When it comes to mummies, many people first of all remember ancient Egypt, the pharaohs, whose bodies have survived to this day, and the Hollywood blockbuster The Mummy. But in fact, mummies are not only Ancient Egypt and Hollywood. In our review, little-known, and sometimes simply incredible facts about mummies.
1. What is a mummy
A mummy is a human or animal body that has been preserved from decomposition by removing internal organs, treating with soda (sodium carbonate decahydrate) and resin, after which it was wrapped in bandages.
2. Mum means wax
The word "mummy" comes from the medieval Latin word "mumia", borrowed from the medieval Arabic "mūmiya" and from the Persian "mum" (wax), which meant an embalmed body, as well as an embalming agent based on bitumen.
3. Variety of mummies
Archaeologists have found many animal mummies including jackals, cats, baboons, horses, birds, gerbils, fish, snakes, crocodiles, hippos and even a lion.4. Anubis
Some people wonder why so many jackal mummies have been found. The explanation for this is quite simple - the god of mummification was Anubis, the Egyptian god with the head of a jackal.
5. The art of mummification
The ancient Egyptians started making mummies around 3400 BC, but it took them almost eight hundred years to realize that if the internal organs were taken out, the mummy would be preserved and not rot. Over time, mummification became a very complex and lengthy process that lasted up to seventy days.
6 Herodotus Is The First Person To Describe Mummification
The first person to write in great detail about the process of mummification was the Greek historian Herodotus. This happened after he visited Egypt around 450 BC.
7 Chinchorro Tribe
Despite the fact that mummies are almost exclusively associated with Egypt, the Chinchorro tribe of South America was the first to start making mummies. According to the latest archaeological evidence, the oldest Chinchorro mummies date back to the seventh millennium BC, twice as old as the first Egyptian mummies.
8. X-ray of a mummy
The first modern scientific examination of mummies began in 1901, conducted by professors of English at the government school of medicine in Cairo. The first X-ray of a mummy was taken in 1903, when Professors Grafton Elliot Smith and Howard Carter used the only x-ray machine in Cairo at the time to examine the mummy of Thutmose IV.
9. Classic
Not all mummies were wrapped in the same position. For example, the vast majority of pharaohs were positioned in a prone position with their arms crossed over their chests. It is this position that is most often shown in films and popular media.
10. Osiris
According to Egyptian mythology, the god Osiris was the first mummy in history. However, his remains have not been found.
11. Afterlife hospitality
It is for this reason that after the mummy was all wrapped in bandages, it was covered with a special cloth with a painted image of Osiris. This was done so that the Egyptian god of the underworld was kind and hospitable to the dead.
12. If there was money
Many people mistakenly believe that only pharaohs were mummified. In reality, those who could afford it were mummified.
13. I'll take everything with me
The ancient Egyptians believed that things that were buried in the tomb along with the mummy would help the deceased in life after death. Thus, everything valuable to the deceased was buried with them. These were art objects, artifacts, treasures and jewels.
14. Protection against thieves
Protection from thieves was also provided - ancient Egyptian myths warned that a curse had been placed on the tombs and their contents that would strike all who entered them. It has been claimed that a number of the archaeologists who unearthed some of these burials were struck with total bad luck, and some even died under unusual circumstances.
However, these curses failed to prevent the looting of many graves and the theft of precious jewelry and other expensive items that "accompanied" the mummies to the afterlife.
15. Dubious entertainment
Also, during the Victorian era, unwrapping mummies became a popular party activity. The hosts who held the dinner party bought the mummy, and the guests could unwrap it during the party.
16. Essential medicinal component
In Victorian times, mummies were considered an indispensable ingredient in many medicines. Most eminent doctors assured their patients that mummy powder or powdered mummies had amazing healing properties.
17. Ramesses III was afraid of reptiles
Ramesses III was afraid of reptiles. It is for this reason that his mummy was found wearing an amulet that was supposed to protect him from snakes in the afterlife.
