Animal Mummies

The ancient Egyptians did not just preserve the bodies of dead people, but also many different animals. These bodies are called ‘mummies'. The ancient Egyptians thought that a person or animal could not live after death without their body being mummified.

The word mummy has nothing to do with mummies and daddies. The Arabs settled in Egypt in the eighth century AD. They looked inside some of the tombs and noticed that the bodies were covered in black sticky stuff which they thought was tar. The Arabic word for tar is ‘mummia'.