The secret of a museum storage-room in Bergama was a small Roman glass bottle which still contained its own dark, compact flakes, sticking to the inside, preserved by a seal deposited some two thousand years ago. This vessel is an unguentarium, a sort of small flask which is regularly entered under perfume, or oil, or cosmetic residue. But the stuff contained in this second-century C. E. vessel excavated in a tomb at old Pergamon compelled the re-writing of this part of the bequest of the bottle, what the ill were invited to believe was the medicine by which they were to be cured.
Once archaeologist Cenker Atila had been pushing to have laboratory work done, the residue ceased to be an anomaly and became proof. With the help of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), the researchers found a “distinctive blend of human fecal biomarkers,” such as coprostanol and 24-ethylcoprostanol. Such sterols are commonly used as a sure indicator of fecal material and in this instance, the proportional percentages were very much indicative of a human contribution rather than an animal one. The analysis also identified carvacrol, an aromatic chemical that is related to thyme and similar herbs on the same sample an ingredient that appears less like contamination than intent.
The fact that Atila describes the moment when the container was opened also contributes to the chemistry being almost theatrical: “When we opened the unguentarium, there was no bad smell.” Instead of a footnote that lack of stench is an ingredient. The remedies of the old medical authors were constructed of substances which were socially unacceptable, such as dung most conspicuously, and compounded with strong aromatics to render them acceptable. The Pergamon vial has now provided the missing element between those pages and practice: not only the ugly contents, but the intentional plan of handling that ugly contents. That is, the act of therapy involved the engineering of the sensory experience of the patient, and the fragrance had been a form of compliance technology way before anyone started using the term.
Pergamon is a particularly loaded location of such a discovery. The reputation of the city as a curing place was connected to the Asklepion shrine and to Galen, the physician, whose texts defined medicine over centuries. Galen saw his name on texts, work on dung preparations to ailments of the type, by Dioscorides and Pliny the Elder, which involved a wide variety of complaints using dung-based preparations. Contemporary readers typically read those passages as rhetorical oddities or as the dark folklore of medicine. A closed bottle whose contents are biomarker-authenticated makes such dismissal more difficult to maintain, and further constricts the claim to a more historically answerable: at least some of such formulas were compounded, put into storage, and transported in the daily vessel.
Another accurate archaeological habit that is complicated by the unguentarium is the classification of small glass vessels by default as cosmetic. This paper indicates that the demarcation between personal care and clinical management became unclear within the same dainty profiles, and that a “scented” object might be a socially acceptable object, and a medically offensive one.
In modern medicine it has its reason to perceive the larger pattern. The treatments like fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) demonstrate that even the most tabooed products of the human body can be re-conceptualized as biologically effective. The Romans lacked microbes, sterols, and laboratory tools, and their only form of observation was hereditary tradition, combined with the keenest consideration of the senses. The traces of those things now exist physically in Pergamon, with a medicine prepared to act, and to be enjoyed.
