The BBC estimates that between 800 BC and the papist times , Egyptians mummified as many as70 million animalsfor religious offerings .
" creature mummies were votive gifts . Today you ’d have a candle in a cathedral ; in Egyptian clip you would have an creature mummy , ” said Dr. Campbell Price , curator of Egypt and Sudan , at Manchester Museum . In many ways , the mummies were just another business — something almost everyone would necessitate to buy at one full point or another .
" You would go to a peculiar site , grease one’s palms an animal mama , using a system of barter . You ’d then give it to a priest , who would amass a chemical group of animal mummies and bury them , ” Price explain . But despite a consecrated program of breeding and killing brute specifically for dry gangrene , it was knockout to keep up with the demand .
So the mummifiers started snub corners . Or so it seems , based onnew researchout of Manchester Museum and the University of Manchester .
Over 800 specimens — array from cats and birds to crocodiles — were ladder through X - rays and CT scans for a project keep an eye on by the BBC ’s Horizon program . And what they found was n’t quite what they were await .
" There have been some surprisal , ” sound out Dr. Lidija McKnight , an Egyptologist from the University of Manchester . About a third of the 800 contain remarkably well - preserved animal mummies , just as the wrapping would have one believe . Another third bear fond cadaver . And the net third ? Nothing much .
" fundamentally , constitutive material such as clay , sticks and reeds , that would have been lying around the embalmer ' workshops , and also thing like eggshells and plume , which were associated with the fauna , but are n’t the animal themselves , ” McKnight say .
Dr. Price does n’t think that this necessarily indicates an ancient scam in which the embalmer passed off bundle of junk for spiritually - important tokens . Rather , he speculates that they were turning to " material associated with the animal during their lifespan " when parentage bunk low and that this was a compromise the lamentation customers would have been cognizant of . recall of it as the Ancient Egyptian equivalent of buying a pink - off interior designer purse .
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