Egypt
Fox News (Jennifer Welsh)
- Animals Mummified By The Millions In Ancient Egypt
Discovery News (Rossella Lorenzi) Millions of animals were ritually slaughtered in ancient Egypt to foster a huge mummification industry that even drove some species extinct. As an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's National...
- Book Review: Herakleides
Bryn Mawr Classical Review (Reviewed by Jane Draycott) Lorelei H. Corcoran, Marie Svoboda, Herakleides: A Portrait Mummy from Roman Egypt. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011. Herakleides: a Portrait Mummy from Roman Egypt not only provides the results...
- Old Kingdom Mummy To Go On View At Carlos Museum
Access Atlanta (Howard Pousner) With photo. A rarely displayed Egyptian mummy, the oldest in the Western Hemisphere, will be the focus of an exhibit next year at Emory University, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned. The mummy, which dates to...
- Mummy Fraud Discovered After 2,000 Years
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1802733,00.htmlGuardian Unlimited article about the results of CT scans on a number of mummies, carried out prior to the reopening this month of the Egyptian Galleries at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge: "Analysis...
- Menagerie Of Mummies Unwraps Ancient Egypt
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6989 New Scientist article about a new collection of animal mummies being studied by the Natural History Museum in London, UK. X-ray analysis of the skeletons of some of the animals, particularly cats, suggests...
Egypt
Mummufied kitten bred for purpose
Fox News (Jennifer Welsh)
Two thousand years ago, an Egyptian purchased a mummified kitten from a breeder, to offer as a sacrifice to the goddess Bastet, new research suggests.
Between about 332 B.C. and 30 B.C. in Egypt, cats were bred near temples specifically to be mummified and used as offerings.
The cat mummy came from the Egyptian Collection of the National Archeological Museum in Parma, Italy. It was bought by the museum in the 18th century from a collector. Because of how the museum acquired it, there's no documentation about where the mummy came from.
The cat mummies from this period are common, especially kittens. "Kittens, aged 2 to 4 months old, were sacrificed in huge numbers, because they were more suitable for mummification," the authors write in the paper, published in the April 2012 issue of the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery.
The researchers did a radiograph — similar to an X-ray — of the mummy, to see under the wrappings, finding the small cat was actually a kitten, only about 5 or 6 months old.
"The fact that the cat was young suggests that it was one of those bred specifically for mummification," study researcher Giacomo Gnudi, a professor at the University of Parma, said in a statement.
- Animals Mummified By The Millions In Ancient Egypt
Discovery News (Rossella Lorenzi) Millions of animals were ritually slaughtered in ancient Egypt to foster a huge mummification industry that even drove some species extinct. As an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's National...
- Book Review: Herakleides
Bryn Mawr Classical Review (Reviewed by Jane Draycott) Lorelei H. Corcoran, Marie Svoboda, Herakleides: A Portrait Mummy from Roman Egypt. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011. Herakleides: a Portrait Mummy from Roman Egypt not only provides the results...
- Old Kingdom Mummy To Go On View At Carlos Museum
Access Atlanta (Howard Pousner) With photo. A rarely displayed Egyptian mummy, the oldest in the Western Hemisphere, will be the focus of an exhibit next year at Emory University, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned. The mummy, which dates to...
- Mummy Fraud Discovered After 2,000 Years
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1802733,00.htmlGuardian Unlimited article about the results of CT scans on a number of mummies, carried out prior to the reopening this month of the Egyptian Galleries at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge: "Analysis...
- Menagerie Of Mummies Unwraps Ancient Egypt
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6989 New Scientist article about a new collection of animal mummies being studied by the Natural History Museum in London, UK. X-ray analysis of the skeletons of some of the animals, particularly cats, suggests...