18. Receptacle of intellect and emotions
The only organ that the ancient Egyptians left inside the mummy was the heart. At that time, the heart was considered the center of the centers of intellect and emotions - qualities that were needed by the dead and in the afterlife.
19. Profitable business
Mummies were a very lucrative business in ancient Egypt. In the process of preparing the mummy, many workers were used: from embalmers and surgeons to priests and scribes.
20. Average mummy weight
Modern sleeping bags are made wide at the shoulders and narrow at the legs, making the person lying inside look like a mummy. It's not just a coincidence, as their design was inspired by the way mummies were wrapped to be preserved for millennia.
In continuation of the topic, we decided to recall about.
Probably, all of you have watched horror films about reanimated mummies attacking people. These sinister dead have always excited the human imagination. However, in reality, mummies do not carry anything terrible, representing an incredible archaeological value. In this issue you will find 13 real mummies that have survived to our time and are among the most significant archaeological finds of our time.
A mummy is a body of a dead creature specially treated with a chemical substance, in which the process of tissue decomposition slows down. Mummies are stored for hundreds and even thousands of years, becoming a "window" to the ancient world. On the one hand, the mummies look creepy, some goosebumps run from just looking at these wrinkled bodies, but on the other hand, they are of incredible historical value, keeping the most interesting information about the life of the ancient world, the customs, health and diet of our ancestors. .
1The Screaming Mummy From The Guanajuato Museum
The Guanajuato Mummies Museum in Mexico is one of the strangest and most terrible in the world; 111 mummies are collected here, which are naturally preserved mummified bodies of people, most of whom died in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century and were buried in the local cemetery " Pantheon of Saint Paula.
The exhibits of the museum were exhumed between 1865 and 1958, when a law was in force requiring relatives to pay a tax for the bodies of their relatives to be in the cemetery. If the tax was not paid on time, then the relatives lost the right to the burial place and the dead bodies were removed from the stone tombs. As it turned out, some of them were naturally mummified, and they were kept in a special building at the cemetery. The distorted facial expressions on some of the mummies indicate that they were buried alive.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, these mummies began to attract tourists, and cemetery workers began to charge a fee for visiting the premises where they were stored. The official date of formation of the Museum of Mummies in Guanajuato is 1969, when the mummies were exhibited in glass shelves. The museum is now visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists every year.
2. The mummy of a boy from Greenland (Kilakitsok township)
Near the Greenlandic settlement of Kilakitsok, located on the west coast of the largest island in the world, in 1972 an entire family was discovered, mummified by means of low temperatures. Nine well-preserved bodies of Eskimo ancestors who died on the territory of Greenland at a time when the Middle Ages reigned in Europe aroused the keen interest of scientists, but one of them became famous all over the world and beyond the scientific framework.
Belonging to a one-year-old child (anthropologists who suffered from Down's syndrome), it looks more like some kind of doll and makes a lasting impression on visitors to the National Museum of Greenland in Nuuk.
3. Two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo
The Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Italy is an eerie place, a necropolis that attracts tourists from all over the world with many mummified bodies of varying degrees of preservation. But the symbol of this place is the baby face of Rosalia Lombardo, a two-year-old girl who died of pneumonia in 1920. Her father, unable to cope with grief, turned to the famous physician Alfredo Salafia with a request to save his daughter's body.
Now it makes the hair on the head of all, without exception, visitors to the dungeons of Palermo move - amazingly preserved, peaceful and so alive that it seems as if Rosalia had only dozed off for a short while, it makes an indelible impression.
4. Juanita from the Peruvian Andes
Whether still a girl, or already a girl (the age of death is called from 11 to 15 years), named Juanita, gained worldwide fame, being included in the ranking of the best scientific discoveries according to Time magazine due to her safety and terrible story, which, after finding the mummy in the ancient Inca settlements in the Peruvian Andes in 1995, scientists told. Sacrificed to the gods in the 15th century, it has survived to this day in almost perfect condition thanks to the ice of the Andean peaks.
