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The oldest and most detailed papyrus 'manual' describing Egyptian mummification practices has been discovered within the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg.
Ancient Egyptian manual reveals new details about mummification

Based on a manual recently discovered in a 3,500-year-old medical papyrus, University of Copenhagen Egyptologist Sofie Schiødt has been able to help reconstruct the embalming process used to prepare ancient Egyptians for the afterlife. It is the oldest surviving manual on mummification yet discovered. ...

Egyptologists were therefore surprised to find a short manual on embalming in a medical text that is primarily concerned with herbal medicine and swellings of the skin. ...

Many descriptions of embalming techniques that we find in this papyrus have been left out of the two later manuals, and the descriptions are extremely detailed. ...

The importance of the Papyrus Louvre-Carlsberg manual in reconstructing the embalming process lies in its specification of the process being divided into intervals of four, with the embalmers actively working on the mummy every four days.

A ritual procession of the mummy marked these days, celebrating the progress of restoring the deceased’s corporeal integrity, amounting to 17 processions over the course of the embalming period. ...

Based on the palaeography, that is, the sign forms, the six metre long papyrus is dated to approximately 1450 BC, which means that it predates the only two other examples of embalming texts by more than a thousand years. ...

FULL STORY: https://news.ku.dk/all_news/2021/02/ancient-egyptian-manual-reveals-new-details-about-mummification/
 
22 Royal mummies are paraded through Cairo streets to their new home.


In the old days the mummies would have paraded themselves.

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New scans of, what was thought to be the mummy of a male priest, have revealed it to be the only known mummy of a pregnant woman.

"A team of Polish scientists have revealed the only known example of an embalmed pregnant Egyptian mummy.

The discovery was made by researchers at the Warsaw Mummy Project and revealed in the Journal of Archaeological Science on Thursday.

The project, started in 2015, uses technology to examine artefacts housed at the National Museum in Warsaw.

The mummy was previously thought to be a male priest but scans reveal it was a woman in the later stages of pregnancy."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-56926005
 
Initial analyses of a mummy discovered at the Saqqara necropolis suggest Old Kingdom mummification included techniques previously believed to have originated a millennium later. If C14 and other tests confirm these suggestive results, it would essentially rewrite our understanding of the history of Egyptian funerary capabilities. These additional tests are expected to take another 6 - 8 months.
Richly Adorned Egyptian Tomb Could Rewrite the History of Mummification

A new analysis of a Fifth-Dynasty official’s mummy suggests sophisticated embalming techniques are 1,000 years older than previously believed

A new analysis of an ancient Egyptian mummy suggests that sophisticated techniques for preserving the dead may be 1,000 years older than previously believed. The discovery centers on the tomb of a high-ranking Old Kingdom official known as Khuwy ...

Archaeologists excavated the mummy at the Saqqara necropolis, south of Cairo, in 2019. Hieroglyphs on the wall of the tomb where the deceased was laid to rest show that the burial took place during the Fifth Dynasty period, which spanned the early 25th to mid-24th century B.C.E. Pottery and jars used to store body parts removed during the man’s mummification also appear to date to the time of the Old Kingdom.

... [R]esearchers previously believed that high-quality linen dressings and resin of the kind employed in Khuwy’s mummification weren’t used until much later. ...

“Until now, we had thought that Old Kingdom mummification was relatively simple, with basic desiccation—not always successful—no removal of the brain, and only occasional removal of the internal organs,” Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at the American University in Cairo, tells the Observer. “Indeed, more attention was paid to the exterior appearance of the deceased than the interior.”

Ikram and her colleagues are set to share their initial findings in an upcoming episode of the National Geographic series “Lost Treasures of Egypt.” The team plans to conduct additional tests on the mummy, investigating the possibility that it may not be Khuwy, or that the tomb was repurposed for a different burial much later.

“I remain hesitant until we can conduct carbon-14 dating,” Ikram tells the National.

She adds, “If this is indeed the mummy of Khuwy, this will truly be a unique discovery that dramatically shifts our understanding of the history of the Old Kingdom.” ...
FULL STORY: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...ues-may-be-much-older-than-thought-180978929/

See Also: https://www.sciencealert.com/analys...mpletely-rewrite-the-history-of-mummification
 
Very interesting updates on the mummies of KV55 and 35. That image of the Elder Lady at 1:30:34 = brrr.

