70 Million Animal Mummies: Egypt's Dark Secret Horizon

In 1871, three Egyptian brothers, Mohammed, Ahmed and Hussein El Rasul

were scrambling up a steep cliff path in the Western Desert

when they came across a secret that had remained hidden for 3,000 years.

Several boulders had shifted to reveal a narrow cleft

in the base of the rocks.

Clambering inside, they discovered a shaft 12 metres deep.

But at the bottom, a tiny man-made passageway.

The brothers crawled into the blackness

and uncovered something they would never forget.

Dozens of mummified bodies.

One of them was discovered to be a high priestess

and daughter of a pharaoh.

Her name was Maatkare.

But Maatkare was not buried alone.

At her feet was an infant-sized bundle.

For over 100 years, it was presumed Maatkare had died in childbirth,

her baby buried with her.

But modern medical techniques revealed the bundle to be

something very different.

We had always thought it was a child

but the X-ray showed that in fact it contains a green monkey, a vervet.

And not her baby at all.

This monkey was found with Maatkare,

sort of cradled against her body,

so I think it must have been a beloved pet.

The brothers' discovery was yet another episode

in centuries of interest in Egyptian mummies.

Both human and animal.

19th-century collectors removed thousands of them

and many have ended up in museums across the world.

Now, experts are applying 21st-century science and technology

to look inside these animal mummies.

Revealing fascinating new details about religion and belief

in ancient Egypt.

These mummies give an insight into understanding

the relationship between human beings and animals.

Animals were magical creatures who could in fact speak to the gods.

And new techniques are helping archaeologists to expose

the shocking reality at the heart of this ancient ritual.

In the dead of night,

at the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital,

medical experts are at work.

Not on the living, but on the ancient dead.

Radiographers and Egyptologists working here are collecting

information on hundreds of animal mummies.

The biggest survey of its kind in history.

The team are using the latest medical imaging technology

when it is not needed for human patients

so they can see inside the mummies without damaging them.

First on the X-ray table is a small bundle

that is usually on display at Manchester Museum.

It was made in southern Egypt between 664 and 332 BC.

Next, a CT scanner takes hundreds of X-ray images, or slices,

from 360 degrees around the mummy.

These images are combined to create a three-dimensional model.

It brings up nice definition of the wrappings, doesn't it?

-The CT.

-Yeah.

And before your very eyes...

-Oh!

-There we are.

-A little rodent.

Who's got very, very prominent incisors.

And then he has got a space until you reach the molars.

-It couldn't be a shrew, could he?

-Possibly.

To be able to look at the inside of something that was wrapped

possibly 2,500 years ago in the deserts of ancient Egypt,

is absolutely astounding.

It never, ever fails to amaze me, what we find

when we have scanning sessions at the hospital.

There is always something that is a little bit surprising.

And that is what makes every mummy different.

Egyptologists have long been fascinated by the bizarre practice

of animal mummification.

During the 19th and 20th centuries,

hundreds of such mummies were unwrapped,

including at least two for a 1970s BBC documentary.

The wrappings contained dozens of creatures, including cats,

crocodiles, hawks and wading birds,

snakes, shrews and even fish.

But unwrapping the mummies in this way completely destroyed them

and much of the information they contained was lost.

Every mummy is unique.

And it is impossible to know what's in it until it has been scanned.

This mummified rodent has been made in two parts.

So we have got the main mummy bundle here and then on its back

we have got the secondary package which is sort of fixed to the top.

So if we scroll through, we should see if there is anything...

-Is there anything in it?

-No, it just goes...

HE GROANS

It could be constructed just of linen.

But why would you put an empty linen bundle onto a mummy of a tiny shrew?

Because we did think that would contain something.

Basically looking for anything that could be grain, which is

what it is always been presumed that the little package contained,

a food offering for the rodent in the afterlife.

Um...

But we certainly can't see anything on this scan.

With or without grain, the backpack was there

to help this little animal's journey into the afterlife.

The ancient Egyptians believed that animals, like humans,

had a soul that survived death.

Professor Joann Fletcher is an expert on ancient Egyptian beliefs.

It is quite clear that for the ancient Egyptians,

death was simply a transition into another world

that replicated life on Earth.

