Myrrh and Stakte, Antu and Medjet

Sean Coughlin

My main goal is to defend a claim implied, if not explicitly made, by Robert O. Steuer in his early 20th century book Myrrhe und Stakte: that there was a transfer of practical knowledge between Egyptian and Greek cultures around the time of Alexandrian and then Ptolemaic occupations.

Steuer’s explicit claim was a bit more specific: based on some early Egyptian Pyramid texts that describe the production of an unguent called medjet from a substance called antu, he claimed this unguent was identical with the Greek unguent stakte. Both, he believed, were a fraction from the resinous exudate of some now-unknown species of Commiphora (i.e., myrrh), and both, he claimed, were produced following the same procedure. What he hoped his book would do was provide a textual basis for testing this experimentally, with the hope it might lead to the identification of the parent plant of ancient myrrh, antu, stakte and medjet.

This precise claim was not without its problems. Most notably, while Greek writers describe a process for making stakte that seems to take about two hours in about two lines, the contemporary recipe for medjet at the Ptolemaic temple at Edfu takes basically a whole wall and over two years to complete. Clearly these are not the same recipe. Steuer was then forced to conclude that medjet ‘at one point’ was the same as stakte, back when the Pyramid texts he worked on were written, but by the Ptolemaic period, it had grown into something completely different.

Now, I don’t think Steuer’s solution was convincing. Still, I think there’s something right about his approach. One thing I want to do in the seminar is motivate continuing in a similar spirit, combining philological and experimental methods. Of course, this brings up some familiar methodological issues concerning plant identification and the like; but rather than solve these problems, I’ll introduce some new lexical and experimental approaches that I think together can offer some additional evidence that is worth considering and that just might point us towards some approximate answers (at least by excluding some things—not always a trivial thing).

Details

Place: Anneliese Maier Research Colloquium, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (remote)

Date: Friday 18 February 2022

Time: 2:00pm-4:00pm