No, it's a lie. I researched it a bunch back in September 2024 (I was curious what the oldest possible edible food was*), and the Smithsonian knows it's BS (because I emailed them about this to get it corrected). I was able to correct Wikipedia, but I see Smithsonian hasn't gotten around to bothering, so this keeps making the social media echo chamber rounds...
To be clear: no edible honey has ever been discovered in Egyptian tombs. Every single anecdote is either unverifiable, or a garbled telephone-game description of some decayed residue which might have been honey thousands of years ago (and often on further chemical testing, proves to not have been).
No, it's a lie. I researched it a bunch back in September 2024 (I was curious what the oldest possible edible food was*), and the Smithsonian knows it's BS (because I emailed them about this to get it corrected). I was able to correct Wikipedia, but I see Smithsonian hasn't gotten around to bothering, so this keeps making the social media echo chamber rounds...
To be clear: no edible honey has ever been discovered in Egyptian tombs. Every single anecdote is either unverifiable, or a garbled telephone-game description of some decayed residue which might have been honey thousands of years ago (and often on further chemical testing, proves to not have been).
See https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf
* https://gwern.net/oldest-food 'Abyssal bacteria' and 'dinosaur collagen' were my final answers.