"Archaeologists have discovered more than 13 ancient Egyptian coffins piled one on top of the other within a burial well at the desert necropolis of Saqqara, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities." Source: Live Science.
"The 2,500-year-old wooden coffins are so well preserved that the intricate designs on them, painted in blue, gold, white, black and red, are still visible.
"The identity of the deceased who were buried within the coffins remains a mystery; archaeologists have yet to look inside the sealed coffins, which haven't been opened since the bodies were interred within, the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities reported in a Sept. 6 Facebook post."
"These newfound coffins are the largest finding at Saqqara since 30 wooden coffins were discovered in a cache at Al-Assasif cemetery within the necropolis in October 2019, the ministry said."
"According to Dr. Janet Davey from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in Australia, some ancient Egyptians were naturally blonde or red haired. Her research has brought an answer to an intriguing question connected with Egyptian mummies and the effects of the mummification process." Source: Ancient Origins (2016).
"An article published recently by The Sydney Morning Herald says that the mystery of the red and blonde hair discovered on some ancient Egyptian mummies may finally be solved. The new research was necessary to check the common perception that no ancient Egyptians had hair that wasn’t colored dark brown or black. Until now, most researchers had claimed that the different colors of the mummy hair were a result of the mummification process itself."
Note:According to Wikipedia, the ancient Egyptians used natron, a "salt mixture from dry lake beds," as a drying agent during mummification ceremonies. Until recently, experts believed that this treatment could have changed the color of the mummy's hair, but Dr. Davey, with the help of industrial chemist Alan Elliot, ran an experiment which demonstrated that this wasn't the case:
"Davey and Elliot covered [hair] samples in the salty powder for 40 days. It is believed that this was the same amount of time that was needed in ancient times to dry out the bodies. The donors of the hair were men and women aged from 4 to 92 years old. Most of the samples were dark hair, with one grey, one fair, and one with henna on it for comparison.
"After 40 days, all the hair was removed from the salty powder and they appeared unchanged. Microscopic analysis also showed no change in the hair."
"Three mummified animals from ancient Egypt have been digitally unwrapped and dissected by researchers, using high-resolution 3D scans that give unprecedented detail about the animals' lives -- and deaths -- over 2000 years ago. The three animals - a snake, a bird and a cat - are from the collection held by the Egypt Centre at Swansea University. Previous investigations had identified which animals they were, but very little else was known about what lay inside the mummies." Source: Science Daily.
Comment: If this technology had been available in the early 1900s, the officials of the Cabot Museum of Archaeology in Boston would have gotten a nasty surprise when they saw the first hi-def 3D X-ray images of a particular mummy in the museum's collection.
"A scanning project [of Egyptian animal mummies] at Manchester Museum and the University of Manchester has revealed that about a third of the bundles of cloth are empty inside." Source: BBC (2015).
"Researchers believe there was a huge appetite for these religious offerings, and demand for the mummies may have outstripped supply."
Note: Animal mummies were used as votive offerings in ancient Egypt, where many of the gods were represented in animal forms:
"Animal mummies were votive gifts. Today you'd have a candle in a cathedral; in Egyptian times you would have an animal mummy." (BBC)
"You would go to a special site, buy an animal mummy, using a system of barter. You'd then give it to a priest, who would collect a group of animal mummies and bury them."
Unfortunately, it looks like many of the ordinary people who wanted to show their devotion fell victim to a swindle operated by the embalmers. Many of these "mummies" contained no animal parts at all. Instead, they were stuffed with "organic material such as mud, sticks and reeds, that would have been lying around the embalmers' workshops, and also things like eggshells and feathers, which were associated with the animals, but aren't the animals themselves."
Pagan or Christian, religion in general has always been rife with fraud.
"The sound of a 3,000 year old mummified individual has been accurately reproduced as a vowel-like sound based on measurements of the precise dimensions of his extant vocal tract following Computed Tomography (CT) scanning, enabling the creation of a 3-D printed vocal tract. By using the Vocal Tract Organ, which provides a user-controllable artificial larynx sound source, a vowel sound is synthesised which compares favourably with vowels of modern individuals." Source: Nature (Jan. 2020).
Interesting talk if you can hear it.
The PDF version of a 2017 paper describing the Vocal Tract Organ can be downloaded from ResearchGate.
