Original subtitles

In 1871, three Egyptian brothers,

Mohammed, Ahmed, and Hussein El Rasul,

were scrambling up a steep cliff path in the western desert

when they came across a secret

that had remained hidden for 3,000 years

Several boulders had shifted

to reveal a narrow cleft in the base of the rocks

Clambering inside,

they discovered a shaft 12 meters deep

And at the bottom, a tiny man-made passageway

The brothers crawled into the blackness

and uncovered something they would never forget

Dozens of mummified bodies

One of them was discovered to be a high priestess

and daughter of a pharaoh

Her name was Maat Kare

But Maat Kare was not buried alone

At her feet was an infant-sized bundle

For over 100 years, it was presumed

Maat Kare had died in childbirth,

her baby buried with her

But modern medical techniques revealed the bundle

to be something very different

We'd always thought it was a child,

but the x-ray showed that in fact,

it contains a green monkey and not a baby at all

The brothers' discovery was yet another episode

in centuries of interest in Egyptian mummies

both human and animal

Since then, thousands of animal mummies

have been found in Egyptian tombs

Now experts are applying

21st-century science and technology

to look inside these animal mummies

These mummies give an insight

into understanding the relationship

between human beings and animals

Animals were magical creatures who could speak to the gods

And new techniques are helping archaeologists

to expose the shocking reality

at the heart of this ancient ritual

"Animal Mummies," right now on NOVA.

In the dead of night

at the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital,

medical experts are at work

not on the living, but on the ancient dead

Radiographers and Egyptologists working here

are collecting information on hundreds of animal mummies,

the biggest survey of its kind in history

The team works at night in order to have access

to imaging technology normally reserved for patients

They use these cutting-edge tools

to see inside the mummies without damaging them

First on the x-ray table this evening is a small bundle

that's usually on display at Manchester Museum

It was made in southern Egypt between 664 and 332 B C

Next, a CT scanner

takes hundreds of x-ray images or slices

from 360 degrees around the mummy

These images are combined

to create a three-dimensional model

It brings up nice definition of the wrappings,

doesn't it, the CT?

Yeah

And before your very eyes

Oh!

There we are

What a rodent

He's got very, very prominent incisors

but then he's got a space until you reach the molars

He couldn't be a shrew, could be?

Possibly

LIDIJA McKNIGHT: To be able to look at the inside of something that was wrapped

possibly two-and-a-half thousand years ago

in the deserts of ancient Egypt

is absolutely astounding,

and it never, ever fails to amaze me what we find

when we have scanning sessions at the hospital

There's always something that's a little bit surprising,

and that's what makes every mummy different

Egyptologists have long been fascinated

by the bizarre practice of animal mummification

During the 19th and 20th centuries,

hundreds of such mummies were unwrapped,

including at least two for a 1970s documentary

The wrappings contain dozens of creatures

including cats, crocodiles,

hawks and wading birds, snakes, shrews, and even fish

But unwrapping the mummies in this way

completely destroyed them,

and much of the information they contained was lost

Every mummy is unique,

and it's impossible to know what's in it

until it's been scanned

This mummified rodent has been made in two parts

McKNIGHT: So we've got the main mummy bundle here,

and then on its back, we've got the secondary package

which is sort of fixed to the top

So if we scroll through,

we should see if there's anything

Is there anything in it?

McKNIGHT: No, it just goes

So it could have been constructed just of linen

But why would you put an empty linen bundle

onto a mummy of a tiny shrew?

Because we did think that would contain something

McKNIGHT: Basically looking for anything that could be grain,

which is what it's always been presumed,

that the little package contained a food offering

for the rodent in the afterlife

But we certainly can't see anything on this scan

With or without grain, the backpack was there

to help this little animal's journey into the afterlife

The ancient Egyptians believed that animals, like humans,

had a soul that survived death

It's quite clear that for the ancient Egyptians,

death was simply a transition into another world

that replicated life on earth

For instance, the bases of some coffins

have maps of the afterlife

so the deceased would know just where to go

to find their way through into the next world

Whether human or animal, by mummifying a body,

the ancient Egyptians believed they were providing the soul

with a physical vessel for its journey to the afterlife

Mummification is very important for animals

just as it is for humans

because that is the act which makes sure that

they can make it from this life to the next and live forever

Nice and gentle

There we go

Oh!