For instance, the bases of some coffins have maps of the afterlife,

so the deceased would know just where to go

to find their way through into the next world.

Whether human or animal, by mummifying a body,

the ancient Egyptians believed they were providing the soul

with a physical vessel for its journey to the afterlife.

Mummification is very important for animals,

just as it is for humans, because that is the act

which makes sure

that they can make it from this life to the next and live for ever.

Nice and gentle.

There we go.

Oh... That's lovely.

Back at the hospital, the team are scanning a crocodile mummy.

He is a lovely one, I like him.

He has a very unnatural shape, though, because he is quite short.

-Yes.

-Do the scan now.

And in we go.

Continuing the Victorian obsession of mummy-collecting,

this specimen found its way into the Manchester Museum

via German collector Maximilian Robinow,

who visited Egypt in 1896.

Its exact contents have remained a secret for thousands of years.

Until now.

-Well!

-Ooh.

-Didn't expect that, did we?

-No.

So we had what looked like a complete crocodile mummy bundle,

so we were expecting one crocodile.

And we have got four skulls in a line.

It is picking something up here.

-Oh, what's...

-And there.

-What's that?

-So there is something else in there as well.

-Ooh! There we go!

-There you go, there is little crocodile.

-Oh, wow!

Oh, look, complete, a complete crocodile.

-A complete crocodile and just look.

-There is one there.

-Oh, wow.

-So that is one, two, three...

-So how many in total do you think?

-Four skulls and four babies?

-Yes, four skulls and four baby crocs.

So eight all in one.

But the question is,

why on earth would you have eight individual crocodiles

represented in one quite small mummy?

Each mummy should have one animal.

They have got crocodile mummies

-where they have buried babies with an adult one, haven't they?

-Oh.

But, I mean, these are not adult sized, are they?

They are quite small. And there's hatchling ones.

That is interesting.

The scan reveals more.

There is evidence of tricks of the embalmer's trade.

Oh...

-So they have used a stick or reed...

-It is like a stick, oh...

..to create the shape.

Of course, you have not got the complete skeleton to provide

shape and rigidity and obviously a great amount of time and effort

has gone into producing what looks like a complete crocodile...

-Yeah, the package.

-..from bits and pieces, essentially.

Whoever mummified these eight crocodiles did so with considerable

care and attention to ensure their souls made it to the afterlife.

And we know that for very important animals,

like Maatkare's monkey, the process of mummification

could be as involved and complex as it was for humans.

These ancient techniques are being studied by Dr Stephen Buckley

at the University of York with hands-on experimental archaeology.

What the experimental archaeology does is,

it allows you to get your hands dirty

and in that way allows a far better understanding of the processes,

the methods, the materials they must have used.

Like all the animals he uses,

the piglet Stephen is mummifying today died of natural causes.

Every animal the ancient Egyptians mummified was treated

with the utmost respect and the embalmer's first job was

to remove the internal organs to stop the body from decaying.

Here I have the stomach.

That is the liver.

And I have...

one of the lungs.

In very special cases, the embalmers even placed the internal organs

in their own sacred jars to be buried alongside the animal.

Just feeling the heart.

The idea certainly was to try to leave the heart in

because it was the seat of the soul.

And so the heart was important to leave in

so that it would be there for Judgment Day, really.

So seen as a vital organ in the context of the afterlife.

With the internal organs removed,

the cavity could be sterilised with alcohol.

Embalming was a highly, highly technical and skilled practice

and there were groups of people who were specialised in it.

So it was not something that, "Oh, I will do it myself,"

and then take it off and give it to the god.

You had to go to the temple

and someone else would do the whole thing for you.

The embalmers then filled the cavity with linen bags containing

rare spices such as cinnamon and myrrh.

Myrrh came from possibly Somalia,

possibly the other side of the Red Sea as well, Yemen.

An expensive ingredient.

And also cinnamon of course coming from India, coming some distance.

And all these ingredients have antibacterial components.

So not only did these packages retain the original shape,

but they also protect it.

With the body packed out,

the embalmers could begin the ritual of covering it with a special resin.

The recipes are for these sacred resins remained a mystery

for thousands of years

but Stephen has been able to isolate the exact ingredients.

