The Unknown People Who Mummified Their Dead Before The Ancient Egyptians | Timeline

a rock shelter in the libyan desert the site of an unprecedented discovery: a small

mummified

child until the moment it was unearthed everyone thought that the

egyptians

had invented mummification in africa, but this discovery led dr. Savino will learn eeeh and his team will develop a new theory that challenges everything we thought we knew about

ancient

Egyptian knowledge of mummification. The knowledge of mummification was not born in Egypt but in another place, in another culture, in another part of African history, that is how these

people

were. Where did they come from? How did they achieve this incredibly high level of mummification at such an early date?

And

unknown

people

mummified

their

dead

long before the Egyptians. This child would prove to be the key to unlocking a long-lost African culture: the Sahara. The largest desert in the world is also one of the hottest places on earth and one of the most remote Italian archaeologists dr. Savino to study at the University of Rome has been driving for two days his destination is the mountains of a caucus in the southwest Libya is a country in North Africa to the west is Algeria to the east Egypt this inhospitable terrain has scared away everyone except a handful of nomadic Tuareg, but it was once the home of our family who mummified

their

son year after year.

Sabina returns to this majestic landscape in the hope of discovering its secrets. It all began 40 years ago with the discovery of the small mummified child gwandma, who, it seems, took his name from the rock shelter where he was found. It took decades for Savino and his colleagues to reveal the full significance of this discovery. I think Mom and the rock shelter really started the archaeological and historical reconstruction of

ancient

civilizations here in the Sahara, we think about the population of Libya. Today it is largely the Middle East, but the team still believed that thousands of years ago this area was inhabited by black southern Africans, but apart from some cave paintings depicting black hunters, archaeologists had no evidence of this, the discovery of the mummy changed everything and the meaning of the black mummies we have the first evidence of black people in the area we were supposed to be but we had not heard evidence of this this was the beginning of an extraordinary search that would eventually reveal an african culture The judge's rock shelter is a simple place, a ledge wide enough to provide shade from the midday sun.

Savino has returned to the rock shelter where he meets the lord of the Tuareg tribe. Ramadani, who witnessed the discovery of the mummy, focused on a small area, the place where Savino's predecessor, Professor Mori, found the mummies. It was already visible because it was partially illuminated by natural erosion, so we must take into account the exact position of The worm carriers' mother should be somewhere right here when a small sac came to light, no one was prepared to what it contained, they opened this sack and found a mother inside, so it was really surprising, shortly after her death, this young man was placed. in a fetal position, he was then embalmed and placed in a sack made of antelope skin, the sack was then insulated by a layer of leaves.

This careful preparation protected his small body from the elements for the next five and a half thousand years, Italian archaeologists knew that they had found important evidence: it was not just the apparent color of the mummy's skin, it was the shape of his skull that suggested that he was black and, if he was, this could rewrite the history of mummification in Africa, they needed to be sure. After a tortuous 10-day camel journey to the nearest city with their fragile cargo, the team returned to Rome to analyze the mummy dr. Georgiou Manzi, of the University of Rome, is the world's leading expert on human remains in Libya and his department has an impressive collection of Libyan skulls, which is why members of the Italian team in the 1950s deduced that the boy was a black boy.

It is mainly a consideration of his face, especially the length here of the root of the nose, also here the advancement of the mouth. Examination of the mummy's teeth also revealed his age at death when the Italian team first examined the boy's state of mind. teeth and found that he was very young, especially using It was the carbon dating results that were so surprising. Quan Maharaj was five and a half thousand years old, making him the oldest black mummy ever found in Africa, but where did he come from who mummified this child a thousand years before the Egyptians? supposedly invented mummification in Africa the origins of the five thousand five hundred year old black mummy were a mystery to find out more about the child Sabina returns to the Tripoli Museum where the mummy now rests Effendi the most impressive evidence of mummification is the skin the school you can see around the school is the earning of a child.