McKNIGHT: That's cute

Back at the hospital, the team is scanning a crocodile mummy

McKNIGHT: He's a lovely one, I like him

He's got a very unnatural shape, though,

because he's quite short

Do the scan now, and in we go

Continuing the Victorian obsession of mummy collecting,

this specimen found its way into the Manchester Museum

via German collector Maximile Robineau,

who visited Egypt in 1896

Its exact contents have remained a secret

for thousands of years, until now

McKNIGHT: Well!

Didn't expect that, did we?

So we had what looked like

a complete crocodile mummy bundle,

so we were expecting one crocodile

And we've got four skulls in a line

It's picking something up here and there

Oh, yeah, what's that?

So there's something else in there as well

Hmm

Oh! There we go!

There you go!

There's your little crocodile

Oh look, a complete one

A complete crocodile,

and just look, there's one there

Oh, wow

So that's one, two, three

So how many in total, do you think?

Four skulls and four babies

Yeah, four baby crocs and four

Oh, eight

Eight all in one

But the question is,

why on earth would you have eight individual crocodiles

represented in one quite small mummy?

Each mummy should have one animal

They have got crocodile mummies where they've buried babies

with an adult one, haven't they?

But I mean, these aren't adult sized, are they?

They're still quite small,

and then there's sort of hatchling ones

That's interesting

The scan reveals more

There's evidence of tricks of the embalmer's trade

McKNIGHT: So they've used the stick or a reed to create the shape

Of course, you've not got the complete skeleton

to provide shape and rigidity

Obviously, a great amount of time and effort

has gone into producing what looks like a complete crocodile

from bits and pieces, essentially

Whoever mummified these eight crocodiles

did so with considerable care and attention

to ensure their souls made it to the afterlife

And we know that for very important animals,

like Maat Kare's monkey, the process of mummification

could be as involved and complex as it was for humans

Embalming was a highly technical and skilled practice

People specialized in it

It wasn't, "Oh, I'll do it myself

and then take it off and give it to the god"

So you had to go to the temple,

and someone else would do the whole thing for you

The care, attention, and expense lavished on an animal

to help it on its journey to the afterlife

may seem extreme

But there was one creature

whose treatment overshadowed all others

A few kilometers south of Cairo

is one of the most important sites in ancient Egypt:

Saqqara

Overlooking the ancient city of Memphis,

Saqqara was a sacred place five kilometers square

And it was the final resting place

of the most important animal in ancient Egypt

A beast so strong, so powerful, so virile,

it could symbolize the very moment of creation itself

It was called the Apis bull, an animal venerated

since the dawn of ancient Egypt as far back as 3,000 B C

Dr Aidan Dodson of Bristol University

has been studying this bull cult for over 20 years

The bull was very much

a pampered individual

It would be massaged, it would be adorned with flowers,

you know, certainly a life far above the farmyard

Only one sacred Apis bull could exist at any one time,

and when it came to the end of its natural life,

it was given the equivalent of a state funeral

In many ways, the death of one of these sacred bulls

was almost like the death of the king

After taking over two months to mummify,

the bull was then interred in its own huge sarcophagus

alongside the Apis bulls that had lived before it

They're perhaps two meters high,

three, four meters long, absolutely vast things

The burial of a sacred bull like the Apis

clearly involved a vast amount of human effort:

the people who were quarrying the tomb,

those who were making the sarcophagus for it,

those who were doing the embalming process

There's also going to be

all kinds of ceremonial around there

There's probably feasting around it as well

So there is a huge amount of resource being put into this

More than 50 Apis bulls were buried at Saqqara

None of their remains survive,

as they were either stolen or destroyed centuries ago,

but experts do know

an extraordinary amount of care and effort

went into mummifying and burying every one of these great beasts,

making the cult of the Apis bull one of the greatest examples

of devotion to animals in human history

But these bulls weren't the only creatures

the ancient Egyptians venerated

The fertile plains of the Nile Valley

once teemed with animals,

and the people who lived there were fascinated

by their seemingly superhuman abilities

Each type of animal embodying certain powers

that humans didn't have, so this made them special

It almost seemed as if the animals

did have these magic qualities

Cats, for instance, that can see in the dark...