Being part of the exposition of the Museum of the Andean Sanctuaries in Arequipa, the mummy often goes on tour, exhibiting, for example, at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society in Washington or at many sites in the Land of the Rising Sun, which is generally distinguished by a strange love for mummified bodies.
5. Knight Christian Friedrich von Kalbutz, Germany
This German knight lived from 1651 to 1702. After his death, his body turned into a mummy in a natural way and is now on public display.
According to legend, the knight Kalbutz was a great lover to use the "right of the first night." The loving Christian had 11 children of his own and about three dozen bastards. In July 1690, he declared his “right of the first night” regarding the young bride of a shepherd from the town of Buckwitz, but the girl refused him, after which the knight killed her newly-made husband. Imprisoned, he swore before the judges that he was not guilty, otherwise "after death, his body will not crumble to dust."
Since Kalbutz was an aristocrat, his word of honor was enough for him to be acquitted and released. The knight died in 1702 at the age of 52 and was buried in the von Kalbutz family tomb. In 1783, the last representative of this dynasty died, and in 1794, a restoration was started in the local church, during which the tomb was opened in order to rebury all the dead of the von Kalbutz family in a regular cemetery. It turned out that all of them, except for Christian Friedrich, had decayed. The latter turned into a mummy, which proved the fact that the loving knight was still a perjurer.
The mummy shown in the photo belongs to Pharaoh Ramses II (Ramses the Great), who died in 1213 BC. e. and is one of the most famous Egyptian pharaohs. It is believed that he was the ruler of Egypt during the campaign of Moses. One of the distinguishing features of this mummy is the presence of red hair, symbolizing the connection with the god Set, the patron saint of royal power.
In 1974, Egyptologists discovered that the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II was rapidly deteriorating. It was decided to immediately take her by plane to France for examination and restoration, for which the mummies issued a modern Egyptian passport, and in the column "occupation" they wrote "king (deceased)". At the Paris airport, the mummy was met with all military honors due to the visit of the head of state.
The mummy of a girl aged 18-19, buried in Denmark in 1300 BC. e. The deceased was a tall, slender girl with long blond hair styled in an intricate hairstyle somewhat reminiscent of a 1960s babette. Her expensive clothes and jewelry suggest that she belonged to a local elite family.
The girl was buried in an oak coffin lined with herbs, so her body and clothes are surprisingly well preserved. Preservation would have been even better if, several years before this mummy was discovered, the layer of soil over the grave had not been damaged.
The Similaunian Man, who was about 5,300 years old at the time of discovery, making him the oldest European mummy, was nicknamed Ötzi by scientists. Discovered on September 19, 1991 by a couple of German tourists during a walk in the Tyrolean Alps, who stumbled upon the remains of a Chalcolithic resident perfectly preserved thanks to natural ice mummification, he made a splash in the scientific world - nowhere else in Europe have they found the bodies of our distant ancestors.
Now this tattooed mummy can be seen in the archaeological museum of Bolzano, Italy. Like many other mummies, Ötzi is allegedly shrouded in a halo of curse: over the course of several years, under various circumstances, several people died, one way or another connected with the study of the Iceman.
The girl from Yde (Dutch. Meisje van Yde) is the name given to the well-preserved body of a teenage girl found in a peat bog near the village of Yde in the Netherlands. This mummy was found on May 12, 1897. The body was wrapped in a woolen cape.
A noose woven from wool was tightened around the girl's neck, indicating that she was executed for some kind of crime or sacrificed. In the region of the collarbone, a trace of the wound was preserved. The skin was not affected by decomposition, which is typical for bog bodies.
The results of a radiocarbon analysis carried out in 1992 showed that she died at the age of about 16 years between 54 BC and 54 BC. e. and 128 AD. e. The corpse's head was half-shaved shortly before death. The surviving hair is long and has a reddish tint. But it should be noted that the hair of all corpses that have fallen into the swamp environment acquire a reddish color as a result of the denaturalization of the coloring pigment under the influence of acids found in the swampy soil.
