King Tut's Peas: Mummy Seed Craze

Even if the craze for anything Egyptian wasn't sweeping Great Britain, who could resist the idea that seeds found with mummies might germinate!?

The following from : Mummy wheat: notes on the history of a myth by Gabriel Moshenska.

"The publicity surrounding the mummy peas and mummy wheat was a source of
interest to the man who might have been expected to know more about them
than anyone: Sir John Gardner Wilkinson himself. In an undated letter to
Pettigrew he sought clarification of the issue:

My Dear Pettigrew

Can you give me any account of the Pea which according to an account in one of the newspapers has been grown from one I gave you out of a jar brought by me from an Egyptian tomb at Thebes. 

They say there are two kinds of Peas, a large one & a dwarf, both from seeds I gave you when unpacking the things I brought to the British Museum in 1833 or 1834.
The subject has excited … interest & I am anxious to get the best information from an authentic source. Of course the fact of their growing must rest with the person who planted them the first time, whose name Ishould like to know also. You can tell me if they are the same I gave you & whether there were two seeds or how many. 

Do you know of anyone who has grown the wheat from seeds taken from Egyptian jars found in the tombs? (Wilkinson n.d.)

Download his PDF which covers this topic beautifully.

Below -Ottawa Citizen - May 5, 1932

LINK - Another current brief page on mummy peas :-)

Chile’s Chinchorro Mummies:   Many Chinchorro mummies have an O-shaped mouth reminiscent

of Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream.” One explanation is that the artisans failed to tie the skulls tightly enough to close the mouth, which would have fallen open in death. Or maybe this was a deliberate practice, to give the face character and make the person seem to come alive. (“The Scream,” it turns out, was inspired by the expression on a natural Andean mummy in a Paris museum.)...Karl Reinhard of the University of Nebraska has identified seeds of wild tomatoes and mint in the bowels of several mummies. 

Oldest viable seed   From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is a mummified (accidentally) ground squirrel...see below.

Carbon dated: The oldest carbon-14-dated seed that has grown into a viable plant was Silene stenophylla (narrow-leafed campion), an Arctic flower native to Siberia. Radiocarbon dating has confirmed an age of 31,800 ±300 years for the seeds. In 2007, more than 600,000 frozen mature and immature seeds were found buried in 70 squirrel hibernation burrows 38 metres (125 ft) below the permafrost near the banks of the Kolyma River. Believed to have been buried by Arctic ground squirrels, the mature seeds had been damaged to prevent germination in the burrow, however, three of the immature seeds contained viable embryos. Scientists extracted the embryos and successfully germinated plants in vitro which grew, flowered and created viable seeds of their own. The shape of the flowers differed from that of modern S. stenophylla with the petals being longer and more widely spaced than modern versions of the plant. Seeds produced by the regenerated plants germinated at a 100% success rate, compared with 90% for modern plants. Calculations of the γ radiation dose accumulated by the seeds since burial gave a reading of 0.07 kGy, the highest maximal dose recorded for seeds that have remained viable.[1][2][3]

• The oldest mature seed that has grown into a viable plant was a Judean date palm seed about 2,000 years old, recovered from excavations at Herod the Great's palace on Masada in Israel. It was germinated in 2005.[4][5][6][7] (For more details refer to Judean date palm: Germination of 2000-year-old seed).
• The third oldest viable seed recorded is the carbon-14-dated 1,300-year-old sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera), recovered from a dry lakebed in northeastern China in 1995.[8][9]

From -  http://www.mummytombs.com/mummylocator/group/scythian.htm

Scythian Mummies:

The Greek writer Herodotus visited the Scythians and described what they did when a king died. After digging a large, square grave,

"...they take the king's corpse and having opened the belly, and cleaned out the inside, fill the cavity with a preparation of chopped cypress, frankincense, parsley-seed, and anise-seed, after which they sew up the opening, enclose the body in wax, and placing it on a wagon, carry it about through all the different tribes."