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| Beautifully wrapped example of a falcon mummy |
'Ibis mummies… accumulated by the million, each one
individually wrapped and crammed into a sealed jar, and stacked with others to
the ceiling like wine bottles in a network of underground passages and alcoves.
But no beverage lay inside these jars, sealed with plaster, barely an atom of
moisture.
They were walking among a vast flock of the dead. The
doomed members of this aviary had spent their lives pacing temple enclosures,
before being sacrificed as offerings to the moon god Thoth, Egypt’s Lord of
time, wisdom, magic and measurement and inventor of ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphs, he who recorded the verdict for the soul on the night of judgement
- resulting in either a declaration of innocence, and the joy of an afterlife
in the fields of Aaru, or guilt and extinction in the pit of everlasting nothingness,
where the devourer of hearts waited to pounce.
In the heyday of
ibis offerings, the priests buried over ten thousand birds a year in the name
of Thoth, Anson recalled.
The existence of
animal catacombs embarrassed professional Egyptologists, he'd noticed. They saw
these mummy zoos as an aberration of religion and preferred to focus on the
more exalted achievements of the Egyptians...'