What a brilliant skill to have

So they had great respect for animals

This is because animals had a sort of supernatural sense

of how nature worked

The ancient Egyptians observed that crocodiles

could predict the levels of the Nile's yearly flood

Crocodiles build their nests

just above where the flood will come,

and they do this long in advance of any of the water rising

So by looking at where the crocodiles had made their nests,

the Egyptians could help predict the height of a flood

These seemingly supernatural powers

linked animals to their gods

Animals were able to do things simple humans couldn't

They'd see a falcon, the black outline against the sun,

flying at great heights

which to them appeared to almost touch the sun,

so what better creature to embody, to exemplify

the great sun god Ra than this wonderful falcon?

Baboons are associated with the sun god

because in the morning, just before sunrise,

they turn towards where the sun rises,

stretch up their arms, and make a terrible racket

So the Egyptians thought the baboons

are singing to the sun and helping the sun rise,

and they're protecting the sun from his enemies

Animals were magical creatures who could speak to the gods

Of course, not all of them were sacred,

otherwise they wouldn't eat them or use them to plow the fields

It is only special animals that were regarded as sacred

The ancients believed that one of the creatures

that could communicate with the gods

was a bird commonly found on the banks of the Nile:

the sacred ibis

So we can see that

its skeleton is in the central part of the bundle

In Manchester, the team is scanning an ibis mummy

which likely came from a site in Middle Egypt at Abydos

McKNIGHT: This is a mummy bundle presumed to be that of an ibis

from the external appearance

Ah, there we go, you see?

The sacred ibis bird

has been extinct in Egypt since the 19th century,

but similar species can still be found in Africa

McKNIGHT: So there, we can see the complete skeleton there,

so it's been positioned

with the limbs folded in, the wings folded in,

and then the neck bent all the way back

round the top of the spine

So it's essentially upside down

Yes

The head is down towards the feet

Two-and-a-half thousand years ago,

huge flocks of ibises would migrate to the wetlands

of the Nile Valley when it flooded

The birds were associated

with the Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth,

because their long beaks evoked the crescent moon

Artifacts found buried with sacred ibis birds

provide clues to why the ancient Egyptians mummified them

Written in ancient demotic script,

it's thought these scraps of papyrus date

from between the second and first centuries B C

Archaeologists think they were originally taken

from an area to the south of Saqqara

at another religious site called Tuna el-Gebel

Now the papyri are held

in the storerooms of the British Museum

Carey Martin is an expert in ancient languages

and can translate this demotic text

It's a plea from a son whose father is desperately ill,

and the son is worried that his father's about to die,

and he says to the god, he's praying to the god,

he says, "Look, if my father recovers,

"if he doesn't die of the illness

"that he's currently suffering in,

"I will make an offering for the burial of the sacred ibis

"I will provide money for this

"and I'll provide it on a regular basis

"If my father lives, I will help you,

I will honor you, oh God"

So he's desperate

His father is dangerously ill

He doesn't know what else to do

He's appealing to the gods for help

Pleas to the gods like this one

would have been placed with the animal mummy before burial

An animal mummy

was more potent than anything else

to get your message to the god, because of course

once the animal died and was mummified,

its spirit immediately moved into the land of the gods

So there, it had direct access to the gods

and could take your request to them

and constantly be there saying, you know,

"Hello, God, so and so wants such and such,"

and constantly be there

reminding the god of your request

The divine was an integral part of day-to-day life

It was totally and completely tied up

in their normal existence

And the Egyptians must have had so much faith

in what this mummy would do for them

in terms of the gods granting them their wishes

The ancient Egyptians were using animal mummies

as what are termed votive offerings...

