Wooden planks on the mummies provide clues about ancient droughts.

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Families gave wooden plates to the dead so that they could be identified during and after mummification. They showed the names and names of the parents and, in some cases, a short religious text.

Researchers in Basel and Geneva examined 300 of these mummy tags, as the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)-funded study announced Tuesday. Thanks to the annual rings on the tablets, they were able to identify the years of drought, because in these years the trees grow less and, accordingly, the annual rings become narrower.

But this is not enough to decipher the climate in the eastern Mediterranean region, present-day Lebanon, the Greek islands and the Nile delta, according to the SNSF. However, the overlapping of the annual rings provided the first sketch of the climate in the region in Roman antiquity.

As the researchers explain in the “International Journal of Wood Culture,” no date has yet been assigned to the annual rings and the environmental impacts recorded in them. Scientists look for other pieces of wood from the same tree species in the same area to pinpoint a time period. Otherwise, radiocarbon dating comes into play. This work has begun.

Roman Egypt was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. In 30 BC, Roman troops captured Alexandria, the powerhouse of the Ptolemies, who ruled Egypt after Alexander the Great’s conquest.

Octavian, later Roman Emperor Augustus, annexed Egypt as a Roman province. In 395, the Roman Empire was divided and the province fell into the hands of the Eastern Romans. The Eastern Roman domination of Egypt, and thus the Byzantine period, ended with the conquest of Arab-Islamic troops in the 7th century.

(SDA)

Source : Blick