Three substances, thousands of years

The story starts well before the Bible, Greece or Rome. In a 2015 Nature study, scientists identified beeswax fingerprints in Neolithic pottery across parts of Europe, North Africa and the Near East, with evidence from Anatolia reaching into the seventh millennium BCE. These are chemical residues, not legends: the distinctive mixture of long-chain wax compounds survived in ancient ceramic fragments. The authors concluded that humans used honeybee products widely at the dawn of agriculture. The residue does not tell us which particular vessel held medicine, but it establishes an extraordinarily long relationship between people and bee products.¹

This connection was practical as much as sweet. Wax could coat, seal, bind and resist water. Its value was not limited to the hive: an astonishing range of technologies depended on a substance that becomes workable with warmth and firmer as it cools.

A Roman poet gives wax the power of flight

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VIII, Daedalus fastens feathers with thread and pliant wax to create wings for himself and Icarus. The story is remembered for the disastrous flight near the sun, but it also reveals what listeners understood about wax: it can join materials, hold a shape and soften when heated. Greek myth carried the story; Ovid’s surviving literary telling is Roman.²

The Bible uses wax to describe irresistible heat

Psalm 68:2–3 (numbering varies by translation) compares the disappearance of enemies to wax melting before fire; Micah 1:4 imagines mountains melting like wax. These passages say “wax,” not specifically “beeswax,” and are metaphors rather than medical prescriptions. Still, their imagery assumes an everyday familiarity with how wax behaves.^3,4

A Greek god connects the beehive and the olive grove

One of the best overlooked stories is Aristaeus, son of Apollo and Cyrene. Diodorus Siculus writes that the nymphs taught him to make beehives and cultivate olive trees, and that he passed those arts to humanity. A single myth therefore treats beekeeping and olive cultivation as foundations of civilized life—skills so consequential they required divine teachers.⁵

Wax made faces survive the centuries

In Roman Egypt, artists mixed pigments with beeswax in the encaustic technique to produce remarkably lifelike mummy portraits. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the method and preserves examples whose expressive faces survive almost two millennia later. Wax was not just a cosmetic or sealant: it was a medium for memory.⁶

The lost-wax method also helped artists create metal forms. The British Museum documents royal Benin brass plaques cast with this technique in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Wax could disappear during the casting process, yet make intricate and enduring metal art possible.⁷

In the Greek story of the contest for Athens, Athena’s olive tree secured a special place in the city’s identity. Pausanias later wrote of the sacred olive and reported the local legend that, after the Persians burned it, it sprouted again almost immediately. The tree embodied more than food: useful abundance, perseverance and civic identity.⁸

The ancient gymnasium was also a place of body oil

The Metropolitan Museum’s guide to Greek art describes athletes rubbing olive oil over their bodies before exercise and scraping off oil and dirt afterward with a curved strigil. A small oil flask, or aryballos, could form part of an athlete’s equipment. For Greeks, oiling the body was not an obscure alternative practice; it was built into public physical culture.⁹

The oil of kings, priests, and the wounded

Exodus 30:22–25 gives an explicit recipe for sacred anointing oil with olive oil, myrrh, cinnamon, aromatic cane and cassia. The oil had a ritual role: consecration and separation for sacred service. In Luke 10:34, the Good Samaritan pours oil and wine on an injured traveller’s wounds and binds them; the passage portrays oil as part of recognizable practical care. These are distinct uses—ritual anointing and tending injury—bound by the same versatile material.^10,11

Historical ointment-makers valued olive oil as a carrier for aromatic substances. Ancient Mediterranean unguents were not merely decorative: perfume could mark rank, worship, hospitality and mourning. A biblical historical encyclopedia notes olive oil’s frequent use as an ointment base in Israel and the specialized trades that emerged around making scented preparations.¹²

An empire’s mountain of broken oil jars

Roman demand for olive oil left a literal landscape feature in Rome. Monte Testaccio is an artificial mound more than forty metres tall, built largely from discarded transport amphorae. Archaeological research traces much of its material to olive oil shipped from Roman Baetica, in present-day Spain, especially in Dressel 20 jars. An ingredient that could fit in a tiny perfume bottle also moved by the shipload and helped bind a far-flung imperial economy.¹³

Animal fat is the least romantic of the three ingredients to modern ears, and perhaps the most revealing. For societies that raised livestock, fat was a valuable material to be rendered, filtered, stored and put to work. It supplied energy for food, combustible fuel, lubricating material, soaps and medicinal preparations. “Tallow” is a modern English umbrella term usually associated with rendered ruminant fat; ancient texts often name suet, grease, marrow or fat by animal and preparation instead. We should therefore resist translating every ancient reference to fat into today’s precise term “beef tallow.”