After Akhenaten: Nefertiti, Smenkhkare, and where were they all buried​

lecture by Dr Chris Naunton.
 
New scans of, what was thought to be the mummy of a male priest, have revealed it to be the only known mummy of a pregnant woman.

"A team of Polish scientists have revealed the only known example of an embalmed pregnant Egyptian mummy.

The discovery was made by researchers at the Warsaw Mummy Project and revealed in the Journal of Archaeological Science on Thursday.

The project, started in 2015, uses technology to examine artefacts housed at the National Museum in Warsaw.

The mummy was previously thought to be a male priest but scans reveal it was a woman in the later stages of pregnancy."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-56926005
More findings about this mummy.

A team of researchers with the Warsaw Mummy Project, has announced on their webpage that a mummy in their collection that has come to be known as the Mysterious Lady may have had nasopharyngeal cancer.

The mummy, which made headlines last year when researchers discovered she had been pregnant at the time of her death, was found in Thebes (now called Luxor) in Egypt sometime in the early part of the 19th century and was subsequently donated to the University of Warsaw in 1826. The sarcophagus holding the mummy was only recently opened for study.


One of the first things researchers on the team noticed when they opened the sarcophagus was that the mummy was female—all signs on the outer part of the coffin had indicated that it held a male priest. More work showed that the mummy was from the first century BCE and that she had also been pregnant at the time of her death (the first ever mummy found in such condition), though that finding has been called into question by others in the field. In this new effort, the researchers have been focusing on the mummy's head.

In taking X-rays and CT scans of the head and using them to create 3D representations of the skull, the researchers found what they describe as possible evidence of nasopharyngeal cancer—a type of cancer that originates in the back of the nose and in the throat. They also found what they describe as a hole behind the left eye, possible evidence of a metastatic tumor. They go on to suggest that if the woman did have neoplastic disease, it could have led to her death.

https://phys.org/news/2022-07-mummy-mysterious-lady-nose-throat.html
 
Maybe the the greatest ancient Egyptian mystery of all.

When King Tut ( Tutankhamun ) pharaoh 1332 to 1323 BCE was unwrapped in 1925, a 34 centimeter dagger decorated in gold was with the mummy.

The mystery is that the dagger was made from a meteor that fell to earth.

Unable to melt the meteor, a blacksmith hammered the meteor in the dagger shape.

It is thought that the dagger was a gift from the ancient Mitanni Empire Princess, Tadukhipa.

The “ curse of Tut “ killed 9 people, so the “ boy king “ got his revenge.

Skeptics just claim these 9 people just had bad luck in normal living, cancer, blood poisoning, old age, and normal diseases.
 
An upcoming Egyptian mummy exhibition in Manchester will promote the view that ancient Egyptian mummification wasn't aimed at preserving the physical body.
Ancient Egyptian mummification was never intended to preserve bodies, new exhibit reveals

It's long been believed that ancient Egyptians used mummification as a way to preserve a body after death. However, an upcoming museum exhibition indicates that was never the case, and instead the elaborate burial technique was actually a way to guide the deceased toward divinity.

Researchers from the University of Manchester's Manchester Museum in England are highlighting the common misconception as part of preparations for an exhibition called "Golden Mummies of Egypt" that opens early next year. This new understanding about mummification's intended purpose essentially upends much of what is taught to students about mummies.

"It's a big 180," Campbell Price (opens in new tab), the museum's curator of Egypt and Sudan, told Live Science.

So, how exactly did this misconception flourish for so long? Price said the Western-led idea began with Victorian researchers who wrongly determined that ancient Egyptians were preserving their dead in a similar fashion as one would preserve fish. Their reasoning? Both processes contained a similar ingredient: salt. ...

"The idea was that you preserve fish to eat at some future time," Price said. "So, they assumed that what was being done to the human body was the same as the treatment for fish." ...

However, the salty substance used by ancient Egyptians differed from salt used to preserve the catch of the day. Known as natron, this naturally occurring mineral (a blend of sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride and sodium sulfate) was abundant around lake beds near the Nile and served as a key ingredient in mummification.

"We also know that natron was used in temple rituals [and applied to] the statues of gods," Price said. "It was used for cleansing."

