Archaeologists found a hunting dog and a baboon buried together in an ancient Egyptian tomb in the Valley of the Kings near Thebes. The animals died around 1400 b.c.; yet they were

so well preserved that they still have

their fur. How is that possible? The dog and baboon are mummies.

Mummies are bodies that have stayed largely intact for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians are well-known for mummifying humans, but scientists are discovering that they created mummies of the animal sort—cats, rams, crocodiles, birds,

and many other creatures—even more frequently.

“Animal mummies are the most commonly preserved artifacts from ancient Egypt,” says Edward Bleiberg, curator of Egyptian, classical, and ancient Middle Eastern art at New

York City’s Brooklyn Museum. “There are millions of them.” And each mummy has its own story to tell.

Ancient trAditionsNormally, a dead body decays

until it’s nothing but bones. That’s

because bacteria in the body, together with insects and ani-mals, feed on the body’s organs, soft tissues, and fluids, causing them to decom-pose, or break down.

Science World 98 October 18, 2010

Biology MuMMification

the MAking of A huMAn MuMMy

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NATRON

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Workers cut open the corpse’s torso and removed the organs. Only the heart remained, because it was believed to control thoughts and feelings in the afterlife. IL

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The Egyptians went to great lengths to mummify dead animals

Ancient Pets Preserved

Workers washed the body with bacteria-killing chemicals and dried it with a salt called natron. After 40 days, they removed the salt and rubbed the body with oils.

3 They wrapped the body with linen strips and poured resins onto the strips to further dry the body. Some-times workers placed the mummy in a stone coffin called a sarcophagus.

4They pushed a long iron hook up the nostrils, scrambled up the brain, and scooped out its pieces. They let the rest of the brain drain out through the nostrils.

21

WORK OF ART: The outside of this cat mummy was fashioned and painted to look like the animal held inside.

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ROYAL BURIAL: This pet gazelle was buried in a wooden coffin alongside its owner—an Egyptian queen.

pHARAOH’S pET: After more than 3,000 years, this mummified dog’s bandages are long gone, but its fur still remains.

unlocking new secretsResearchers say they can learn

a lot about the ancient Egyptians from examining animal mummies.

CT scans can show scientists how the Egyptians treated the animals when alive, and if and how they killed them. “[That] would give us a better understanding of the Egyptian culture,” says Elias.

Scientists are also inves-tigating whether the ancient Egyptians used the same process to make both animal mummies and human mum-mies. Researchers, for exam-ple, don’t know if the organs of animal mummies were always removed.

One thing scientists have learned already is that the Egyptians were logical think-ers. Through trial and error, they continued to improve their mummy-making pro-cess over time. One of these improvements was their for-mula for making resins.

“They were able to do experiments just like we do,” says Bleiberg. “They observed the results of what they had

done and learned to improve the pro-cess over time. They understood the scientific method.”

—Jennifer Marino Walters

ancient Egyptians. But until recently, few people studied them. The reason: It is very difficult to see what is inside the mummies without ruining them.

In the 1800s, researchers simply unwrapped mummies, destroying them in the process. “Unwrapping a mummy is not as simple as peeling a banana,” says Bleiberg. “It’s very hard to get the wrappings off because of the resins that have been poured

into them. So very often the body was damaged.” A body can also

decay once it is unwrapped. In the 1930s, research-

ers began to use X-rays to try to see what was inside mummies. However, the images were not com-pletely clear.

Today, scientists exam-ine mummies using high-

tech digital X-rays called computed tomography, or

CT, scans. The scans give the researchers clear, 3-D images of

a mummy’s insides without the sar-cophagus being pried open or the

linens being destroyed. “The body is completely undisturbed,

and we get to see the way it looked when the ancient

Egyptians prepared it,” says Bleiberg.

see-through scAns

CT scanning a mummy is no small feat. Five to eight people carefully pack the mummy and transport it by van to a nearby hospital. They bring the mummy in on a

gurney, just like they

fied as offerings to gods, or because the Egyptians believed that the spirit of a god lived within the animal.

MuMMies under wrAPsExperts believe that animal mum-

mies were very important to the

The ancient Egyptians believed that a being would live forever in an afterlife if its body was preserved. Around 2600 b.c., they developed a way to slow down the decaying pro-cess. They began to mummify human remains using a complex procedure that killed bacteria and dried out the body so microorganisms couldn’t grow (see Nuts & Bolts, p. 8).

About a thousand years later—around 1500 b.c.—Egyptian mummy makers turned to animal subjects as well. Some animals were mummi-fied to serve as food in the afterlife for Egyptians who had died. Mummified pets were placed in their owners tombs to accompany them to the afterlife. Other animals were mummi-

EXcAVATEd: A dig near cairo, Egypt, uncovered a tomb containing ape skulls and hawk mummies.

would a live patient. Then they slide the mummy into the hospital’s doughnut-shaped CT scanner on a board.

The CT scanner has detec-tors all the way around it. The detectors circle the mummy in a spiral pattern, shooting it with high-energy waves (X-rays). The scanner takes approximately 1,500 images of the preserved remains.

“The X-rays go all the way through the mummy, cap-turing the mummy in three dimensions,” says Jonathan Elias, director of the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “We can capture everything about that mummy on film.”

Scientists have been using CT scans on human mummies since 1975. They began using the technology on animal mummies about five years later. Although X-rays remain the most common method for studying mummified animals, more and more scientists are using CT scans on animal mummies. The process is the same as with human mummies, but scanning is usually much quicker with preserved animals. Imaging a small animal mummy takes only seconds, while scanning a human mummy takes about five minutes.

Although animal mummies may be faster to image than human mummies, it is more challenging to see inside them—even with such high-tech tools. “When the ancient Egyptians made animal mummies, they tended to fold the limbs inward, all bunched up,” says Elias. “So the mummies are very dense, making it hard to see what’s going on.” The tiny size of many animals also makes the CT scans more difficult to read.

10 October 18, 2010 Science World 11

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C so pets could be with their owners in the afterlife

D all of the above

3. How do cT scans help scien-tists study animal mummies?

A They make the mummies less fragile.

B They can detect where mummies are in tombs.

C They tell how old the mummies are.

D They provide a clearer image of mummies’ bodies than an X-ray.

ScANNEd BIRd: A cT scan (top) provides a detailed image of a mummified kestral (bottom).

INSIdE VIEW: An X-ray (right) of a linen-wrapped mummy topped with a bronze ibis head (left) shows the skeleton of the bird inside.