You can see here right on the longest pine tree and the rib cage we have a lot of skin that can actually be found, you see the remains of this organic matter here. In fact, the remains of the true mummy are impossible to find this type of evidence without the mummification process. Another point is that the first act of mummification I estimate is a cat along the stomach and removing the tears from construction and probably putting something on it. for him an organic matter only to stop any type of bacterial activity inside, much as the Egyptians did not deny Bali Varma, who was mummified in a sophisticated way using a process called evisceration, this means that incisions were made throughout his stomach and chest, then his organs were removed and an organic preservative was inserted to prevent his body from decomposing as the oldest eviscerated mummy ever found in Africa.

Gwandma, who apparently suddenly found himself on the world stage, scholars such as mummy expert and Egyptologist dr. Jo Ann Fletcher was intrigued. I first became interested in the black mummy probably about 15 years ago with the publication of a major work on mummification around the world. The key point of interest in the mummy is the fact that its internal organs have been disemboweled. They have been removed from the chest, the thorax and of course the abdomen and because of this very sophisticated form of evisceration, what we have is essentially the oldest form of complete mummification yet found in Africa and it is interesting that everyone always goes to Egypt. home of Morafication and yet, in fact, from the dates of the black mummy, there is certainly nothing like that happening in Egypt at that time, so my question to myself was: did this black mummy contribute in any way? way to the later Egyptian practice of complete mummification or Did the two traditions develop independently?

Popular tradition claims that Egypt is the only ancient civilization in Africa. Its art and religion were famous and, according to the orthodox view, it was definitely the home of African mummification, but there are those who believe that the black mummy is a challenge. Professor David Mattingly, of this established school of thought, specializes in Siharan civilizations, which a mummy has discovered somewhere in the central Sahara. Perhaps it is not surprising that the average person on the street can assume Egypt's direct involvement somewhere in this process and I think it is a common image that Egypt is like a searchlight that shines illuminating those dark spaces of the Sahara and yet , a Maheu church was artificially mummified fifteen hundred miles west of the Nile Valley and a thousand years before the Egyptians disemboweled their

dead

, was it possible that Mummification in Africa began in the central Sahara, is not in Egypt and If the Egyptians did not prepare the black mummy, who did?

It really begs the question of who on earth could achieve such an extraordinarily preserved corpse. I mean, who were these people who could do it? This I mean, I personally know very little about them, so where do they come from? How did they achieve this incredibly high level of mummification at such an early date? Discovering more about these people and their culture is exactly what Savino Dalarna has been doing for a long time. Over the past 12 years, his search for answers began at the Varma rock shelter. We judge that careful excavations have yielded vital clues. Here we consider the entire history of who taught the occupation.

This charcoal is the remains of a chimney, probably four thousand years ago. It's been a thousand to six thousand years since the time of the judge in the hood and this was the old floor of the same age as the one that makes mommy and you still have the gold falling the fact is that during a judge maja Veera the most important part of his life was the cattle. This seems surprising. Cattle do not live in deserts, but they stand out strongly and sway along the caucus mountains. More than 50 percent of the paintings from the watered period were cut, so this really explains the importance of this. animal 6000 years ago cows and goats a mA who judges people were obviously animal herders, but how could they survive in this desert?

The remains of a simple plant provided the first clue that the wonwoo house he once judged looked very different upon seeing the team. who was Hira more than five thousand years ago, five thousand five hundred years ago, here we have evidence from Poland of the tithi plans, which are plants that are really demanding of a lot of water. The Tifa plant still exists in the region, but they only thrive in oases where water is abundant, so they could In this entire area that was once lush savannah, it was time for climatologists to provide some answers. One of NASA's satellites brought Dr.'s attention to the Sahara.

Kevin White now leads a team at the University of Reading using the latest technology to study ancient environments. NASA scientists were looking at images of the Western Desert as an analogy for their studies of the Martian surface and were observing it using radar instruments and comparing them with more conventional satellite images, they discovered a whole series of river networks buried beneath what which is now a layer of sand. Radar penetrated the desert surface to reveal an ancient system of river channels that once flowed into vast lakes. These lakes dried up a long time ago. and now they are what scientists call paleo lakes.