Price said that another material commonly associated with mummies is incense, which also served as a gift to the gods.

"Look at frankincense and myrrh — they're in the Christian story of Jesus and were gifts from the three wise men," Price said. "In ancient Egyptian history, we've found that they were also appropriate gifts for a god." ...

He added, "Even the word for incense in ancient Egyptian was 'senetjer' and literally means 'to make divine.' When you're burning incense in a temple, that's appropriate because that's the house of a god and makes the space divine. But then when you're using incense resins on the body, you're making the body divine and into a godly being. You're not necessarily preserving it."

Like Egyptians, Victorian Egyptologists also believed that the deceased would need their bodies in the afterlife, which added more credence to the misunderstanding of mummification.

"It didn't help that there was a biomedical obsession that was born from Victorian ideas about needing your body complete in the afterlife," Price said. "This included removing the internal organs. I think that actually has a somewhat deeper meaning…and is basically about turning the body into a divine statue because the dead person has been transformed."

Archaeologists often find mummies placed with a sarcophagus that shows the likeness of the deceased. ...

"In English, a mask is something that obscures your identification; a portrait reveals identity," Price said. "Those objects, panels and masks give an idealized image to the divine form." ...

"Golden Mummies of Egypt" will be on display at the Manchester Museum beginning Feb. 18, 2023. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/ancient-egyptians-mummification-purpose-divinity
 
... Archaeologists working at a burial site in Egypt have unearthed ancient mummies with golden tongues. ...

The archaeologists discovered ... "amulets of gold foil in the form of a tongue that were placed in the mouth of the mummy." This, they believe, was a special ritual to ensure the dead could speak to the court of the god Osiris in the afterlife. ...

This new ScienceAlert article describes additional golden tongue discoveries and provides more details about the leading speculations about their use. Nonetheless, the golden tongues remain something of a mystery.
Mummies With Golden Tongues Discovered in Ancient Egyptian Necropolis

Archaeologists have discovered several ancient mummies in Egypt sporting gold chips where their tongues should be.

The auspicious discovery was made at the Quweisna (sometimes spelled Quesna) necropolis in the central Nile Delta. Discovered in 1989, the site is thought to have been occupied during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, which stretched from about 300 BCE to 640 CE.

The golden-tongued mummies were unearthed in a newly discovered extension of the archaeological compound, where numerous other bodies were interred across three different time periods in ancient Egypt.

Some of the unearthed skeletons have their bones glazed in gold, while others have simply been buried near gold-shaped scarabs and lotus flowers.

The golden tongues are a bit of a puzzle, even though they've been found before.

At the start of 2021, researchers digging at a 2,000-year-old site in Egypt uncovered a skull with a gleaming tongue-shaped ornament framed in its yawning mouth. ...

Today, a person with a 'silver tongue' is a most persuasive speaker, but in ancient Egypt, experts think a golden tongue was necessary to get on the good side of the lord and judge of the underworld, Osiris.

Like Hades, Osiris also lived among the dead, and he enforced a strict rule of speechlessness. In fact, the underworld in ancient Egypt was sometimes known as 'the Silent Land', and Osiris himself was called 'the Lord of Silence'.

Osiris apparently loathed noise, which is why during funerary arrangements in ancient Egypt, it is thought that silence was enforced. Only when the mouth of a mummy was opened in preparation for the afterlife was any music played or sound made.

Perhaps the introduction of a golden tongue allowed mummies to speak to Osiris without making any noise. But if that's the case, then why are only some mummies buried with golden tongues? ...
FULL STORY (With Photos): https://www.sciencealert.com/mummies-with-golden-tongues-discovered-in-ancient-egyptian-necropolis
 
Golden amulets to speed him along the road to the afterlife.

Wealthy ancient Egyptians were given scores of amulets when they were mummified in the hope it would speed their journey to the afterlife, a study suggests.

Scientists have “digitally unwrapped” the mummified body of a wealthy ancient Egyptian “golden boy” from 2,300 years ago and found 49 amulets of 21 different types on him.


The boy, who is believed to have been 14 or 15 when he died, was about 4ft 2in tall and is believed to have died of natural causes.

