"Researchers have discovered the world's first-known pregnant mummy, dating from the first century in Egypt. The find was unexpected, as inscriptions on the mummy's coffin suggested the remains inside belonged to a male priest, according to a new study." Source: Live Science.
"... The mummy turned out to be the remains of a female who died when she was between 20 and 30 years of age and was about 6.5 to 7.5 months pregnant, based on the circumference of the fetus's head."
Note: Nobody knows how this female mummy ended up in a male priest's coffin, but "it's thought that up to 10% of mummies are found in the 'wrong' coffins, due to illegal excavations and looting, according to the study. What's more, there was damage to the wrappings on the mummy's neck, likely caused by robbers who may have stolen some amulets ..."
I have no idea why tomb robbers would take a mummy out of one coffin and place it another, which is presumably what happened if the looting theory is correct.
"Twenty-two mummified members of ancient Egyptian royalty passed through downtown Cairo in an awe-inspiring parade on Saturday [April 3, 2021]. The event, which drew fanfare to the country's robust collections of antiquities in an elaborate procession, saw the mummies being relocated from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, about 3 miles away in nearby Fustat." Source: NPR.
"The spectacle was named The Pharaohs' Golden Parade and comprised 18 kings and four queens, including some of Egypt's most prominent rulers of the past. Among them was King Ramses II, one of Egypt's most famous Pharaohs, who reigned in 12th Century BC. He ruled the New Kingdom for 67 years and was renowned for signing the first known peace treaty, the BBC reported."
The Egyptians turned this into quite a spectacle. "Under heavy security, the mummified remains of the pharaohs and other royals were transported in climate-controlled cases loaded onto trucks decorated with wings and pharaonic design for the hour-long journey from their previous home in the older, Egyptian Museum, " according to Al Jazeera. The bizarre parade was livestreamed [next video]. The stream begins at 17:30.
Video from 2015. Views of mummy brain start at 4:56. The remains look something like granola.
This was an unusual find because ancient Egyptian embalmers normally removed the brain during the mummification process using a procedure called excerebration. I guess the embalmers couldn't be bothered in this particular case for one reason or another.
Excerebration was a nasty process that used a combination of liquification and extraction (with a kind of thin hook) to remove the brain:
"An object more than 6.8 inches long probably made from plants in the group Monocotyledon (including palm and bamboo) would have been used for liquefying and removing the brain. The instrument would be inserted through a hole punched into the ethmoid bone near the nose. Some parts of the brain would be wrapped around this stick and pulled out, and the other parts would be liquefied. The Egyptian mummy would then be put on its abdomen and the liquid drained through the nose hole before other embalming procedures." (Wikipedia)
This demonstration was exaggerated for maximum gross-out effect. The liquid would be mostly gray rather than red, for instance, and the hook would have been used to pull pieces out through the nose rather than just pouring the goop out this way.
"The oldest known instructions for the ancient art of embalming mummies were recently discovered on a medical papyrus from ancient Egypt." Source: Live Science.
"How-to descriptions of the mummification process are exceptionally rare in the archaeological record — only two other such 'manuals' are known. This newest example, found in an ancient scroll dating to around 1450 B.C., predates other mummification texts by more than 1,000 years. The guide contains many helpful suggestions, such as how to make herbal insect repellent and using red linen wrappings to reduce facial swelling."
"Modern medical technology is helping scholars tell a more nuanced story about the fate of an ancient king whose violent death indirectly led to the reunification of Egypt in the 16th century BC. The research was published in Frontiers in Medicine." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"Pharaoh Seqenenre-Taa-II, the Brave, briefly ruled over Southern Egypt during the country's occupation by the Hyksos, a foreign dynasty that held power across the kingdom for about a century (c. 1650-1550 BCE). In his attempt to oust the Hyskos, Seqenenre-Taa-II was killed. Scholars have debated the exact nature of the pharaoh's death since his mummy was first discovered and studied in the 1880s."
It sounds like the Hyksos either killed the pharaoh in battle or took him prisoner and viciously executed him. According to researchers at the Cairo University, "The mummies deformed hands suggest that the King was likely imprisoned with his hands tied. CT images provided detailed analysis of Seqenenre's previously reported injuries to the forehead, right supra-orbital, nose-right orbit, left chick, and skull base. This study revealed additional craniofacial fractures in the right lateral side of the skull that had been concealed by the embalmers beneath layers of material. Analysis of the morphology of the injuries enabled a better understanding of the mechanism of trauma, possible number of the attackers, and their relative position to the King. The size and shape of the fractures correlated well with the studied Hyksos weapons. The lethal attack was aimed at the King's face, likely in an attempt to disgrace him."
According to Wikipedia, "Two or three men, whether assassins or soldiers, must have surrounded and dispatched him before help was available. A blow from an axe must have severed part of his left cheek, exposed the teeth, fractured the jaw, and sent him senseless to the ground; another blow must have seriously injured the skull, and a dagger or javelin has cut open the forehead on the right side, a little above the eye. His body must have remained lying where it fell for some time: when found, decomposition had set in, and the embalming had to be hastily performed as best it might."
