Eight million dog mummies found in Saqqara,Egypt

reply to post by misse2miss


The probably did it over a couple of thousands of years.

Once the art of true mummification (like for a Pharoah) was known, not that much practice would have been necessary.

True mummification takes a lot of expensive and rare resins, skills comparable to a surgeon although you don't have to worry about killing the patient, and linen to wrap the body in.

Were these 'mummies' wrapped in linen or just left in the desert to desiccate?

Cats were revered in Egypt, dogs not so much, and Anubis was a jackal, not a dog. If they were using dogs as food, discarding puppies instead of feeding them to 'meat' size seems wasteful in a society that would have needed any meat available. Maybe they simply had a population explosion of feral dogs and needed to get rid of them? If they were aware and afraid of rabies, etc., maybe it was a public health measure to kill them off as soon as possible. It doesn't take much to make an entire society paranoid about any given species of animal. Their meat food sources were fish, goats, and geese primarily. Maybe an excess dog population was considered an annoyance or worse, they were food 'stealers'.

Originally posted by misse2miss
Now that i am overlooking this thread once again i find myself wondering.

8 million is a hell of a number (8,000,000)... The time it took to mummify 8 million animals;it actually seems very outrageous now.

Does anyone know how old these remains are or the oldest compared to newest?

edit on 3-1-2013 by misse2miss because: error

Most of the animal remains there come from the new kingdom which was about 1550BC to about 1070BC. They are not all really "mummified", the bulk of them were just crudely preserved and just thrown in there. Many of the animals are just in large piles about 3 feet tall.

what was the popluation of the region like in those times?

I imagine if there was a practise of throwing away/killing the runt of the litter they could build up pretty fast if many people owned pets.

Originally posted by cartesia
what was the popluation of the region like in those times?

I imagine if there was a practise of throwing away/killing the runt of the litter they could build up pretty fast if many people owned pets.

They raised and bred animals for the purpose of selling them to people who would have them killed and placed in the necropolis

reply to post by RandyBragg


Ahh thanks for clearing that up for me.

I was able to find pictures!!
Pictures of Tombs

Egyptians revered cats. Dogs eat cats. That was my initial thought on this subject.

reply to post by DoorKnobEddie

I tend to agree. Its a pet cemetery. They have them today. Look at all the "spirit orbs".

images.nationalgeographic.com...

Originally posted by intrptr
reply to post by DoorKnobEddie

 

I tend to agree. Its a pet cemetery. They have them today. Look at all the "spirit orbs".

images.nationalgeographic.com...

or dirt on the lens

reply to post by intrptr


So is that why my windshield looks like that after a long drive? All the spirit orbs from the insects?

Originally posted by misse2miss

Originally posted by intrptr
reply to post by DoorKnobEddie

 

I tend to agree. Its a pet cemetery. They have them today. Look at all the "spirit orbs".

images.nationalgeographic.com...

or dirt on the lens

More likely dust in the air caught in the flash. They are in a tomb. But why shouldn't animal spirits hang where they are buried? You don't believe in "spirits"?

reply to post by Josephus

So is that why my windshield looks like that after a long drive? All the spirit orbs from the insects?

No, that would be their guts. Don't you know that?

Ares - the Greek god of war
Enyalius or Enyalio (Greek: Ενυάλιος) in Greek mythology is generally a byname of Ares the god of war

"youths sacrificed a puppy to Enyalios before engaging in ritual fighting"

Cult/ritual

Although Ares received occasional sacrifice from armies going to war, the god had a formal temple and cult at only a few sites.[23] At Sparta, however, each company of youths sacrificed a puppy to Enyalios before engaging in ritual fighting at the Phoebaeum.[24] The chthonic night-time sacrifice of a dog to Enyalios became assimilated to the cult of Ares

The temple to Ares in the agora of Athens, which Pausanias saw in the second century AD, had been moved and rededicated there during the time of Augustus. Essentially it was a Roman temple to the Augustan Mars Ultor.[23] From archaic times, the Areopagus, the "mount of Ares" at some distance from the Acropolis, was a site of trials. Paul of Tarsus later preached about Christianity there. Its connection with Ares, perhaps based on a false etymology, is etiological myth.[citation needed] A second temple to Ares has been located at the archaeological site of Metropolis in what is now Western Turkey

Interesting

wiki
wiki.enyalius

8 million animal mummies is a staggering amount of work.

It would take 400 people mummifying 15 animals a day more than three years to accomplish.

But that doesn't account for acquiring the animals, killing and gutting and performing some
level of embalming....getting rid of the viscera and cleaning up, etc....

That's ALOT of work all day everyday for a thousand people for a few years at least. Very interesting
question would be WHY?

The Egyptians, or whomever was there at that time, must have had huge breeding grounds for dogs, cats and birds in order to sacrifice that many.
Wasn't there some quote on here where it was suggested there were so many cats found buried at one location the locals dug out the dirt for 30 years and used it as fertilzer?

But finds like these do show a large disconnect these people had with the earth and animals if they are sacrificing day old puppies en masse for that long. It's comparable to mass industrial chicken farms slaughtering millions of birds today.

Originally posted by shivaX
Now this is a BIG news. 8 million animal mummies is not a joke. Mummies of other species like bulls, cows, baboons, ibises, hawks and cats were also found. The link says that the mummies were found nearby a temple of Anubis. This could indicate some occult practice which the ancient Egyptians are famous for.

edit on 3-1-2013 by shivaX because: (no reason given)

Firstly, your thread title is misleading, but caught my attention.

Secondly, mummification was a normal practice in ancient Egypt.

I am not surprised this was uncovered.

reply to post by shivaX

and: where are the housing locations for the thousands of builders?
how did they feed these thousands of builders in a desert? where are the water containers for thousands of gallons? where are all of the tools for such a project? how did they get these perfectly cut 2 ton sections from the quarry? why a pyramid design? how did the get a structure so massive to stay stationary on sand for thousands of years? I have hundreds more, I question their lineage also...

Originally posted by Flavian
reply to post by shivaX

 

Secondly, and this is pure speculation based on nothing more than time to think, but Anubis is the God of Embalming (amongst other things). Mummification doesn't just happen, it is a specific high skill set so practice is needed. Therefore, if the majority of these animals were mummified hours after birth i would say they were practice for the embalmers.

I think you've got the best explanation. They must have had a lot of practice, and animals would have been an obvious choice. Considering it must have been a popular job, there could have been hundreds of students at any one time, over 3000 years... The students probably would have practiced on humans as well, but probably started with animals.

Originally posted by signalfire
Once the art of true mummification (like for a Pharoah) was known, not that much practice would have been necessary.

True mummification takes a lot of expensive and rare resins, skills comparable to a surgeon although you don't have to worry about killing the patient, and linen to wrap the body in.

Those two sentences are contradictory. Or was the first sentence sarcasm? Not sure.

You need a lot of practice in order to get skills comparable to a surgeon. There were probably a lot of candidates to do the job, and only the best could be allowed to mummify the Pharoah. They needed some way of training all the men to begin with, some way for them to do the practice, and then finally a way to test which ones are the best.

Originally posted by Skywatcher2011
Firstly, your thread title is misleading, but caught my attention.

How? Because its an estimate, or because its not just dogs, or is the location wrong?

I'm not the OP, but I'm interested.

reply to post by shivaX


And just how did they count/estimate the number of mummified corpses? Besides work involved in counting, what about the work in excavating them? The source article doesn't say, so I have my doubts about this large of a number. Also, not blaming the OP, but the headline to the source article, as well as this thread, are wrong; it's not just dogs, but cats, birds, mongeese, etc.