To Dr. Fu’s knowledge, no one has tasted the crumbly bits that were pulled out of the tomb. “I think people don’t want to try it because we see that it’s not that attractive,” she said.

But if they did taste it, they might have been disappointed. Some archaeologists sampled cheese they found in an Egyptian tomb in the 1930s, and their paper from 1942 noted that it had “no smell and only a dusty taste.”

My questions were answered.