This recipe is made up of sesame oil, pine resin and beeswax.

The mixture sets so that it would seal the body

and so...

provide a complete protective barrier to insects that might want to get in.

But also killed bacteria.

The key to successful mummification was to dry out the body completely.

So the embalmers used a naturally occurring salt called natron

mined from two hidden locations in the north and south of Egypt.

What the natron does is,

is to effectively suck the water out from the body

but also the alkaline content

helps inhibit the bacteria and enzymes that cause decay.

The largest animals were packed in natron for up to 40 days

before the ceremonial wrapping of linen bandages could begin.

The final hallowed act

was to coat the bandages in the sacred resin

before the animal was finally ready

to embark on its long journey to the afterlife.

Ancient Egyptian mummification was actually involved and costly

because some of these ingredients were coming from quite some distance.

They clearly went to great effort to mummify some animals

in a similar way that they did with humans.

The care, attention and expense lavished on an animal to help it

on its journey to the afterlife may seem extreme.

But there was one creature whose treatment overshadowed all others.

A few kilometres south of Cairo

is one of the most important sites in ancient Egypt, Saqqara.

Overlooking the ancient city of Memphis,

Saqqara was a sacred place 5km square.

And it was the final resting place

of the most important animal in ancient Egypt.

A beast so strong, so powerful, so virile,

it could symbolise the very moment of creation itself.

It was called the Apis Bull, an animal venerated

since the dawn of ancient Egypt, as far back as 3,000 BC.

Dr Aidan Dodson of Bristol University has been studying

this bull cult for over 20 years.

The bull was very much a pampered individual.

It would be massaged, it would be adorned with flowers.

Certainly a life far above the farmyard.

Only one sacred Apis Bull could exist at anyone time.

And when it came to the end of its natural life,

it was given the equivalent of a state funeral.

In many ways, the death of one of these sacred bulls

was almost like the death of the King.

After taking over two months to mummify,

the bull was then interred in its own huge sarcophagus

alongside the Apis Bulls that had lived before it.

They are perhaps two metres high, three or four metres long,

absolutely vast things.

The burial of a sacred bull like the Apis clearly involved

a vast amount of human effort.

The people who were quarrying the tomb, those who were making

the sarcophagus for it, those who were doing the embalming process...

There is also going to be all kinds of ceremonial around there,

there is probably feasting around it as well.

So there is a huge amount of resource being put into this.

More than 50 Apis Bulls were buried at Saqqara.

None of their remains survive

as they were either stolen or destroyed centuries ago.

But experts do know an extraordinary amount of care and effort

went into mummifying and burying every one of these great beasts.

Making the cult of the Apis Bull one of the greatest examples

of devotion to animals in human history.

But these bulls were not the only creatures

the ancient Egyptians venerated.

The fertile plains of the Nile valley once teamed with animals

and the people who live there were fascinated

by their seemingly superhuman abilities.

JOANNE FLETCHER: Each type of animal embodying certain powers

that humans didn't have. So this made them special.

It almost seemed as if the animals did have these magic qualities.

Cats, for instance, that can see in the dark.

What a brilliant skill to have. So they had great respect for animals.

This is because animals had a supernatural sense

of how nature worked.

The ancient Egyptians observed that crocodiles could predict

the levels of the Nile's yearly flood.

Crocodiles build their nests just above where the flood will come.

And they do this long in advance of any of the water rising.

So, by looking at where the crocodiles had made their nests,

the Egyptians could help predict the height of the flood.

These seemingly supernatural powers linked animals to their gods.

Animals were able to do things simple humans couldn't.

They would see a falcon, the black outline against the sun,

flying at great heights which to them appear to almost touch the sun.

So what better creature to embody, to exemplify the great sun god Ra,

than this wonderful falcon?

Baboons are associated with the sun god because in the morning,

just before sunrise, they turn towards where the sun rises,

stretch up their arms and make a terrible racket.

So the Egyptians thought the baboons are singing to the sun

and helping the sun rise and protecting the sun from his enemies.

Animals were magical creatures who could in fact speak to the gods.

Of course, not all of them were sacred,

otherwise they wouldn't eat them or use them to plough the fields.

So it is only special animals that were regarded as sacred.

