During a turbulent period in ancient Egypt,
common people turned to animal mummies to petition the gods, inspiring
the rise of a massive religious industry
(Courtesy Brooklyn Museum) shrew mummy (top), found at an animal cemetery in Abydos, was made
sometime between 30 B.C. and A.D. 100, during Egypt’s Roman Period. An
elaborately wrapped mummy bundle (bottom) takes the form of a human
topped with a carved wooden ibis head. CT scans reveal that the bundle
is stuffed with feathers, but no ibis skeleton.
For decades, 30 boxes lay forgotten in the storage
vaults of the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptology department. The contents had
not been catalogued, or even seen, since the 1930s and 40s, when they
were purchased from the New-York Historical Society. But in 2009,
curatorial assistant Kathy Zurek-Doule finally opened the boxes. Lying
nestled inside each one was an elaborately wrapped mummy in the shape of
an animal. Ibises, hawks, cats, dogs, snakes, and even a shrew were all
represented in the collection, which had been amassed by a wealthy New
York businessman in the mid-nineteenth century. Faced with an unexpected
trove of objects unlike any other the museum has, Egyptology curator
Edward Bleiberg and his team embarked on a comprehensive study of the
mummies. The rediscovered objects gave Bleiberg the chance to
investigate a question that has puzzled archaeologists ever since they
first realized that vast animal cemeteries along the Nile hold millions
of mummies: Why did the ancient Egyptians invest so much in the
afterlife of creatures?
Unlike Greeks and Romans, ancient Egyptians believed
animals possess a soul, or ba, just as humans do. “We forget how
significant it is to ascribe a soul to an animal,” says Bleiberg. “For
ancient Egyptians, animals were both physical and spiritual beings.” In
fact, the ancient Egyptian language had no word for “animal” as a
separate category until the spread of Christianity. Animal cults
flourished outside the established state temples for much of Egyptian
history and animals played a critical role in Egypt’s spiritual life.
The gods themselves sometimes took animal form. Horus, the patron god of
Egypt, was often portrayed with the head of a hawk; Thoth, the scribe
god, was represented as an ibis or a baboon; and the fertility goddess
Hathor was depicted as a cow. Even the pharaohs revered animals, and at
least a few royal pets were mummified. In 1400 B.C., the pharaoh
Amenhotep II went to the afterlife accompanied by his hunting dog, and a
decade later his heir Thutmose IV was buried with a royal cat.
However, large numbers of mummies in dedicated animal necropolises
did not appear until after the fall of the New Kingdom, around 1075 B.C.
During the subsequent chaotic 400-year span known as the Third
Intermediate Period, the central Egyptian state collapsed and a series
of local dynasties and foreign kings rose and fell in rapid succession.
This time is often depicted as calamitous in official accounts, but
Bleiberg notes that during the First Intermediate Period, a similarly
chaotic era without central authority that lasted from 2181 to 2055
B.C., life for the average Egyptian went on as normal. In fact,
University of Cambridge Egyptologist Barry Kemp has shown that villagers
were relatively prosperous during this time, perhaps because they paid
taxes only to local authorities, and not to the central state. If life
in the Third Intermediate Period was similar, then the average Egyptian
may have had more disposable income. With no pharaoh to mediate Egypt’s
relationship to the gods, and with foreigners undermining religious
traditions, there was also a turn to personal piety among the general
public. “Without the pharaoh, people needed to approach the gods on
their own,” says Bleiberg.
(Courtesy The Brooklyn Museum)
CT
scans revealed that these mummies hold complete cat skeletons. The
feline on the right had its forelegs and paws laid over its belly in a
position similar to the placement of arms in human mummies.
