Ancient Egyptians Had Vegetarian Diet, Mummy Study Shows

[ashling]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/10/egyptians-vegetarian-mummy-study_n_5297691.html

(Inside Science) -- Did the ancient Egyptians eat like us? If you're a vegetarian, tucking in along the Nile thousands of years ago would have felt just like home.

In fact, eating lots of meat is a recent phenomenon. In ancient cultures vegetarianism was much more common, except in nomadic populations. Most sedentary populations ate fruit and vegetables.

Although previous sources found the ancient Egyptians to be pretty much vegetarians, until this new research it wasn't possible to find out the relative amounts of the different foods they ate. Was their daily bread really daily? Did they binge on eggplants and garlic? Why didn't someone spear a fish?

A French research team figured out that by looking at the carbon atoms in mummies that had lived in Egypt between 3500 B.C. and 600 A.D. you could find out what they ate.

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intriguing.

[hlthe2b]

1. Except that there are a lot of wall paintings in the ancient tombs depicting hunting birds & animals

I certainly don't doubt they ate more vegetarian than not, but suspect this is a bit of a exaggerated conclusion

[ashling]

2. The article discusses this

and certainly does not answer all of the questions (they never do) but the technique used is certainly interesting

[NYC_SKP]

3. Happy Mummy's Day!!!

[sarge43]

4. Interesting

Wish there had been more information about the mummies, such as their time period and the type of mummification. That would tell us something about their social class. True mummification wasn't practiced until o/a 2000BCE. Further, mummification was an expensive, time consuming, labor intensive task, performed on the upper social strata. Peasants, laborers, slaves were buried in shallow graves. Their bodies would be naturally mummified by the hot, dry sand.

Without more data those mummies could have been priests and other temple personnel who lived with a prohibition about eating meat. We don't know much about the internal temple rituals.