"The oldest deliberately interred mummies were unearthed in the Camarones Valley of Chile. This valley is in the far north of the country, in a region called the Atacama Desert. A narrow strip of land between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, this desert receives little rainfall and is considered one of the driest places on Earth. The mummies there were found in 1917 by the German archaeologist Max Uhle at Chinchorro Beach near the town of Arica, CNN reported." Source: Live Science.
"The mummies belong to what Uhle called the Chinchorro culture (9,000 to 3,100 years ago), who lived in what is now southern Peru and northern Chile. Chinchorro people settled in coastal villages and relied on fishing as their primary means of subsistence, using fishing hooks made out of shellfish. They also hunted animals on land and gathered edible plants from the surrounding area."
Report from 2019.
Note: The Chinchorro mummies are something like 2000 years older than the oldest Egyptian mummies discovered so far.
"DNA tests on British prehistoric mummies revealed they were made of body parts from several different people, arranged to look like one person." Source: BBC (2011)
"It is thought the body parts may have come from people in the same families."
Note:Cladh Hallan is the name of an archaeological site on the island of South Uist. According to one expert on Bronze Age Britain, these composite mummies may not have been buried immediately, but "played an active part in society [in a form of ancestral worship], as they do in some tribal societies in other parts of the world." As such, they may "have been asked for spiritual advice to help the community make decisions."
"Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh lived and died almost 3,000 years ago in ancient Egypt. We don’t know a lot about Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh’s life, but we do know he was a priest in the temple of Amun at Karnak. Here he had two main roles – one was ‘Opener of the Doors of Heaven’, which meant he was one of the priests who was entitled to open the doors of the shrine in the temple sanctuary, containing the cult image of the god." Source: The British Museum.
"After Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh died, he was mummified, wrapped in fine linen and sewn into his plaster and linen mummy case. This case was beautifully painted in bright colours and gilded with gold leaf over the face. At the time of his funeral, he was lowered into his coffin, and carried to his tomb. Then several litres of warm black ‘goo’ were poured all over the mummy case, covering it completely, effectively cementing the case into the coffin. The lid was then placed on the coffin, and he was left to journey forth to the underworld."
"... For the first time in over 100 years, Ta-Kr-Hb has been lifted out of her coffin so that she can be fully assessed. The lower part of the coffin (the trough) is a forensically rich environment that features soils, plants, and insects. The conservation team at the museum are confident that the scientific analysis of this material, and also of the resin used to cover the bandages, will reveal more details about the mummification of Ta-Kr-Hb and the places her body was kept in.
"Perhaps the most exciting development is the discovery of painted figures on the internal and external bases of the trough. Both figures are representations of the Egyptian goddess, Amentet or Imentet, known as the ‘She of the West’ or sometimes as ‘Lady of the West’. The West here may be a geographical allusion but it is primarily a mythological, supernatural reference."
Note:According to ArtNet, "Ta-Kr-Hb, as the mummy is identified in hieroglyphics on the coffin, is believed to preserve the remains of a priestess or princess from Thebes ... The fragile artifact, which sustained damage at the hands of grave robbers and Victorian collectors, had been undergoing conservation ahead of a display at the new City Hall Museum in Perth in 2022."
"'The gruesome mummy of Unknown Man E, also known as the ‘Screaming Mummy’, has long puzzled scholars,' renowned Egyptologist Zahi Hawass told Al-Ahram Weekly, adding that this particular mummy is surrounded in mystery. Although he was re-buried in the royal mummy cache of Deir Al-Bahari, he was not wrapped in the usual fine linen bandages like the rest of the mummies. Instead, he was wrapped in sheepskin, which was considered impure by the ancient Egyptians. His hands and feet were tied with leather thongs. He was not even mummified, but was merely left to dry in natron and then had some resin poured into his open mouth." Source: Archaeology News Network (2018).
Note: There has been speculation that this is the mummy of a 20th Dynasty Egyptian prince known as Pentawar who was "involved in the so-called 'harem conspiracy', a plot to kill his father [Ramesses III] and place Pentawer on the throne," according to Wikipedia. "He either killed himself or was executed following the assassination attempt."
It's possible, I guess, that this man wasn't actually screaming at the time of his death. The drying out process may have caused his mouth to open.