The news media had a field day earlier this year with the news that King Tutankhamen may not have been murdered. Detailed CT scans, funded by the National Geographic, ruled out the long held theory that the cause of his death was a blow to the head.
A visit to San Diego’s Museum of Man, which is said to display more mummies than any other museum in the United States, visitors can learn about the fascinating process of mummification. The permanent ancient Egypt exhibit, housed on the second floor in the East Wing, includes a mummy (on loan from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County), a mummified falcon, mummy masks and a coffin.
The Museum also holds the only two stolen mummies, the body of a 15 and 1 year-old girl (from between A.D. 1040 and 1260) found in a cave near Chihuahua, Mexico by two Lemon Grove teenagers in 1966, and then hidden in the garage of a friend for fourteen years. Another Mummy is the Peruvian Mummy, found in a cave near Lupo, the Andes. There is also the somewhat gruesome small exhibit of shrunken heads made by the Jivaro Indians of Ecuador.
The interactive Discover Egypt exhibit in San Diego’s Museum of Man, located in the Children’s Discovery Center, houses a mummy, decked with Scarab amulets (representation of a beetle, considered sacred and a symbol of the soul. It is worn as a talisman). If interested, one can listen to the mummification process narration, as told by the “Egyptian God Anubis.”
There are a number of ways to mummify a body, naturally or with chemicals. Some mummies had died naturally, others by accident and there were also those who were sacrificed. A body could have been mummified in a desert type environment by dry heat and then covered by sand. Preservation could also have happened when someone died in a glacier accident.
On September 10 of this year, a Tutankhamen exhibit will open at a price of $100 per visitor. There will be fifty relics from Tut’s tomb, including the urn that contained his mummified internal organs and the gold crown that sat on his mummified head. Artifacts from other pharaohs, including those from Thutmose IV and Amenhotep II, will also be on display. The artifacts are between 3,300 and 3,500 years old.
Feeds