Head of mummy of parapoh Amenhotep III
G. Elliot Smith, 1912
Showing posts with label mummy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mummy. Show all posts
11/14/12
11/4/12
6/30/12
6/4/12
Head of a Mummified Cat
Egyptian Late Period to Ptolemaic
c. 664–30 BCE
The Egyptians viewed their gods not as spirits but as intelligences that could be personified in a body. The earliest evidence of cats as deities comes from a 3100BC crystal cup decorated with an image of the lion-headed goddess Mafdet. The goddess Bast was originally depicted as a fiercely protective and warlike lion, like Sekhmet, but as Bastet's image "softened" over time she became more strongly associated with domestic cats.
As cats were sacred to Bast, the practice of mummification was extended to them, and the respect that cats received after death mirrored the respect they were treated with in everyday life. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that in the event of a fire, men would guard the fire to make certain that no cats ran into the flame. Herodotus also wrote that when a cat died, the household would go into mourning as if for a human relative, and would often shave their eyebrows to signify their loss.
A colossal tomb at the temple of Bast was discovered in 1888. This tomb, outside of Beni Hasan, held more than nineteen tonnes of animal mummies and remains, the vast majority being cats..
The farmer who made the discovery sold most of the tomb's contents to be ground up as fertilizer.
-wiki
Egyptian Late Period to Ptolemaic
c. 664–30 BCE
The Egyptians viewed their gods not as spirits but as intelligences that could be personified in a body. The earliest evidence of cats as deities comes from a 3100BC crystal cup decorated with an image of the lion-headed goddess Mafdet. The goddess Bast was originally depicted as a fiercely protective and warlike lion, like Sekhmet, but as Bastet's image "softened" over time she became more strongly associated with domestic cats.
As cats were sacred to Bast, the practice of mummification was extended to them, and the respect that cats received after death mirrored the respect they were treated with in everyday life. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that in the event of a fire, men would guard the fire to make certain that no cats ran into the flame. Herodotus also wrote that when a cat died, the household would go into mourning as if for a human relative, and would often shave their eyebrows to signify their loss.
A colossal tomb at the temple of Bast was discovered in 1888. This tomb, outside of Beni Hasan, held more than nineteen tonnes of animal mummies and remains, the vast majority being cats..
The farmer who made the discovery sold most of the tomb's contents to be ground up as fertilizer.
-wiki
4/11/10
4/10/10
2006 First place winner in photography given by The National Science Foundation and Science magazine in their Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.
CT scan of a 2,000 year old mummy given the name Sherit (little one).
Sherit had been housed in the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum & Planetarium Museum for 75 years before transported to Stanford's Grant Building for the scan.
Some 60,000 scans were made of the mummy using a high-end AXIOM Siemens scanner.
4/9/10
3/6/10
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)