10 mummified crocodiles emerge from an Egyptian tomb

At first glance, you might think they’re live crocodiles scurrying about in the mud.

But the animals are mummies, possibly dead more than 2,500 years ago and preserved in a ritual that probably honored Sobek, a fertility deity revered in ancient Egypt.

The mummies were one of a group of 10 adult crocodiles, probably of two different species, whose remains were recently unearthed in a tomb at Qubbat al-Hawa on the west bank of the Nile River.

The finding was published in the journal Wednesday PLOS ONE.

The crocodile has played an important role in Egyptian culture for thousands of years.

In addition to being related to a deity, he was a food resourcesand parts of the animal, such as its blubber, were used as medicinal to treat sore muscles, stiffness and even baldness.

Mummified animals, such as ibises, cats and baboons, are relatively common finds in Egyptian tombs.

Other mummified crocodile remains have been unearthed, but most were juveniles or cubs;

Furthermore, those discovered in this new study were in excellent condition.

“Most of the time they’re fragments, broken things,” says Bea De Cupere, an archaeozoologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and co-author of the study.

“To hear that you have 10 crocodiles in a grave. That’s special.”

She was named to the Qubbat al-Hawa site by a research team led by Alejandro Jiménez Serrano, an Egyptologist at the University of Jaén in Spain.

In 2018, researchers discovered seven small tombs under a Byzantine-era garbage dump.

In one of the tombs – located between the rubbish dump and four human burials believed to date from around 2100 BC – were the mummified crocodiles.

De Cupere studies everything, including bones, teeth and shells, as well as coprolites, or fossilized feces, and animal tracks.

“Archaeologists do an excavation and if they find animal remains that they think are worth examining, that’s when we step in,” explains De Cupere.

Of the 10 adult crocodile mummified remains found, five were just heads and the other five were in various states of completion, but one, more than 2 meters long, was nearly complete.

Animal and human mummies are often found wrapped in resin-fixed linen bandages, forcing scientists to use techniques such as CAT or X-ray to see through the material.

The Qubbat al-Hawa crocodiles contained no resin and the only flax fragments present had been almost completely eaten by insects, allowing researchers to study the mummies at the excavation site.

Based on the shape of the skulls and the arrangement of the bony plates, or scutes, of the animals, the team hypothesized that most of the crocodiles in the grave appear to belong to one species, Crocodilus suchuswhile others were Nilotic Crocodylus.

Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at the American University in Cairo who was not involved in the study, said that gathering this kind of information allowed us to better understand how the ancient Egyptians understood the different behaviors of these two species and which one the Egyptians wanted.” Because niloticus would eat you, whereas with suchus, it’s conceivable that you could swim in the same pool and live,” Ikram said.

The lack of resin also indicated that crocodiles probably mummified themselves by burying them in warm, sandy soil, where they dried naturally before being buried, which researchers have proposed occurred before the Ptolemaic period, which lasted between 332 BC and 30 B.C

“Since the Ptolemaic period, large quantities of resin have been used,” De Cupere explained.

The team’s hypothesis is that the crocodile mummies were buried around the 5th century BC, as animal mummification became increasingly popular in Egypt.

But to know for sure, radiocarbon dating will be needed. The researchers hope that, in the near future, there will be the possibility of such dating, as well as DNA analysis to verify the two species.

“The discovery of these mummies gives us new perspectives on ancient Egyptian religion and the treatment of these animals as offerings,” said Jiménez Serrano.

Ikram also sees these discoveries as an important window into the relationship between people and the Qubbat al-Hawa necropolis, from the earliest burials more than 4,000 years ago to the present day.

“Within the community, what did these graves look like? What was their use?” Ikram explains.

“You see how these graves had an afterlife.”

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