The Curious Case of Pyramid Peppermint
October 2024 | Vol. 12.10
By Jesse Millek and Lutz Popko
It’s not often that a scientific article is born from a cup of tea, but the following is just such a tale. It began on a cold winter’s morn in Michigan as a foot and a half (46cm) of snow lay on the ground with temperatures hovering around 0 degrees Fahrenheit (-18C). To warm up for a morning of research and writing, I (Millek) brewed a cup of peppermint tea, and feeling perhaps a bit melancholy due to the weather, I decided to read the little info fact on the tea box which said, “Peppermint has been used medicinally for thousands of years—in fact, dried peppermint leaves dating back to 1000 BC have been found in the pyramids of Egypt.”
The tea box featuring the quote about pyramid peppermint 1000 BCE. Photo by J. Millek.
To many, this wouldn’t have struck a nerve, but being an ancient Near Eastern archaeologist, it certainly struck one for me. “The pyramids of Egypt” (typically referring to the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure on the Giza plateau) are from the Old Kingdom dating to roughly 2500 BCE. The only things found in them were bats, sand, and rubble having been emptied in antiquity.
The Pyramids of Giza. Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash.
My thinking was that the tea box fun-fact was a one-off, but a quick Google search revealed that “pyramid peppermint” was actually quite widespread among sellers of peppermint and peppermint products. Most said something along the same lines as the tea box, but some websites added in other “facts” including that the peppermint had been carbon dated to 1000 BCE or that ancient Egyptian tomb robbers preferred to steal the peppermint while leaving the gold behind in their tomb plundering escapades.
Screen shot of the now extinct “Simply living Redefined” blog’s section on peppermint and the pyramids accessed via the Wayback Machine on 07/02/2024.
Of course, as I was looking at all of this, the question on my mind was, “Where in the world did this false fact come from and how did it spread throughout the world of tea and essential oils?” The answer came from a Google Scholar search, which showed me that the answer was academia. Not from papers on ancient Egyptian plants, but articles examining the medical, pharmaceutical, or industrial applications of peppermint (Mentha piperita). The pyramid peppermint fact was included as a sort of “fun fact” before moving on to discuss peppermint’s potential as an anti-inflammatory, a possible therapeutic in cardiovascular health, or against hepatotoxicity in experimental rats.
Mentha piperita (peppermint). Photo by Mäta, CC BY-SA.
Trying to find where this “fact” came from, I traced the citations back to their source: the 1996 Encyclopedia of Medicinal Plants by Andrew Chevallier, where he said, “Peppermint’s origin is a mystery, but it has been in existence for a long time — dried leaves were found in Egyptian pyramids dating back from about 1000 BC.” This still didn’t answer the question where the fact came from, since it seemed to me unlikely that Chevallier would simply make it up. The trail grew warm again when I came across a similar claim that peppermint was found rather in an Egyptian tomb from 1000 BCE. This led me to a 1979 article by Jane LaRue where she said, for what appears to be the first time, “Mentha X piperita has been found in Egyptian tombs dating back to 1000 B.C.” Chevallier, perhaps reading this, probably simply equated tomb with pyramid (as the latter are the most famous Egyptian tombs of all), but we cannot know this for sure. Nevertheless, to get to the bottom of this mystery, the next logical step was to see if peppermint was ever actually found in an ancient Egyptian tomb; perhaps this false pyramid peppermint fact was in fact based on something factual.
Of all of the excavations in Egypt from the past 200 years, there was only one instance where someone claimed they had found peppermint in an ancient Egyptian tomb. This was from an 1884 excavation by famed Egyptologist Gaston Maspero who was excavating a tomb near Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, a necropolis in western Thebes dated to the 20th through 26th dynasties (ca. 1189 – 525 BC). In the tomb, Maspero found the remains of a braided bundle of twigs; however, it was German botanist Georg Schweinfurth who examined them. He concluded that they were the remains of sterile runners of peppermint, though Schweinfurth admitted that the plants did not share many of the morphological characteristics of peppermint. Schweinfurth’s find was largely overlooked and forgotten other than in German articles on peppermint; however, it is likely that this is the origin of modern-day pyramid peppermint as it morphed over the nearly century and a half from a braided bundle of peppermint from a Theban tomb into pyramid peppermint from 1000 BCE.