It was believed one of the creatures that could communicate

with the gods was also one of the most common birds in ancient Egypt.

It was called the sacred ibis.

So we can see that its skeleton is in the central part of the bundle.

In Manchester, the team are scanning an ibis mummy which,

it is thought, was buried at a site in Middle Egypt called Abydos.

This is a mummy bundle, presumed to be that of an Ibis

from the external appearance.

-Ah, there we go, you see?

-Mm.

The sacred ibis bird has been extinct in Egypt

since the 19th century.

But similar species can still be found in Africa.

So there, we can see the complete skeleton there.

So it has been positioned with the limbs folded in, the wings folded in,

and then the neck bent all the way back round the top of the spine.

So it is essentially upside-down?

Yes, the head is down towards the feet.

2,500 years ago, huge flocks of ibis would migrate

to the wetlands of the Nile Valley when it flooded.

The birds are associated with the Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth,

because their long beaks evoked the crescent moon.

Artefacts found buried with sacred ibis birds provide clues

to why the ancient Egyptians mummified them.

MAN SPEAKS ANCIENT LANGUAGE

Written in ancient demotic script, it is thought these scraps

of papyrus date from between the second and first centuries BC.

Experts think they were buried to the south of Saqqara,

at another religious site called Tuna El-Gebel.

Now the papyri are held in the storerooms of the British Museum.

Cary Martin is an expert in ancient languages

and can translate this demotic text.

It is a plea from a son

whose father is desperately ill

and the son is worried that his father is about to die

and he says to the gods,

he is praying to the gods. He says, "If my father recovers,

"if he does not die of the illness that he is currently suffering in,

"I will make an offering for the burial of the sacred ibis.

"I will provide money for this and I will provide it on a regular basis.

"If my father lives, I will help you, I will honour you, O God."

So he is desperate, his father is dangerously ill.

He doesn't know what else to do, he is appealing to the gods for help.

Pleas to the gods like this one would have been placed

with the animal mummy before burial.

An animal mummy was more potent than anything else

to get your message to the God because of course,

once the animal died and was mummified,

its spirit immediately moved into the land of the gods.

So there, it had direct access to the gods

and could take your request to them and constantly be there,

saying, "Hello, God, so-and-so wants such-and-such."

And constantly be there, reminding the god of your request.

The divine was an integral part of day-to-day life.

It was totally and completely tied up in their normal existence.

And the Egyptians must have had so much faith in what this mummy

would do for them in terms of the gods granting them their wishes.

The ancient Egyptians were using animal mummies

as what are termed votive offerings.

Vessels to carry their pleas to the gods.

Votive offerings are not just something you see in ancient Egypt.

This practice continues today

because votive candles, which are the same as a votive mummy, really,

are burnt in churches

and the smoke is supposed to take your prayer to God.

So you can see how organised religion today

still uses the same trope that ancient Egyptians did.

Different animals were mummified to carry pleas to different gods.

Just how extensive this practice was

can be revealed at the sacred site of Saqqara.

A few hundred metres from the catacomb of the Apis Bulls

are another set of underground tombs.

Buried by shifting desert sands,

they were lost for nearly two millennia.

Professor Paul Nicholson has been excavating

and mapping the Saqqara site for over 20 years.

He first entered this tomb in 1995.

Now he has returned to explain what he found.

We have masses and masses of dog mummy.

You can see it piled here to a depth of over one metre.

Some thousands of them,

running back 20 or so metres to the end of the burial gallery.

Originally, we can imagine that most of them

would have been nicely stacked one on top of the other in layers.

They would have been well wrapped and soaked in resin.

But what has now happened is that that resin has broken down,

the bandages have gone to powder.

They have been turned over by robbers

so that we are left with only a few complete examples

sitting on the surface of the pile.

And this is only one of over 40 galleries in the catacomb itself.

Our estimate is that

there were somewhere between seven and eight million animals

originally placed in the dog catacomb.

It is likely the dog catacombs were in use for around 500 years.

Meaning to 16,000 dogs were mummified

and buried here every year.

The dog catacombs are huge.

The main corridor is around 170 metres long,

with galleries leading off it every few metres.

Originally, each gallery was 1.5 metres deep in dog mummies.

