Volunteer stumbles upon 3,000-year-old bread crumb in UK museum. See ‘surprising’ find
While sorting through some overlooked archive materials at a museum in the United Kingdom, a volunteer came across some bread crumbs from ancient Egypt. Photos show the microscope slide and its “surprising” sample.
Stephen Crabtree initially volunteered with Leeds Discovery Centre “to study fossilised plants” and ended up helping catalogue some old microscope slides, Leeds City Council said in a Feb. 10 news release. The slide collection included thousands of samples and had been at the museum for decades.
But “what began as a fairly routine cataloguing exercise has slowly uncovered a remarkable archive,” Clare Brown, a curator at the museum and the project’s supervisor, said in the release.
One of the slides Crabtree found turned out to be a sample of ancient Egyptian bread, officials said.
A photo shows the wooden microscope slide. A worn label at the top appears to read: “Bread from Egyptian Mummy in Tomb at/on Thebes” and the letters “jB.” The bread itself looks hard and brown.
Museum officials said the bread is “believed to be up to 3,000 years old.” It’s unclear who collected the sample, when they did so and how it ended up in a museum archive over 2,000 miles away.
“Discovering a morsel of ancient Egyptian bread was particularly surprising,” Brown said, “and the fact we can connect the Leeds collection to bread baked thousands of years ago on a different continent is fascinating.”
“We don’t know exactly how or where many of these slides were collected, but we do know that each one of them was meticulously preserved for study and posterity by a diligent microscopist more than a century ago,” Brown said. “That in itself is evidence of how important they thought these specimens were and how much they wanted future generations to see and be inspired by them.”
Other newly catalogued microscope slides included dust from the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia and sea creatures collected in the 1870s during the HMS Challenger’s voyage to circumnavigate the globe, officials said.
“We’re extremely grateful to (the slide creators), and to Stephen for following in their footsteps and rediscovering their work all these years later,” Brown said.
Museum officials plan to finish documenting and photographing the slide collection then make it publicly available, officials said.
Leeds is in northern England and a roughly 200-mile drive northwest from London.
This story was originally published February 10, 2025 at 11:23 AM with the headline "Volunteer stumbles upon 3,000-year-old bread crumb in UK museum. See ‘surprising’ find."