Against this backdrop, pilgrims visiting temples began to purchase
animal mummies from priests to bury as votive offerings. Some wealthier
pilgrims bought bronze statuettes of divinities that were also wrapped
as mummies and placed in animal cemeteries. But real animal mummies
would have been a much cheaper option, and they were soon a pervasive
presence in Egyptian life. Salima Ikram of the American University in
Cairo estimates that the known 31 animal necropolises once held at least
20 million mummies. According to an ancient text, the Temple of Thoth
in the necropolis of Saqqara at one time had 60,000 living ibises being
readied for mummification, and archaeologists estimate that some four
million ibis mummies were eventually buried there. A few mummies have
been found with papyri petitioning the gods for help to resolve a family
matter or cure an illness. Bleiberg notes, however, that the majority
of animal mummies were not accompanied by written petitions and that
it’s possible most were intended to carry oral messages. Perhaps
pilgrims whispered their requests in the ears of the mummies, which then
delivered their messages to the gods.
(Courtesy The Brooklyn Museum)
An
X-ray of this elegantly wrapped hawk mummy dating to between 30 B.C.
and A.D. 395 shows it contains only a single bird’s wing.
X-rays and CT scans of the mummies
in the rediscovered Brooklyn Museum collection reveal just how diverse
animal mummies could be. While many show entire skeletons inside the
mummy bundles, others reveal only partial remains. Some even show
multiple animals mummified together in one bundle. A particularly
poignant CT scan of a cat bundle shows that the feline was mummified
with its forepaws crossed in the same position as human mummies’ arms
were crossed, a reminder that the ancient Egyptians drew little
distinction between people and animals. To determine if different
wrapping styles could be dated to particular periods, Bleiberg took
radiocarbon samples of some of the mummies’ linens, but the dates turned
out to be inconsistent. It’s possible that the linen used in the
wrappings was often recycled, which makes dating unreliable. A piece of
linen could begin life as an article of clothing that lasted for
decades, then be used as a rag, and then be repurposed as mummy
wrapping, perhaps decades, or even centuries, after it was first made.
Given the scale of the animal mummy-making business, some temples may
have made their own linen, just as they raised their own animals in
numbers approaching modern-day industrial farming. “This was an
extremely important economic phenomenon,” says Bleiberg. “ There was a
lot of money being directed toward animal mummies in first millennium.”
(Courtesy The Brooklyn Museum)
An
X-ray of this dog mummy (left) shows how the animal’s skeleton was
compressed and its tail tucked behind its hind legs, while an X-ray of a
small, bull-shaped linen bundle (right), shows the object contains a
bone fragment that could be bovine.
As with any large-scale business, the production of animal mummies
could be rife with corruption. At the necropolis of Saqqara,
Egyptologists discovered a draft document written on ostraca, or
potsherds, that details a case of corruption against the Temple of
Thoth. Though the exact charges are not translatable, they evidently had
to do with payments worshippers made for animal mummies—and what they
actually got in return. The document outlines reforms that call for “one
god in one jar,” meaning one whole animal per purchase. That implies
the priests of Thoth were selling fraudulent mummies that either had no
animal inside at all, or held multiple animals that each represented a
separate purchase. Whatever their crime, six priests were imprisoned.
The document also describes a program of oversight by outside priests
and states that, in the future, mummies would be stored in a holding
area until they could be buried all at once during an annual festival
overseen by reliable officials.
(Courtesy The Brooklyn Museum)
These
two ibis-shaped mummies are not what they appear. One (left) contains
no skeleton, and an X-ray of the other (right) reveals it actually
contains snake skeletons. Both could be the result of corrupt temple
practices.
Some of the mummies in the Brooklyn Museum collection may have been
the result of such corrupt practices. X-rays reveal multiple snakes in
an “ibis” mummy, as well as mummy bundles without any remains, perhaps
intended to fool unsuspecting worshippers. One mummy contained nothing
but feathers, but was unusually well wrapped. Why would a corrupt priest
bent on swindling a pilgrim devote so much time to elegantly wrapping a
fraudulent mummy? “It’s possible the feathers came from an unusually
important bird,” says Bleiberg, “We’ll never know for sure.” Although
animal mummies were one of the most common classes of object left behind
by the ancient Egyptians, they carry messages that may never be fully
understood.
Eric A. Powell is online editor at Archaeology. For information on the traveling exhibit Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt, go to brooklynmuseum.org. The exhibit’s catalogue is available in bookstores and at gilesltd.com
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Πηγή : http://www.archaeology.org/issues/124-1403/features/1724-egypt-animal-mummies-brooklyn-museum
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