Pictures: Bird Mummies "Fed" After Death, Stuffed With Snails

Artfully Enrobed
Photograph courtesy Andrew Nelson, University of Western Ontario
Wrapped in linen, this so-called sacred ibis—a hatchling housed at Montreal's McGill University—provided some of the first evidence that ancient Egyptians sent animal mummies on their final journeys fully fed, a new study says.
CT scans of the 2,500-year-old bird, one of four specimens used in the study, show that its body was packed with grains after death to sustain it in its afterlife mission as a messenger to the gods, according to findings published January 13 in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
"The ancient Egyptians intended to send this ibis to eternity with a full belly," the study team writes.
(Also see "Egyptian Animals Were Mummified Same Way as Humans.")
—James Owen
Published February 7, 2012
Snail Pouch
Image courtesy Andrew Wade and Yale Peabody Museum (item ANT.006924.004)
A CT-scan-based 3-D reconstruction of an adult sacred ibis mummy from the ancient Egyptian city of Abydos reveals that a posthumous food parcel of snails was inserted inside the bird via an incision, currently stored at Yale University.
When the ibis was sacrificed, its last meal and stomach would have been removed and then carefully replaced during the mummification process, explained study leader Andrew Wade of the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
The bird is one of three sacred ibis mummies aged between 2,600 and 2,000 years that were found to have been packed with food for the afterlife. Now extinct in Egypt, sacred ibises have been found throughout ancient catacombs and in other chambers dedicated to offerings to the gods.
(Related: See National Geographicanimal-mummy pictures.)
Published February 7, 2012
See-Through Snail
Image courtesy Andrew Wade and Yale Peabody Museum (item ANT.006924.004)
Pictured inside the body of a mummified sacred ibis via CT scan, this snail's shell formed part of the meal given to the bird for its final journey as a messenger to the gods.
Other ibis mummy snacks identified in the new study include cereal grains and small vertebrates such as fish.
The discoveries provide the only known evidence of food packaging in either animal or human mummies, according to lead study author Andrew Wade.
"Some animal mummies had food placed next to them—little bowls of milk for cat mummies and things like that," Wade said. "But this would be the first time we've seen food being returned into the mummy."
(From National Geographic magazine: animal mummies explained.)
Published February 7, 2012
Mummy Scanning
Photograph courtesy Andrew Nelson, University of Western Ontario
The mummies of two ibises and a hawk are put through a CT scanner at McGill University's Montreal Neurological Institute.
Ancient Egyptian bird mummies show a great deal of variation, study leader Wade noted.
"Some we see are basically fakes, or very close to being fakes-sometimes they wrap up a couple of feathers," he said.
"Some of them were dipped in resin, then wrapped up," he added. "Other are emptied of their organs and dried in a manner that human mummies were."
(Pictures: Millions of Puppy Mummies in Egypt Labyrinth.)
Published February 7, 2012
Wrap Idol
Photograph courtesy Andrew Wade and Yale Peabody Museum/Elsevier
Mummified sacred ibises like the specimen pictured were often used as votive offerings to gain the favor of Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of writing and wisdom—often depicted as an ibis-headed man.
"You would go to the temple and pay the priest to mummify an ibis to take your wants and needs to Thoth and put in a good word for you," Wade explained.
The latest radiographic techniques are allowing researchers to examine the mummified birds more closely, without risking damage to their fragile remains.
(Related: "Mummy Birds Recovered From Egypt Factory.")
Published February 7, 2012
A Real Mouthful
Photograph courtesy S. Ikram, North Abydos Project/IFA/NYU, and Elsevier
The shells of an afterlife meal of snails are pictured lodged in the beak of an unwrapped ibis mummy from the ancient city of Abydos. More typically, food packets were stuffed into birds' body cavities following evisceration.
While the sacred ibis is extinct in modern-day Egypt, the birds were mummified in their millions in ancient times.
"They were rearing these birds in great numbers," Wade said. "You would go to the temple, order one, they would mummify it, and it would be put into these caches in the cult centers." (Interactive map: Egyptian animal-mummy sites.)
(Pictures: Ancient Egypt Crocodile Mummies Revealed.)
Published February 7, 2012
Mummy Mortuary
Photograph by Richard Barnes, National Geographic
A storage site for sacred ibis mummies at the central-Egyptian site of Tuna el-Gebel, where more than four million ibis mummies have been found (file picture).
Bird mummies were a thriving industry in ancient Egypt and "very important in the political economy of the country," Wade said.
Cults that provided them as votive offerings to paying customers "made astronomical amounts of money," he added.
"We were very excited to work with these animal mummies," he said, "as they are often underappreciated, in spite of the information they can tell us about Egyptian ideology, mortuary practice, political economy, and identity."
More: Surprise Egypt Tombs Yield Ornate Coffins, Dog Mummies >>
Authors on the ibis-mummy study: Andrew D. Wade, Salima Ikram, Gerald Conlogue, Ronald Beckett, Andrew J. Nelson, Roger Colten, Barbara Lawson, Donatella Tampieri
Published February 7, 2012