Caroline Cartwright. The trustees of the British Museum

This New Scientist article, usually accessible only to subscribers, is made available for free by the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney, Australia

MUMMIES weren’t the only bodies preserved in the tombs of ancient Egypt. These biscuit beetles were discovered inside a loaf of funerary bread collected in the early 1800s, possibly from a tomb in the necropolis of ancient Thebes.


Such tombs were cool, extremely dry and sealed off from the outside world. “This slowed down in a major way the natural processes of microbial activity and decay,” says Caroline Cartwright of the British Museum in London. The conditions preserved everything from coffin wood to the ceremonial bread — and its stowaways.

The beetles, and their final meal, were buried 3000 to 3500 years ago. Along with other foods like fruit and cake, loaves were left in ancient Egyptian tombs as symbolic offerings, intended to feed the deceased in the afterlife.

To find out what ingredients were in the ritual bread, Cartwright and her colleague John Taylor took images of more than 20 ancient loaves using one of the Department of Scientific Research’s scanning electron microscopes – catching these bugs in the process.

Some of the loaves were made with ingredients we would consider inedible today, like chaff and straw. Others were made of barley or wheat, and some contained fruits.

Caroline Cartwright. The trustees of the British Museum

The bugs pictured are biscuit beetles, about 2 to 3 millimetres long, but the loaf also housed adult grain beetles and fragments of larvae belonging to both species.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Bread bugs”