Sterile runners of supposed Mentha piperita identified by Schweinfurth. (Courtesy of the Economic Botany Collection; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: EBC 26667).
What is ironic is that Schweinfurth’s “peppermint” wasn’t peppermint at all because peppermint is native to England, a fact Schweinfurth knew about but seemingly brushed aside in his identification. Modern peppermint was first identified in Hertfordshire, England, by someone named Dr. Eales, and the discovery of the new mint variety was passed onto English botanist John Ray who, in 1696 CE, published it under the English name “Pepper-mint.” Peppermint was given its modern scientific name (Mentha piperita) in 1753 CE by Carl Linnaeus in his Species Plantarum Volume 2. All modern peppermint is descended from the plants grown in England particularly those grown in fields from Mitcham, Surrey, England where large-scale cultivation of the plant began in the mid-18th century. Peppermint could not have been found in an Egyptian tomb from 1000 BCE, pyramid or otherwise, since the plant did not even exist in Egypt until modern times after it had been exported there from England.
With most of the pyramid peppermint mystery seemingly solved, there was however one question which I could not find a ready answer for. Along with pyramid peppermint there was also papyrus peppermint—Ebers Papyrus peppermint to be exact.
Replica of the Ebers Papyrus housed in the Leipzig University Library. Photo by L. Popko.
Many online websites, and some academic articles too, claimed that this 3500-year-old Egyptian medical papyrus prescribed peppermint as a curative agent against a variety of sinus or stomach conditions. But since peppermint did not exist in Egypt at the time, I knew this could not be true. To find the origins of this second Egyptian peppermint false fact, I turned to the one person best equipped to answer such a question, Dr. Lutz Popko, an expert on ancient Egyptian medicine and the Ebers Papyrus. Once again, the answer comes from a choice made by a 19th century German scholar named Heinrich Joachim.
Ebers Papyrus, cols. 90–92, green frame: one occurrence of the plant njꜣjꜣ in a recipe against the sniffles. Image courtesy of Leipzig University Library.
In the Ebers Papyrus, there is a plant named njꜣjꜣ used as a treatment for breathing problems. This ancient Egyptian plant name is similar to the Arabic word “nana,” which is the word “mint”, thus leading to an early Latin translation of “mentha”, i.e. mint. However, in Heinrich Joachim’s 1890 German translation of the Ebers Papyrus, rather than translating the plant simply as mint, he opted for “Pfefferminz” which was adapted by Cyril Bryan in the English translation of the German translation as “peppermint.” While it is likely that the njꜣjꜣ plant is a type of mint, perhaps pennyroyal, it is not peppermint, and this false fact came from a 130-year-old mistranslation.
So, was peppermint found in the pyramids from 1000 BCE and was it prescribed in an ancient Egyptian medical papyrus? No, no it was not. Peppermint is native to England and was only officially discovered in 1696 CE where it was exported and grown around the world, becoming the popular source of tea and essential oils that it is today. Why two German scholars from the 19th century decided on peppermint we will never know, but hopefully we can start the process of dismantling this pervasive pyramid papyrus peppermint puzzle once and for all.
Jesse Millek is a Visiting Research Fellow at The Netherlands Institute for the Near East. Lutz Popko is a Research Associate at the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Their article, “Peppermint’s Phony Pharaonic Past: Dispelling the Myth of Mentha piperita in Ancient Egypt”, was recently published in History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals (66.1: 4-25).
How to cite this article:
Millek, J. and L. Popko 2024. “The Curious Case of Pyramid Peppermint.” The Ancient Near East Today 12.10. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/pyramid-peppermint/.
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