A recipe nobody wrote down

The paints, binders, and adhesives behind Egyptian artifacts were mostly a mystery, because finding out meant cutting into priceless objects.

Proteins from a speck

Researchers turned mass spectrometry-based proteomics on glues and adhesives across a wide set of Egyptian artifacts, publishing the results in Science Advances.

The pigments were easier

Hematite and realgar for red, orpiment for yellow, Egyptian blue, huntite for white. Most carry elemental markers that X-ray fluorescence can spot without touching the surface.

Why proteomics wins

It needs less material than older methods and reads every protein in a mixture, instead of hunting only for ones you already suspected, like gas chromatography does.

Proven on beer and fingerprints

The same approach found beer byproducts priming Danish Golden Age canvases, and proteins left by Renaissance readers thumbing through medical manuals.

Samples across 18 centuries

Tiny samples came from coffins, tomb wall fragments, a plaster mummy bust, and painted limestone in Swedish, British, and Danish collections, dating 1425 BCE to 400 CE.

Cow, goat, donkey, antelope

Collagens from boiled skin and connective tissue showed up in adhesives, paints, and ground layers alike, with no pattern tying a species to a color, era, or object.

“No notable correlation was observed between the choice of the animal species/part and the object type”

Seeds in the red paint

Sesame proteins turned up in red samples from a coffin and a tomb wall, moringa on another coffin. Both seeds gave prized oils for cooking, medicine, cosmetics, and mummification.

A god in the glue

Moringa was seen as a manifestation of Ptah, patron of craftsmen. Its traces on a coffin may be a leftover of seed processing, or an artisan blessing their own work.

“the use of moringa could represent a possible action taken by the artist to devote or safeguard the final product”