Animal Mummies Unwrapped

CreditCreditManchester Museum, University of Manchester

Scientists are peering into ancient Egyptian mummies that are shaped like animals but often hold surprises unrelated to their exteriors. Glimpses of the sometimes creepy contents go on view this fall, with documentation on how 19th-century collectors mishandled mummies.

“Gifts for the Gods: Animal Mummies Revealed,” an exhibition that opens on Thursday at the Manchester Museum at the University of Manchester in England, is based on new X-rays and scans. The outer forms of the wrappings are shaped like jackals, cats, birds and crocodiles, but inside, some embalmers incorporated human bones, mud, sticks, reeds, eggshells and feathers.

Lidija McKnight, a research associate for the Ancient Egyptian Animal Bio Bank at the University of Manchester, described the embalmers as “quite ingenious” in their construction techniques.

Egyptian breeders apparently kept millions of animals in captivity to be slaughtered and mummified and then buried in catacombs as paid offerings to the gods. Members of Egyptian royalty also had their pets mummified and interred in lavish stone sarcophagi.

Western painters of the 19th century created romanticized Orientalist scenes of harem women feeding and petting the creatures. But given the scale of the surviving catacombs, it is more likely that the breeding sites resembled overcrowded factory farms.

Deities portrayed in animal form, including the cat goddess Bastet and the ibis-headed Thoth, were believed to prefer the selfsame animals as sacrifices. Campbell Price, the Manchester Museum’s curator for Egypt and Sudan, said that even if the skeleton inside did not correspond to the image on the wrappings, it was still considered “a suitable, appropriate gift for the gods.”

European and American tourists and scientists bought and unwrapped animal mummies, reducing corpses to powdery bits. Travelers took home intact preserved creatures; these novelty souvenirs were relatively easy to transport and display under glass on parlor mantelpieces. (They now typically sell for over $1,000 each.)

By contrast, Dr. Price said, “a human mummy is quite cumbersome and smelly.”

Mummified animals were also exported by the ton to serve as ship ballast and farm fertilizer. Auctioneers selling the material in huge lots at times used the desiccated heads as gavels.

The exhibition team has found hundreds of mummies “in the weirdest of places,” Dr. McKnight said. Forgotten corpses donated by explorers have surfaced in the attics of small British museums, with diaries, logbooks and letters occasionally revealing the provenance trails.

Researchers are also analyzing mummification formulas and evidence of diseases to try to pinpoint when and where the mummies were made and buried.

In the Manchester galleries, visitors will be able to wander through a simulation of a catacomb amid soundtracks of birdsong, jackal cries and priests’ chants.

Two related new exhibitions are currently on view through mid-January. “Animals and Pharaohs: The Animal Kingdom in Ancient Egypt,” at the CaixaForum in Barcelona, Spain, includes 14 mummified creatures among its 430 objects. A traveling exhibition from the Field Museum in Chicago, “Mummies: New Secrets From the Tombs,” now at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, features linen wrappings around the bones of cats, a baboon, a gazelle, a kestrel, a baby crocodile and an ibis. Scans show that the ibis swallowed one last piece of grain just before its neck was wrung and its body was layered with tar and linen to create a suitable offering for Thoth.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: Animal Mummies Unwrapped. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe