50 Fun Facts About Mummies

The English word 'mummy' ultimately comes from a Persian word for what?

Arabic mūmiya meant both an embalmed corpse and the bituminous embalming substance; the Persian root mūm means wax.

Roughly how many animal mummies have been found in Egypt?

Many are cats; many more are sacred ibises, dated to roughly 450–250 BC.

In 1890, about 180,000 mummified cats were shipped from Egypt to England to be used as what?

The Victorians treated mummies as raw material as often as relics.

The Chinchorro, makers of the oldest deliberately prepared mummies, lived in which modern country?

Their mummies come in black, red, mud-coated and bandaged styles; the oldest dates to around 5050 BC.

The Spirit Cave mummies, dated at more than 9,400 years old, were found in which US state?

Their dating pushed the oldest deliberate mummification in the Americas well before the Chinchorro child.

Whose Histories give one of the most detailed ancient accounts of Egyptian mummification?

Book 2 describes the use of natron to dry the body and insists it stayed in the salt no more than 70 days.

Egyptian embalmers dried the body in which naturally occurring salt?

It was packed inside the body cavity and over the skin for about 70 days.

For how many days was the body left in the drying salt, in the classic Egyptian process?

Herodotus insists the body stayed in the salt no longer than that.

Which organ did Egyptian embalmers deliberately leave inside the body?

It was thought to be the seat of thought and feeling and would be weighed against a feather in the afterlife.

Through which opening did embalmers drain the brain after breaking it up with a rod?

Modern experiments found the organ came out far more easily once liquefied and left to drain by gravity.

The preserved organs were stored in how many canopic jars?

By the Nineteenth Dynasty each lid bore one of the four sons of Horus as guardian of its organ.

Whose heads appear on the lids of later canopic jars?

Each son guarded a particular organ; poorer families sometimes skipped the jars altogether.

Which jackal-headed Egyptian god was the patron of embalming?

He also attended the Weighing of the Heart that decided whether a soul could enter the realm of the dead.

Tests in 2018 showed a mummy in which Italian city had been deliberately embalmed 5,600 years ago?

The linen wrappings carried conifer resin and plant extracts, pushing artificial mummification back 1,500 years.

Who led the 1922 excavation that found Tutankhamun's tomb?

His patron was George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon; the tomb is designated KV62.

Asked 'Can you see anything?' at the tomb door, what did Carter famously reply?

His own journal records it as 'Yes, it is wonderful'; the tomb held more than 5,000 artifacts.

Which pharaoh's mummy received the first X-ray of a mummy, in 1903?

Grafton Elliot Smith and Howard Carter used the only X-ray machine in Cairo.

What modern technique lets researchers 'unwrap' mummies digitally without touching them?

The scans are detailed enough to reconstruct tiny linens in the nostrils; Tutankhamun had a digital autopsy this way.

How did Lord Carnarvon, the first 'curse' victim, actually die in 1923?

He slashed the bite while shaving; Marie Corelli had published a warning about 'dire punishment' two weeks before.

When Ramesses II's mummy flew to Paris in 1976, what was it greeted with at Le Bourget?

It was treated at the Musée de l'Homme for fungus; the story that it was issued a passport is a myth.

What was done to Ramesses II's mummy in Paris before it went home in 1977?

The claim that the pharaoh travelled on a passport is incorrect, though French 'passeport' paperwork may explain the legend.

In what year was Ötzi the Iceman found in the Ötztal Alps?

He lies in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano; he was killed by an arrow to the left shoulder.

How many tattoos did Ötzi the Iceman have?

His hair also held high levels of copper and arsenic, hinting at metalworking.

What evidence suggests Ötzi was murdered?

He died somewhere between about 3350 and 3105 BC.

Tollund Man, the famous bog body found in 1950, was preserved in which country?

He was found near Silkeborg in Jutland with a plaited hide noose around his neck; an autopsy found he was hanged.