Vessels to carry their pleas to the gods

Votive offerings

are not just something that you see in ancient Egypt

This practice continues today

because votive candles,

which are the same as a votive mummy, really,

are burnt in churches,

and the smoke is supposed to take your prayer off to God

So you can see how organized religion today

still uses the same trope that ancient Egyptians did

Different animals were mummified

to carry pleas to different gods

Just how extensive this practice was

can be revealed at the sacred site of Saqqara

Buried by shifting desert sands,

underground tombs here were lost for nearly two millennia

Professor Paul Nicholson has been excavating

and mapping the Saqqara site for over 20 years

He first entered this tomb in 1995

Now he's returned to explain what he found

We have masses and masses of dog mummy

You can see it piled here to a depth of over a meter,

some thousands of them running back 20 or so meters

to the end of the burial gallery

Originally, we can imagine that most of them

would have been nicely stacked, one on top of the other,

in layers

They would have been well wrapped, soaked in resin

But what's now happened is that that resin has broken down

The bandages have gone to powder

They've been turned over by robbers

so that we're left with only a few complete examples

sitting on the surface of the pile

And this is only one of over 40 galleries

in the catacomb itself

Our estimate is that

there were somewhere between seven and eight millions animals

originally placed in the dog catacomb

It's likely the dog catacombs were in use

for around 500 years, meaning up to 16,000 dogs

were mummified and buried here every year

The dog catacombs are huge

The main corridor is around 170 meters long,

with galleries leading off it every few meters

Originally, each gallery

was a meter and a half deep in dog mummies,

but this catacomb is only one

of at least eight underground animal tombs at Saqqara

filled with up to 15 million animal mummies

of different types

And Saqqara is not the only site

30 more have been found across Egypt

that may have held up to 70 million mummified animals

Most experts believe the vast majority of these animal mummies

were votive offerings

These millions of votive mummies that we have,

each one is the prayer

of an individual,

so they don't just represent a prayer, but they represent

millions and millions of believers

who actually went to the temple, made this dedication

and believed in that god

When animal mummies were given, it was a very formalized system

The person who wanted to give the gift would go to the temple,

talk to a priest and then purchase from the priest...

Because the temples were not foolish...

One kind of animal mummy

and then the priest would be in charge

of dedicating it formally to the god

after, of course, the person had paid the temple

It depends on how much one could afford

Of course if you were elite and noble, you could easily go

and get lots of animal mummies,

or else entire families might club together

so that one mummy would be dedicated,

but with the name of lots of people

From 500 B C, the demand for animal mummification

increased massively

More and more people were drawn towards it

as Egypt's political fortunes changed

It seemed there was a never-ending series of waves

of foreign invasion, which really threatened

their very way of life

And so they sought ways

in which they could best express themselves as a nation,

and what typified the Egyptians above all other nations

was their ability to mummify, to preserve their dead

The Egyptians turned to their religion,

turned to animal mummification

as a kind of means of demonstrating that

to all these foreigners that were coming in

This was a way for them

to define themselves, feel more secure

and establish their identity

To account for the millions of animal mummies found at Saqqara,

experts think that large religious festivals

must have been held there,

attracting pilgrims from across the country

Thousands and thousands of people

would probably flock there for the big celebrations

So you would have lots of people there,

you would have lots of people buying things, selling things,

food, drink, so it would be densely populated, very lively,

noisy, smelly, and it would be really sort of a mass festival,

the same way you have at important shrines nowadays

Early writers suggest hundreds of thousands of pilgrims

were visiting Saqqara,

spending huge amounts on votive offerings

The personal ritual of offering an animal mummy to a god

had become big business

When one looks at the number of sites where animal mummies occur

throughout Egypt, you can tell that this was a massive industry

because you had to have people all over the country

who were rearing different kinds of animals

You have to feed them, you have to look after them

Then there were people who were going to mummify them,

so you need all the materials that were used for mummification

as well as all the personnel

People were expending huge amounts of money

on bandages and paint, plaster, gilding, maybe even glass eyes,

all kinds of stuff in order to produce these animal mummies,

and this had a huge impact on the economy of Egypt

In using animal mummies to carry their pleas to the gods,

the ancient Egyptians transformed

the rare and special act into a mass industry

New imaging techniques have given archaeologists

more insight into why

But now, medical and forensic science is also revealing

how this huge industry actually worked

At Swansea University, material scientist Dr Richard Johnston

is using the latest industrial technology

to study a mummified cat

Little is known about its origins,

but the style of its wrappings suggests it died around 600 B C

The micro CT scanner produces images

with 100 times the resolution of normal CT scans

Zoo archaeologist Dr Richard Thomas

from the University of Leicester can use them to determine

how this cat may have lived and died

And then if we remove the wrappings completely,

so we can just see the bones then

Fantastic!

