Sarah Marris

Mystery of the Cocaine Mummies

The UK series Equinox brings us this investigation of a mystery that is baffling Egyptologists. The case calls into question whole areas of accepted scientific fact from botany, through chemistry to archaeology. In 1992, routine tests on a mummy in a Munich museum revealed high body levels of cocaine and nicotine. But such substances were not available in ancient Egypt, coming as they do from the Americas – not, apparently, to be “discovered” for thousands of years after the passing of the Egyptian dynasties. Are the mummies fakes; were the substances from plants that have since disappeared or were there, in fact, trade routes between Egypt and South America that predate accepted chronology?

Mystery of the Cocaine Mummies

The UK series Equinox brings us this investigation of a mystery that is baffling Egyptologists. The case calls into question whole areas of accepted scientific fact from botany, through chemistry to archaeology. In 1992, routine tests on a mummy in a Munich museum revealed high body levels of cocaine and nicotine. But such substances were not available in ancient Egypt, coming as they do from the Americas – not, apparently, to be “discovered” for thousands of years after the passing of the Egyptian dynasties. Are the mummies fakes; were the substances from plants that have since disappeared or were there, in fact, trade routes between Egypt and South America that predate accepted chronology?

Discovery Atlantis

The film presents compelling evidence that Altlantis wasn't so far away after all, but what it omits is just as compelling. Although Plato’s account of Atlantian masonry, consisting of red, white and black stones, was a visually perfect match for the modern walls of the Minoan excavation site favored by the film, and his account of a sea made impassable by small islands of mud could, in fact, be a description of the rafts of pumice left by the catastrophic eruption of an ancient volcano there, little mention is made of Plato's specific account of where Atlantis was or the common root that links Atlantis to the Atlantic ocean. Also omitted is Plato's chronology placing the sinking of Atlantis in the same time frame as the end of the last ice age which caused the inundation of huge expanses of once fertile lands. Is "Atlantis: The Evidence" a thinly disguised example of Eurocentrism in the media? Watch Discovery: Atlantis for a more comprehensive view on an age-old debate.