What did a 1950 autopsy conclude about how Tollund Man died?

The noose of plaited animal hide was still around his neck.

Most bog bodies, including Tollund Man and Lindow Man, date to which period?

They cluster in northwest Europe, where acidic, oxygen-poor peat tans the skin.

Lindow Man, jokingly nicknamed 'Pete Marsh', was found in a peat bog in which English county?

Commercial peat cutters found him in 1984; he is freeze-dried and on display at the British Museum.

Xin Zhui, 'Lady Dai', was found remarkably preserved at which Chinese site in 1971?

Her Han-dynasty tomb at Changsha held 1,400 artifacts and her soft tissue was still pliable.

The Tarim mummies were discovered in the Tarim Basin of which region?

Genetic studies found Western Steppe-related ancestry among them.

The Children of Llullaillaco, three Inca child mummies, were found in 1999 near the summit of what?

Johan Reinhard and María Constanza Ceruti found them on the Argentina–Chile border; the cold kept them almost perfectly preserved.

Mummy Juanita, the 'Ice Maiden', was found in 1995 on which Peruvian mountain?

She was an Inca girl of about 12–15 sacrificed in a capacocha ritual between about 1440 and 1480.

The first Inca ice mummy was found in 1954 on El Plomo Peak in Chile after what event?

The nearby volcano Sabancaya's eruption exposed the body.

The Mummies of Guanajuato in Mexico are examples of what kind of preservation?

Bodies were exhumed when a burial tax went unpaid, a practice that ended in 1958.

Rosalia Lombardo, the embalmed child who died in 1920, lies in catacombs in which city?

She is displayed in the Capuchin catacombs of Sicily's capital, and looks almost asleep a century on.

Whose embalmed body has been on permanent display in a Moscow mausoleum since 1924?

Two colleagues had suggested cryonic preservation so he could be revived; embalming won out.

'Mummy brown' was a paint pigment made from what?

Mixed with white pitch and myrrh, it was loved by Delacroix, Burne-Jones and Alma-Tadema.

What did the painter Edward Burne-Jones reportedly do with his tube of mummy brown in 1881?

He held a ceremony for it after learning what the pigment was made of.

In medieval and early modern Europe, 'mummia' was sold as what?

In 1599 Richard Hakluyt complained that physicians made people swallow the stuff against their will.

Which Briton pioneered public mummy unwrappings as entertainment, earning a macabre nickname?

European aristocrats bought mummies and held unwrapping sessions as entertainment.

Where was the First World Congress on Mummy Studies held in 1992?

More than 300 scientists gathered in Puerto de la Cruz to pool nearly a century of data.

Mummies are divided into two main categories: anthropogenic and what?

Spontaneous mummies such as Ötzi form by accident through dry heat, cold or bog chemistry.

Wasps of the genus Aleiodes are nicknamed 'mummy wasps' because they do what?

Their prey is parasitised and left as a shrivelled, wrapped husk.

The oldest known natural human mummy, a 6,000-year-old severed head, was found where?

It turned up in 1936 at the Cueva de las Momias.

The 'Gebelein Man', nicknamed Ginger, was excavated in 1896 by which British Museum keeper?

Six naturally mummified bodies came from shallow sand graves in Upper Egypt; Ginger still has reddish hair.

Where are Ötzi's remains and belongings on display today?

The South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology built a refrigerated chamber for him.

A mummified vicar, Nicolaus Rungius, lies beneath a church in which country?

He is under St Michael's Church in Keminmaa, one of several corpses preserved beneath Christian churches.

Egypt's sacred ibis mummies were dedicated to which god?

The ibis cult flourished in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods.

To the earliest date does evidence of deliberate mummification now extend?

Burials in Southeast Asia, China, New Guinea and Australia show the practice; researchers are now checking cultures 20,000 years old.

Which chemist applied chemical analysis to Egyptian mummies and helped examine Tutankhamun in 1922?

His work revealed which substances the embalmers actually used.