I mean it's amazingly clear

The scans are so detailed

they allow a 3-D printer to create an exact replica

of the skull

For the first time,

Richard can actually feel the bones for himself

This is around two and a half times

the size of the original skull

The level of detail, it's incredible

One of the things that's strikingly obvious is

that you've got a really big piece of skull missing

Is it evidence that this cat didn't die naturally?

If we look at this image, this is

a slice or a plane through the skull

Now, this is a really helpful image, in fact, actually

You can see where the missing portions of the skull are

that have broken away and fallen into the brain case

So what that tells us immediately is that this damage

must have happened after mummification

so clearly this cat mummy has not been well treated

following mummification

So what, then, was the cause of death?

Well, can we have another look?

That might give us some useful clues

Okay

So the first thing that I can tell is that this cat has

a full adult set of teeth so this cat must have been

older than six months,

and if we take a really close look at the mandible,

we can see that there's no signs of gum disease

There's no tooth loss that's happened

during the course of the life of this animal,

which is the kinds of things

we'd expect if it was a very old cat

So what else can we see?

I mean here you've got the vertebrae of the neck

and you see how tightly packed and close together they are,

whereas in between these two vertebrae,

you've got this separation

There's this kind of big gap

that shouldn't be there effectively

In all mammals, the atlas and axis are the top two vertebrae

of the neck

In a cat this size, they should be only a few millimeters apart

Now, one possibility is that that kind of displacement

of the cervical vertebrae can occur

through strangulation

or the breaking of the neck of an animal,

and that would be a fairly instantaneous cause of death,

and the strongest possible clue we have

to how this animal may have died

Okay

But this cat isn't the only animal mummy

which shows signs of being deliberately killed

So this is the upper part of the skull

and actually there looks to be a defect there

Can you see in the skull, in the top of the skull?

Oh that's right, yeah

So there's a bit of bone actually missing there

The Manchester team is grappling

with their largest mummy, a Nile crocodile

Get ready to catch him

He's actually quite heavy

It's all that resin, I think

Just move him back in there, that's it

Just check, nice and slowly

Make sure he doesn't come a cropper

That's brilliant

At nearly two meters long, the team estimates

he must have been around five years old when he died

The fracture pattern to the crocodile's skull suggests

the fatal blow came before he was mummified

But the scans reveal more

Something's happened here

The ancient embalmer who mummified this crocodile

didn't use the most thorough techniques

So can we scroll through?

So these little opacities here are most probably gastrulates

which crocodiles swallow so they ingest food in big chunks,

often whole, and then they use stones which they've ingested

to break up the food, but of course that does prove

that it's still got its internal organs

because they're still in the abdomen

so it's not been eviscerated

The reason that votive animal mummies are probably

not as carefully made as other kinds of animal mummies

is because they were mass produced,

because when you had pilgrims come, you would need thousands

and thousands of these things

and so if you want to have a quick production line,

you can't expend the same amount of time, effort, energy

and quality of materials as you would for a pet

or a human being

These less sophisticated mummification techniques

enabled the embalmers to produce animal mummies

more quickly and cheaply

But it couldn't solve the most serious problem they faced:

how to ensure they had a steady supply of animals

to meet the demand of visiting pilgrims

Lost for over 2,000 years,

this ibis bird catacomb at Saqqara was rediscovered

by archaeologists in the 1960s

It's been sealed for 20 years

Now molecular biologist Sally Wasef

is going to reenter the tomb

Over two million mummified ibis birds are buried

in this catacomb

Sally's hoping to understand

how they were supplied for mummification

by comparing samples of their DNA

The DNA's usually not in a very good condition

because inside a catacomb it's really hot and humid,

and that helps degradation to be faster for the DNA

But the ancient Egyptians helped us by mummifying the birds,

which slowed the degradation process

so it helped to preserve some of the DNA

Unlike the mummy collectors of the 19th century,

Sally works according to strict rules

on which bones she can take away as samples

Such a mummy, I'm not allowed to open it or take samples from

because it's fully wrapped and inside the jar

So I usually sample from those broken stuff

where you can see the bones loose, and such a bone is nice,

still have the skin intact, the feathers and everything,

which give me more indications

that most likely I'll be ending up with good DNA quality

from this bone

Back in the lab, Sally will be able to reconstruct the DNA

of this mummified bird

from the fragments still contained in its bones

She can then compare it to other birds in the catacomb

to determine how closely they were related to each other

Once we have that DNA picture completed, what we do is

that we look at how those are different from each other

Are they close together?

