Heheh.

By Liz Climo!

You can be an accidental mummy!

"Hel-looo?"

Did you know that you can become a mummy by accident? No, this isn’t a promo for a reality show about teen mothers (zinger!).

What I mean is that if you happened to fall into a tar pit or an ice crevasse or just a deep hole . . . and then if you died (sorry) . . . and then if you dried out and were eventually found, you could be a mummy, too.

It’s nice to dream, anyway! And this brings me to the Franklin Institute, a Philadelphia museum putting on an exhibition of 150 mummies from across the world that’s called —wait for it— Mummies of the World.

Some of the mummies are accidental ones, and some were mummified on purpose. Like this poor monkey-mummy from South America. Sure, it’s a cool name: “monkey mummy”. But that’s not a nice thing to do to a monkey!

To learn more about this awesome exhibit, check out this New York Times article. (That’s where these photos came from, BTW.)

Edible Mummies and Headless Gladiators

"You want a piece of me?"

Yummy! A scientist named Richard Sugg says people ate mummies for a long time. More exactly, these people took mummies for medicine!

From the 1100s through the 1700s, doctors often had their patients eat ground-up mummy powder. Why would medical experts think it was smart to eat dried dead people? Look, mummies are so mysterious, it just seemed like eating them HAD to be healthy! Plus, maybe they thought that mummies were SO old, eating them wasn’t cannibalism.

In other news, archaeologists in England uncovered an ancient cemetery full of headless Romans! The skeletons date back to about 1,700 years ago, when the Roman Empire was still colossal. But while it’s too bad many had their heads cut off, at least some were buried WITH their detached noggins!

What’s interesting is that the skeletons have battle scars. And they came from mainland Europe, NOT England. So the theory was that these the headless Romans were soldiers.

But other evidence showed the dead men had one arm that was stronger than the other. Okay, so they probably swung a sword or axe with that one! Ah, but one body had tooth marks from a lion or bear, which suggests a gladiator.

Ancient beheaded gladiators? That’s pretty cool!

Top photo from National Geographic,

article from the Guardian.

bottom photos and article 

from York Archaeology (via).

Mummies Don't Scream

As this mummy from the ancient Chachapoyas civilization in Peru shows, mummies died screaming.

Or at least that's what I thought!

But then I read this article which states that it's all about the mummy's jaw. If it isn't wired shut, “the jaw will drop down as the muscles relax and decompose after rigor mortis.”

And with an open mouth, that means we have one screaming mummy, coming up!