Top 10 Most Creepy Ancient Egyptian Mummies In The World
Probably all of you watched horror films about the revived mummies attacking people. This sinister dead always stirred the human imagination. However, in reality, mummies do not carry anything terrible in them, representing an incredible archaeological value. In this issue, you will find 10 real ancient Egyptian mummies that have survived to our time and are one of the most significant archaeological finds of our time.
Mummy is the body of a dead creature, specially treated with a chemical substance, which slows down the process of decomposition of tissues. Ancient Egyptian mummies have stored hundreds and even thousands of years, becoming a “window” in the ancient world. On the one hand, the mummies look scary, some goosebumps run over from one glance at these wrinkled bodies, but on the other hand – they represent an incredible historical value, storing in themselves the most interesting information about the life of the ancient world, customs, health, and diet of our ancestors.
1. Screaming mummy from the Guanajuato museum
The museum of the mummies of Guanajuato in Mexico is one of the strangest and most terrible in the world, there are collected 111 mummies there, which are naturally preserved mummified bodies of people, mostly dead in the second half of the XIX century and the first half of the 20th century and buried in the local cemetery “The Pantheon of Saint Paula”.
The museum’s exhibits were exhumed from 1865 to 1958 when a law was enacted obliging relatives to pay a tax for the bodies of their relatives to be in the cemetery. If the tax was not paid on time, the relatives lost the right to the burial place and the dead bodies were removed from the stone tombs. As it turned out, some of them were naturally mummified, and they were stored in a special building in the cemetery. Distorted expressions of faces on some ancient Egyptian mummies indicate that they were buried alive.
In the late XIX – early XX century, these ancient Egyptian mummies began to attract tourists, and cemetery workers began to charge for visiting the premises where they were stored. Officially the date of the formation of the Museum of mummies in Guanajuato is 1969 when mummies were exhibited in glazed shelves. Now the museum is visited annually by hundreds of thousands of tourists.
2. The mummy of a boy from Greenland (Qilakitsoq market town)
Near the Greenlandic settlement of Qilakitsoq, located on the west bank of the largest island in the world, in 1972 an entire family was discovered, mummified through low temperatures. Nine perfectly preserved bodies of the ancestors of the Eskimos who died in Greenland at the time when the Middle Ages reigned in Europe aroused a keen interest of scientists, but one of them became famous all over the world and beyond the scientific framework.
Belonging to a one-year-old child (as anthropologists who suffered from Down’s syndrome) found it more like a doll, makes an indelible impression on visitors to the National Museum of Greenland in Nuuk.
3. Two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo
Catacombs of Capuchins in Italian Palermo – this is an eerie place, a necropolis that attracts tourists from around the world with a lot of mummified bodies of varying degrees of safety. But the symbol of this place is the childish face of Rosalia Lombardo, a two-year-old girl, who died of pneumonia in 1920. Her father, unable to cope with grief, turned to the famous physician Alfredo Salafii with the request to keep the body of her daughter.
Now it makes the hair on the head move on all the visitors of the dungeons of Palermo without exception – amazingly preserved, peaceful and so alive that it seems that Rosalie has only dozed off for a while, it makes an indelible impression.
4. Juanita from the Peruvian Andes
Whether the girl (called the age of death from 11 to 15 years), named Juanita, has gained worldwide fame, having fallen into the rating of the best scientific discoveries according to Time magazine due to its safety and terrible history, which after finding the mummy in the ancient The Inca settlement in the Peruvian Andes in 1995 was told by scientists. Sacrificed to the gods in the 15th century, it has reached our days in an almost perfect state thanks to the ice of the Andes peaks.
Being a part of the exhibition of the Museum of the Andean Sanctuaries in the city of Arequipa, the mummy often goes on tour, exhibiting, for example, at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society in Washington, or at many sites of the Land of the Rising Sun, generally distinguished by a strange love for mummified bodies.
5. Knight Christian Friedrich von Kahlbutz, Germany
This German knight lived in the period from 1651 to 1702. After his death, his body turned into a mummy in a natural way and is now on public display.
According to the legend, Knight Kahlbutz was a big fan of using the “right of the first night”. The loving Christian had 11 own children and about three dozen bastards. In July 1690, he declared his “right of the first night” for the young shepherd’s bride from the village of Buckwitz, but the girl refused him, after which the knight killed her newly-made husband. The prisoner in custody, he swore before the judges that he was not guilty, otherwise “after his death, his body will not crumble to dust.”
Since Kahlbutz was an aristocrat, his honest word was enough to be justified and released. The knight died in 1702 at the age of 52 and was buried in the family vault of von Kalbutsev. In 1783, the last representative of this dynasty died, and in 1794, a local church started a restoration, during which the vault was opened to rebury all the dead of the von Kahlbutz family in an ordinary cemetery. It turned out that all of them, apart from Christian Friedrich, were decayed. The latter turned into a mummy, which was proved by the fact that the loving knight was still a perjurer
6. Mummy of the Egyptian pharaoh – Ramses the Great
The mummy represented on the photo belongs to Pharaoh Ramses II (Ramses the Great), who died in 1213 BC. And is one of the most famous Egyptian pharaohs. It is believed that he was the ruler of Egypt during the time of the campaign of Moses. One of the distinctive features of this mummy is the presence of red hair, symbolizing the connection with God Seth – the patron saint of royal power.
In 1974, Egyptologists found that the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II quickly deteriorates. It was decided to immediately take her plane to France for examination and restoration, for which the ancient Egyptian mummies issued a modern Egyptian passport, and in the column “occupation” wrote “the king (deceased).” At the airport in Paris, the mummy was greeted with all military honors, relying on the visit of the head of state.
7. Mummy girl 18-19 years old from the Danish town of Skrydstrup
Mummy girl aged 18-19 years, buried in Denmark in 1300 BC. E. The deceased was a tall, slender girl with long blond hair, set in an intricate hairdo, something reminiscent of a Babette of the 1960s. By her expensive clothes and jewelry, we can assume that she belonged to the family of the local elite.
The girl was buried in a coffin made of oak lined with herbs, so her body and clothes were surprisingly well preserved. Preservation would be even better if several years before this mummy was discovered, the soil layer above the grave was not damaged.
