Me – owww!
This cat mummy was made for the goddess Bastet. Statues of Bastet show her with a cat’s head and kittens sitting by her feet. People thought that if they left Bastet a gift of a mummified cat in her temple, then she would be pleased. Thousands of mummified cats have been found at a big temple to Bastet in the Nile Delta.
A jumbled up dog
We’re not sure if this mummy is a pet dog or a wild jackal. The dog was the special animal of the god Anubis, so this dog might have been left as a present to Anubis in one of his temples. The head is made of clay. Inside the carefully wrapped bandages the bones are all mixed up.
A gift to the gods
Many gods had the bull as their special animal. People paid to sacrifice (kill) and mummify a bull as a present to one of these gods. But bulls were large and expensive so people often used a calf instead. The most famous bull mummy in ancient Egypt was the Apis Bull which was mummified when it died at the end of its life as a sacred temple bull.
Watch the birdy
Falcons are birds which fly high in the sky, so the falcon became the symbol of the sun god Horus. This mummy has a bronze mask in the shape of a falcon’s face. Falcons were quite difficult to catch, so not every falcon mummy contains a whole bird. The embalmer must have thought the person buying it to give to Horus wouldn’t notice!
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Mystery mummy?
The ibis was the special bird of Thoth – the god of writing, maths, medicine and the moon. This ibis mummy has beautiful wrappings but it’s hard to tell from the outside what is inside. We can take an x-ray of any mysterious mummy bundles and look at the bones shown on the x-ray to work out which animal is inside.
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I told you I was eel…
Small mummified animals and birds were put inside bronze boxes with a model of the animal on top. The eel model on this box has a human head and is wearing a double crown. The eel mummy is inside. The eel was the special animal of the god Atum. Ancient Egyptians believed that Atum was the god who created the world.
