Y'know that fact, the one where it says 'Archaeologists found 3000 year old honey in an Ancient Egyptian tomb and they ate it because honey lasts forever'?
As an Egyptologist, it's always baffled me because uhh...there's very few tombs that were intact enough to have food stuffs in them, and even fewer where honey was involved. If someone ate honey from one of those tombs, I'm pretty sure I would know about it. I mean, I know about Petrie smelling of bat piss and being a bit nuts, why wouldn't I have ever heard the name of the archaeologist who decided to chance botulism?
So I looked it up and got a wonderful spiral of circular citation. Everyone was saying the same thing over and over again, but no one was saying who it was other than 'archaeologists in an Egyptian tomb', which was incredibly frustrating. So, giving up on that, I looked into the known intact tombs we have like Kha and Merit or Psusennes I, but neither had honey jars. Which left only one option: Tutankhamun.
His tomb contains one cylindrical alabaster jar (No.055) in which Howard Carter noted there was a 'resinous material'. Looking that jar up led me to where they'd tested it and discovered it was honey. However, there are no records of anyone tasting or eating the contents of this jar prior to it being tested decades later (y'know, when they'd invented the tech to test that stuff).
So basically, there was a jar of honey in Tutankhamun's 3300 year old tomb, but there's no evidence that Howard Carter ate any of it, especially since he notes that he cleaned the jar with xylene.
