49 Fun Facts About Mummies

'Mummy' comes from a word for which black substance, once thought to coat the bodies?

Asphalt. Medieval writers believed Egypt's blackened bodies had been embalmed with it, so the name of the tar passed to the corpses themselves.

Egypt's sacred Apis, kept in a temple at Memphis and mummified when it died, was which animal?

A bull. Priests picked each Apis by its markings; when one died it was embalmed, and the later bulls were laid in giant stone sarcophagi in the tunnels of the Serapeum at Saqqara.

In 1890, a shipload of Egyptian mummies was sold in England as fertilizer; most were mummies of which animal?

Cats. Egyptians had offered them to the gods by the thousand, and Victorian merchants saw the bodies as cheap fertilizer for English fields.

The Chinchorro mummies, far older than Egypt's, are a World Heritage Site on the Pacific coast of which country?

Chile. The Chinchorro, a fishing people of the Atacama coast, mummified children and babies as well as adults, rebuilding each body with sticks, reeds and clay.

What let a Nevada tribe reclaim Spirit Cave Man, North America's oldest mummy?

A genome study. Officials had disputed his ancestry, but DNA showed the man, who lived more than 10,000 years ago, was related to today's Native Americans, and he was handed back in 2016.

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

Herodotus. He describes embalmers showing families painted wooden models of corpses, so they could choose among three grades of treatment at three prices.

Egyptian embalmers dried the body in which naturally occurring salt?

Natron. Egyptians gathered the salt from dry lake beds, and its name lives on in chemistry: sodium's symbol, Na, comes from natrium.

Which organ did Egyptian embalmers deliberately leave inside the body?

The heart. Egyptians believed it, not the brain, held a person's intelligence and character, so it had to stay with the body for the afterlife.

Egyptian embalmers broke up the brain with a rod and drained it out through which part of the head?

The nose. A stick left behind in one skull suggests embalmers stirred the brain to a liquid and let it drain out, not just hooked it out in pieces as ancient writers said.

Egyptian embalmers sealed a body's organs in four of which vessels?

Canopic jars. Later embalmers put the wrapped organs back inside the body, yet families still buried a set of jars: solid dummies with no hollow at all.

The lids of the vessels holding a mummy's organs were carved as the heads of which Egyptian god's four sons?

Horus. Earlier lids were carved as human heads; only later did three of his sons take the faces of a baboon, a jackal and a falcon.

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

Anubis. In myth he invented embalming itself, first practising the art on the body of the murdered god Osiris.

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

Turin. Its Egyptian Museum holds the prehistoric body, embalmed with conifer resin and plant extracts about a thousand years before the Great Pyramid, far earlier than experts had believed possible.

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

Howard Carter. The first step lay under the ruins of ancient workmen's huts he had left alone in earlier seasons, just below the entrance to another pharaoh's tomb.

Asked 'Can you see anything?' as he first peered into Tutankhamun's tomb, what did its discoverer famously reply?

'Wonderful things' is the polished line from his published account, which gives it as 'Yes, wonderful things'; his own journal for that day records the plainer 'Yes, it is wonderful.'

In 1903, anatomists studied the mummy of the pharaoh Thutmose IV without damaging it by using which new technology?

X-ray imaging. The rays were only eight years old, and anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith wanted them for the other royal mummies too but never managed to arrange it.

What modern technique lets researchers see inside a mummy's bandages in 3-D without touching them?

CT scanning. A 2005 scan of Tutankhamun found a badly broken left leg, suggesting that an injury, not the long-suspected blow to the head, lay behind his early death.

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

An infected mosquito bite. He died only weeks after the burial chamber was opened, and newspapers hungry for a story turned his death into the pharaoh's curse.

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

Full military honours. The Republican Guard received the pharaoh like a visiting head of state; the often-repeated tale that Egypt had to issue him a passport is false.

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

Irradiated against fungi. Parasites were eating the pharaoh, so engineers at a French atomic research centre bathed the whole mummy in gamma rays before sending him home.

Who stumbled on Ötzi the Iceman, high in the Alps, in 1991?

German hikers. Erika and Helmut Simon saw a body sticking out of the ice and, like the police, took it for a mountaineer who had died in a recent accident.

What were Ötzi the Iceman's 61 tattoos probably for?

Pain relief. They cluster over his worn joints and lower back, where clothes hid them, and many lie on lines still used in acupuncture.

What evidence suggests Ötzi was murdered?

An arrowhead in his shoulder. Nobody noticed it for ten years; later examinations showed the flint had torn an artery, and he most likely bled to death.

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

Denmark. The peat cutters who dug him up near Silkeborg saw a face so fresh, stubble and all, that they reported a murder to the police.

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

He was hanged. The plaited leather noose was still around his neck; some scholars read his death as a ritual offering, perhaps for fertility, and others as an execution.

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

The Iron Age. Bog acid tans skin like leather while leaching the calcium from bones, which is why a 2,000-year-old face can survive with every wrinkle intact.

Lindow Man, England's 'Pete Marsh' bog body, is displayed in which London museum?

