The team had no reason to believe that, when all was said and done, they would end up with anything other than a mummified rabbit, much like the old objects Ikram had studied. Working on the 1.8-pound rabbit had been more than a little grisly, but that didn’t mean it was going wrong. It was 1999, and along with her students at the American University in Cairo, Egyptologist Salima Ikram had been reconstructing ancient techniques for animal mummification. To approximate the result of baking under the desert sun, it had been sitting on a bed of natron, a type of salt, and perched on a laboratory rooftop. Its head had exploded, and the pelt pulled away from its bones. Five days later, it swarmed with beetles. Two days dead, it was swollen and rank, and riddled with holes to let gases escape. Mummified cats and a slew of scarabs were recently found in a tomb within the King Userkaf pyramid complex in the Saqqara Necropolis, south of Cairo.
0 kommentar(er)