Kevin White is using this technique to discover similar channels in Libya's central Sahara, but it is the Paleo Lake sediment that interests Kevin most because it tells the story of the past. The lake sediments tend to capture a lot of information about what was happening in the surrounding slaves and the surrounding landscape and we can start to reconstruct the vegetation communities, we can start to reconstruct some of the hydrology, the nature of the water and we also get a fossil record that can be useful in some circumstances, but as you can see, it is a bit difficult place to reconstruct these climates, the team needs to collect field samples for analysis.

Kevin's colleague, dr. Nick Brooks is planning a trip to Libya using satellite maps. This is a tough spot here, on top of that dune, over here and then there's definitely a gap there, so this is easy, just one more, the little ones more get there and then get to this area means all three that gap there , I guess it's in the countryside, if you can get to this point here, then it's just downhill, there will really be a slip place there, we know people lived here in the era of why I'm a great judge because we found pottery and stone tools from that period.

What I'm actually looking for are things like organic deposits in lakes so we can radiocarbon date them and then we can also date things like snail shells and freshwater snails that we know about. must have lived in a humid environment we can date animal bones if we can find bones from things like elephants, rhinos, crocodiles and fish, even that would be fantastic Nick and Savino are colleagues, they are heading to a dry riverbed a few hours from a Farmer hosting jazz-rock could the evidence from this site prove that this area once looked very different, so which was your favorite of all?

The entire set of engravings we brought in Masson's plate. My favorite actually are the Matan Idiot mug figures. It is one of the most famous rock sites in Africa. You can see the divine upside down with the two human figures still in a kind of box, there are many animals, there is the elephant and two or three giraffes with many overlaps, yes. it's quite complex, the EDT eraser is really impressive, it's very good, it's nice, but it's still pretty good yeah, and the three forced hairs kept applying figures there and my favorite is the one in the corner, I really think it should be very hard.

Candy, what am I? So I share the reality,we find the drops, the night is down here, it seems like it hasn't gone very far, enigmatic figure, yes, yes, let's go to aalayam's ribcage, the back is quite evident, all the animals represented here live only in savannahs, but it was the next copy that completed the image for Nick, one of the most famous is the depiction of a crocodile in a wild shape style which is believed to be the oldest style of arty rock and how crazy oh Sh it really is spectacular and we know it. that things like elephants and giraffes and some of the other large animals can live in fairly dry environments, not as dry as we have here today, yes, but this is really the final proof that this was a river in which you need crocodiles not to live. arid environment, so by looking at the carvings on the rock face here we can, with a little imagination, speculate on what the landscape would have been like, what would have been happening, we would probably be standing at the water's edge here, perhaps when It was a season.

River or something, maybe we have some hippos here in shallow water, this probably would have been a dangerous place to be because it's pure having crocodiles coming out of the water on their backs, lots of animals, so why the animals just please, maybe maybe elephants going down to the water there, we would have had a savanna landscape and I saw a lion in the rock carving, then maybe I would have had lions hunting giraffes and gazelles or whatever, plus the people who were here hunting animals, it's a piece of African landscape as you would see it today in southern Africa, but it is not riddled with spikes of either Tanzania or Kenya today, but rather some parts that evoke the image of this Garden of Eden.

In today's Sahara it takes a lot of imagination, but it is still possible to experience what an ancient lake was like even in the middle of the desert. Gaborone is one of the few oases left in the Sahara and allows us to glimpse the surroundings. During the time of Gwandma, who judged the black mummy that grew around the edge of the lake, our living fossils that transport us directly to the past are exactly the vegetation that we found in the rock shelter, in fact we found the pollen grains in the excavation that They are 5,500 years old. so it's exactly the same vegetation so this means that at the time of one more mummy we had this kind of plan so this kind of environment so it means a lot of water armed with samples Nick returned to England his results will not only complete the picture of this ancient Saharan landscape, but they would ultimately help answer a much broader question about the origins of ancient Egypt.

NIC Brooks and the climate team at the University of Reading have spent years collecting samples in the Libyan desert. Analysis of their data has given them enough information to produce a modern environment dating back ten thousand years. Let's try it. The lakes were reconstructed based on our field data. So we went quite far into the sand. It's easier to fly over than to drive. Let's take a look. Are you here. The model transports us from the arid present to the time of Juan Ma, who judges the climate of the Sahara. he changed dramatically by covering the dunes with vegetation and turning the valleys into lakes.

It all happened 10,000 years ago when a shift in the Earth's axis caused tropical monsoons to penetrate directly into the central Sahara and with these rains came the ancestors of the enormous gwandma 20,000 years ago. humans black humans coming from the south following the monsoon belt occupy the central mountain range of the Sahara, this led to the first occupation of the central Sahara and we have these blacks in the central mountain ranges in the mountains of the article and in the immediate surroundings and they were no They are the only ones. About seven thousand years ago, people from Mesopotamia and Palestine arrived, introducing cattle and goats into the central Sahara, so we can imagine that the center of the Sahara, the Ethical Mountains, have been one of the first melting pots of words because we have blacks. people who come from the south and say something like white people who come from the Near East and probably the Eastern Sierra, today in Libya you can see the legacy of this early melting pot walking the streets of today's Libya.

I am always amazed by the incredible diversity of humanity that one encounters and broadly speaking, Libya's position in the Mediterranean with its inland siharan has been a great melting pot throughout its history, but what is truly surprising is How far back in time this mixture goes. of white Mediterranean types with harmonic Negroid types and that we can see very clearly in this work in the central Sahara this ethnic diversity explains an intriguing rock art that initially baffled Savino the face of this people is not black like a more enormous one but they are white and you can see this by looking at the face profile and style, it is this mixed race culture that mummified a movie judge, but what kind of society did this young man live in?

We must imagine that we have here probably four five families 25 30 40 people living here used round huts, each family has probably two or three cows and a family and 15 goats, rivers, trees, bushes, it really was a different environment and their time was their time to stay here and people sat and prepared things that you have to imagine. that these people had to meet with him to discuss and be able to claim rights to the pasture and the water, so it means social obligations, it means cultural rules and I think Dean was the one who taught mom is really a piece, a very important piece , a very important piece. of this evidence, but what else can the black mummy tell us about this society?

An important clue is the ostrich eggshell necklace he was still wearing intact when he was first discovered. We still have some beads on that side of the ostrich egg shown in ancient times. societies, the inclusion of funerary goods indicated rituals and ceremonies and the mummification process suggested something else, although Wonwoo, who judges, is the only complete Saharan mummy ever found, these people have been mummifying their dead for hundreds, if not thousands, of years before the boy died now. It's a really sophisticated form of mummification and it wouldn't have appeared out of nowhere. The black mummy is obviously almost the end result of a very complex development in this highly skilled procedure, but why was this young man mummified?

The family was special but we can say that it was not particularly rich or particularly powerful the fact is that this type of possible society was quite egalitarian in its social organization the fact that this is a very small child who was when we found a great The sheer amount of care and attention suggests that this is a society that does not necessarily judge individuals by their achievements, so the fact that people obviously mummified those in society who are often considered the least important, the children, presumably in the hope that they would. living again in some form of another life, I think can tell us a lot about those responsible;

Obviously, there is great compassion and love that would have gone into such a procedure and perhaps a desire to keep the dead child with one at all times. but it was the date Ranma was mummified that raised the key question: did mummification in Africa begin here in the central Sahara? We have Lee here, in this very place, the oldest mummy, however, it is more than five thousand years old and is at least 1,000 years older. than the Egyptian mummies, then this means that the process of mummification, the knowledge of mummification, was not born in Egypt and we have here the first evidence of this, so it is really very tempting to suggest some kind of movement or some kind of circulation of ideas from the center.

The fumigation of the Sahara extends to the Nile Valley, so it is really tempting to do this, but as an environmentalist I need hard evidence to do it. He Savino knew that many of the black mummy's descendants had been forced to move from the central Sahara only 500 years ago. years after his death, environmental work had confirmed another dramatic climate change about 5,000 years ago, returning the Sahara to its current arid state, the milder climate of the Nile Valley attracted attention, who would judge that people ended up moving towards the east and taking with him his knowledge of mummification? and if so, these Central Saharan peoples brought some other ritual to the Nile Valley.

Archaeologists began to look for other traditions shared by both cultures. Note that Ino's search took him on a journey across the Libyan Sahara. The search for him took years. He searched again but finally found his first clue: it was an unremarkable pile of rocks on a rock-filled plane called Mossad just 60 miles from the Juan Mata Church rock shelter. It was like finding a needle in a haystack. Savino had stumbled upon a mysterious circular monument that would prove that cattle had ritual significance in the life of the Sahrawi people. It included a bloody ritual slaughter. Here was evidence of a cattle cult.

The engraving of this cattle when I discovered it told me that this monument was probably it had something to do with cattle worship, so I decided to excavate this circular monument and we found cattle bones and charcoal, so this was really the first solid archaeological evidence of any kind of ritual connected to cattle worship. Cattle bones dated to around the time of the John Moo-hoo Church were buried in a circular stone monument with a diameter of almost 10 feet and pottery was left behind as ritual offerings, but the burial was only part of the discovery of Savino in a circle of stones next to the tomb found the killing area.

Which is trying to suggest that probably the cow that was actually killed here and probably the people prepare the cat or shoulder meat and then make a sacred fire to start their ritual and after that they just bring a small part of bones and put a part of this boss right inside this monument and another small part right at the base of the engraver the slab all the evidence is that some people bring the animal that you don't really attend, share its meat and after putting the The devil is here Savino It is believed that these people prayed for rain, sacrificed what was most precious to them, their livestock, and livestock rituals would play an important role in the Egypt of the Nile Valley.

The discovery of ritual areas for the slaughter of sacred livestock in Libya in These Saharan cultures remind me a lot of later gypped skin practices whereby cattle were ritually sacrificed within the temple precinct and then offered as a sacred offering daily to the gods in question, not only that but during funerary ceremonies. cult of the deceased where human mummies were buried in tombs, the highlight of the funerary rite was to cut off the four legs of a cow and, while it was still trembling with life, offer them to the mouth of the deceased to transfer the life that can still be seen trembling in this severed limb will then be transferred to the body of the deceased human with the hope, the fervent hope that these people will live again in the afterlife, so cattle are used as a medium to transfer. sacred power sacred knowledge sacred energy if you like deceased humans, then you have this kind of symbiotic relationship between humans and animals that is very clear in pharaonic Egypt and, as we are seeing in the Saharan cultures, equally clear further west, for So the Egyptian idea that cattle provided a channel between humans and the gods was nothing new; in fact, cattle counting had been present in the central Sahara for thousands of years before reaching its zenith in the Nile Valley;

It is quite tempting to suggest that there is actually some kind of relationship that should exist between this huge and important cultural preparation of the catapult in the Sahara and the emergence of the catapult in the Egyptian analogy. I think it is very likely that Savino would have established that, as in Egypt, both mummification and cattle cults were central to this Saharan society and then in a dry Wadi, less than a mile from the cattle monuments, he found something even more conclusive: the engraving of a figure with an animal head. The most interesting subject in this print is the Shiridi dog mask.

These types of human beings are actually one of the most important topics to represent in the area of ​​Indian massages we can understand the age of mourning by the spine that is very black means very very old what is the relevance of this type of dating of these engravings is that the presence of humans wearing masks and in In this case, the dog mask is much older than the type of evidence we have in the Nile Valley, although the organic matter in the crevices of the engraving dates back five thousand six hundred years. Savino believes that this carving could be up to a thousand years old.

Older, I find it very interesting that these animal-headed human figures existed outside of Egypt at such an incredibly early date and then later in the Veronica culture you find exactly the same motifs repeated in the verysophisticated form of Egyptian art in which the Egyptian god Anubis has become one of the most recognizable symbols of ancient Egypt is Anubis, the ancient Egyptian god of embalming and guardian of the dead, and his image was actually used by the ancient Egyptians in the form of a mask in the form that we see in front of us during the very sacred rituals of At the funeral, in the funerary rites, one of the priests wore exactly this same mask and performed the magical rituals that would allow the dead to return to live in the afterlife and I find it really fascinating that petroglyphs of human beings dressing jackals were found in Saharan cultures. masks almost dog-headed figures, in fact, at least a thousand years before the emergence of a new basis in ancient Egyptian mythology, overwhelming evidence suggests that this defining Egyptian cult of human animal worship actually emerged in the Sahara, but in reality it could be a small dark society.

If archaeologists had to know whether the culture of a Woohoo church, the black mummy, had spread beyond Libya, 500 miles to the south, a site in modern Niger began providing the answers in the 1980s. Archaeologists The French discovered pottery, human burials, and rock art that were almost exactly the same as evidence found in Libya by the Italians, and similar artifacts were found throughout North Africa. It looked like this culture. It was much more widespread than anyone would have imagined, just Tripoli, the Chiron Way and the Nile and right in the center we have the rocky coast mountains and we have Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Chad, a nature and Molly, for This area is larger than Europe, which means that this entire large area was inhabited during ancient times by the same terror culture of the ancient Africans.

The size of this culture was extraordinary. It covered most of North Africa, from Mali to the western fringes of Egypt itself. In many ways, this vast expanse. The Saharan culture didn't really have to go far in terms of physical distance to influence the people of the Nile Valley. They were almost there, so it was only a very short step from the western desert of Egypt to the valley itself. The big picture was almost complete, but archaeologists still needed evidence that this African culture had affected Egypt. They needed evidence of a direct link. needed proof of contact, the Italians turned to the most common artifact in the caucus mountains, pottery in the food, a cave, Savino had already discovered pottery fragments dating to the oldest pottery in Africa, would they find here the proof that the Sahara had had direct contact? influenced the Nile Valley, we can still see that this is a 9,000-year-old piece of Romney pottery.

It is decorated with impressions of a clay that waits with an undulating movement and this patrice is one of the oldest in the world. The Italian team collected enough pottery fragments to reconstruct an entire vessel now they are back in Rome with Savino this the pottery we have in the area an entire church is typical of the type of decoration that is probably six thousand years old this type of decoration that is made with impressions with a stick we find pottery Decorated in this identical way over a very large area, this vessel was not unique, it was representative of a distinctive siharan style and was completely different from undecorated pottery, it may belong to the same period in the valley of the Nile, but then there were excavations in the south.

The Nile Valley revealed something extraordinary: suddenly about 6,000 years ago a new style of pottery appeared, it was siharan and this was proof of contact, so it means that, in my opinion, people harbored ideas and this kind of communication reached southern Nevada in About 6,000 years ago everything made sense the Sahara was drying and a people in search of water had to move to the nearby Nile River and its fertile valley was like a magnet this was the last piece of the puzzle here it was evidence that the Siharan culture had arrived and influenced the Nile Valley, but what had happened to these people, the funerary monuments, the rock art and the black mummy were some of the only finds that proved that they once existed, Despite its influence and sophistication, only a few traces of this remarkable culture have been recovered.

Its history had literally been covered by the sands of the Sahara, a heritage of ancient Egypt and the central Sahara have been incredibly intertwined for the last 10,000 years, but if we go back to about five or eight thousand years ago, I think we find a period in where the relationship was expressed in a quite different way than the kind of common model we have today, instead of that searching light that shines from Egypt illuminating the desert, perhaps we need to think of a desert culture that is illuminating with many little lights to a fledgling Egypt in the Nile Valley and that's really going to play a big role in the formation of ancient Egypt.

I find it quite extraordinary that this central Siharan civilization displays all the characteristics we generally associate with later Egyptian pharaonic culture and mummification is a prime example. There are definite links between the two cultures as to which came first. Most Egyptologists would like to think they fooled us, but I think a lot of this information from Saharan cultures should really make us think again, but the journey of discovery has led a dedicated team of archaeologists. to discover the secret origins of Egypt, the greatest ancient civilization ever known, and it all began with the chance discovery in a remote corner of the Sahara of the body of a mummified boy whose legacy was far greater than his parents had ever imagined they were. our engines. a two and a half year old boy who lives with his family and the mountains of the article more than five thousand and five years ago they were sub-Saharan Africans and accidentally gave the floor to the oldest black mummy ever seen.