Mummies Egyptian mummies have fascinated people ever since they found out about them. I remember when I was a kid some of the horror movies were based on mummies and there are still some today. Mummies have not always gotten the respect they deserved as dead bodies. In the 1800s when the steam engine became popular in Egypt mummies were used as fuel for the engines. I have to wonder if the stoker was asked to throw another mummy into the fire to speed the train up. I also wonder how many interesting things we burned up which may have advanced our knowledge in some way. There must have been hundreds of thousands of mummies created over the thousands of years the practice was continued. Not all mummies are of humans. Many animals have been made into mummies. The Egyptians felt they should mummify their pets so when their owners died and were mummified they could be lain beside them. Offerings of mummified animals were made to the Egyptian gods. Even mummified crocodiles have been found. Why would the ancient Egyptians mummify so many animals? The reason was simple, supply and demand. The Egyptians would mummify animals to sell them to people who wanted to make religious offerings to their gods. This is going to be hard to believe, but the number of mummified animals is estimated to have been about 70 million which were created between 800 B.C. and 400 A.D. It seems there were some mummy creaters who cheated. We know this because some of the animal mummies didn’t contain any animal remains. Here is the breakdown of animals from a test of 80 animal mummies conducted by the Manchester Museum and the University of Manchester. One third of the mummies contained complete animals, one third had only partial remains and one third had no animal remains. Apparently, some of the mummy creaters were not scared of the gods. Even though some mummies of animals had no animals in them or only partial remains, scientists believe the people who bought them knew this and since even the ones that didn’t have partial remains still had a feather or two and egg shell, this may have been considered good enough. It is also thought this was not a scam because the supply of animals might easily have outstripped since so many people wanted them. Many Egyptians who purchased the animal mummies without any animals in them received a discount. The Manchester team has been creating animal mummies for research, but they only use birds who have died of natural causes. I have to wonder what the purpose of these experiments are. We usually think of the Egyptians creating the first mummies, but this is not true. The first people to create mummies were the South Americas, specifically the Chinchorro culture. These were created about 2,000 years before the Egyptian mummies. Their oldest mummies date back over 7,000 years. Their process was to remove the organs, clean all the body cavities and fill the body with clay. They would then sew the body closed and paint the bodies black and place wigs on their heads leaving the eyes and mouth open. This culture mummified all the dead regardless of their station in life. Since the Chinchorro lived in the Atacama Desert this helped to mummify the bodies since it was incredibly dry. The bodies were not buried very deep and were often exposed by winds. No real reason was ever discovered for this practice by these people. Recently there has been a big stir on the internet about mummies with certain mummies being put into the spotlight. Several mysterious mummies were found near the Nazca lines in Peru. The Nazca lines are lines drawn in the soil by an ancient race which show gigantic depictions of animals and shapes which are so large they can only be seen correctly from an altitude. The mummies I am talking about each had only three fingers on each hand which raised quite a lot of interest. UFO researchers and others proposed they were aliens, but DNA tests showed they were humans so they were first declared human. This brings us to the current time. When the bodies were examined closer several differences were found between the mummies and humans even though the DNA matched. The Russians had scientists examine the remains and here is what they found. They found the rib structure in the mummies was different from humans. The mummies had a different shape to their rib cages. One of the Russian scientists claimed he had seen four other male mummies which dated back about 6,500 years. Not only were the rib cages different, but the skulls were different. They were elongated, had missing nasal cavities and the lower jaws didn’t move. This has made many think differently about declaring them human. Aside from these differences the mummies were like us and this has caused some to think they were either aliens similar to us or some ancient human race we are not aware of. Three fingered creatures appear in rock carvings in Peru. For some strange reason mummies interest many of us. Maybe because the process represents a way ancients thought would preserve bodies for the afterlife, therefore they have a sort of paranormal connection. Maybe it is just a grim interest in death since most people feel they want to know more about life after death. No one can be sure why we are so interested in mummies, but you can be sure of one thing and that is the interest is there.
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