But this catacomb is only one of at least eight

underground animal tombs at Saqqara,

filled with up to 15 million animal mummies of different types.

And Saqqara is not the only site.

30 more have been found right across Egypt that may have held

up to 70,000,000 mummified animals.

Most experts believe the vast majority of these animal mummies

were votive offerings.

These millions of votive mummies that we have,

each one is the prayer of an individual.

So they don't just represent a prayer,

but they represent millions and millions of believers who actually

went to the temple, made this dedication and believed in that God.

When animal mummies were given, it was a very formalised system.

The person who wanted to give the gift would go to the temple,

talk to a priest and then purchase -

from the priest, because the temples were not foolish! -

one kind of animal mummied,

and then the priest would be in charge of dedicating it formally

to the god after of course the person had paid the temple.

Depends on how much one could afford.

Of course, if you were elite and noble, you could easily go

and get lots of animal mummies.

Or else, entire families might club together

so that one mummy could be dedicated but with the name of lots of people.

From 500 BC, the demand for animal mummification increased massively.

More and more people were drawn towards it

as Egypt's political fortunes changed.

It seems there was a never-ending series of waves of foreign invasion

which really threatened their very way of life.

And so they sought ways in which they could best express themselves as a nation

and what typified the Egyptians above all other nations

was their ability to mummify, to preserve their dead.

The Egyptians turned to their religion,

turned to animal mummification as a means of demonstrating that

to all these foreigners that were coming in.

This was a way for them to find themselves, feel more secure

and establish their identity.

MUEZZIN CHANTS

To account for the millions of animal mummies found at Saqqara,

experts think that large religious festivals must have been held there,

attracting pilgrims from across the country.

Thousands and thousands of people would probably flock there

for the big celebrations.

So you would have lots of people there,

you would have lots of people buying things, selling things, food, drink.

So it would be densely populated, very lively, noisy, smelly.

And it would be really a mass festival,

the same way you have at important shrines nowadays.

Early writers suggest hundreds of thousands of pilgrims

were visiting Saqqara, spending huge amounts on votive offerings.

The personal ritual of offering an animal mummy to a god

had become big business.

When one looks at the number of sites where animal mummies

occur throughout Egypt, you can tell that this was a massive industry.

Because you had to have people all over the country

who are rearing different kinds of animals,

you have to feed them, you have to look after them.

Then there are people who are going to mummify them.

So you need all the materials that were used for mummification

as well as all the personnel.

People were expending huge amounts of money on bandages and paint,

plaster, gilding, maybe even glass eyes.

All kinds of stuff in order to produce these animal mummies.

And this had a huge impact on the economy of Egypt.

In using animal mummies to carry their pleas to the gods,

the Ancient Egyptians transformed the rare and special act

into a mass industry.

Latest imaging techniques have given archaeologists

more insight into why.

But now, medical and forensic science is also revealing how

this huge industry actually worked.

At Swansea University, materials scientist Dr Richard Johnston

is using the latest industrial technology to study a mummified cat.

Little is known about its origins

but the style of its wrappings suggests it died around 600 BC.

The micro-CT scanner produces images with 100 times

the resolution of normal CT scans.

Zoo archaeologist Dr Richard Thomas from the University of Leicester

can use them to determine how this cat may have lived and died.

And then if we remove the wrappings completely...

..so we can just see the bones then.

Fantastic. It's amazingly clear.

The scans are so detailed they allow a 3-D printer to create

an exact replica of the skull.

For the first time, Richard can actually feel the bones for himself.

-This is around two and a half times the size of the original skull.

-OK.

It's amazing, the level of detail. It's incredible.

There may be evidence this cat didn't die naturally.

One of the things that's strikingly obvious is that

you've got a real big piece of skull missing.

-So where on earth did those bits of skull go?

-OK.

If that damage occurred before mummification,

then we wouldn't expect to find any evidence for those

bits of skull, they would tended to have fallen away from the skull.

Can you show me an image that might help see

-if we've got any parts of that skull actually within the brain case?

-Yes.

If we look at this image, this is a slice or plane through the skull.

This is a really helpful image in fact, actually.

You can see where the missing portions of the skull are,

that have broken away and fallen into the brain casing.

