The oldest cheese in the world has been found by archaeologists and it comes with its own sort of pharaoh’s curse.The tomb of Ptahmes, Egyptian mayor of Memphis in 13th Century BC, was rediscovered in 2010 and exploration of the site a few years later uncovered some broken jars including one that contained some canvas fabric and a solid whitish substance that was sampled, dissolved and analyzed to figure out what it might be.

The results have just been published in the journal Analytical Chemistry. Using liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry, a team led by Enrico Greco of Italy’s University of Catania determined the sample was some kind of dairy product made from combining sheep or goat’s milk with African buffalo, which were the ancient Egypt’s equivalent of modern cows. But while cheese and wine may typically grow more fine with age, this sample came with the curse of contamination. Peptides found in the sample suggest it may also play host to some nasty microbes named Brucella melitensis that cause the potentially deadly disease brucellosis.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one way the disease spreads from animals to humans is by eating unpasteurized dairy products.If this preliminary analysis turns out to be correct, it could mark not only the oldest cheese ever found, but also the earliest evidence of the disease.

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