Tuesday, May 30, 2006

More on white wine in tomb of Tutankhamun

The USA Today website is featuring an article fromthe latest edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science (volume 33, issue 8): "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."
See the above article for more details.

The abstract for the paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science itself can be found at:
http://tinyurl.com/ommqo (sciencedirect.com)
Full contents listing for all issues can be found at:

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