I've come to a bog
or maybe it's more of a fen. I don't know, it's the muddiest place I can visit right now.
When I was a kid I was really into goosebumps. 'Say cheese and die'
it's a, it's a literary classic for the ages, but when I would watch the tv show I would always hide
when it came to this one particular part, i'd look away hide under a blanket something like that.
I couldn't even bear to see this guy for one second when I was a kid!
In my opinion, that's fair enough. There's something really morbidly fascinating,
dare i say creepy about a mummy. Coming face to face with someone who died centuries if
not thousands of years ago, it can be you know quite a shock. There's really nothing like it,
nothing else can put you in touch with the past quite like a mummy, quite like a real person.
For eight-year-old Stefan it was, it was just a little bit too much. I've
recently found myself down a bit of a mummy rabbit hole once again,
for whatever reason, and I thought I'd share with you guys four (*five) obscure examples,
some mummies that you might not know about. Give you some ammunition for historically themed
daydreaming which is what life's all about, I think we all agree.
During the dying days of the Archaemenid empire, around the turn of the Macedonian conquest,
maybe a generation or two before. A young man was working at Chehrehabad salt mine. I say man,
he was probably around 16 years old. Certainly, probably a man in his time, definitely doing a
man's work but by our standards younger than than a miner typically is. As he worked away
in his long brown shirt, red belt around his waist, bag over his shoulder, little did he
realize the absolute disaster that was about to befall him. Presumably without warning, the mine
he was working in collapsed on top of him and a few other chaps, freezing them in their moment of
death. The salt that they were working so hard to extract preserving them for millennia.
I always find it interesting to imagine the daily lives of people who lived during what
we now would know were major historical events. Did he know who the Greeks were,
who the Macedonians were? Did he care if he did? or was he just trying to
mine some salt, make some money, impress the people downtown. In my opinion probably
the latter. That's some good fuel for the daydreaming engine, if I do say so myself.
Around the same time as salt man 4 met his demise,
Cloneycavan man and Old Croghan Man were thrown into a peat bog.
Which is why i'm here.
I'm sure you're well aware the unique properties of bogs can preserve people in extraordinary
detail for millennia. Bog bodies are probably the most incredibly preserved mummies in the
entire world. Both of these chaps came to a very violent end. Cloneycavan was hit on the
head and chest with an axe. A 40 centimeter cut across his abdomen suggests that he was
disemboweled and I only hope for his sake that that happened after he died. Old Croghan was
stabbed, decapitated and then even his torso was separated from his legs. Now here's where the
story gets crazy. Interestingly, the key to their identities may lie in their nipples and i'm not
exaggerating. According to Eamonn Kelly, the act of sucking on a king's breast was an important act
of submission in prehistoric Ireland. That is a spicy ritual you've got on the go there Ireland,
very spicy indeed. Did the cutting of these chaps nipples symbolically
rule them out of kingship? The king was in theory a consort of the mother goddess, apparently,
and at times of hardship, famine and things like that, where it seems like the king has lost the
favour of the gods, they could be sacrificed. I'm speculating here of course, maybe they
attempted to become the king and failed and so had their nipples cut before they were deposited
in a peat bog. This isn't entirely speculative, they've got really well manicured hands,
they have hair styled using imported resins. So these were probably not your average common folk.
Whoever they were, if breast suckling sacrificial kings does not interest you,
does not cause you to spend the rest of the day daydreaming, then we can't be friends. We're,
we're different people. I don't know why you're watching this channel.
On the island of Tenerife lived a truly unique people, the Guanches. For the most part they
were totally isolated on their islands, living essentially a neolithic lifestyle up until the
15th century when the Spanish arrived. They wore goatskin clothes lived in caves or small villages,
fought with giant wooden swords that were apparently bigger than the famous
europeans Zweihanders, and obviously they mummified their dead, they mummified their
royal families. They're a really fascinating bunch there'll definitely be a video on the Guanches
at some point on this channel, but for now their mummification. Upper class Guanches had
their organs removed and replaced with volcanic rock, which is of course abundant on Tenerife.
