A group of sticky goo found at the bottom of a 2,500-year-old bronze bottle from Southern Italy is chemically identified, solving 70-year-old archaeological debate.
It is honey – a sweet leftover from an offering to an ancient god.
A team of chemists and archaeologists used cutting-edge analytical techniques to test residues like pastes. They concluded that the bottles discovered in the city of BC Paestum in the 6th century originally contained beehives.
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“What I find interesting is that ancient Greeks thought honey was a superfood,” said the lead author of Luciana Da Costa Carvalho, a chemist at Oxford University, in the video. The researchers published the findings on Wednesday (July 30) in the American Chemical Society Journal.
Honey and bees were important in ancient Greek and Roman medicine, rituals, cosmetics and food. So when archaeologists found eight bronze vessels at underground shrines in 1954, they assumed that honey was included in the jar as an immortal symbol. Despite at least four attempts over 70 years to confirm the presence of sticky sweet substances, no evidence of sugar was found.
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However, Carvalho and colleagues decided to take advantage of recent advances in chemical analytical techniques to resume the issue of the origin of gooey matter.
Carvalho and his colleagues, a technique that can use mass spectrometry to distinguish between different molecules and compounds, were the first to identify intact hexose sugars in ancient jar residues. Fresh honey is about 79% hexose sugar, the researchers wrote in the study, and is the most abundant in fructose.
Analysis of proteins in ancient samples revealed the presence of royal jelly, milky white secretion made by workers’ bees. Researchers also recovered the peptides – a small version of the protein, short amino acid chains – are endemic to one species of European honeybees (APIS mellifera).
Adding these analyses, the researchers write that the study presents the first direct molecular evidence in favor of the presence of honey, possibly provided as honeycomb.
“The amount of sugar in ancient residues is very low compared to modern honey,” Carvalho told Live Science via email. “The residue tastes like washed honeycomb, but I think it’s a bit acidic,” Carvalho said, but she hadn’t actually tried it.
Researchers also identified copper ions in honey mixtures. “Their presence would have contributed to the preservation of sugars on the surface of the residue,” Carvalho said, as this meant that these ions could kill microorganisms.
The analysis of Goop helps archaeologists to better understand ancient rituals and shrines. The bottle was found in an underground temple, also known as the Paestum Herun. Hern also included a large wooden table with iron bars wrapped around wool on top.
The offering may have been made by Helis, the mythological founder of the ancient Greek city of Sivalis, Sivalis, in the arch of Italian boots. When Sivalis was destroyed in the 6th century BC, its inhabitants fled and established a city called Poseidonia. However, when the Romans took over it in the 3rd century BC, they renamed the city Pestum.
The new research “has benefited the collections of the Reanalysis Museum as analytical techniques continue to be developed,” Carvalho said in the video.
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