And we find a lot of similarity

between a very large number of birds

We can say okay, those birds were raised together,

they were farmed

Or if you have too many variations,

actually they are caught from the wild

or migrating from outside Egypt

Sally's research is ongoing, but so far results have suggested

there is a low genetic variance

between mummified ibis birds at Saqqara

If proven, it's evidence the birds were being farmed

to satisfy the increasing demand for animal mummies

700 meters away, in Saqqara's dog catacomb,

the remains of eight million dog mummies suggest

a mass breeding program for dogs must also have been in place

Professor Ikram has been studying the piles of bones

She's found more evidence

of how this animal production line could have worked

One of the things we've found is

that there are really diverse ages and you can tell this

from the jaw bones because you get

these sort of teeny weeny little jaws

and then you have huge things

And then they would have taken the puppies away when they were,

well, very young, either drowned them or just removed them

from their mother's care so they would have died quite quickly

and could have been mummified

And then of course their mothers would have whelped again

and so you would have forced the breeding

to, instead of once or twice a year,

to twice or three times a year, which kept this puppy farm going

and gave us the eight million dogs that we have here

Now these bones can reveal more

There is evidence of how the dogs at Saqqara were treated

We have evidence for a lot of sick animals

For example, something like this, where there are holes

and you can see where the bone has grown over

so this has been a diseased animal that would have been

limping in its foreleg, and it died when it was quite young

And here's another one, which has some sort of horrible growth

coming out from an infection

Often you see this kind of extreme disease on zoo animals

where they have been kept in confined spaces

So this is why we think that quite possibly

the dogs were kept in enclosures

They weren't always allowed to move freely

If they got infected,

because the people who were looking after them knew

that they'd be dead soon enough,

they didn't really bother to take care of them

It's very likely

that many of the dogs that ultimately find their way

into the dog catacomb

would have been bred in and around ancient Memphis,

probably in a series of puppy farms,

breeding perhaps dozens of animals at a time

for mummification

The whole question of the killing of animals

is quite a difficult one,

quite an emotive one for us from a 21st-century perspective

However, what we have to bear in mind

is that what they were doing was providing

for the eternity of that animal,

providing a suitable burial for a representative of a god,

so what they were doing was a sacred act

By the end of the fifth century B C,

these private rituals had grown into a national obsession

Animals were being bred, killed and mummified

at sites across the country, employing thousands of workers

and generating huge profits

And then, 200 years later,

another huge political upheaval shook ancient Egypt

The ruling Persians were replaced by Greeks,

who poured money into animal cults

It became a massive, massive growth industry,

even more than before

They were spending the equivalent of millions today

on maintaining cults that were, for the Egyptians,

crucial to the continuation of this culture

Animal mummification had become a tool of state control

Religion is a very unifying force

and politically, it's every politician's dream

If you've got this idea of mass control over millions of people

through a form of religion you ultimately fund and sustain,

it's brilliant because you have control of those people

Dozens of new temples were being built,

encouraging more and more pilgrims to visit sites

like Saqqara and purchase animal mummies

But cracks were beginning to appear

in the burgeoning industry

It seems the embalmers had problems keeping up

with the demand

Remove the tissue paper

Oh!

Aw, that's cute That's lovely

He's got a nice face

Nice face, nice ears

Shall we move him in then?

Okay

It's thought this beautiful cat mummy was buried

at a site called Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt,

but this mummy is not all it seems to be

It's got the nice modeled face with a little roll of linen

for the nose and then two eyes

So it's very cylindrical, it's quite typical of a cat mummy

Let's have a look what's inside

What's inside?

Ooh!

Oh!

McKNIGHT: "Not an awful lot" is the answer to that

Oh, yeah

Would you say there's bone?

They've got the density of bone,

would you agree?

There's not limbs or anything like that

You can't see long bits of,

of, you know, limbs or anything like that

Ooh

Vertebrae?

That's about the most substantial, isn't it, really?

