musing on an age-old philosophical riddle, comedian Steve Martin once pondered "King Tut, how'd he get so funky," in a famed episode of Saturday Night Live. Now we know. It was the wine. Fans of pinot blanc may be relieved to learn that an archaeology team has reported the first evidence of white wine in ancient Egypt. And it has turned up in the tomb of King Tutankhamen.
"In ancient Egypt, the royal family and the upper classes drank wine, which was also thought to be suitable among the necessities for a good afterlife," write the report authors, led by Maria Rosa Guasch-Jane of Spain's University of Barcelona, in the latest edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science. Wine jars and wine-making scenes appear in Egyptian tombs from 3150 to 332 B.C., across many dynasties from the time of the Pharaohs.
But until now, all the wine, or more accurately its dried remnants found inside clay amphora within tombs, has been red. "Red wine symbolized the rebirth of the dead, being compared with the blood of God Osiris," say the study authors. In King Tutankhamen's tomb for example, sealed around 1322 B.C., two amphorae had yielded traces of red wines, "irp" to the ancients, one of them holding high-quality "shedeh" wine.
King Tut's most elaborate grave goods are on a nationwide tour, currently at Chicago's Field Museum until next year. Not on the tour are 26 two-handle wine amphorae found inside the tomb by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. Carter found 12 of them intact but with their seals broken. Like any good wine cellar's contents, each one bore information about the wine it contained, including name, year, vineyard and vintner. But not the wine's color. Today the containers are kept at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
The Spanish study authors examined the amphora and report that six more contain dried remnants of wine. With museum permission, they subjected residue samples to an intensive chemical analysis, ("liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry in tandem mode" for any lab aficionados) looking for two markers of red wine, tartaric acid and syringic acid.
Of the six jars, five contained white wine, the researchers conclude. Three of them were made in the Western Nile Delta in an estate owned by the temple of the god Aton, near modern Alexandria. An amphora marked "Year 5. Sweet wine of the Estate of Aton of the Western River. Chief vintner Nakht" also had white wine, as did another given to Tut by his vizier. "This may indicate that white wine was highly valued in Egypt since only the best products were offered for the afterlife of the Pharaoh," says the study.
Until the study, the earliest reference to white wine in Egypt came from the Greek Athenaeus (170 — 230 AD) who praised wine from a region near Alexandria as white, pleasant, fragrant and "not likely to go to the head", among other qualities.
During King Tut's era, the gods Ra and Osiris were believed to give rebirth to the dead. And each tomb was designed to reflect the underworld in which this rebirth occurred. Both red and white wines were placed in Tut's burial chamber, which had an east to west orientation. In the tomb, red wine was placed to the west and white to the east, likely for symbolic reasons connected to the Egyptian belief in rebirth, the researchers suggest.
Each week, USA TODAY's Dan Vergano combs scholarly journals to present the Science Snapshot, a brief summary of some of the latest findings in scientific research. For past articles, visit this index page.
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