Ancient Egyptians kept baboons in captivity—and then mummified them
Archeologists exhumed the primates' skeletons from Egypt's Valley of the Monkeys to discover how they lived 2,500 years ago.
Ancient Egyptian society forced captive baboons to spend their life in enclosures without sunlight before mummifying their bodies as a ritualistic offering to the gods, a new archaeological study has revealed.
An analysis of 2500-year-old baboon skeletons, found in Egypt’s so-called Valley of the Monkeys, has revealed that the animals
The Art Newspaper
December 6, 2023
© Bea De Cupere, CC-BY 4.0
suffered from malnutrition and a lack of sunlight, leaving them with bone deformations, though they appear not to have been treated violently.
“We were shocked by the high proportion of deformations and the severity of the pathologies, which seem to be in contradiction with the elaborate treatment the animals received after death, as mummies,” says Wim Van Neer of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Belgium, and lead author of the research paper, published in the journal Plos One.
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