Ancient Egyptians believed in an afterlife to which entry was not guaranteed. People needed to undertake a perilous journey through the underworld before a final judgment, with friends and relatives doing everything they could to ensure their loved one reached a happy destination.

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Scientists in Egypt used CT scans to make the amulets discovery.

The study’s first author Dr Sahar Saleem, from Cairo University, said: “Here we show that this mummy’s body was extensively decorated with 49 amulets, beautifully stylised in a unique arrangement of three columns between the folds of the wrappings and inside the mummy’s body cavity.

“These include the Eye of Horus, the scarab, the akhet amulet of the horizon, the placenta, the Knot of Isis and others.

https://www.ireland-live.ie/news/uk...49-amulets-to-speed-journey-to-afterlife.html
 
Best look yet into ancient Egyptians' mummy-making chemicals

Despite autopsies or X-ray scans, archaeologists are stumped on how ancient Egyptians actually mummified humans. A new study published today in the journal Nature provides an answer for how they mastered this complex process. By studying the residues left on a set of embalming pots, a team of archaeologists identified chemical mixtures used to preserve the dead.

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In the current study, the authors studied the contents of ceramic vessels from an embalming workshop in Saqqara, Egypt. “This archaeological site in Saqqara is the only mummification workshop ever discovered in Egypt,” says Sahar Saleem, a mummy expert and radiology professor at Cairo University.

Found a few meters south of the pyramid of King Unas, the underground workshop is dated around 664-525 B.C.E. The team found 121 beakers and bowls marked with embalming instructions, such as for preparing linen bandages or for specific body parts.

The authors studied the chemical makeup from residues left on nine beakers and 22 red bowls. They identified a large diversity of natural substances from plant oils and bitumens (natural petroleum) to resins and animal fats. Sixty percent of the vessels contained remnants of juniper or cypress. The second most commonly found product was cedar oil or tar, which were found in over half of the pots.

Some ceramics contained blends of different chemicals. For example, one container had ricinoleic acid (a type of fatty acid used in soap) mixed with oleic acid (fatty acid found in animal and vegetable fats and oils) and possibly castor oil. The authors suggest that this combination of ingredients was used as an antiseptic and antifungal agent to preserve human tissue and reduce unpleasant smells. Bitumens, tars, resins, and beeswax have hydrophobic and adhesive properties that when made into balms could be applied onto bandages to seal skin pores and remove moisture.

The bowls were engraved with instructions for specific steps in the embalming process. Eight were designated for head treatment and, to the authors’ knowledge, this was the first time elemi oil or tar of juniper-cypress was found as ingredients for embalming the head. Some bowls contained markers of oil or tar of conifer to ‘to wash’ the body while another bowl labeled ‘to make his odor pleasant’ showed signs of animal fat and degraded resin. To preserve the skin, ancient Egyptians used a bowl of animal fat mixed with heated beeswax as a kind of moisturizing ointment.

https://www.popsci.com/science/ancient-egyptians-mummification-chemistry/

maximus otter
 
Maybe their mummies had them on a bad diet?

Anemia was common in mummified ancient Egyptian children, according to a new study that analyzed child mummies in European museums.

Researchers used computed tomography (CT) scans to peer non-invasively through the mummies' dressings and discovered that one-third of them had signs of anemia; they found evidence of thalassemia in one case, too.

"Our study appears to be the first to illustrate radiological findings not only of the cranial vault but also of the facial bones and postcranial skeleton that indicate thalassemia in an ancient Egyptian child mummy," the team writes in their published paper.

Paleopathologist Stephanie Panzer and her colleagues from Germany, the US, and Italy, suggest that anemia was likely common in ancient Egypt, and it was probably caused by factors such as malnutrition, parasitic infections, and genetic disorders, which still cause the health problem today.

Researchers have even speculated that Tutankhamun died of sickle cell disease, a cause of anemia. However, as the researchers of this new study explain, "the direct evidence of anemia in human remains from ancient Egypt is rare."

Anemia is a condition where the body lacks enough healthy red blood cells to carry oxygen to the body's tissues. As Panzer and colleagues studied child mummies, the remains are more likely to show signs of anemia than adult mummies, due to their early death. ...

https://www.sciencealert.com/egyptian-child-mummies-reveal-high-prevalence-of-an-ancient-sickness
 

Egypt unearths mummification workshops, tombs in ancient burial ground


SAQQARA, Egypt (Reuters) - Egypt unearthed human and animal mummification workshops as well as two tombs in the ancient burial ground of Saqqara, officials said on Saturday, marking the latest in a string of discoveries that the country hopes can help revive its vital tourism industry.

