ALTHOUGH PRACTICED BY other civilizations, mummification is most popularly associated with the ancient Egyptians. Our modern fascination with the mummy is only too apparent in the crowds that flock to the Egyptian Museum to gawp at the wizened remains of long dead pharaohs, or the enduring popularity of certain B-rate horror movies of which they are the spine-tingling focus.

Apparently the human mummy is only just part of the story, for not only did the ancient Egyptians also mummify their animals, they did so in industrial quantities. Animal cemeteries at places such as Tuna al-Gebel, Saqqara, Bubastis and numerous other sites have yielded animal mummies that number in the millions and yet have received relatively little attention. Divine Creatures Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt, edited by American University in Cairo (AUC) Egyptology Professor Salima Ikram, does much to redress this imbalance though it remains, in the most positive sense, very much still a work in progress.

Divine Creatures is basically a series of essays written on the subject of animal mummies and mummification that starts by addressing the general and most accessible and then progresses to discuss the more specific and technical. These range from the reasons behind animal mummification to the detailed analysis of particular cults. The book is illustrated throughout with numerous maps of key sites, in both black and white and color, which show the sheer extent of the catacombs.

Ikram’s opening essay on animal mummies sets the scene in general and divides the mummies into four broad categories: pets, victual mummies, sacred animals and votive mummies. The second essay is Ikram at her best. She has a gift for communication, as her students readily testify, that is evident in the manner in which she reports her findings in the exciting field of experimental archaeology.

Ikram describes her adventures in recreating ancient mummification techniques using materials as close as possible to those used by the ancients. Those expecting a dry chemical analysis can be assuaged for it is indeed dry: a natron bath is not a liquid bath but rather a desiccation process. Ikram’s description of the simulated process is anything but dry. Perhaps, compared to popular scientists, she even goes a little over the top by giving names to her puppets. Does one really want to know that Rabbit Four had been killed by strangulation and eviscerated when it has just been called “Fluffy?”

Her subsequent essays focus increasingly either on a specific necropolis or a specific cult species. There is a chapter on Bull Cults and it’s no surprise when the opening concentrates on the Apis at Memphis and an exploration of the Serapeum. But fewer people may be aware of the Mothers of Apis and fewer still, myself included, of Mnevis, the ‘Bull of Heliopolis’ or the Buchis bull of Armant. The “Cult and Necropolis of the Sacred Ram at Mendes,” while not as readable as earlier chapters, also casts light on one of the lesser-known icons of ancient Egyptian worship.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Egyptian animal mummies is that many of them were not mummies at all. Elaborately wrapped ‘mummies’ bearing the masks of falcons or ibises have been unwrapped or X-rayed only to expose a few bones, coagulated feathers or even nothing but sand and mud. This happens to be a recurring theme in the essays, whether it’s about Tuna el-Gebel, Saqqara or elsewhere.

Interestingly, it is often the case that the more elaborate the mummy, the bigger the fake. Regarding this phenomenon, different essayists offer a variety of different explanations. For example, was it a priestly con whereby devotees were fobbed off with dummy mummies in some theocratic dupe? Or were these creatures simply so rare and precious that only portions of them were available to be offered to the gods by any one devotee? These essays offer a wide scope of different explanations, all of which are very fascinating.

Clearly, whether ibis, baboon or crocodile, demand outran supply and the animals had to be bred in absolute or semi-captivity. Hence we get a fascinating essay on the crocodile cult including a discussion of the crocodile hatchery at Medinet Madi. Extraordinary, but spoilt by a reference to the young crocs as being “little amphibians.”

Ikram makes an interesting observation in her third and last essay of the series. While cleaning the mummified pair of vast Nile crocodiles in the Egyptian Museum, she noted that baby crocodiles had been placed in their mouths. Why? We now know that crocodiles are ‘caring’ parents and that the young are carefully taken in the adult’s jaws from nest to water. What we rediscovered in the twenty-first century, courtesy of Discovery Channel, was previously well known to the ancients.

Divine Creatures is not a totally trouble-free tome and may have needed more consultation on zoological facts. Another example may be Zivie and Lichtenberg’s essay: “The Cats of the Goddess Bastet,” which suffered especially from zoological inaccuracy. For example: Felis chaus is not the wild cat but rather the swamp or jungle cat while Felis sylvestris libyca is not the domestic cat but the wild ancestor of the domestic cat, a point of view or fact upheld in the very next essay by Kessler and Nur el-Din. Most now look at the domestic cat as Felis catus.

Though this may seem an exercise in pedantry, it is indeed of vital importance when considering the domestication of the cat. The assertion that F. chaus cannot be distinguished from F. sylvestris in juvenile animals is not tenable, given the tail-to-body length ratio and skull characteristics. In “Tuna al-Gebel Millions of Ibises and Other Animals,” phalacrocorax africanus are called shags when they should be long-tailed cormorants and I would really question the rough-legged buzzard being ever recorded here when it is in fact a sub-arctic species.

The closing essay of this book demonstrates Ikram’s utter commitment to do justice to Egypt’s forgotten mummies. She has dusted off the non-human treasures of the Egyptian Museum and catalyzed, through the Animal Mummy Project, the study of this neglected area of Egyptology. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than through her description of the mummy of the pet gazelle of Isitemkheb. And it is, perhaps, through our relationship with pets that we are now most related to our ancestors. We, however, no longer need victual mummies nor have sacred animals or require votive mummies but we do keep pets. Again, this is a work in progress, but nevertheless an absolutely fascinating and important work in progress.  et