Was King Tut on drugs? Jars buried with young pharaoh solves mystery about ancient Egyptian society

This redefines “high” society in ancient Egypt.

Yale University researchers have found trace amounts of opium jars in an ancient Egyptian vessel, proving that opium use was widespread in the land of the pharaoh — including during the time of King Tutankhamun. The druggy study was published in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies.

“Our findings combined with prior research indicate that opium use was more than accidental or sporadic in ancient Egyptian cultures and surrounding lands and was, to some degree, a fixture of daily life,” said the lead author, Andrew J. Koh, the principal investigator a the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program.

The 22-centimeter alabaster vase was inscribed in four languages — Akkadian, Elamite, Persian, and Egyptian — and dedicated to Xerxes I, whose Achaemenid Empire encompassed Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant, Anatolia, and parts of Arabia and Central Asia.

Intact specimens of this prestige artifact are exceedingly rare — the vessel likely is one of under 10 specimens in collections worldwide, dating back to the reigns of Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes (roughly 550 B.C.E. to 425 B.C.E.). It has been in the Yale Peabody Museum’s Babylonian collection since it was started in 1911.

Koh’s curiosity was piqued after he found dark-brown aromatic material inside the vase, which was capable of housing 1,200 milliliters of liquid.

To see what it was comprised of, the scientists employed organic residue analysis — a method refined by the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program — as well as other techniques of chemical examination.

Using these techniques, researchers were able to identify oscapine, hydrocotarnine, morphine, thebaine, and papaverine — well-known diagnostic biomarkers for opium, Science Daily reported.

The findings reportedly mirror echo findings of opiate remnants in Egyptian alabaster vessels and Cypriot base-ring juglets discovered in an alleged’s merchant’s tomb in Sedment, Egypt.

it reportedly dated back between 16th-11th century BCE during Egypt’s New Kingdom.

These two findings were more than a millennium apart and spanned multiple social strata, leading researchers to deduce that opium could reside in the many alabaster vessels found in Tut’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

In fact, some of these ancient containers also contained dark, sticky material that eluded chemist Alfred Lucas in 1933. They had notably been harvested by ancient tomb raiders, further pointing to the contents’ potential value.

“We think it’s possible, if not probable, that alabaster jars found in King Tut’s tomb contained opium as part of an ancient tradition of opiate use that we are only now beginning to understand,” said Koh. “It’s possible these vessels were easily recognizable cultural markers for opium use in ancient times, just as hookahs today are attached to shisha tobacco consumption.”

Koh said there are signs that opium usage in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and other hubs in antiquity was spiritual rather than solely medicinal. During King Tut’s lifetime, artifact’s in Crete referenced the “poppy goddess” in clearly ritualistic contexts while the poppy plant appears in multiple ancient texts from the Ebers Papyrus to Hippocrates.

Koh believes that “analyzing the contents of the jars from King Tut’s tomb would further clarify the role of opium in these ancient societies.”