Mostafa Waziri, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told reporters that the two large "embalming workshops" date back to the 30th dynasty (380-343 BC) and the Ptolemaic (305-30 BC) eras.

The discovery was made after a year-long excavation near the sanctuary of the goddess Bastet, which is home to the catacombs of mummified cats in Saqqara, some 30 kilometres (18.6 miles)south of Cairo.

It was the same spot where hundreds of mummified animals and statues were uncovered in 2019.

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"We found embalming workshops, one for humans and one for animals. We found all the tools that they used (in mummification) in ancient times," Waziri said.

Both workshops featured stone beds, clay pots, ritual vessels, natron salt, which is one of the main ingredients for mummification, and linens among other mummification instruments.

The country plans to inaugurate the Grand Egyptian Museum, a state-of-the-art facility near the Giza Pyramids on the outskirts of Cairo, after construction is completed later this year.

https://news.yahoo.com/egypt-unearths-mummification-workshops-tombs-132904002.html

maximus otter
 
The mummy of a young Egyptian man, dating from 1st century AD.
As was the tradition for wealthier families at the time, his mummy/casket bears his portrait on the wrapping.
The eyes are so expressive. I wonder why he died so young?

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The mummy of a young Egyptian man, dating from 1st century AD.
As was the tradition for wealthier families at the time, his mummy/casket bears his portrait on the wrapping.
The eyes are so expressive. I wonder why he died so young?

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People died young a lot back then, from all kinds of maladies.
That painting looks so fresh and untouched by time.

Edit: It looks like the paint might be pigmented wax painted onto a board prepared with some kind of white gesso. Very similar to Roman paintings of the time.
 
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Apparently the bodies inside weren't always necessarily young but that the portrait often showed someone at their prime (as decided by the grieving family, I presume). I absolutely love this era of mummy portraiture though as the faces are so real and expressive.
 
Today's Quora has a feature on modern Egyptians who look uncannily like ancient Egyptian artwork on mummy-cases or statues.
How little, if at all, we've changed over thousands of years!

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Heaven scent.

Scientists have identified the aromatic ancient recipe that preserved an Egyptian noblewoman who was mummified around 1450 BCE, meticulously recreating 'the scent of eternity'.

Advances in chemical analysis technology enabled detection of individual substances in balm residue from once-sealed canopic jars that stored the mummified organs.

In ancient Egypt, mummification was the ultimate art form for preserving the dearly departed for nearly 4000 years, part of intricate burial practices that we know of thanks to artifacts left behind.

Although ancient Egyptian texts are fascinating, there are few written sources addressing this sacred process, and those that do have left us in the dark about the recipe's specifics.

"'The scent of eternity' represents more than just the aroma of the mummification process," notes archaeologist Barbara Huber from Germany's Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology.

"It embodies the rich cultural, historical, and spiritual significance of Ancient Egyptian mortuary practices."

https://www.sciencealert.com/scent-of-eternity-scientists-reveal-fragrant-aroma-of-ancient-mummy
 
The Australian Museum in Sydney is currently hosting an exhibition called 'Ramses & the Gold of the Pharoahs' which is a display on loan from Egypt of approximately 180 treasures from the life and tomb of Ramses II, his wives, relatives & officials.
Whilst the Pharoah himself didn't make the trip, his stunning coffin did and I took these few images of it when I visited on Tuesday afternoon.
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The Australian Museum in Sydney is currently hosting an exhibition called 'Ramses & the Gold of the Pharoahs' which is a display on loan from Egypt of approximately 180 treasures from the life and tomb of Ramses II, his wives, relatives & officials.
Whilst the Pharoah himself didn't make the trip, his stunning coffin did and I took these few images of it when I visited on Tuesday afternoon.
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Thanks for the pictures, LL. All the reviews have been very positive. I've managed to squeeze in a booking for mid-December and I'm very much looking forward to it. Always been a big fan of things ancient Egyptian.
 
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