A Rare Alabaster Vase Reveals the First Clear Evidence of Opium Use in Ancient Egypt
What were Egypt’s alabaster jars actually used for? Their stone and inscriptions were easy to study, but their contents remained hidden. One unique vessel is now offering the first glimpse inside.
A new study reveals that an alabaster vase inscribed for Xerxes once held opium. The research, published in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology, marks the first time the contents of an inscribed Egyptian alabastron have been identified. The finding shows that opiates circulated widely across Egyptian society, appearing in both elite and everyday contexts.
“Our findings combined with prior research indicate that opium use was more than accidental or sporadic in ancient Egyptian cultures and surrounding lands and was, to some degree, a fixture of daily life,” said Andrew J. Koh, the study’s lead author, in a press release. “We think it’s possible, if not probable, that alabaster jars found in King Tut’s tomb contained opium as part of an ancient tradition of opiate use that we are only now beginning to understand.”
A Multilingual Vessel From Xerxes’ Empire
The star of the study is a 22-centimeter-tall alabaster jar. Written in Akkadian, Elamite, Old Persian, and Egyptian, it dedicates the vessel to Xerxes I, whose Achaemenid Empire spanned Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Levant, Anatolia, and parts of Arabia and Central Asia. A Demotic note records it once held about 1,200 milliliters of liquid.
Intact inscribed alabaster vessels of this type are rare, likely fewer than 10 survive worldwide. They date to the reigns of Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes (roughly 550 B.C.E. to 425 B.C.E.) and are possibly linked to elite contexts, from Persepolis and Susa to the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. Most lack clear find spots, but their distribution suggests they circulated as prestige objects across the Achaemenid world.
The vase entered the Yale Peabody Museum’s Babylonian Collection shortly after its founding in 1911, becoming one of the earliest artifacts in its 40,000-piece assemblage.
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Finding Ancient Opium
To recover the vase’s contents, researchers used organic residue analysis, a technique refined by the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program. Because the vase is intact and made of calcite, they used a nondestructive “swishing” method, rinsing its interior with heated ethanol to draw out compounds absorbed into the stone. A second solvent sequence in the lab captured any remaining traces.
The extracts were analyzed using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, which detects faint chemical residues. The strongest signals appeared in the first washes — a pattern the team links to calcite’s ability to trap and preserve oily compounds — while later washes were nearly clean. The researchers identified morphine, thebaine, papaverine, noscapine, and hydrocotarnine, a suite of alkaloids diagnostic of opium.
Rewriting King Tut’s Alabaster Legacy
The opium profile from the Xerxes vessel mirrors chemical signatures previously found in New Kingdom jars from an ordinary tomb at Sedment — evidence that stretches across nearly a thousand years and multiple social classes.
This long-lived pattern raises new questions about the many alabaster vessels recovered from Tutankhamun’s tomb, some of which contained dark, sticky residues that early chemist Alfred Lucas could not identify and that ancient looters had carefully scraped from the jars.
“We now have found opiate chemical signatures that Egyptian alabaster vessels attached to elite societies in Mesopotamia and embedded in more ordinary cultural circumstances within ancient Egypt,” Koh said. “It’s possible these vessels were easily recognizable cultural markers for opium use in ancient times, just as hookahs today are attached to shisha tobacco consumption. Analyzing the contents of the jars from King Tut’s tomb would further clarify the role of opium in these ancient societies.”
Read More: Discovery of King Thutmose II’s Tomb May be Most Significant Find Since King Tut
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