Looks can be deceiving: Fake and composite mummies from a Ptolemaic Period cemetery at Saqqara, Egypt

Description

Disposing of the dead in ancient Egypt was a highly ritualised and complex process instigated by religious beliefs that promised eternal life to those who could satisfy a number of specific requirements. The most important of these requirements was the preservation of the body. But what if there was no body to bury or the body itself was, for some reason, incomplete? A Ptolemaic Period cemetery extending westwards to the Step Pyramid enclosure at Saqqara has yielded more than five hundred burials since excavations began in 1996, among which were four suspicious-looking mummies. Detailed examination of these inhumations delivered surprising findings: the wrappings of one of the mummies (B. 519) contained no more than a few bone fragments commingled with scraps of textile and other materials associated with the mummification process, whereas the other three mummies (B. 415, B. 627 and B. 639) were composed of skeletal elements that belonged to more than one individual.The finding of composite mummies at Saqqara is not unique to ancient Egypt; evidence of this practice has been reported from other burial sites of the Greaco-Roman Period, including Hawara in the Fayum Oasis and Ismant el-Kharab in the Dakhla Oasis. In this presentation I will explore the purposes and circumstances for making fake and composite mummies at Saqqara.

Period	11 Aug 2016
Event title	9th World Congress on Mummy Studies
Event type	Conference
Location	Lima, PeruShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International