Computed tomography determined that during life she had a curvature of the spine. Further studies led to the conclusion that the cause of this, most likely, was the defeat of the vertebrae with bone tuberculosis.
A man from Rendswühren, who also belongs to the so-called swamp people, was found near the German city of Kiel in 1871. At the time of death, the man was between 40 and 50 years old, and body examinations showed that he died from a blow to the head.
The superbly preserved mummy of Seti I and the remains of the original wooden coffin were discovered in the Deir el-Bahri cache in 1881. Seti I ruled Egypt from 1290 to 1279. BC e. The mummy of this pharaoh was buried in a specially prepared tomb.
Seti is a minor character in the science fiction films The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, where he is depicted as a pharaoh who fell victim to a conspiracy by his high priest, Imhotep.
The mummy of this woman, nicknamed the Altai Princess, was found by archaeologists in 1993 on the Ukok plateau and is one of the most significant discoveries in archeology at the end of the 20th century. Researchers believe that the burial was made in the 5th-3rd centuries BC and belongs to the period of the Pazyryk culture of Altai.
During excavations, archaeologists discovered that the deck in which the body of the buried was placed was filled with ice. That is why the woman's mummy is well preserved. The burial was immured in a layer of ice. This aroused great interest of archaeologists, since in such conditions very ancient things could be well preserved. Six horses under saddles and with harness were found in the chamber, as well as a wooden block of larch, nailed down with bronze nails. The contents of the burial clearly indicated the nobility of the buried person.
The mummy lay on its side with its legs slightly tucked up. She had numerous tattoos on her arms. The mummies were wearing a silk shirt, a woolen skirt, felt socks, a fur coat and a wig. All these clothes were made of very high quality and testify to the high status of the buried. She died at a young age (about 25 years old) and belonged to the elite of Pazyryk society.
This is the famous mummy of a girl aged 14-15, who was sacrificed by the Incas more than 500 years ago. It was discovered in 1999 on the slope of the Nevado-Sabankaya volcano. Next to this mummy, several more children's bodies were also found, which were also mummified. The researchers suggest that these children were chosen among others due to their beauty, after which they traveled many hundreds of kilometers across the whole country, were specially prepared and sacrificed to the gods on top of the volcano.
A mummy is a body of a living creature specially treated with a chemical substance, in which the process of tissue decomposition slows down. Mummies are stored for hundreds and even thousands of years, carrying the history of our ancestors, their customs and appearance. On the one hand, mummies look terribly scary, sometimes goosebumps run from one glance, on the other hand, they keep the most interesting history of the ancient world. We have compiled a list of 13 of the most creepy and at the same time the most interesting mummies ever discovered in the world:
13. Guanajuato Mummies Museum, Mexico
Photo 13. Guanajuato Mummies Museum - 59 mummies that died in 1850-1950 are on display [blogspot.ru]The Guanajuato Mummies Museum in Mexico is one of the strangest and most terrible in the world, with about 111 mummies (59 of which are on display) that died between 1850 and 1950. The distorted facial expressions on some of the mummies indicate that they were buried alive. Hundreds of thousands of tourists visit the museum every year.
12. Baby mummy in Qilakitsoq, Greenland
Photo 12. Mummy of a 6-month-old boy in Greenland (Qilakitsoq township) [Choffa] Another example of a living burial is a 6-month-old boy found in Greenland. Nearby, 3 more mummies of women were found, perhaps one of them is the boy's mother, with whom he was buried alive (according to the Eskimo customs of that time). The mummies are dated 1460. Thanks to the icy climate of Greenland, the clothes of that time are well preserved. In total, 78 pieces of clothing made from the skins of animals, such as seals and deer, were found. There were small tattoos on the faces of adults, but the face of a child is just awful!
11. Rosalia Lombardo, Italy
Photo 11. 2-year-old girl who died in 1920 from pneumonia [Maria lo sposo] Little Rosalia was only 2 years old when she died of pneumonia in 1920 in Palermo (Sicily). The saddened father instructed the famous embalmer Alfred Salafia to mummify the body of Rosalia Lombardo.
