Cats got the pharaoh treatment
2004-09-15 21:53
Paris - The ancient Egyptians put as much care into mummifying their animals as they did to their kings and relatives, according to a study published on Thursday in the British scientific journal Nature.
Countless mammals, birds and reptiles were killed and mummified as a votive offering to the gods they represented, a cult that accelerated from 1400 BC under the pharaoh Amenhotep III.
The goddess Bastet was embodied by the the cat; Horus was represented by the falcon or baboon; Thoth was symbolised by the ibis; and Sobek was worshipped in the form of a crocodile, and so on.
Millions of animals preserved
So many millions of animals were preserved that many experts assume that, in order to meet demand, the Egyptians used a fast-track mummification process - essentially, wrapping the creature in coarse linen bandages and then plunging it into a vat of resin before it expired.
Not so, according to a team of British organic chemists.
They applied the latest forensic tools of chromatography and mass spectrometry to gain a chemical fingerpint from tissues and wrappings from mummified cats, hawks and ibises dated from the ninth to the fourth centuries BC.
Wide range of substances used
It revealed that the mummifiers carefully used a wide range of substances, some of them precious and costly, for ensuring that the animals' mortal remains would endure.
The materials included oils, fats, bitumens, beeswax, as well as pine and possibly cedar resins.
"The mixture of balms is of comparable complexity to those used to mummify humans," the impressed scientists say.
The study is lead-authored by Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol, western England.