"Since the early 1900s, almost 300 human mummies have been uncovered along the coast of southern Peru and northern Chile, including adults, children, infants, and miscarried foetuses." Source: Science Alert (2018).
"With some dated to as far back as 5050 BC, these are the oldest mummies discovered in the world to date.
"They were made by a group of hunter-gatherers known as the Chinchorro people, who were mummifying their dead roughly 2,000 years before the ancient Egyptians began mummifying their pharaohs."
It's possible that many of these mummies were people who died from arsenic poisoning. According to one researcher, "... contaminated drinking water in the area from nearby volcanoes could have initiated the practice of mummification, because researchers have found arsenic in the mummies' tissues.
"'Arsenic poisoning can lead to a high rate of miscarriages, and infant mortality, and the sorrow over these deaths may have led this community to start preserving the little bodies,' he said.
"Mummification could have started with the foetuses and grown to include adults. The oldest mummies we have found are of children.'"
"New analysis of a 20th Dynasty mummified individual reveals her rare mud carapace, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Karin Sowada from Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, and colleagues." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"Studies of mummified bodies from the late New Kingdom to the 21st Dynasty (c. 1294-945 BC) have occasionally reported a hard resinous shell protecting the body within its wrappings, especially for royal mummies of the period. Here, Sowada and colleagues describe their discovery of a rare painted mud carapace enclosing an adult mummy in Sydney's Chau Chak Wing Museum."
This bug could crawl into bed with you tonight. Sweet dreams.
"A man who lived in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of Texas sometime between 1,000 and 1,400 years ago may have died from a horrible case of constipation, according to a study of his mummified remains." Source: Live Science.
"And during the painful months just prior to his death, he ate mainly grasshoppers, the study researchers found.
"Apparently, Chagas disease [see top video], which is caused by a parasite called Trypanosoma cruzi, had blocked up the man's gastrointestinal system. That blockage caused his colon to swell to about six times its normal size — a condition called 'megacolon.' The man was unable to digest foods properly and gradually became malnourished, scientists found. The condition would have made it difficult for the man to walk or even eat on his own. The researchers think that in the last two to three months of his life — either family or members of his community — helped the man eat by feeding him grasshoppers whose legs had been removed."
This parasite is carried by the Triatominae, a family of blood-sucking insects also known as conenose bugs, kissing bugs (because they like to bite you around your mouth) and, appropriately enough, vampire bugs.
At least 130 species of this bug feed on invertebrate blood.
Comment: Great. I thought I'd heard of every kind of nasty disease known to man, but this one's new and particularly disgusting. "Megacolon" -- that sounds like the title of a scatological disaster movie (or an especially gruesome porn flick) . According to the researchers who studied this guy's remains, "they had found 2.6 pounds [1] ... of feces inside the mummy along with a vast amount of food remains that his body never processed." That's just lovely.
The best part of Chagas disease is that you could be infected right now and not even know it until your lower intestine swells up to the size of a Macy's parade float. These vampire bugs are all over the place as well and they seem to be expanding north. Don't worry about it, though. There are only about 300,000 cases every year in the United States.
The Ancient World Review doesn't have a lot of traffic, but I've run the numbers and the odds are that at least one of you reading this right now will get bitten by a vampire bug before the holidays are over. If you do come down with megacolon, here's an instructional video on how to cook and eat grasshoppers like this guy did in Texas a thousand years ago. It probably won't help, but it'll give you something to do while you're waiting for medical science to come up with an effective treatment.
"An Egyptian mummy that was decorated with a woman's portrait contained a surprise — the body of a child who was only 5 years old when she died. Now, scientists have learned more about the mysterious girl and her burial, thanks to high-resolution scans and X-ray 'microbeams' that targeted very small regions in the intact artifact." Source: Live Science.
Note: This is Hawara Portrait Mummy No. 4, one of the famous Fayum portrait mummies (I think). The fact that this is a child's mummy has apparently been known for some time. For instance, a paper which appeared in the 1985 Journal of Egyptian Archaeology states that "its small size indicates that this is the mummy of a child."
When the mummy was examined, "a small, elliptical object" was discovered in the wrappings over the abdomen:
"X-ray diffraction showed that it was made of calcite — but what was it? One possibility is that it could be an amulet included because the child's body was damaged during mummification ... After such a mishap, priests would often place an amulet such as a scarab over the damaged body part to protect the person in the afterlife, and the newfound calcite 'blob' was about the right size and in the right position for it to be a protective scarab..."
"Egypt announced Saturday the discovery of an ancient treasure trove of more than a 100 intact sarcophagi, dating back more than 2,500 years ago, the largest such find this year." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"The sealed wooden coffins, unveiled on site amid much fanfare, belonged to top officials of the Late Period and the Ptolemaic period of ancient Egypt.
"They were found in three burial shafts at depths of 12 metres (40 feet) in the sweeping Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo."