The ancient remains of a complete canine mummy in an undisturbed section of the catacomb. Credit: P.T. Nicholson; Copyright Antiquity Trust
Posted on 06/22/2015 1:25:16 PM PDT by Red Badger
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. [See Photos of the Dog Mummies in Ancient Egyptian Catacomb]
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 ....
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
The ancient remains of a complete canine mummy in an undisturbed section of the catacomb. Credit: P.T. Nicholson; Copyright Antiquity Trust
..Woof! Woof!.............PinGGG!.................................
Nah, they didn't notice.
LOL
Eight million?
Who counted them?
8 million “Mummy” dogs?...aint that a bitch?
It was in the woof...................
ISIS will want to burn it all...........................Dogs are ‘unclean’ to muslims.................
They rounded up.
Do dogs receive “woofs” on their Woofer accounts?
Only if their bark is worse than their byte......................
“ISIS will want to burn it all...........................”
Funny you should mention that.
“Bizarre products came from mummies, or parts thereof. Such commodities included “Mummy,” ground mummies molded into pills for medicinal use (175); “mummy brown” paint (176); and cheap fuel for locomotives. Mark Twain reported in his 1869 travelogue The Innocents Abroad (Hartford, Conn.) that mummies were burned like coal to produce steam on the rail line from Cairo to Alexandria (176–77). Entrepreneurs imported mummy rags to make paper in the United States. Paper mogul Isaac Augustus Stanwood, for example, had trouble obtaining enough domestic rags during the Civil War until he hit upon the idea of bringing over shiploads of linen-wrapped Egyptian mummies. His machinery macerated linen bandages and papyrus fillers. From the resulting slurry, Stanwood produced coarse brown sheets “sold to shopkeepers, grocers, and butchers, who used [them] for wrapping paper” (189).”
http://www.ajaonline.org/online-review-book/1184
Catacomb, not dogacomb???
Recycling is good.................
I’ll bet they did!
One catacombs system, with 8 million dogs? When the entire population of the entire nation of Egypt was estimated around 3 million back in 1446 BC? Sorry, I’m not buying it.
Dog-a-comb..............
Well, I’d imagine that these mummies represent a long period of time, not just a few years, we’re talking centuries of Anubis worship................
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