It's certainly not the complete cat skeleton

that we were imagining we would see

What you see on the outside is not always

what you see on the inside

If they are skeletal remains,

they're in sort of that area there

so if they've made a kind of core, if you like,

from bits and pieces that were lying around,

and then they've made it quite deliberately elongated

and made into a much bigger bundle

Artificially

It's been very decoratively wrapped and then given

this wonderful modeled face

In fact, these incomplete or partial animal mummies

have been a common feature of Lidija's study,

their contents hidden from pilgrims and museum curators

for thousands of years

We found that in about two-thirds of the cases

we have got some animal skeletal material,

but then only in about half of those do we have

a complete animal skeleton,

so somewhere between a third and a half of all the mummies

we've looked at have a complete animal inside

Most 19th and 20th century Egyptologists thought

this was evidence the embalmers,

either struggling to keep up with the demand for animals

or just keen to make some easy cash,

were swindling pilgrims by selling them fake mummies

without their knowledge

But by analyzing the wrappings and resins

used in the mummification process,

scientists like Stephen Buckley are challenging this assumption

What's interesting is that we're seeing recipes,

different recipes for different animals

We found with cat mummies, for example, pistachio resin

from northeast Mediterranean

And yet the crocodile mummy, we found sandarac,

a resin from northwest Africa, from the Atlas Mountains

The molecular fingerprint, if you like, is showing us

that they were using exotic, expensive ingredients

from far and wide, so quite a lot of care and expense

Crucially, Stephen's found traces of expensive resins

not only on the complete animal mummies

but on the partial ones as well

With these so-called fakes,

the embalming agents where they're using

costly imported ingredients, the recipes are the same

as those used on those mummies where the full animal is there

So the fake mummies are actually,

as far as the embalming agents are concerned,

treated with the same amount of effort and care and expense,

and it seems to be that with that, whether it was just a bone

or in the real animal, as long as the recipe was there,

as long as it looked right, that was good enough for the gods

It's scientific proof of the embalmer's intentions

To the ancient Egyptians, even the tiniest fragment of bone

must have been deemed sacred and worthy of mummification

You've got to remember these things were presumably made

to be sold, sold to pilgrims,

so you want your product to be attractive

and maybe it's sufficient

to have the sweepings from the workshop

That's got enough magical

religious power to satisfy your plea to the gods

If it's suitable for the goddess Bastet,

presumably, the cat goddess,

then that's, you know, the job's a good 'un

700 years after high priestess Maat Kare had been buried

with her pet monkey,

ancient Egyptian animal mummification had grown

from a few elite pets and sacred animals

into a vast religious cult

and an industry engrained in the fabric of society

where animals were not only killed to be mummified

but were intensively bred in the millions

to satisfy a national obsession with animal mummification

These mummies give one an insight,

a way into understanding Egyptian history, the culture,

the religion, the technology and the way people might have felt,

believed and thought,

and also the relationship between human beings

and animals,

so it really is an astonishing way in to understanding

a vast number of things about the ancient Egyptians

But the ritual of animal mummification would soon end

In 380 A D, the Romans,

who had conquered Egypt nearly four centuries before,

officially converted to Christianity, a new religion

that fiercely opposed all forms of mummification

and animal cults

All Egyptian temples were closed down,

and not only did this prevent worship continuing,

but each temple functioned as a kind of town hall

for every settlement throughout Egypt,

so by closing the temple, you not only put an end

to the pagan practices of worship

but also the transmission of ideas,

the mummification of humans and animals

The demise of animal mummification didn't only signal

the end of its religion, but the entire Egyptian civilization

The early Christians did everything they could

to distance themselves from these pagan practices,

and that's when you see a great divide,

and of course we in the modern West have gone

with the Christian notions

The ancient Egyptians are left over there and that's why today

we see their practices, their beliefs as quite strange,

different to ours, and they can be quite difficult to understand

and I think this is nowhere better exemplified

than in their practice of animal mummification

The great era of ancient Egypt had ended

The immense pyramids and imposing temples would stand

for thousands of years,

but the rituals of animal mummification

became a distant memory

The desert sands gradually covered the catacombs

and locked away their secrets

Now modern scientific techniques

are allowing these sacred animals

to finally tell their story,

one last message carried from the afterlife