In Britain today it is estimated that we will spend £6.4b this year on our pets, three thousand years ago the ancient Eygptians would spend their wealth on animals, though for a different purpose, that of mummification.
A new exhibition opening this week at Manchester Museum sheds light on the practice.
Travel back in time to 750BC and the Egyptian landscape was far removed from the arid desert we see today, a country of lush grassland irrigated by the water’s of the Nile. The ancient peoples lived in much closer proximity to the animals that they shared this luscious landscape with and chose to mummify them and place them in tombs and catacombs.
But these animals by and large were not pets but instead used to communicate with the gods,Thoth, the God of wisdom, believed to be good for solving disputes, or Sobek, the crocodile God, of Royal power, associated with revenge.
These, so called Votive gifts of animals, covered just about every animal known to the Ancient Egyptians, cats and dogs, birds of prey, sing birds, rodents through to crocodiles and ibis.
The exhibition, says Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan, is myth busting, people assume Egypt is dark and scary, associated with death or barren and scarred with sand and rock.
Instead the visitor is acquainted with the lush landscape, the walls all painted green until they are thrust recreation of a subterranean animal catacomb creating an immersive and atmospheric experience for the visitor with a dimly lit, narrow corridor lined with pots containing votive animal mummies, centred around a focal point for worship.
You emerge from the catacomb into a modern world, 19th Century paintings show how animals were ‘worshipped’ by the ancient Egyptians and portray the British fascination with a ‘romantic’ concept of ancient Egypt.
Intrigued by the mysteries of the animal mummies, alongside the pyramids of Giza, one of the main tourist attractions in Egypt during the 18th and 19th centuries was the ‘Tombs of the Birds’. This catacomb at the site of Saqqara, was subsequently lost and was only re-identified in the 1960s by a British team. Saqqara continues to be excavated by British archaeologists today representing continuity in British involvement with this important site.
The Victorian anthropolists followed, some more famous than others, Henry Wellcome, Max Robinow, who became friends with Manchester Industrialist Jessie Howarth whose subsequent friendship with Flinders Petrie would establish the city as one of the centres of Egyptian artefacts.
But while this was going on, one hundred and eighty thousand unwrapped cat mummies were being shipped into Liverpool destined to be crushed and used as fertiliser.
The section on the scientific study of animal mummies highlights the importance of The University of Manchester’s groundbreaking research in this area, supported by fifty British museums.
Using wrapped, partially wrapped and unwrapped animal mummies from a variety of UK collections, the exhibition will look at the use of imaging (photography, radiography, CT, light microscopy) to gain further insights into the subject.
The Ancient Egyptian Animal Bio Bank Project based at the University of Manchester, and conducted by Dr. Stephanie Atherton-Woolham and Dr Lidija McKnight aims to catalogue consistent data from animal mummies in museum collections outside Egypt. Currently, this includes over 800 individual animal mummies from collections in Britain, Europe and the United States.
They have found amazing discoveries.The mummy of what was believed to be a small child was in fact the remains of a cat, while a jackdaw turned out to be the bones of a human arm.
Unlike the human version, the animals were not always treated with reverence, the organs were not taken out, many are not complete, there is evidence that their production was more akin to the modern day production line.
Dr Lidija McKnight, Research Associate, the Ancient Egyptian Bio Bank Project, The University of Manchester said, “This exhibition will showcase the role played by the British in the discovery, excavation, collection, curation and scientific research of this understudied subject. The University of Manchester, with its long history in Egyptian mummy research, is leading the field; helping to shed light on the material remains of this ancient practice and, hopefully, to reveal more about how and why these animal mummies were produced.”
Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan, Manchester Museum said, “We are excited as this is the first exhibition on animal mummies to be held in the UK, and offers the chance to reunite mummified material from different archaeological sites for the first time in over a century. It will feature over 60 mummies, including many never before seen on public display. We are extremely pleased to be able to tour this Manchester-based exhibition to partner institutions. We expect the exhibition to be very popular at Manchester Museum, and look forward to enabling more visitors to share in this exciting subject.”
Manchester Museum
Thursday 8 October 2015 – Sunday 17 April 2016 before being displayed at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow (May-September 2016) and World Museum, Liverpool (October 2016-March 2017).
