Posted on 06/19/2015 12:28:29 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
In ancient Egypt, so many people worshiped Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death, that the catacombs next to his sacred temple once held nearly 8 million mummified puppies and grown dogs, a new study finds.
The catacomb ceiling also contains the fossil of an ancient sea monster, a marine vertebrate that's more than 48 million years old, but it's unclear whether the Egyptians noticed the existence of the fossil when they built the tomb for the canine mummies, the researchers said.
Many of the mummies have since disintegrated or been disrupted by grave robbers and industrialists, who likely used the mummies for fertilizer. Even so, archaeologists have found enough evidence to suggest that the Anubis animal cult was a large part of the ancient Egyptian economy.
Ancient Egyptians built the temple and catacomb in honor of Anubis in Saqqara, a burial ground in the country's ancient capital of Memphis. Archaeologists have also found catacombs with the mummified remains of such other animals as the ibis (long-legged birds), hawk, baboon and bull, suggesting the ancient Egyptians also worshipped other animal gods.
"When you go to Saqqara now, you see an area of attractive desert with the pyramids sticking up and one or two of the prominent monuments" associated with animal cults, said the study's lead researcher, Paul Nicholson, a professor of archaeology at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom.
But during the Late Period (747 to 332 B.C.), if one were to visit Saqqara, they would have seen temples, merchants selling statues of bronze deities, priests conducting ceremonies, people offering to interpret dreams and tour guides jostling for business, Nicholson said. Not far off, animal breeders likely raised dogs and other creatures that would later be mummified in honor of the gods.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
A new survey of the dog catacomb overlaid on top of a 1897 map drawn by French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan (seen in gray). The small catacomb on the right is inaccessible due to shifting sands and a 1992 earthquake that hit the region. Credit: New layout by S. Mills, S. Williams and H. Nouwens; Copyright Antiquity Trust
Whoops, the source was supposed to be LiveScience, not Culture24.
Fascinating. I had never heard of any of this.
Civ, have a question regarding a point (in space) approximately three thousand light years away and what the time-line would possibly be here on Earth if one were to be approximately three thousand light years away. Which time-line would exist at the point three thousand light years away; the current Earth time-line or the three thousand years ago time-line or would probably both time-lines exist?
You think they had cat dogocombs, too?
Fascinating SC — though this seems to date to the Assyrian-nubian period (747 to 332 BC). Anubis is an older god — afaik he is dated to pre-dynastic Egypt (pre 3100 BC) — seems like his worship was continued far longer than other deities in the Egyptian pantheon
Oh, you!
;D
They worshipped Anubis, a dog-like god, but killed millions of puppies to please him? I guess Rags have been wrong in the head since the beginning of time.
I’ll bet that’s why a popular name for dogs is “Rags”...
The Egyptians had a raft of different deities, which got edified, demoted, and/or merged over time, as Egypt went from being a collection of city-states to having several larger kingdoms, with occasional unification (a fact, despite the picture of unified nation-state that was the official line, even in antiquity). Aten, an Old Kingdom deity, was raised to supremacy by Akhetaten, for reasons which remain obscure (although the political motivation may be the only thing at work there). The Egyptians had a number of different cat deities, but eventually only one was supreme, the others dwindling into very local worship.
http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/anubis.html
If one could make out the small details from that distance, it would be worth developing FTL travel. That’s probably optimistic though, for at least two reasons. ;’) We s ee what the stars were doing years (generally many, many years) after the events happen, but are unaware of what is going on there right now. Same goes for Earth — what’s happening now is what’s happening now.
From at least one philosophical perspective, time is meaningless, and not in the quantum mechanical sense.
8 million is a *lot* of dog mummies. This kind of thing would *never* have happened in China...
LOL. Now that's funny.
(Which scares me more than a little.)
The only reason that upsets me is, I didn’t think of it first. ;’)
Who did an actual body count to arrive at this 8 million figure? Or is this just a guesstimate based on a survey configured according to the parameters cooked up by digital models. You know, kinda like global warming.
There are a known number of rooms, so it was probably just a matter of counting up how many in a fraction of one or more rooms, and estimating the count that way.
Of course they had “cat cot o combs.” That’s how they got the dogs to go in for their mummification....they chased the cats into the “cat o combs.”
Are you sure about Aten? I thought he was a "new god" at the time of Akhenaten
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