Why more than 35,000 people want to drink a red liquid found in a 2000-year-old tomb
2018 has been a weird year already, especially in the realm of the culinary. Netizens have gone from attempting to swallow a tablespoon of cinnamon powder in 60 seconds without liquids, to biting Tide Pods — little pockets of liquid detergent — to snorting condoms. But all of this is almost pedestrian. At the glorious peak of oddities is a new disturbing want: drinking the unknown liquid found inside a sarcophagus that’s thousands of years old.
A change.org petition that has been signed (hopefully, ironically) by more than 17,000 people globally is demanding that people be let to “drink the red liquid from the dark sarcophagus”. The petitioner Innes McKendrick’s reasonable demand is “we need to drink the red liquid from the cursed dark sarcophagus in the form of some sort of carbonated energy drink so we can assume its powers and finally die.”
The petition plays right into millennial motifs of absurdity and death, and is, in all likeliness, not serious; then again, people did snort condoms and drink detergent. Especially considering that the “mysterious” red liquid found inside the 6-foot-tall, 2000-year-old granite sarcophagus, recently discovered in Alexandria, Egypt — that people initially hoped was cursed — is not really “bone juice” or a life-giving elixir. Nor is it the mythical “red mercury” that has been termed both elaborate hoax and dangerous Soviet weaponry.
The sobering reality is nowhere close to being that fancy or awesome. The Antiquities Ministry in Egypt, possibly alarmed at the idea of thousands of people wanting to consume an unknown liquid found inside a dark dank coffin, informed the press that the liquid is, in fact, sewage water.
While this revelation may hopefully discourage many of the petitioners, it is still prudent to remind the remaining ones that sewage, even if it is found inside an old sarcophagus, is not really the bottle of Dom Pérignon one would wish it to be. According to Rolf Halden, a professor and director of the Center for Environmental Health Engineering at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute, the sewage water, likely to also be mixed with debris from decaying bodies, will be home to many microorganisms — viruses, bacteria and other pathogens in that liquid, including some bacteria that can form "endospores" which are extremely tough to kill — some of which can be potentially dangerous.
In fact, according to reports, the archaeological team that had lifted the lid by less than two inches were forced to abandon their efforts for more than an hour because of the overpowering stench that got released.
Then again, stink hasn’t discouraged people from eating food; and Surströmming, fermented canned fish, is widely considered a delicacy in Sweden.
But beyond the desire to consume sewage, bone juice, the elixir of life or red mercury, perhaps, lies just a generation of people who have taken refuge — from modern societal, political and economic horrors — under the absurd and the meaningless. And, you never know, 2000-year-old sewage may just be what humanity has been missing.
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