Some of the earliest known records of mellified corpses come from Greek historian Herodotus (4th century BCE) who recorded that the Assyrians used to embalm their dead with honey. A century later, Alexander the Great's body was reportedly preserved in a honey-filled sarcophagus, and there are also indications that this practice was known to the Egyptians.
Another record of mellification is found in the Bencao Gangmu (section 52, "Man as medicine") under the entry for munaiyi (木乃伊 "mummy"). It quotes the Chuogeng lu (輟耕錄 "Talks while the Plough is Resting", c. 1366) by the Yuan dynasty scholar Tao Zongyi (陶宗儀) and Tao Jiucheng (陶九成).
According to Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen, this content was Arabic, but Li Shizhen confused the story with a Burmese custom of preserving the bodies of abbots and high monks in honey, so that "the Western notion of a drug made from perdurable human flesh was combined with the characteristic Buddhist motif of self-sacrifice for others".  In her book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, writer Mary Roach observes that the text points out that it does not know the veracity of the mellified man story.