The other mummies

Preserving human mummies is one thing, but animal mummies are another. Amira El-Noshokaty is in on a project to save the once-treasured animal remains from turning to dust
Animal Mummies Project director Salima Ikram
Human mummies are a link with the ancient past, and the numbers of visitors to the Mausoleum of the Mummies in Cairo's Egyptian Museum attest to our fascination. We view them wrapped in layers of linen, sometimes elaborately adorned with religious texts, lying silently in glass cabinets. But as for animal mummies, the museum contains few indeed.
This is about to change. The official Animal Mummies Project (AMP), inaugurated three years ago to study the mummies and collate information, is planning to mount a permanent exhibition at the museum. Salima Ikram, Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and co-director of the project, says the exhibition will be ready to open in December 2002. "Each animal will be in a separate showcase along with details of its history and an X-ray to show what's inside the wrapping," she says.
Comparatively little attention has been paid to animal mummies. From about 100 years ago, it was decided that non-human mummified remains -- animal, fish and plant -- be automatically taken to the Agricultural Museum for study and storage.
The Ancient Egyptians had many reasons for preserving the bodies of animals, but the mummies tended to fall into three main categories. Some were undoubtedly pets; some, such as pigeons, were preserved and wrapped to serve as food for deceased humans in the afterlife; while the third group, the most important in both numeric and cultural terms, were the cult mummies.
The cult mummies ranged from the Apis Bulls, venerated in life and death, and the crocodile incarnations of the god Sobek -- whose cult was based in Fayoum -- to the cats and sacred ibises which have been found in their hundreds of thousands. It is evident that these creatures were cared for in life, as is seen from the veterinary repair to a broken wing of an ibis described by Cuvier in the 19th century.
AMP hopes the Egyptian Museum exhibition will interest children, who will be able to use this new tool to learn that their ancient forebears had a reverence for animals and kept pets. They also hope to encourage young people to develop an interest in their ancient culture through being able to relate to such information.
Ikram says AMP plans eventually to identify, X-ray, and preserve all the non-human mummies unearthed in Egypt and currently housed in other museums and departments, as well as the thousands discovered and left in situ for want of storage space. However, AUC's joint efforts with the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) are starting at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and an appeal has gone out to Egyptian companies and businessmen to support the project. "There are 30,000 visitors to the Egyptian museum weekly, and many of them are Egyptian," Ikram says. "Once the project gets going it could engender a lot of publicity."
The mummy of a baboon, revered by the Ancient Egyptians as sacred to the god Thoth
Nasri Eskandar, manager of both AMP and the research and restoration centre at the SCA, says the search for information on animal mummies began with a review of old files and all available data on non-human mummies in the museum. "We were astonished to discover that the latest official catalogue dated back nearly a hundred years, to 1905," he said.
Accurate identification could not be made from comparisons of the mummies with the data listed in the 1905 catalogue, but subsequent X-rays revealed, surprisingly, that most of the bones wrapped within the mummies belonged to different species.
X-rays were only invented during World War II, in 1944/5, so earlier identification had, necessarily, either been somewhat superficial -- examining the mummies externally-- or destructive -- viewing the mummy only by destroying the wrappings.
X-rays have now revealed some astonishing results. For example, there were cases where mummies shaped like monkeys held bones of other animals. There were equally carefully wrapped mummies which proved to be fakes, and there were cases where a single snake mummy held three snakes; or squirrel mummies held the bones of mice or even of non-Egyptian species.
"We start with X-rays of the mummies and leave it to zoologists and other specialists to take a more scientific approach to the remains," Eskandar said
AMP is producing a catalogue with full details of the 160 animal mummies in the museum's collection. Eventually the same system will be used on non-human mummies in provincial museums and those locked in store houses on excavation sites. Since there are some 190 archaeological missions currently working in Egypt, and each has unearthed countless objects, the task is more difficult than it sounds.
Project members find the work fascinating. Long hours are needed to identify and examine the mummies, but funds are also needed to continue the research. To this end Ikram came up with a novel idea which, sadly, proved less than successful. She suggested that the 160 mummies listed in the new catalogue be put up for "adoption" via the Internet; with prices for the various species ranging from US$50 to $100. The money would go towards preserving the mummies and installing them in appropriate cases at the right temperature and humidity for their survival.
Disappointed by the lack of response, Ikram subsequently announced that the adoption procedure would be for a limited time only and would end on 14 June. "We need to raise about US$175,000 for the project," she said.
Funds so far have come from a number of sources, chief among them the Bio-anthropology Foundation. "It is hard to raise money for the project simply because so few people care about animals," she said. "In fact, these mummies could be the door to a study of the ancient environment.
"Almost 50 per cent of the Nile fish depicted in ancient reliefs are now extinct. This would be one way to learn about the growth and development of Egyptian civilisation through [its] constant change, both natural and man-made. Information on climate and topography are among the factors that [a study of] non-human mummies could reveal."
AMP, meanwhile, looks forward to the day when the animal mummies scattered in other departments are brought back to where they rightly belong, safe and sound in showcases in the Egyptian Museum.
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