Mummy of an adult man, name unknown. The preparation has been carried out with great care and skill by the embalmer, and the rounded and shapely contours of a living body have been skillfully imitated. The features of the face are painted upon the outermost wrappings. The fingers and toes are each wrapped separately; the...
The mummy of Queen Tiye was found within the second side chamber of the tomb of Amenhotep II. Found in 1898 by Victor Loret, it was discovered that Amenhotep II’s tomb had later been used by the Ancient Egyptian priesthood as a storage for many royal mummies spanning both the 18th and 19th Dynasties. Tiye...
The mummy of Queen Henuttawy was found in the Deir el-Bahari Royal Cachette (TT320). She was the wife of Pinedjem I of the 21st Dynasty. A golden embalming plaque was found inside the stomach of her mummy, bearing the Eye of Horus, the names of the Four Sons of Horus, and an inscription including the...
A team at the British Museum and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), have led a pioneering study into 2500-year-old ancient Egyptian lizard mummies. The team used an innovative technique called neutron imaging to ‘look’ inside a group of six sealed first millennium BC animal coffins from...
A mummy currently believed to be that of Ramesses I was stolen from Egypt and displayed in a private Canadian museum for many years before being repatriated. The mummy had been stolen from the Royal Cachette in Deir el-Bahari (TT320) by the Abu-Rassul family of grave robbers and sold by Turkish vice-consular agent Mustapha Aga...
Archaeologists have unearthed the first full-color portraits of Egyptian mummies in more than a century. The excavation at Gerzeh archaeological site in Faiyum revealed a huge funerary building, also turned up papyri, pottery, and coffins from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods Egyptian archaeologists completing their 10th season of excavations at Gerzeh, 75 miles southwest of...
This falcon-headed coffin does not contain an actual mummy but a symbolic Osiris mummy stuffed with grains like corn and sand. The falcon head on the coffin and the hieroglyphic text on the painted lid indicate they are associated with the funerary deity Ptah-Sokar-Osiris. During the mysteries, two statuettes of Osiris were manufactured: one was...
Some ‘hawk’ mummies are the remains of birds who were bred and lived in captivity. Many hawk mummy bundles contain only partial skeletons, or none at all. Most animals, however, may have been seen rather as heralds who entered the Afterlife grateful to the sponsor who paid for their care and feeding and embalming. They...
Originally Egyptologists at the museum thought that the mummy of Ankh Hor was untouched, but recent x-rays found modern pins and clips. A re-examination of the cartonnage revealed that it had been cut, re-sealed and painted over. Although no one knows why it was opened, it is possible that Victorian researchers started to unwrap Ankh...
The mummy of Lady Rai is one of the oldest known mummies uncovered in Egypt. She was discovered in 1881 and researchers estimate that she was about 30 – 40 years old when she died around 1530 BC. From the writings left behind about Lady Rai, we know that she was the nursemaid to Queen...
