23 Truly Amazing Mummies

life.com — The Beauty of Xiaohe, estimated to be some 3,800 years old and one of the most perfectly preserved mummies ever found, was discovered along the ancient "Silk Road" trade route of Asia.

Secrets of the mummy: Scanner will reveal if 4,000-year-old Egyptian was preserved with bird inside its body as an afterlife offering

By Daily Mail Reporter

A 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy was taken on a bizarre day trip today to try and unlock some of the secrets of the ancient world.
The relic is usually held at the Barnum Museum in Connecticut, but was shuttled to Quinnipiac University in an unusual procession, to be studied using the institution's high-tech hospital scanner.

The tests could answer questions on whether a mysterious packet inside her body was a mummified bird killed as an offering to the gods to help secure the woman a place in the afterlife.
Researchers might also be able to learn more about the woman's life on earth, including her age and whether she had children.

Mystery: Kathy Maher, executive director at the Barnum Museum, examines the mummy's empty casket

Experts today carefully packed the mummy into a modern-day coffin provided by local undertakers and transported in hearse with a police escort.

The mummy, known as Pa-Ib and believed to date from around 2,000 BC, was a prized exhibit of the flamboyant US showman P.T. Barnum and has been in the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut, since the 1890s.
Scientists will then be able to peer inside the mummified remains in unprecedented detail using a Toshiba 64-slice CT scanner usually used for diagnosing diseases in living patients.
It has a resolution eight times better than another scanner used on the same mummy in 2006, when tests revealed a number of packages inside the abdominal cavity.
One archaeologist speculated one of these bundles could be a bird mummy, a prospect that has excited Egyptologists.

Preserved: the torso of a 4,000-year-old mummy Pa-Ib being wrapped before being taken for scans

The pelvis also showed some evidence that the woman had given birth, but the original data was erased to make way for patient scans.
The latest scans could shed yield new discoveries which could prove important to archaeologists' understanding of ancient rituals.
'It really is going to give us a fantastic view of this mummy,' said Professor Ronald Beckett, co-director of the Bioanthropology Research Institute at Quinnipiac.
'Every mummy has a story to tell. Every piece of information adds to our understanding of the ancient Egyptians.'
Lorelei Corcoran, director of the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the University of Memphis, called the mummy 'extremely unusual'.
'It just gives us another example of this very intriguing phenomenon of bringing a gift with you to the afterlife,' she said.
Dr Corcoran said she knows of only two other human mummies with bird mummies, one at the J. Paul Getty Museum in California and another in Switzerland.
She said birds such as the falcon and ibis were associated with the Egyptian god Thoth, who was believed to play an influential role in the final stage of judgement of the dead.
'He's the one whose opinion you would want to influence in order to get to the eternal afterlife,' she said.

 

Delicate: curators carefully move the head and body ready to be transported to the scanner

Colleen Manassa, assistant professor of Egyptology at Yale University, said the likelihood of a bird mummy inside a human mummy would be 'highly improbable' if the human mummy is 4,000 years old, as the museum believes, because Egyptians were not embalming animals around that time.
She said the mummy is likely to be younger, which would mean there could be a bird mummy inside, but it would still be highly unusual.
'It would make it a very important mummy,' Prof Manassa said, by showing the practice of animal offerings was not just done at temples.
Prof Manassa said the closest time parallel is a case at an Egyptian museum in which a baboon was mummified and wrapped in a bundle that was placed over the mummified and wrapped body of a woman separately more than 3,000 years ago.
Prof Beckett said the packets may turn out to be organs, which were taken out of the body, preserved and placed back in the mummy for use in the afterlife.
'Wouldn't it be wonderful if it turned out to be a bird?' he said. 'It's just so rare that it would be that we would be surprised.'
Prof Beckett said he does not believe the woman was royalty, saying her worn teeth suggest the diet of a commoner.
Determining the cause of death will be difficult, researchers say, but they might be able to offer a range of diseases from which the mummified woman could have suffered, such as arthritis.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1243208/Mummy-tests-reveal-secrets-ancient-Egypt-4-000-years-death.html#ixzz0cihomcCo

Norwegian Wood For The Ages: 'Mummified' Pine Trees Found

This three grew from 1334-1513. (Credit: Terje Thun, NTNU)

ScienceDaily (Oct. 18, 2009) — Norwegian scientists have found “mummified” pine trees, dead for nearly 500 years yet without decomposition.

Norway’s wet climate seems perfect for encouraging organic matter to rot – particularly in Sogndal, located on Norway’s southwestern coastline, in one of the most humid, mild areas of the country. In fact, with an average of 1541 millimetres of rain yearly and relatively mild winters, Sogndal should be an environment where decomposition happens fast. Not so.

“We were gathering samples of dead trees to reconstruct summer temperatures in western Norway, when our dendrochronological dating showed the wood to be much older than expected”, says Terje Thun, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Museum of Natural History and Archaeology. Thun conducted the work with his colleague Helene Løvstrand Svarva.

From a time before the Black Death

“We were astounded to find fresh wood in trees that started to grow in the late 1200s and had died almost 500 years ago, which is much older than we originally expected. Somehow they have kept from decomposing for several centuries in this humid climate”, Thun says. “This is quite extraordinary - I would go as far as to call it sensational.”

Thun says that when a pine tree dies, it secretes a great deal of resin, which deters the microorganisms needed for decomposition. “Nevertheless, preventing the natural breakdown of the wood for centuries is quite a feat”, he says. Thun is one on Norway’s leading dendrochronology experts. Dendrochronology is the dating of trees.

