The mystery of a pregnant Egyptian mummy and its transfer to Poland

Polish archaeologists who discovered the mummy of a pregnant Egyptian woman a few days ago do not only know its identity, but also many details about its discovery and transport to Poland in 1826.

The three archaeologists, who are part of the Warsaw Mummies Project, were analyzing the Egyptian collection at the National Museum when they discovered that the body identified as a high priest named Hor-Djehuti was in fact a woman 26 to 28 weeks pregnant, whose identity is unknown.

Warsaw University anthropologist and archaeologist Marzena Ozarek-Szilke told Polish media that the team was “about to close the project and send the publication” with the data obtained in 2015 when a scan of the embalmed body not only revealed that it was a woman: her husband Stanislaw Ozarek-Szilke, also Egyptologist, identified by studying the radiographic images “a familiar image” for all these parents, “a small foot (in the belly of the mother)”.

“We were initially surprised to see that she didn’t have a penis, but rather breasts and long hair. We later found out that she was a pregnant woman“, He said Ozarek-Szilke a The Associated Press. “When we saw the little foot and the little hand (of the fetus) we were amazed“.

“For unknown reasons, the fetus was not removed from the abdomen of the deceased during mummification,” said Wojciech Ejsmond, of the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures at the Polish Academy of Sciences, who confirmed its discovery by saying that “our mummy is the only one recognized so far in the world with a fetus in the womb”.

Ejsmond, who placed the mother’s age at the time of her death between 20 and 30, considered that the pregnancy could have contributed in one way or another to her death, while specifying that “it is not it’s no secret that the death rate, especially during pregnancy and childbirth, was very high at that time ”.

For now, the sex of the fetus is unknown and its poor state of preservation raises many difficulties in this regard, although the find “highlights an unexplored aspect of ancient Egyptian funeral customs and interpretations of pregnancy in context. of the religion of ancient Egypt ”, as published by the scientific team.

The discovery was announced in the latest issue of Journal of Archaeological Science, reviewed by a committee of specialists.

“This is the first known case of an embalmed body of a pregnant woman (…) This opens up new perspectives for research on pregnancy in Antiquity and on practices linked to motherhood.The article says. The mummy was brought to Poland in the 19th century and is part of the collection of antiques of the University of Warsaw.

The Warsaw Mummies Project is one of the most important in the field of Egyptology in the world and its creators are three doctoral students from the University of Warsaw: Kamila Braulinska, Marzena Ozarek-Szilke and Wojciech Ejsmond.

Six years ago, scientists proposed to the National Museum in Warsaw to carry out a full analysis of the animal mummies stored in the museum’s collections, but quickly decided that “since we had the means and the technical capacity, it would be a shame to do not extend the study to human mummies, ”Braulinska explained. The mummy which was identified as the body of Hor-Djehuti, as indicated by the inscription on the sarcophagus that contained it, was donated to the museum in 1826 by Jan Wezyk-Rudzki, a Polish painter, architect and sculptor who l ‘would have bought. Count Stanislaw Kostka Potocki.

When the mummy was first exhibited in the halls of the National Museum in 1917, newspapers at the time described it as “so beautiful that no other museum is like it”.

With information from EFE and AP

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