So what that tells us immediately is that this damage

must have happened after mummification.

So clearly this cat mummy has not been well

treated following mummification.

But is there anything within this that suggests that we might

come up with a theory for how it was killed?

-Well, can we have another look? That might give us some useful clues.

-OK.

-Erm, so, can have a look at the teeth?

-Yeah.

So, the first thing that I can tell is that this cat has a full

adult set of teeth. So this cat must have been older than six months.

And if we take a really close look at the mandible...

we can see that there's no signs of gum disease, there's no tooth loss.

This happened during the course of the life of this animal,

which is the kind of thing we would expect if it was a very old cat.

So, what else can we see?

Here you've got the vertebrae of the neck

and you see how tightly packed and close together they are,

whereas in between these two vertebrae,

you've got this separation -

there's this kind of big gap that shouldn't be there, effectively.

In all mammals, the atlas

and axis are the top two vertebrae of the neck.

In a cat this size, they should only be a few millimetres apart.

Now, one possibility is that that kind of displacement

of the cervical vertebrae can occur through strangulation

or the breaking of the neck of an animal.

That would be a fairly instantaneous cause of death

and the strongest possible clue we have

-to how this animal may have died.

-OK.

But this cat isn't the only animal mummy which shows

signs of being deliberately killed.

So, this is the upper part of the skull and actually,

there looks to be a defect there.

Can you see on the skull, on the top of the skull?

So there is a bit of bone actually missing there.

The Manchester team are grappling with their largest mummy,

-a Nile crocodile.

-Get ready to catch him.

-He's actually quite heavy.

-It's all that resin, I think.

Just move him back in there now. That's it. Nice and slowly.

Make sure he doesn't come a cropper.

That's brilliant, okey doke.

At nearly two metres long,

the team estimate it must have been around five years old when it died.

The fracture pattern to the crocodile's skull suggests

this was a fatal blow delivered before it was mummified.

But the scans reveal more.

Something has happened here.

The ancient embalmer who mummified this crocodile didn't use

the most thorough techniques.

So, can we scroll through?

So, these little opacities here are most probably gastroliths

which crocodiles swallow. So they ingest food in big chunks,

often whole, and then they use stones which they have ingested

to break up the food.

But of course, that does prove that it's still got its internal organs,

-because they are still in the abdomen.

-They've not been...

It's not been eviscerated.

The reason that votive animal mummies are probably not as carefully

made as other kinds of animal mummies is because they were mass produced.

Because when you had pilgrims come, you need thousands

and thousands of these things

and so if you want to have a quick production line,

you can't expend the same amount of time, effort,

energy and quality of materials as you would for a pet or a human being.

These less sophisticated mummification techniques enabled

the embalmers to produce animal mummies more quickly and cheaply.

But that couldn't solve the most serious problem they faced -

how to ensure they had a steady supply of animals to meet

the demand of visiting pilgrims.

Lost for over 2,000 years, this ibis bird catacomb at Saqqara

was rediscovered by archaeologists in the 1960s.

THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

It's been sealed for 20 years.

Now, molecular biologist Sally Wasef is going to re-enter the tomb.

Over two million mummified ibis birds are buried in this catacomb.

Sally is hoping to understand how they were supplied

for mummification by comparing samples of their DNA.

The DNA is usually not in a very good condition because inside a catacomb,

it's really hot and humid

and that helps degradation to be faster for the DNA.

But Ancient Egyptians helped us by mummifying the birds which

slowed the degradation process,

so it helped to preserve some of the DNA.

Unlike the mummy collectors of the 19th century, Sally works

to strict rules on which bones she can take away as samples.

Such a mummy, I'm not allowed to open it or take samples from

because it's fully wrapped and inside the jar.

So I usually sample from those broken stuff

where you can see the bones loose,

and such a bone is nice.

Still have the skin intact,

the feathers and everything which give me more indications

that most likely I'll be ending up with good DNA quality from this bone.

Back in the lab, Sally will be able to reconstruct the DNA of this

mummified bird from the fragment still contained in its bones.

She can then compare it to other birds in the catacomb

to determine how closely they were related to each other.

Once we have that DNA picture completed, what we do

is that we look at how those are different from each other.