Used in mummification

Resin was one of the ingredients used in Ancient Egypt for mummification, so its conservation abilities have been known for millennia. However, that trees could “self-mummify” in such a humid climate for centuries was new to the NTNU scientists.

“Many of the trunks we dated turned out to have seeded in the early 1200s, and had lived for more than 100 years at the time of the Black Death around 1350”, Thun says. “That means that the dead wood has ‘survived’ in nature for more 800 years without breaking down.”

It seems there truly is something good about Norwegian wood.

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Funeral director finds 400-year-old cat

Pet project: Richard Parson holds up his 400-year-old discovery in front of the wall where it was found

Undertaking a spot of renovation work can uncover some nasty surprises but this is the mummy of all shocks.

A funeral director has found a perfectly preserved 400-year-old cat behind the wall of his cottage. 'The builders were stripping one of the bathrooms upstairs and this little fellow came to light,' said Richard Parson.

'It is quite scary-looking and is a lot bigger than a normal domestic cat,' added the 42-year-old.

It is thought the animal either crawled behind the wall and got stuck or its body was placed there by a past resident to ward off evil spirits.

Neighbours in Ugborough, Devon, told Mr Parson the cat was found 20 years ago by previous owners – but was put back.

And he is planning to do the same. 'It is a little bit of village history and adds charm to the property,' he said.

Cats were often put into walls 'to keep away witches, the evil eye, bad luck and vermin,' said Dr Marion Gibson, a witchcraft expert at Exeter University.

A child's boot is also supposedly hidden in the house as a good luck charm because it was once a cobbler's shop.

Egypt discovers dozens of well-preserved mummies in 4,000-year-old necropolis in Fayoum

By Cher Thornhill

Egyptian archaeologists have discovered an ancient necropolis containing dozens of beautifully preserved mummies dating back as far as 4,000 years.

Excavations sponsored by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities revealed 53 tombs cut into rock south east of the Illahun pyramids in the oasis of Fayoum.

Antiquities chief Zahi Hawass described four of the mummies, dating to the 22nd Dynasty (931-725 BC), as among the most beautiful ever discovered.

Remarkable: The decoration and inscriptions on the mummy trappings are unusually well preserved

Sitting in wooden coffins, the mummies are wrapped in linen and painted in the traditional Egyptian colours of gold, turquoise and terracotta.

The decoration and inscriptions on the mummy trappings are remarkably well preserved.

The mission, led by Supervisor of Antiquities for Middle Egypt Dr. Abdel-Rahman El-Ayedi, also recovered charred remains from a number of other coffins, which are thought to have burned during the Coptic period.

Ancient beauty: A wooden coffin containing a linen-wrapped mummy covered in cartonnage found by the Egyptian archaeological mission

Among the remains, the team unearthed 15 painted masks, clay pots and protection charms known as amulets.

The archeologists also found a Middle Kingdom funerary chapel with offering table.

Preliminary study suggests the chapel was reused in subsequent periods, perhaps as late as the Roman era (30 BC to 337 AD).

Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, who announced the discovery, said the tombs vary in design. While some are reached through a single burial shaft, others have another shaft leading to a second, lower chamber.

Enlarge

The mummies were painted in traditional ancient Egyptian colours of gold, turquoise and terracotta

The latest discovery follows another exciting find just two months ago when Zahi Hawass announced the uncovering of thirty mummies inside a sealed tomb in the world's oldest standing step pyramid at Saqqara.

It is unusual to find intact burials in well-known necropolises such as Saqqara, which served the nearby city of Memphis, because thieves have ransacked the area over the years.

Of the roughly 30 mummies found inside the burial chamber alongside the limestone sarcophagus and its mummy, Hawass said some would have been poor and some wealthy. They may have been relatives of the original owner.

The Fayoum already holds a special place in Egyptian and in world history.

Greek mummy portraits found there, examples of which are kept in its museums, are believed to be the first real-life portraits in the world.

Egypt unveils pharaonic 'brain drain' bed

Egyptian antiquities authorities on Thursday revealed an ancient pharaonic embalming bed unearthed from a mysterious tomb near Luxor used to prepare bodies for mummification more than 3,000 years ago.

The wooden bed was painstakingly restored after being discovered in pieces in the KV-63 tomb in southern Egypt's famous Valley of the Kings, next to Tutankhamun's tomb, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said in a statement.

The bed, featuring carved heads of a lion and a lioness at its foot, slopes downwards five centimetres (two inches) from head to toe to help drain bodies being prepared for mummification.

Bodies had their organs removed as soon as possible after death, including the brain which was thrown away as it was thought to serve no purpose in the afterlife.

The heart was left in the body, with other organs cleaned, perfumed and preserved in jars to be buried with the mummy.

Afterwards, the corpse spent 40 days on the bed for draining of fluids, and another 15 days being bandaged.

Antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass said in a statement that the 170-cm- (68-inch-) long bed had been reconstructed from pieces of wood found scattered around tomb KV-63.

Luxor antiquities director Mansour Bouriq told AFP that unlike most beds found in tombs, this one was not ceremonial but actually used for embalming.

"We believe this was a room used for embalming because we found some embalming materials, including herbs, oils and pottery vessels," he said.

Tomb KV-63 was discovered by Egyptian and US archaeologists in 2006, the first to be found in the area in more than 80 years.

It is believed to date from the 8th dynasty (1570-1304 BC), although there was no mummy found inside to enable the tomb to be dated more precisely.

(c) 2009 AFP