After this they'd be wrapped in goat skins. If you were an absolute legend in your community, a real
baller by Guanche standards, then you might be wrapped in about 15 skins something
like that. Your body would then be placed in one of the island's many caves and a dry stone wall
would be placed at the entrance to protect you. I mean, there are certainly worse places to be
buried. The views on Tenerife are incredible. So interesting to imagine your family, you know,
going through this process, taking you up the mountain, building a wall over the entrance of
your cave, and then maybe, you know, sitting back, relaxing, looking out at the view of
the Atlantic ocean and maybe sharing a few words about you, you know reminiscing over your life.
Obviously Egypt is the most famous place for mummies
but what is really fascinating is how far back in time archaeology is is pushing this ritual of
mummification mummy. S293 is currently the oldest mummy at the museum of Turin. He died in around
3600 bce. He's so old that archaeologists had thought he was mummified by accident,
just by the natural conditions of the desert, but it turns out uh we were dead wrong about that.
BADUM TSSS! Forgive me :(
Chemical analysis of the body shows that before he was wrapped in linen,
he was rubbed down with conifer resin and flax. Presumably to uh get rid of the aroma,
the smell of decay. What is fascinating is that those two ingredients were also used
by later Egyptians in their embalming recipe. So Egyptians, since pre-dynastic times,
had basically been working with the same recipe. This man lived and died a thousand years before
the pyramids were built. He's as close to them as i am to William the Conqueror. It's extraordinary,
really when you think about just the sheer depth of time of Egyptian civilization,
it's really unique, really really special and I daydream, I daydream about it.
Let's go from the oldest Egyptian mummies to the oldest deliberate mummies in the entire world,
the Chinchorro mummies of Peru and Chile. Now the Chinchorro were a coastal people who started
mummifying their dead around 9,000 years ago! Extremely ancient! Now you might think because
of the extraordinary age of these mummies that the process of embalming them was very simple
but nothing could be further from the truth. They are extremely elaborate, extremely varied. Look
at this perfect example, "the three-year-old child's hand is covered with a form of sand
cement, adult fingernails have been inserted and allowed to protrude from the sand cement".
They basically took the entire body apart and re-built it. First they'd remove the
skin and dry it. Then they'd remove all the vital organs of course, take everything out,
replace them with clay, ashes, plant matter, that sort of stuff. The muscles would then be removed
from the bones. The body would be reassembled, sometimes with a stick replacing the spine,
and then the original skin would be used to wrap everything back up. The head of course
was also removed, the brain replaced again with ashes. Sometimes they would just build
a new head entirely. After all of this, they would place a clay mask on top of the dead.
How extraordinary! What an absolute fuss! Talk about elaborate. How can archaeology,
with just the few material remains we have, even begin to understand such complex rituals. Every
part of that process must have been loaded with symbolism for them. I suppose all we can say
is that when a Chinchorro person died, and they committed to this process of mummification, that
the deceased's role in society totally changed from the one they had when they were alive into
something more, something much more, something spiritual, something otherworldly, perhaps?
Either way there their role in society must have changed. I don't believe you would change the
physical remains so much if there wasn't also a dramatic philosophical change accompanying it.
That's my speculation though. What's interesting about them is that, in a way, from my perspective,
they're almost blurring the lines between mummification and sculpture.
How many body parts can you remove before that person ceases to be a mummy and starts
being a sculpture made with some body parts? Interesting, interesting. If I made a sculpture
and had a mummified arm in there, would that sculpture be a mummy?
I can't answer this question but i'm for sure going to be thinking about it all night now.
So those are the four (*five I'm an idiot) mummies I found interesting.
Hope you found them interesting too. There's a big debate at the minute in, in our society,
in our time about the displaying of human remains and the showing of human
remains. I did put thought into this video believe it or not even though i'm just standing in
this fen, poorly lit. If you want to know why I chose these mummies and my
you know thoughts about the displaying of the dead, there's a video on my second channel coming
out the same time i'll put it in the pinned comment in the description. Check it out.
I'm going to leave you in the safe hands now of another extremely famous and important mummy.
Hi everyone! I'm Stefan's mummy. Thank you very much for watching this video.
If you're interested in archaeology then please consider subscribing.
Also a special thanks to the very generous patrons for supporting my little boy. Bye!