Joan of Arc Relics, a Hoax: They Come from an Egyptian Mummy

This is a figure that entered from legend into literature and media.

The 19-year-old illiterate farm girl from Lorraine (northeastern France) is the most famous heroine of France.

She led the French, while disguised herself as a man, to several victories over the English troops (notable the conquest of Orleans) during the Hundred Years War.

In her war campaigns, she said she heard voices from saints asking her to deliver France from the English.

This was used against her when English captured the French heroine, as she was trialed for heresy and witchcraft and burnt on pyre in the town of Rouen in 1431.

Now, a rib thought for over a century to have come from her pyre proved to be actually that of an Egyptian mummy, after an international French-Swiss team analyzed the relics.

The bone, a piece of cloth and a cat femur, supposedly recovered from Joan of Arc's pyre, were preserved by an apothecary until 1867, before being given to the archdiocese of Tours.

In 1909, Joan of Arc was beatified and in 1920, canonized by the Roman Catholic Church, while scientists of those times declared it "highly probable" that the relics were authentic.

The fake could have been prepared in the 19th century, perhaps to hurry up her beatification.

At that time, powdered mummy remains were employed as medicine "to treat stomach ailments, long or painful periods, all blood problems," said lead researcher Philippe Charlier.

The 19th-century apothecary might have transformed "these remains of an Egyptian mummy into a fake relic, or fake historic remains, of Joan of Arc," he said.

"Perhaps it was created to increase the importance of the process of beatification in 1909."

"Tests dated the rib bone to between the 7th and 3rd centuries B.C. The cat bone dated from the same period and also was mummified. The researchers also found pine pollen, probably from resin used in Egyptian embalming," he said.

DNA was not achievable from the relics, so the sex of the mummy or the cat could not be determined.

"The embalming products appear to have prevented the conservation of the DNA, and they are too old, so it didn't work," Charlier said.

The team even appealed to perfumers to sniff the remains, employing their exceptional olfactory senses "so they could identify the smells, the vegetable matter, in the embalming and guide our research," Charlier said.