Image credit to Mummy.
Scientists have found a 3,000-year-old mummy in Israel and discovered upon opening it up and studying it that it is not human.
Two ancient Egyptian sarcophagi are believed to contain human remains. One of them has been thought to be a mummified child because it looks like a “small human.”
However, the CT scan revealed a surprise inside. The mummies were not actually human.
One of them was a bird that represented the god Horus and the other “child” mummy was filled with mud and grains in the shape of the god Osiris.
For many decades these two ancient sarcophagi were part of the collection of the National Maritime Museum and although their origins are unknown, the museum’s official records suggest that they contained mummified hearts.
But when a team of CT archaeologists scanned the 3,000-year-old “bird and child” mummies at Rambam Hospital in Haifa, Israel, the remains of the child mummy were found to be a votive offering to Osiris, the Egyptian god of death and lord of the underworld, in the form of a doll filled with clay and grain.
The two mummies date back between 2,500 and 3,000 years and according to a report by the Daily Mail, Rambam’s director of medical imaging, Dr. Marcia Javitt, said the smaller mummy was “bird-like.”
It also contained a mummified bird, probably a falcon, which symbolized Horus, the ancient Egyptian god of royalty and the sky.
The larger of the two mummies looked like “a boy” and was discovered to be in fact a hand-made doll made of plant material representing the God Osiris and this artifact according to Ron Hillel of the Haifa museums, is known as the “grain mummy” or “corn mummy”.
In ancient Egypt, when a mummy was placed in its tomb, mummified artifacts and animals were also added to symbolically protect the mummified remains and the journey of its soul to the afterlife.
Researchers say it is possible that these two mummies were buried in the “Tomb of the Pharaoh” as an offering to the Gods on behalf of the deceased.
Guardians of a deceased Pharaoh?
Dr. Javitt said the ancient Egyptians mummified a number of animals including cats, crocodiles, and fish as votive offerings and food for the afterlife, but birds played a very important role after death in ancient Egypt.
They were considered “protective” beings so he often placed mummified birds and bird-shaped artifacts inside the Pharaoh’s tombs.
And while Dr. Javitt makes it clear that he is not saying this mummified bird definitely came from a pharaoh’s tomb, he said, “It is conceivable that it has something to do with that kind of story.”
The research team combined conventional CT scanning with state-of-the-art dual-energy CT scanning, also known as “spectral CT,” which is a density-revealing CT scan.
Dr Javitt said: “With mummies the bones become less dense, the tissues become dehydrated and it’s nothing like scanning a living human animal or other creature because the tissue relationships are very different.
However, dual-energy CT allowed researchers to measure the atomic number of tissue that doesn’t depend on hydration or condition — “it’s elementary,” Dr. Javitt said.
This new research has revealed a lot about how these two ancient mummies were made, and it is known that they symbolically helped the soul of a deceased Egyptian after death.
Since the ancient Egyptians believed in the immortality of the soul, the moment of death was considered a temporary interruption in a journey, rather than what it is today: the cessation of life.
And to ensure the continuity of life after death, people paid homage to the gods during and after their life on earth.
However, what these two mummies represented is only part of the story and Dr. Javitt and her colleagues at the museum told reporters that they plan to return to work next week with the specific goal of determining the origin of the mummy pair.
And to solve the mystery of exactly whose soul they were designed to protect the mummies of children and birds, the doctor said she and her team will work as “anatomical and archaeological detectives” until all remaining questions are answered. Source
