American Museum of Natural History
For thousands of years, peoples around the world practiced mummification as a way of preserving and honoring their dead.
Mummies brings you face to face with some of these ancient individuals and reveals how scientists are using modern technology to glean stunning details about them and their cultures.
Discover when, how, and why ancient Egyptians and Peruvians were mummified and find out who they were in life. This show features an up-close look at rarely-exhibited mummies as well as interactive touch tables, rare artifacts, and cutting-edge imaging.
Mummification was practiced by numerous cultures in what is now Peru, beginning more than 7,000 years ago and allowed the living to remember, and remain connected with, the dead. Some people kept mummies in their homes or brought them to festivals. Others brought offerings of food or drink to their loved ones』 graves.
The Chinchorro people, who lived in what is now Peru and Chile, were the world’s first practitioners of mummification, thousands of years before Egyptians. The Chinchorro painted the mummies they prepared black or red and added a wig. Making a mask would have been one of the last steps of the process. The sculptor covered the dead person’s skull with clay, fashioned a nose, eyes, and mouth, and then left it to dry. The masks rarely survived intact because unbaked clay is fragile—a modern sculptor made the mask below using ancient materials and methods.
Replica of a Chinchorro mummy mask.
© 2015 The Field Museum, A115210d_029D, photographer John Weinstein
Mummies are often entombed with food, figurines, pottery, and other items for use or wear in everyday life. Smaller goods were often placed inside a mummy’s wrappings. Fine ceramics, such as this double-spouted jar with the face of a jaguar made in the Paracas culture (conventionally dated from 800 BC–AD 100), were often buried with the mummified dead. Items like these can help archaeologists understand how ancient Peruvians lived, and what they cared about.
Ceramic jar made in the Paracas culture.
© 2015 The Field Museum, A115203d_002C, photographer John Weinstein
Thousand-year-old vessels for chicha, a beer made from corn, were buried with mummies in the ancient Chancay culture of Peru. The vessels』 figures hold out small cups, as if to offer the dead a drink. The Chancay were known to replenish cups of chicha, dishes of beans and corn, and other foods inside the tombs of their loved ones.
Vessels created to contain chicha.
© 2015 The Field Museum, A115208d_018E, photographer John Weinstein
Researchers don’t understand the meaning of all grave goods found with mummies, such as this Nazca vessel portraying a preserved head. Once thought to be war trophies, severed heads among the Nazca (100 BC–AD 800) were ritual objects of unknown purpose. The figure portrayed on the vessel has its mouth sewn shut with cactus spines.
This Nazca vessel portrays a preserved head.
© 2015 The Field Museum, A115205d_016B, photographer John Weinstein
Mummies in EgyptMummies are inextricably linked in our imagination with ancient Egypt, and not without reason. Mummification was practiced for thousands of years in Egypt and was long considered a key step in a person’s journey to the afterlife.
Egyptian mummies were prepared using a detailed process that included removing many of the internal organs, desiccating the body in a drying salt, and wrapping the preserved body in linen before placing it in a wooden coffin, like this one. The painted coffin (#30023) below, and the mummy that was inside it, are both featured in Mummies.
Coffin #30023 dates back to the late 25th Dynasty or early 26th Dynasty of ancient Egypt, (approximately 700–600 BC).
© 2015 The Field Museum, A115218d_003C, photographer John Weinstein
Grave robbing was a problem in ancient Egypt, but coffins of limestone made the grave more difficult to open or damage. While most people couldn’t afford one, wealthier Egyptians sometimes paid for the added security. The fragment below is from a limestone coffin, also called a sarcophagus, that would have held a wooden coffin and, inside that, a mummy. The full sarcophagus would have weighed several thousand pounds.
Fragment of a sarcophagus of Middle Ptolemaic Egypt (225–175 BC).
© 2015 The Field Museum, A115213d_017A, photographer John Weinstein
Egyptians believed that the liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines needed to be preserved because the person would need all their body parts in the afterlife. The organs were placed in a small stone or wood chest divided into four compartments or into canopic jars like the ones pictured below. Each jar features a removable top carved to represent one the four Sons of Horus, deities who protected the organs inside and served the dead. The jackal-headed jar, for instance, would have held a person’s stomach that had been carefully dried and wrapped in linen.
Limestone canopic jars whose forms—human, baboon, hawk and jackal—represent the four Sons of Horus.
© 2015 The Field Museum, A115240d_002A, photographer John Weinstein
Archaeologists have uncovered cemeteries containing millions of animal mummies. They weren’t pets—they were raised in large quantities to be mummified, then sold as religious offerings. Most Egyptian gods were associated with animals, and many animals were buried in special tombs in honor of the gods associated with them. The mummified gazelle below was probably raised at a temple specifically for the purpose of being mummified and used as a burial offering.
Ancient Egyptian mummified gazelle.
© 2015 The Field Museum, A115212d_007A, photographer John Weinstein
Mummies RevealedAs new technologies emerge, scientists reexamine museum collections, which often yield new information. Today, new imaging technologies are helping researchers to see inside these centuries-old specimens without damaging them. In Mummies, see the latest research and find out what cutting-edge science can tell us about these individuals—including mummy #30007, also known as the Gilded Lady.
Ancient Egyptian mummy #30007.
© 2015 The Field Museum, A115214d_016A, photographer John Weinstein
This beautifully preserved mummy with intricate linen bindings, a gilded headdress, and painted facial features is from Roman-era Egypt (30 BC–AD 646). Still never unwrapped since she was carefully preserved, this mummy's inner secrets remained hidden until examined by computerized tomography (CT) scanning in 2011.
CT scanning of The Field Museum’s mummies rendered extremely detailed views of bones, muscles, and even the hair of the persons inside their wrappings and coffins. This image of mummy #30007’s skeleton was composed by putting together thousands of 「slices」 of images of only bones, no tissue.
Intact form of mummy #30007; Skeleton of #30007 rendered from CT scan.
© 2015 The Field Museum, A115214d_030A, photographer John Weinstein; CT scan composite © 2015 Field Museum, Katarina Kaspari
The headdress is made of cartonnage, a papier-mâché like substance made from glued layers of papyrus or linen, then covered with gilding, a thin layer of gold. Ancient Egyptians believed the gold would enable the person’s eyes, nose, and mouth to stay intact for the afterlife. The golden skin was used to show divinity because after death, she would be transformed into the god Osiris, who had skin of gold.
© 2015 The Field Museum, A115214d_035B, photographer John Weinstein
CT scanning of mummy #30007 revealed that she was a woman in her forties with curly hair and a slight overbite. It also uncovered evidence that she may have died from tuberculosis, a common and frequently deadly ailment in ancient Egypt.
CT scan of mummy #30007.
© The Field Museum
This hyper-realistic sculpture, created by forensic artist Élisabeth Daynès, portrays the woman behind the gilded mask as she may have looked during her life in ancient Egypt.
Gilded Lady sculpture by Daynès.
© 2012. Photo: E. Daynès–Reconstruction Élisabeth Daynès Paris
來源：American Museum of Natural History
編輯：藝術史與卡考古