10. Mummy with a painted face, Egypt
Photo 10. The mummy from Egypt is presented in the British Museum [Klafubra] When we think about mummies, the first thing that comes to mind is Egypt. Many films have been made featuring these surviving corpses, which, bandaged in bandages, come back to life, attacking civilians. The photo shows one of the typical representatives of mummies (the exhibit is on display at the British Museum).
9. Christian Friedrich von Kalbutz, Germany
Photo 9. Knight Christian, Germany [B. Schroeren] The photo shows the German knight Christian, an aura of mystery surrounds this terrible look of the mummy.
8. Ramses II, Egypt
Photo 8. The mummy of the Egyptian pharaoh - Ramses the Great [ThutmoseIII] The mummy shown in the photo belongs to Pharaoh Ramses II (Ramses the Great), who died in 1213 BC. and is one of the most famous Egyptian pharaohs. It is believed that he was the ruler of Egypt during the campaign of Moses and is represented as such in many works of art. One of the distinguishing features of the mummy is the presence of red hair, symbolizing the connection with the god Set, the patron saint of royal power.
7. Skrydstrup woman, Denmark
Photo 7. Mummy of a girl 18-19 years old, Denmark [Sven Rosborn] Mummy of a woman 18-19 years old, buried in Denmark in 1300 BC. From her clothes and jewelry, it can be assumed that she belonged to the family of the leader. The girl was buried in an oak coffin, so her body and clothes are surprisingly well preserved.
6. Ginger, Egypt
Photo 6. Mummy of an Egyptian adult [Jack1956] The mummy of Ginger “Ginger” is an Egyptian mummy of an adult male who died over 5,000 years ago and was buried in the sand in the desert (at that time the Egyptians had not yet started mummification of corpses).
5. Man Gallah, Ireland
Photo 5. Gallagh man buried in a swamp [Mark J Healey] This strange kind of mummy, known as the Gallagh Man, was discovered in a swamp in Ireland in 1821. The man was buried in a swamp wearing a cloak with a fragment of a willow branch around his neck. Some researchers believe he may have been strangled.
4. Man Rendsvuren, Germany
Photo 4. Man bog Rendsvuren [Bullenwächter] The Rendswühren swamp man, like Gallach the swamp man, was found in a swamp, this time in Germany in 1871. The man was 40-50 years old, it is believed that he was beaten to death, the body was found in the 19th century.
3. Seti I - the pharaoh of ancient Egypt
Photo 3. Seti I - Egyptian pharaoh in the tomb. [underwood and underwood] Seti I ruled 1290-1279 B.C. The pharaoh's mummy was buried in an Egyptian tomb. The Egyptians were skilled embalmers, so we can see their work in our time.
2. Princess Ukok, Altai
Photo 2. Mummy of Princess Ukok [ The mummies of Egypt are one of the mysteries of mankind. And despite the fact that many secrets have already been revealed, many questions remain on this topic.
Mummies began to attract the attention of the world community, scientists, and tourists relatively recently.
The time of the surge falls around the time of the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Today it is known that the ancient Egyptians needed mummies not to leave a place on the planet in which the soul would live, but rather to communicate with the spiritual world, the afterlife, into which souls fell after death.
The body, mummified, according to the inhabitants of ancient Egypt, connected the soul and the earth, served as a kind of conductor.
True, not everyone could afford to order mummification, but only rich and famous people.
was an exception. For them, a special crypt was created during their lifetime, dishes were prepared, various household items necessary for the life of an ordinary person.
All this after the death of a person was put together in a crypt, and his body was prepared accordingly.
What were mummies made of?
Who was mummified?
- pharaohs. Firstly, they were famous and rich, and secondly, they were prescribed extraterrestrial abilities and divine origin. The pharaohs were not just peculiar leaders, rulers and leaders, but also those who were worshiped;
- Egyptian mummies were also created for animals that were classified as sacred. Usually they were cats and bulls;
- birds. Falcons and hawks were also considered sacred. People tried to imitate them, thus adopting, in their opinion, the important abilities of these unique living beings. From these considerations, mummies were created.
