You may see each other, but the practice of mummification of the deceased is still carried out. In our country, no one will definitely do this, but in the American city of Salt Lake City, Utah, this service is offered for about $ 70,000. Interestingly, they offer not only deceased relatives to mummify, but also pets. It costs less - about $ 4,000 for an animal weighing up to 7 kilograms.
This procedure is so expensive because mummification is quite rare these days. You can, of course, remember Lenin's grandfather, but this is rather one of the very rare exceptions than statistics. Nevertheless, this procedure was very popular thousands of years ago. Especially in places with very warm and dry climates like Peru and Egypt.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York is currently hosting a special exhibition inviting people to look at the 18 mummies on display. It is interesting to note that some of these mummies have not been on display since the World's Fair, which was last held in Chicago over 100 years ago.
The exhibits in the New York exhibition are objects from the collections of the Field Museum of Natural History. Thanks to modern technologies such as computed tomography, visitors to the exhibition can see for the first time in person what is inside the ancient sarcophagi on display.
“Visitors to the exhibition can not only find out who these people were and what life they had, but also see what these people could have been like in life,” says Ellen Futter, director of the American Museum of Natural History.
The images, which can be found below, show only a small part of those exhibits that people can see when they come to the exhibition. Most of the exhibits on display, including mummified bodies, sarcophagi and mummified body parts, were unwound by museum staff. They cannot be photographed, so you can only see them in person on the spot. However, what can be photographed, we will look at the images below.
Some South African tribes carried out mummification of bodies long before they began to do it in Egypt. Their practice of mummification is still used today, while the process has not changed for several thousand years.
Promotional video:
A thousand years ago, this head-shaped mask was placed on the head of mummies by the Chiang Kai culture. The mummified body itself was wrapped compactly and covered with decorative fabric. If several members of the same family were mummified at once, then they were all placed in the same burial place.
Access to these burial sites remained open only to living members of the same family, allowing relatives to bring fresh food and water to the graves of their loved ones. Relatives were even allowed to take these mummies with them to some festivals and other special events.
The diorama below shows what these burial sites looked like.
Thanks to computed tomography, scientists have learned what exactly is in these mummified pedestals. For example, this is the mummy of a young woman (image below), at the time of her death was something about 20 years old, as well as the mummies of two children buried with her, about 6 and 2 years old.
Among the Peruvian culture, the practice of burying a person along with the tools with which this person worked during his lifetime (for example, fishing tackle), as well as food and water was widespread.
These vessels were used to store corn beer (chicha). Urns were installed near the burial place and are made in the form of a person holding a cup, as if offering to refresh the deceased.
Despite the fact that many artifacts left with mummies have been exhibited at exhibitions before, computer scans, which made it possible to find out what exactly is inside the cocoon of Peruvian and Egyptian mummies, was used by scientists for this exhibition for the first time.
With the help of computed tomography, scientists took hundreds of photographs, on the basis of which three-dimensional images of the contents of the cocoon were created.
This image is a scan of Lady Dai's Egyptian mummy. Thanks to technology, scientists have learned that the woman was about 40 years old at the time of her death, had curly hair and a slightly malocclusion. It is possible that he died of tuberculosis.
And here in the photo you can see the sarcophagus where the mummy of Lady Dai was kept. The Field Museum was preparing the mummy for the exhibition.
Scanning allows researchers to find out almost everything from the shape of the face to the thickness of the skin. On the basis of this data, they created sculptural images that make it possible to understand how people like the same Lady Dai could look like in life. The exhibited Egyptian mummies clearly show how complex the method of mummification of bodies was used. Many sarcophagi are covered with intricate designs and hieroglyphs.
This sarcophagus dates back to 700-600 BC. In the upper part of its lid, the face of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth is depicted, holding the body of another person who has departed into the world, whose mummy lies in this sarcophagus. He represents the person to Osiris - the god of the underworld (in the picture in a white headdress). On the lower part of the lid of the sarcophagus, you can see the process of embalming a person by the god Anubis with a jackal's head. Among the ancient Egyptians, he was the guide of the dead to the afterlife.
During the mummification in Egypt, human organs were removed from the body and placed in vessels, including those presented in the form of animals, as in the image below (in Peru, organs were not usually removed from the body).
The practice of mummifying animals was also common in Egypt. This gazelle, most likely, was specially grown in the temple in order to be mummified in the future, thus making a kind of offering to the gods.
Below you can see the tightly wrapped mummy of a baby crocodile, which was buried as an offering and found in one of the ancient Egyptian tombs.
According to David Hurst Thomas, co-curator of the New York exhibition, computer scanning allows researchers to find out what is inside the discovered historical artifacts in a non-invasive and extremely accurate way.
“There has been tremendous progress in science over the past couple of decades,” says Thomas.
Thanks to technology, children in museums can now virtually "unfold" the mummy and see what is inside the cocoon.
The same technologies were used at one time to find out the reasons for the death of this baby mammoth.
Computer scans can be used to create 3D images, as is the case with this image of a teenage mummy.
Scanning allows you to recreate the size and cut of the eyes, the size and shape of the nose, mouth, ears. On the basis of this data, sculptors then recreate the image of a person who lived several thousand years ago.
The result of this work looks something like this.
The exhibition itself in New York will run until January 7, 2018, so if you are going to the United States on a tourist trip, we highly recommend visiting it.
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK