In 1888 an Egyptian farmer digging in the sand near the village of Istabl Antar uncovered a mass grave. The bodies weren't human. They were feline — ancient cats that had been mummified(木乃伊化的) and buried in holes in astonishing numbers. "Not one or two here and there", reported English Illustrated Magazine, "but dozens, hundreds, hundreds of thousands, a layer of them, a layer thicker than most coal joints, ten to twenty cats deep. " Some of the linen-wrapped cats still looked presentable, and a few even had golden faces. Village children peddled the best ones to tourists for change; the rest were sold as fertilizer. One ship transported about 180,000, weighing some 38, 000 pounds, to Liverpool to be spread on the fields of England.
Those were the days of generously funded explorations—that dragged through acres of desert in their quest for royal tombs, and for splendid gold and painted masks to decorate the estates and museums of Europe and America. The many thousands of mummified animals that turned up at religious sites throughout Egypt were just things to be cleared away to get at the good stuff. Few people studied them, and their importance was generally unrecognized.
In the century since then, archaeology has become less of a treasure hunt and more of a science. Archaeologists now realize that much of their sites' wealth lies in the majority of details about ordinary folks—what they did, what they thought, how they prayed. And animal mummies are a big part of that.
"They're really displays of daily life," says Egyptologist Salima Ikram. After peering beneath bandages with x-rays and cataloguing her findings, she created a gallery for the collection — a bridge between people today and those of long ago. "You look at these mummified animals, and suddenly you say, Oh, King So-and-So had a pet. I have a pet. And instead of being at a distance of 5,000-plus years, the ancient Egyptians become clearer and closer to us."
