When tourists visited Egypt in the late 19th century, they often came home carrying animal mummies. The ancient creatures were considered excellent souvenirs, compactly embodying the exotic rituals of an ancient society. The mummies were also abundant. One cemetery in Saqqara contained 7 million embalmed dogs. Another held 4 million mummified ibises. Some of the souvenirs were subsequently unwrapped to see what was inside. Others were bequeathed to museums, where they were politely received and shuffled into basements.
That’s where a curatorial assistant at the Brooklyn Museum found 30 uncataloged animal mummies in 2009, neatly shelved in a storage vault. Times had changed since they were set aside in the 1930s and ’40s. “Early on, museums were specifically interested in displaying luxurious objects,” says associate curator Yekaterina Barbash. “Now more and more curators are interested in displaying the real life of ancient Egyptians.”
The Brooklyn mummies were neither rare nor glamorous. On the contrary, as the most commonplace artifacts of ancient Egypt, they clearly relate to everyday cultural practices. And yet they’re also very peculiar, only slightly better understood today than they were by 19th-century tourists. Textual evidence shows that Egyptians perceived animals in ways that were baffling even to their contemporaries. Associating dogs and ibises with deities, Egyptians elicited scorn from neighboring Jewish and Roman authorities.