British Museum. Peat cutters found him in a Cheshire bog in 1984; a blow to the head, a cord at his neck and a cut throat have been read as a ritual 'triple death', though some experts doubt the last two.

Xin Zhui, China's remarkably preserved 'Lady Dai', lived more than 2,100 years ago under which dynasty?

Han. Her tomb came to light when hospital workers dug an air-raid shelter into a hill, and about 1,500 high-school students then helped to excavate it.

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

Xinjiang, China. Their Western looks long suggested migrants from far away, but DNA research in 2021 found the earliest of them were a genetically isolated local people.

Hair from the 'Llullaillaco Maiden', an Inca girl found frozen on a volcano, showed heavy use of alcohol and which leaf?

Coca. Her braids kept a record of her final years: the doses jumped about a year before she died, when researchers think she was chosen, and kept climbing.

Whose embalmed body was seized after a 1955 coup and hidden for years in an Italian cemetery under a false name?

Eva Perón. The officers who overthrew her husband wanted to erase her as a symbol of his movement, so the body vanished for 16 years before it was handed to him in exile in Madrid.

What exposed the frozen body of Mummy Juanita on Peru's Mount Ampato in 1995?

An eruption melted the ice. Hot ash from a neighbouring volcano thawed five centuries of snow, and her burial bundle slid from the summit into a crater, where two climbers found it.

Why were the bodies that became Mexico's Mummies of Guanajuato dug out of their cemetery crypts?

An unpaid grave tax. From 1865 workers cleared the tombs of families who could not pay, expecting bones, and found bodies dried intact; soon they were charging visitors to look.

Rosalia Lombardo, a toddler embalmed in 1920 and nicknamed 'Sleeping Beauty', lies in the Capuchin catacombs of which Sicilian city?

Palermo. Her embalmer never revealed his recipe, and it stayed a mystery until his handwritten notes turned up decades later: glycerin, formalin, zinc salts, alcohol and salicylic acid.

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

Vladimir Lenin. His body was meant to be shown only briefly, but the crowds kept coming; a century on it is still soaked in chemical baths to keep it lifelike.

Why did the London colourmaker Roberson stop making 'mummy brown' paint in the 20th century?

It ran out of mummies. The paint really was ground-up Egyptian bodies, and in 1964 the firm's director said it had a few odd limbs left, but not enough to make more.

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

Buried it in his garden. He had scoffed at the idea that the name was literal; once convinced, he held a funeral for the tube and a girl planted a daisy on the spot.

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

A medicine. Apothecaries sold powdered mummy for bruises and bleeding, and when ancient bodies grew scarce, dealers faked the drug from fresh corpses.

What did surgeon Thomas Pettigrew do to mummies to entertain London audiences in the 1830s?

Unwrapped them. 'Mummy' Pettigrew's unrollings made him a celebrity, and one duke was so impressed that he had Pettigrew mummify his own body when he died in 1852.

The Guanches, who mummified their dead before Spain conquered them in the 1400s, lived on which islands?

The Canary Islands. Specialist embalmers there removed the organs, then dried and stuffed the body, methods so like Egypt's that the two are often compared.

Monks who tried to mummify themselves while still alive, living for years on bark, roots and pine needles, belonged to which country?

Japan. The ascetics, called sokushinbutsu, ended the regime buried alive underground, meditating to the end; their mummies are kept in temples, more of them in Yamagata than anywhere else.

Which philosopher's skeleton, topped with a wax head, still sits dressed in his own clothes at University College London?

Jeremy Bentham. His will asked that he be kept as an 'auto-icon', but the mummifying of his head went so badly that a wax one had to take its place.

In 2021, the 'Pharaohs' Golden Parade' carried 22 royal mummies through which city to a new museum?

Cairo. Eighteen kings and four queens, Ramesses II among them, rode five kilometres on vehicles fitted with special shock absorbers while the nation watched live.

Gebelein Man, an Egyptian buried about 5,500 years ago, became a mummy without any embalming thanks to what?

Hot sand. It drew the water out of his body in a shallow grave, saving even his ginger hair, and in 2012 researchers learned how he died: stabbed in the back.

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

Bolzano, Italy. He went first to Innsbruck in Austria, until a survey showed he had been lying 92 metres inside Italy, on a border drawn when snow hid the true line.

Which horror star played Imhotep, the bandaged monster of Universal's 1932 film The Mummy?

Boris Karloff. He had become a star a year earlier as Frankenstein's monster, and Universal was soon billing him by one word alone: Karloff.

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

Thoth. Pilgrims bought the mummified birds as offerings to the ibis-headed god, and millions of them have been found in cemeteries near Hermopolis and Memphis.

The oldest known deliberate mummies, traced in 2025 to Southeast Asia, were preserved how?

Smoked over fire. Hunter-gatherers bound their dead in a crouch and dried them above low, smoky fires for months, a custom some New Guinea highlanders kept into modern times.

In 2007, what found in a box bearing her name let Egyptologists identify a long-anonymous mummy as the pharaoh Hatshepsut?

A single tooth. The molar had been stored with one of her organs, and it slotted exactly into a gap in the jaw of a mummy that had lain unnamed for a century.