Pliny records a surprisingly familiar manufacturing method

Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Book XXVIII, chapter 38, explains how to clean suet from ruminants: remove veins, wash, boil repeatedly to reduce odor and clarify it, and expose it to sunlight. He specifically praises fat from around the kidneys. This is an unusually concrete bridge to present-day rendering: preparation, purity, smell and source all mattered in Roman material practice.¹⁴

In the same book, Pliny records beef-suet in preparations for cracked or ulcerated lips and for boils, as well as mixed ointments containing other animal fats. These are reports of Roman therapeutic practice, not proof that every recipe would meet modern medical standards. Their significance is that beef suet was explicitly known as a topical ingredient nearly two thousand years ago.¹⁴

What fat meant in biblical ritual

Leviticus 3:16 says that the fat of a sacrificial animal belongs to God. In context, the text refers to particular animal fat portions offered at the altar, not to a recipe for rendered skin balm. It shows something different but culturally important: fat was ritually charged and sufficiently valued to be assigned to the divine rather than ordinary consumption.¹⁵

An ancient Egyptian fat-based hair product

Researchers analyzing hair from ancient Egyptian mummies published evidence of a fatty styling substance that functioned as a hair gel. Its use reflects attention to personal appearance and, in certain burials, the wish to preserve hairstyle into the afterlife. The paper identifies a fatty substance, not specifically beef tallow. This is an excellent example of the broader material tradition without falsely assigning a species.¹⁶

Here the three threads begin to meet. A 2023 molecular analysis of embalming balms associated with Senetnay, a high-status Egyptian woman buried around 1450 BCE, identified beeswax, plant oils, fats, resins and other substances. Researchers could recover a chemical picture of recipes mixed approximately 3,500 years ago. The plant oil was not conclusively identified as olive oil, nor was the animal fat necessarily beef. Yet the underlying design logic—a wax component and lipid components blended into a complex material—is strikingly recognizable.¹⁷

The University of York’s work on mummification notes that hydrophobic materials such as beeswax served as external barriers helping exclude moisture and microorganisms from the dead. This is a preservative use in funerary practice, not a claim that embalming mixtures should be applied to living skin. It does, however, illustrate how closely craftspeople watched the protective behavior of wax.¹⁸

Modern research has even found separate compounds and cosmetics distributed differently across the hair, face and neck of Egyptian mummified heads. A 2026 study reports heterogeneous recipes and clues that different body regions received different treatments. The idea of tailoring a mixture to its location is ancient.¹⁹

The simplest explanation for the endurance of balms is their physical behavior. Liquid oils spread; softer animal fats contribute body and lubrication; beeswax helps hold mixtures together and form a more persistent film. Historical ointment-makers often combined materials instead of relying on one alone. That arrangement can be understood through chemistry without requiring every old therapeutic explanation to be literally correct.

In an especially relevant modern clinical study, Al-Waili investigated an equal-parts mixture of honey, beeswax and olive oil in 21 people with atopic dermatitis and 18 with psoriasis. Several participants experienced clinically assessed improvement. Other small investigations of the same three-ingredient mixture reported encouraging findings for diaper dermatitis and certain superficial fungal infections. These formulations included honey, unlike Casa San Miguel’s balms; the studies therefore support the history of mixed apicultural-and-olive preparations, not claims about our exact recipes.^20,21,22

A laboratory investigation also studied the same honey–beeswax–olive-oil mixture against Staphylococcus aureus and Candida albicans. This adds a mechanism-oriented line of inquiry to the older practical tradition.²³

Beeswax was a sealant, an artist’s medium, a casting tool and a component of medicinal and funerary mixtures. Olive oil was food, anointing substance, athletic equipment, trade commodity and the carrier of aromatic preparations. Animal fat was fuel, household material, ritual offering and an ingredient listed in ancient treatments. Their histories intersect because humans consistently valued a small set of useful physical properties: lubrication, flexibility, protection, controlled melting and the capacity to carry other materials.

The claim worth making is not that a present-day balm is an ancient Egyptian formula. It is more interesting—and more defensible—to say that the craft of combining animal fats, botanical oils and natural waxes belongs to an exceptionally old human repertoire, documented in archaeological chemistry, classical writing, religious texts and ongoing material practices.

“The beehive and the olive tree had the same mythological teacher.”

Aristaeus learned both crafts from nymphs in a classical account. Two of the most enduring ingredients in traditional body care were imagined as gifts that helped make society possible.⁵

“An ancient Roman wrote down how to render kidney suet.”

Pliny describes washing, repeated boiling and deodorizing suet, and he separately records beef-suet in topical remedies. This is more concrete than an unsourced claim that Romans “used tallow.”¹⁴

“A piece of wax can outlast an empire.”

Neolithic pottery preserves beeswax traces millennia old; Roman Egyptian portraits used it to fix pigments; Benin metalworkers used expendable wax patterns to cast royal art. Wax was simultaneously ordinary and remarkable.^1,6,7

This is a celebratory history grounded in actual texts and finds. A biblical metaphor proves a cultural familiarity with wax, not its botanical or zoological origin. A myth shows what a civilization admired, not a dated scientific invention. An archaeological residue proves presence, but does not automatically prove why it was applied. Pliny documents medical advice circulating in his era, not a modern clinical endpoint. Clinical observations can establish specific effects for the tested mixture, not every ingredient combination. Keeping these distinctions sharp makes the stories more memorable rather than less.