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Let's talk mummies


kmt_sesh

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Just now, docyabut2 said:

But Tut never had a honored pyramid tomb.  If Grave robbers took these great pharaohs.  Would`nt they sell them and keep their bodies somewhere?

Their motive was not to hold or take the body, their motive was the treasures within the tomb. The robbers could have cared less about the body...There have been some Pharaohs found that have been in pieces due to robbers. There was one major artifact that was prized by the robbers and that was the Heart Scarab....worth a fortune in those days. It was wrapped over the heart. See the link below:

http://www.egyptian-scarabs.co.uk/heart_scarab.htm

The selling of this Heart Scarab by a robber could have them living like kings.

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15 hours ago, kmt_sesh said:

I suspect leaving the brains inside the skull was more common than suspected. In most such cases the brain wouldn't preserve at all, given its gelatinous state. But in the occasional case it has preserved naturally, simply given the dry environment and low oxygen content of the burail. A good example is the preserved body of a 3,000-year-old boy named Nakht. He's not part of our collection but was the first Egyptian mummy ever CT scanned. This was in Canada. He was provided a nice coffin, but his body turned out not to have been mummified at all. The family probably couldn't afford that level of burial. The only damage to his body was his skull, which had come apart, but his brain was still intact. All that happened to it was the two hemispheres had come apart. It was actually his brain that was scanned (not the rest of the body).

Pen-ptah was fully mummified, right down to the linen plugs placed in his eye sockets. The conservator and his staff discovered the brain tissue when they were trying to place the detached skull back onto his body. The brain tissue was audibly rattling around in the skull. It had largely fallen apart into little globs. They got it out simply through the foramen magnum, that large orifice at the back of the skull, though which the spine passes. I've seen pictures of it and keep them on my iPad to show visitors. It looks a lot like ground beef. But that's not all. They also found the carcasses of ancient blow flies that had gotten in there to eat away at the brains, and the carcasses of ancient dermestid bettles that had gotten in there to eat the blow flies.

Pen-ptah had his own ecosystem inside his skull!

P.S. I love the dancing mummies. :D

Well, I'm sure the bug colonies were not intended.  That's why the brains and eyes were preferably removed, I suspect.  Besides which, the cadre of mummification priests perhaps were looking forward (!) to that day's lunch fixins:

Brain-Burger-Sandwich--98830.jpg.8167b8a105b3cb731362849189b4989c.jpg

Yes, shocking...needs some sauce to cover the gruesome!

Edited by The Wistman
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22 hours ago, Not A Rockstar said:

The recent rise in other topics about Peruvian mummies had me trying to research actual valid examples and the few I could find through the hype out there seem to all be natural mummification, often from freezing.

Is there any evidence of efforts to preserve the dead in South America, as we see in places like Egypt and Africa?

I'm not all that well versed on South American mummifications. I was hoping Jarocal would enter the thread to make up for my deficit, because he's the guy who knows pre-columbian cultures. I'm an Egypt guy, of course.

But off the top of my head there's the Chinchorro of coastal Chile and Peru. They were mummifying their dead at least 8,000 years ago (long before the Egyptians). Their process wasn't as effective as Egypt's but is quite interesting, if not somewhat disturbing. The dead person was skinned so that the skin could be smoked and tanned. The body itself had the musculature and ograns scraped off the bones, and all of that was probably discarded. Finally, the bones were wrapped with a lot of vegetable matter so as to "reflesh" the body, and the tanned skin was sewn back on. Here's one such mummy:

150309-mummy-editorial.jpg

They don't tend to preserve well from this process, but they're often fitted with elaborate death masks (like the girl in the photo). We don't have much Chinchorro material culture in our collection and none of their mummies. Our South American mummies are almost all Chancay and Nazca, from Peru. They're naturally preserved in very arid environments. I'm not sure what other South Americans might have artificially preserved their dead.

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11 hours ago, The Wistman said:

Well, I'm sure the bug colonies were not intended.  That's why the brains and eyes were preferably removed, I suspect.  Besides which, the cadre of mummification priests perhaps were looking forward (!) to that day's lunch fixins:

Brain-Burger-Sandwich--98830.jpg.8167b8a105b3cb731362849189b4989c.jpg

Yes, shocking...needs some sauce to cover the gruesome!

That's just gross. I'll bet it still tastes like chicken. What disturbs me most is the eyeball looks like an egg and now I want an egg. I love eggs...but not if they're looking at me.

The brain was often removed but the eyeballs were not. The idea was to keep the body as externally intact as possible, so if they removed your eyeballs, the belief was you'd be blind for eternity in the afterlife.

But if the body is placed under salt for over a month, the eyeballs—composed almost entirely of water—are not going to survive. It was a consequence of being mummified. The embalmers did numerous things to counteract this. Very commonly they stuffed balls of linen into the eye sockets, as with Pen-ptah, and glued the eyelids shut. They might also replace the eyeballs with small discs to help the glued eyelids to bulge out. The creepiest thing they did (in my opinion) is place two round stones in the eye sockets, and paint eyeballs onto the stones. In this case they would generally leave the eyelids unglued. What typically resulted was a bug-eyed mummy leering back at you.

CT scans of mummies will occasionally show atrophic eye tissue inside the sockets.

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How stupid, I knew about the Chinchorro even. Sorry. Must have been a brain dump. Those are the only ones I know about and I learned that earlier in this thread. The rest seen natural.

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19 hours ago, docyabut2 said:

But Tut never had a honored pyramid tomb.  If Grave robbers took these great pharaohs.  Would`nt they sell them and keep their bodies somewhere?

None of the kings in Tut's time (New Kingdom) has a pyramid, with the exception of Ahmose. By Tut's Tut's time pyramids were considered antiques. Remember that Tut lived over 1,100 years after Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid. As with all relogions, ancient Egypt's changed a great deal between Khufu and Tut, and the pyramids no longer served the needs of the royal religion.

The bodies were often taken but were often rifled in their tombs. The raiders didn't care about mummies but tore them apart, royal or not, to get at the amulets inside the layers of bandages. That's why so many mummies today are in fragments. It's also why later on, after the New Kingdom, the ordinarily few amulets with which most mummies were provided, were made out of glazed ceramic instead of gold and semi-precious stones.

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Attendant to this topic, here is a lecture/presentation (@ 1 hr.) by the estimable and prolific egyptologist Dr. Aidan Dobson to the Society of Antiquaries of London on the history and development of Ancient Egyptian coffins....a thorough and lucid treatment.   From 2014...highly recommended:

 

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And here is another excellent lecture, this time by Dr. Bob Brier speaking at the University of Richmond, on the art and practice of mummification in AE.  From 2009, @ 45 min:

 

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Excellent videos. Wistman. Thanks for posting. I like both of those guys: Dodson for his literature and Brier for his lectures.

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