Who created the mummies in Egypt
The first stage in the development of mummification is embalming. It is believed that Anubis was the first to practice this practice. He was the guide of souls from the world of the living to the world of the dead.
Subsequently, Anubis taught people to do the same as he did, thereby passing on the skill.
At the moment, no one can say exactly how Anubis' abilities were transferred to people. But since then, Egyptian mummies have been created simply perfect, they have survived to this day in the same pristine state.
In addition, archaeological excavations, studies of crypts and other research activities related to mummification have led to the discovery of vessels with contents used to create mummies.
Surprisingly, the properties of elixirs have remained unchanged, despite the millennium age.
In general, unique, it can be considered both in a general sense and in the context of a separate tribe. And it is difficult to meet a person in Africa who would not believe that the Egyptian mummies are the result of the work of a superman who had unique abilities in early times.
How exactly were mummies made in Egypt
In fact, a mummy is the body of a person or animal, impregnated with an embalming compound. The body was wrapped in bandages, and it was plentiful and dense enough so that the preservative substances were preserved where their effect was needed.
It is also noteworthy that only specially selected priests were engaged in mummification.
No one else knew what balms were made of and how they were applied. One thing was known - mummification takes a lot of time, about two months.
Embalming began with the fact that the organs of the deceased were removed from his body. They were not thrown away, but they tried to keep them intact.
This was done so that after death, in the afterlife, the creature could use everything that he might need. The body was freed from everything except the heart.
As for the brain, there was a special approach. The brain, according to the Egyptians, was not needed, or rather, people simply did not know what its purpose was.
To remove the brain completely, special dissolution agents were used. The main goal was to preserve the appearance of the body unchanged.
The next stage is the filling of the almost empty body with a tissue with a composition that does not allow the remains of the body to decompose. The way the mummies were made is perfectly clear today.
The last thing that was done was bandaging the outer part of the body with bandages soaked in the same composition.
This was mummification initially, but subsequently some techniques were improved.
So, aromatic products were developed that carried a similar purpose, but reduced the time required for full preparation for the creation of a mummy.
The essence of the procedure for creating a mummy in Egypt was reduced to the following actions:
- first the body was freed from the organs;
- then it was filled with oils;
- after a few days the oils were removed;
- the body was dried;
- after 40 days, the body was treated externally.
Later, it was created, which involved more thorough external preparation of the mummy. She was painted, making her cheeks and lips in bright colors, did her hair.
Among the members of the expedition and their entourage, there was a wave of deaths that followed the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.
Shortly after the results of the excavations were announced in the press, a major industrial businessman in England, Joel Wolfe, went to Egypt to inspect the treasury of all times.
He forced Carter, who was in charge of the expedition, to give him permission to inspect the burial vault. He spent almost the whole day in it, and when he returned to the hotel, he suddenly died. The symptoms were the same: chills, high fever, loss of reason and quick death.
Who's next for the curse?
The roentgenoscopy of the mummy extracted from the golden sarcophagus of Tutankhamen was entrusted to Archibald Juglas Reed. His work was carried out flawlessly and deserved high praise from experts. But as soon as he arrived at home, he felt a sharp attack of nausea, weakness, and after two hours of delirium he died.
For several years, one by one, all the members of the expedition who excavated and extracted treasures from the tomb, and those who were involved in the study of the mummy of the pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, died. Only 22 people. For all of them, death was equally unpredictable and fleeting. The curse of the pharaoh did not spare doctors, linguists, historians of world renown: La Flor, Callender, Winlock, Astori ...
A few years later, in 1929, the widow of Carnarvon died according to the conclusion of doctors “from a mosquito bite”. Carter's assistant Richard Batella, a young, healthy man, had a heart failure. Egypt was in a panic. The story of the curse of the pharaoh went all over Europe. Following them, the brother of the lord and the nurse who was present at the death of the patron died. People passed away who were in no way related to the archaeological discovery and had never been to. Carter calmly met reports of their deaths.
