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Cleopatra's Cosmetics And Hammurabi's Heineken: Name Brands Far Predating Modern CapitalismEgyptian perfume bottle. Could product branding have begun in ancient Egypt? (Credit: iStockphoto) ScienceDaily (Feb. 19, 2008) — From at least Bass Ale's red triangle--advertised as "the first registered trademark"--commodity brands have exerted a powerful hold over modern Western society. Marketers and critics alike have assumed that branding began in the West with the Industrial Revolution. But a pioneering new study in the February 2008 issue of Current Anthropology finds that attachment to brands far predates modern capitalism, and indeed modern Western society. In "Prehistories of Commodity Branding," author David...

Bonn scientists shed light on the dark secret of Queen Hatshepsut's flaconThe corpus delicti is a plain flacon from among the possessions of Pharaoh Hatshepsut, who lived around 1450 B.C., which is on exhibit in the permanent collection of the Egyptian Museum of the University of Bonn. For three and a half millennia, the vessel may have held a deadly secret. This is what the Head of the collection, Michael Höveler-Müller and Dr. Helmut Wiedenfeld from the university's Pharmacology Institute just discovered. After two years of research it is now clear that the flacon did not hold a perfume; instead,...