An Egyptian Babushka!
I'm sure we all know that a babuska is - and no, I'm not talking about a Russian grandmother. As known in non-Russian-speaking lands, a babuska is one of those vaguely human-shaped wooden dolls which, when twisted, opens to reveal a similarly shaped but smaller doll inside it. This too can be twisted apart to disclose a third doll and so on until you end up with a tiny cylinder of brightly-painted wood about the size of a pea.
It now appears that the ancient Egyptians had something similar, except that it wasn't wooden dolls they were stuffing inside each other, it was animals inside humans!
For nearly 120 years the Barnum Museum in Connecticut has had an Egyptian mummy on display, acquired back in the "good old days" when such things were freely available to anyone with a bit of cash and a taste for the macabre. Barnum and Baily's Circus was, of course, famous for catering to the public taste and macabre is what the public want, so a mummy was more or less de rigeur. However since the public's desire for entertainment - macabre or otherwise - is now catered for by the ubiquitous television, Barnum's mummy no longer goes on tour but stays comfortably ensconced in a glass case in the museum.
Of course, in these enlightened times scientists and archaeologists have got in on the act. While the public might gawp at the mysterious hieroglyphs on the mummy's sarcophagus, Egyptologists have read them and identified the mummy as the former Pa-Ib, a woman from about 2,000 BC. In fact, back in 2006 the Egyptologists actually managed to persuade Barnums to let them x-ray Pa-Ib, who was disinterred from her sarcophagus and carted off to the nearest hospital for a CT scan.
The results were interesting. As readers of these pages are probably aware, the first step in the process of mummification was to remove the interior organs of the deceased. All those squishy bits - livers, lungs, heart and so on - were full of moisture and long ere they could have felt the dehydrating effects of a natron bath they would have started to "go off". By removing them and sticking them in the natron separately the mummifiers ensured that the dead person could be buried with a complete set of internal organs. Well, when I say "buried with", they were in the same room - or, at least, the same pyramid complex - as their former owner.
What you may not have considered is that the removal of all those bits left a gaping void. Up in the chest area this wasn't much of a problem as a person's ribs could be counted on to keep their proper shape, but lower down the absence of liver, stomach and intestines was as dramatic as an expensive course of liposuction - except that most Egyptians didn't have the fat to begin with. In consequence the embalmers either hid the sunken belly under carefully applied and stiffened bandages or they stuffed the void with whatever came to hand. Mud and crumpled up papyrus were favourites.
In the case of Pa-Ib, however, the CT-scan revealed the presence of a number of separate packages, but it wasn't detailed enough to reveal the contents of those packages. Unfortunately, dried out 4,000 year old tissue does not stretch as well as it did immediately after the body was removed from the natron bath. Although it was possible to introduce the packages into the body through the customary slit in the side, it was not possible to remove them in order to open them up.
The first question the Egyptologists want answered, therefore, is what is in those packages. The second is to discover whether Pa-Ib was a mother. The original CT-scan indicated that she may have given birth, but before the archaeologists could give the matter proper study the hospital inconsiderately erased the data from the scan in order to do more scans on patients.
Three years further on Quinnipiac University has purchased a new CT-scanner with eight times the resolution of the previous one, so Pa-Ib is going to have a second scan. Fortunately, unlike living patients, the Egyptologists don't have to worry about the radiation dose Pa-Ib might receive, so they feel justified in sending her through the machine again, even though it is merely to satisfy their curiosity.
What excites them is the possibility that one of those mysterious packages may contain a mummified bird. Apparently there are only two other examples of such burials known: one is in the Getty Museum in California and the other is in Switzerland, so if Pa-Ib turns out to have a bird inside her, she will be only the third such mummy. The only problem is that if one of those packages is indeed a falcon or an ibis, it will be a puzzle for Egyptologists because so far as is known, Egyptians were not mummying birds or animals as far back as 2,000 BC. Either Pa-Ib is younger than we thought by several hundred years, or our understanding of Egyptian mummification developments will need to be radically altered.
© Kendall K. Down 2010