An inveterate bachelor, he worried only about the participation of his pet, who shared with him his Cairo living space - a nightingale. On the day when Carter's colleague and prominent scientist Richard Batell died of an incurable and unknown disease, the archaeologist did not find his bird in the cage. He noticed only the scales of a silver snake hurriedly crawling out the window. He regretted his friend for a long time and did not take in any way the message that Batell had died due to blockage of the vessels of the lungs. Carter, on the other hand, turned out to be the only long-liver who was not touched by the curse of the pharaoh of Ancient Egypt.
The mummy of Ramses II came to life!
After the incident with Batell, turmoil began in Cairo. People were frightened by an unknown disease that spares no one. The employees of the Egyptian Museum of Cairo, where the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II was transported in 1886, also knew about these rumors.
The evening was hot. Stuffiness has accumulated in the hall with a collection of sarcophagi of the National Museum of Antiquities. After sunset, electric lights were turned on in the building. And then the unthinkable happened. From the sarcophagus, where the mummy of the Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt Ramses II was kept, a lingering sound was emitted. The hinges of the tomb creaked. And then those present saw a picture from which everyone shuddered. The mouth of the king's mummy was distorted by an inaudible scream. The body trembled, the embalming bandages burst, and the arms crossed over the chest straightened, striking the glass lid of the sarcophagus with force. The pieces scattered in all directions. People in a panic rushed to the stairs, one of the guests jumped through the window.
In the morning press, all the circumstances of this shocking event were discussed with gusto. However, the Ministry of Antiquities, in its comments, indicated that in fact the explanation for such a strange “mummy behavior” is quite simple. With the accumulation of people in the hall, unbearable stuffiness and humidity were created. And the mummy should be kept in the dry air of a cool tomb.
Whatever it was with the climatic conditions, but the mummy froze, turning its head in a northerly direction - towards the Valley of the Kings. The broken glass was soon replaced. Hands swaddled as before in a cruciform state. However, the face of the pharaoh of Ancient Egypt remained turned to the north.
Doctors have solved the mystery of the curse of the pharaohs
35 years after the death of an English philanthropist who financed the excavations in the Valley of the Kings, and thanks to which the tomb of Tutankhamen became known to the world, scientists managed to find out what caused his sudden death. And the death of several members of the expedition and people close to them. Joffrey Dean, chief medical officer at Port Elizabeth Hospital in South Africa, found a virus - a fungus that caused patients to experience symptoms: dizziness, weakness, loss of reason.
Any animal, including bats, could spread pathogens. It was they who were the permanent inhabitants of the chambers of the pharaoh of ancient Egypt. This disease is transmitted by the respiratory route, so the nurse of Lord Carnarvon soon suffered the same fate.
Conclusion on the cause of death of the expedition members
In 1962, after the announcement of the result of research on pathogenic bacteria by Dr. Dean, physician Ezzeddin Taha from the University of Cairo called a special meeting. It was dedicated to his discovery of the secret of the curse of Pharaoh Tutankhamen. For a long time, Dr. Taha monitored the health of archaeologists and staff members of the Egyptian Museum who worked with the mummy. In their lungs, he found the presence of microscopic fungi Aspergillus niger, which for a long time remained closed in pyramids and tombs. The scientist concluded that now you can quite safely go in search of new treasures, since there is a vaccine against these pathogenic bacteria.
Perhaps science would have known the true causes of the death of Lord Carnarvon and the members of the team, if he himself had not suffered the same fate: the curse killed Taha.
Desert road in the middle of the sands between Cairo and Suez. A car passing by here is a rarity. No road markings, signs, sharp turns and descents. Dr. Taha, traveling with two co-workers, took this road to Suez. There was an accident on the road, they crashed with a limousine: all three died on the spot, the passengers and the driver of the other car were not injured. At autopsy, an embolism was found in the airways of a physician - a rupture of the vessels of the respiratory tract ...
Video about ancient Egypt. Curse of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.