Are they close together?

If we find a lot of similarity between a large number of birds,

we can say, "OK, those birds were raised together,

"they were farmed," or if you have too many variations,

actually they are caught from the wild or migrating from outside Egypt.

Sally's research is ongoing.

But so far, results have suggested there is a low genetic

variance between the mummified ibis birds at Saqqara.

If proven, it's evidence the birds were being farmed to satisfy

the increasing demand for animal mummies.

700 metres away in Saqqara's dog catacomb,

the remains of eight million dog mummies suggest a mass breeding

programme for dogs as well as ibis birds must have been in place.

Professor Ikram has been studying the piles of bones.

She has found more evidence of how this animal production line

could have worked.

One of the things we found is that there are really diverse ages

and you can tell this from the jawbones,

because you get these, sort of, teeny-weeny little jaws

and then you have huge things. And then they would have taken

the puppies away when they were, well, very young,

either drowned them or just removed them

from their mother's care so they would have died quite quickly

and could have been mummified.

And then, of course, their mothers would have whelped again

and so you would have forced the breeding to, instead of once

or twice a year, to twice or three times a year, which kept this

puppy farm going and gave us the eight million dogs that we have here.

Now these bones can reveal more.

There is evidence of how the dogs at Saqqara were treated.

We have evidence for a lot of sick animals,

for example something like this where there are holes.

You can see where the bone has grown over,

so this has been a diseased animal that would have been limping

on its foreleg and it died when it was quite young.

Here's another one which has some sort of horrible growth

coming out from an infection.

Often you see this kind of extreme disease on zoo animals,

where they have been kept in confined spaces, so this is why

we think that quite possibly the dogs were kept in enclosures,

they weren't always allowed to move freely if they got infected

because the people who were looking after them

knew that they'd be dead soon enough.

They didn't really bother to take care of them.

It's very likely that many of the dogs that ultimately

find their way into the dog catacomb would have been bred

in and around ancient Memphis,

probably in a series of puppy farms breeding perhaps

dozens of animals at a time for mummification.

The whole question of the killing of animals is quite a difficult one,

quite an emotive one for us from a 21st century perspective.

However, what we have to bear in mind is that what

they were doing was providing for the eternity of that animal,

providing a suitable burial for a representative of a God.

So what they were doing was a sacred act.

By the end of the fifth century BC,

these private rituals had grown into a national obsession.

Animals were being bred, killed and mummified at sites right across

the country, employing thousands of workers and generating huge profits.

And then, 200 years later,

another huge political upheaval shook Ancient Egypt -

the ruling Persians were replaced by Greeks

who poured money into animal cults.

It became a massive, massive growth industry, even more than before.

They were spending the equivalent of millions today on maintaining cults

that were for the Egyptians crucial to the continuation of this culture.

Animal mummification had become a tool of state control.

Religion is a very unifying force

and politically... It's every politician's dream.

If you have got this idea of mass control over millions of people

through a form of religion you ultimately fund and sustain,

it's brilliant, because you have control of those people.

Dozens of new temples were built, encouraging more and more

pilgrims to visit sites like Saqqara and purchase animal mummies.

But cracks were beginning to appear in the burgeoning industry.

It seems the embalmers had problems keeping up with the demand.

-There's the tissue paper. Oh!

-Aw, that's cute.

-Lovely.

-He's got a nice face.

-Nice face, nice ears.

-Shall we move him in, then?

-OK.

It's thought this beautiful cat mummy was buried at a site

called Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt.

But this mummy is not all it seems to be.

It's got the nice modelled face with a little roll of linen

for the nose and then two eyes.

It's very cylindrical, it's quite typical of a cat mummy.

Have a look what's inside.

What's inside?

-Oh.

-Mmm.

-Oh.

-Not an awful lot, is the answer to that.

-Oh, yeah.

-Would you say that's bone?

-It's got the density of bone.

-Would you agree?

-There's not limbs or anything like that.

You can't see long bits of, you know, limbs or anything like that.

-Oh, vertebrae.

-That's about the most substantial, isn't it, really?

Certainly not the complete cat skeleton we were imagining

we would see.

What you see on the outside is not always what you see on the inside.

