Cat mummy at the Brooklyn Museum.
While I knew about human mummies, and have seen them in museums, I had no idea that animals were mummified too.
Cat mummies was a new idea for me — I like my cats warm and purring, slinking through the garden, or just soaking up sun on the deck.
The Brooklyn Museum has a collection of cat mummies:
The wrappings and coffins, when present, represent a huge range of styles and levels of complexity. The collection consists of a young cat wrapped with simple pieces of linen to larger cats with very complex patterning of dyed linens cut into fine strips. The coffins themselves can be simple stone boxes with polychrome designs, to wooden forms in the shape of seated cats with sometimes elaborate polychrome and gilt decoration.
[Via : Brooklyn Museum Animal Mummy Update.]
The original post doesn’t have any further information about the cat mummies. I want to know why the mummy doesn’t appear to have any legs, or a tail.
A search of the museum website though produces several images of cat and other mummies. The full image from which the picture on this post is taken also has information about the cat mummy’s location, date, and other details. Apparently it dates to around 305 B.C.E.–1st century C.E.
Photo — Brooklyn Museum:
Copyright © 2004–2009 the Brooklyn Museum. Some rights reserved. Non-commercial use of text and images in which Brooklyn Museum holds the copyright is permitted, with attribution, under the terms and conditions of a Creative Commons License.
Have you ever seen a cat mummy?
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
To answer your question, the cat does have a tail. In the case of this mummy, the tail is simply tucked up under and placed between the legs, and then the mummy was wrapped.
Thanks Lisa. That’s good to know.
Cheers,
Miraz
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