Myrrh's first article traces embalming, anointing oil and a burial spice. Beside those sits a separate, medicinal thread running through Egypt, China and the Gospels themselves, and it has almost nothing to do with the dead.
Egyptian medicine used myrrh well before its embalming role. The Ebers Papyrus, a medical compendium of roughly the sixteenth century BCE, prescribes it as a wound dressing, and Queen Hatshepsut's expedition to Punt around 1470 BCE was mounted largely to secure a direct supply of living Commiphora trees rather than depend on middlemen, a venture recorded on the walls of her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari.
Traditional Chinese medicine classifies myrrh, mo yao, as a bitter, cooling herb that moves stagnant blood, prescribed for wounds, swelling and menstrual pain, a functional category it shares with dragon's blood and one that owes nothing to embalming or to Marian symbolism.
The crucifixion narratives carry a third, separate use of the same substance. Mark 15:23 records wine mixed with myrrh offered to Jesus before the crucifixion, usually read as a rough analgesic rather than an anointing, and one he is described as refusing. Set beside the burial spices of John 19:39, the Gospels use myrrh twice in one narrative for opposite purposes, to dull pain and to preserve the dead, within a few hours of each other.