If they are skeletal remains, they are in that area there.

So they've made a kind of core, if you like, from bits

and pieces that were lying around and then they've made it quite

-deliberately elongated and made into a much bigger bundle.

-Artificially.

It's been very decoratively wrapped

and then given this wonderful modelled face.

In fact, these incomplete or partial animal mummies have been

a common feature of Lidija's study,

their contents hidden from pilgrims

and museum curators for thousands of years.

We found that in about two thirds of the cases,

we have got some animal skeletal material, but then

only in about half of those do we have a complete animal skeleton.

So somewhere between a third and a half of all the mummies

we have looked at have a complete animal inside.

Most 19th and 20th century Egyptologists thought this

was evidence the embalmers, either struggling to keep up with

the demand for animals or just keen to make some easy cash,

were swindling pilgrims by selling them

fake mummies without their knowledge.

But by analysing the wrappings and resin

used in the mummification process,

scientists like Stephen Buckley are challenging this assumption.

What's interesting is that we are seeing a recipe...

Different recipes for different animals.

We found with cat mummies, for example,

pistachio resin from the north-east Mediterranean.

And yet, the crocodile mummy, we found sandarac,

a resin from north-west Africa from the Atlas Mountains.

The molecular fingerprint, if you like, is showing us that they

were using exotic, expensive ingredients from far and wide,

so quite a lot of care and expense.

Crucially, Stephen has found traces of expensive resins not only

on the complete animal mummies but on the partial ones as well.

With these so-called fakes,

the embalming agents, where they're using costly imported ingredients,

the recipes are the same as those used on those mummies

where the full animal is there.

So the fake mummies are actually,

as far as the embalming agents were concerned, treated with

the same amount of effort and care and expense,

and it seems to be that with that, whether it was just a bone or

the real animal, as long as the recipe was there,

as long as it looked right, that was good enough for the gods.

It's scientific proof of the embalmer's intentions.

To the Ancient Egyptians, even the tiniest fragment of bone

must have been deemed sacred and worthy of mummification.

You've got to remember these things were presumably made to be sold,

sold to pilgrims, so you want your product to be attractive

and maybe it's sufficient to have the sweepings from the workshop.

That's got enough magical, religious power

to satisfy your plea to the gods.

It's suitable for the goddess Bastet, presumably, the cat goddess,

and that's, you know, the job's a good 'un.

700 years after high priestess Maatkare had been buried

with her pet monkey, Ancient Egyptian animal mummification had

grown from a few elite to pets and sacred animals into a vast religious

cult and an industry ingrained in the fabric of society

where animals were not only killed to be mummified

but were intensively bred in their millions to satisfy

a national obsession with animal mummification.

These mummies give one an insight,

a way into understanding Egyptian history - the culture, the religion,

the technology and the way people might have felt,

believed and thought -

and also the relationship between human beings and animals,

so it really is an astonishing way in to understanding

a vast number of things about the Ancient Egyptians.

But the ritual of animal mummification wasn't to last.

In 380 AD, the Romans, who had conquered Egypt nearly four

centuries before, officially converted to Christianity -

a new religion that fiercely opposed all forms

of mummification and animal cults.

All Egyptian temples were closed down.

Not only did this prevent worship continuing, but each temple

functioned as a kind of town hall for every settlement throughout Egypt.

So by closing the temple,

you not only put an end to the pagan practices of worship,

but also the transmission of ideas,

the mummification of humans and animals.

The demise of animal mummification didn't only signal

the end of its religion, but the entire Egyptian civilisation.

The early Christians did everything they could to distance themselves

from these pagan practices and that's when you see a great divide.

And of course, we in the modern West have gone with the Christian notions,

the Ancient Egyptians are left over there,

and that's why today we see their practices, their beliefs as quite

strange, different to ours, and they can be quite difficult to understand.

And I think this is nowhere better exemplified

than in their practice of animal mummification.

The great era of Ancient Egypt had ended.

The immense pyramids and imposing temples

would stand for thousands more years,

but the rituals of animal mummification

became a distant memory.

The desert sands gradually covered the catacombs

and locked away their secrets.

Now, modern scientific techniques are allowing these sacred

animals finally to tell their story.

One last message carried from the afterlife.