Did Egyptians mummify dogs? What the evidence shows

Part 1

How many dog mummies have been found

Underground catacombs at Saqqara, a burial ground near Egypt's ancient capital of Memphis, held the mummies. An excavation team led by Salima Ikram of the American University in Cairo and Paul Nicholson of Cardiff University found almost 8 million animal mummies there. The main passageway runs 568 feet, with branch corridors reaching a maximum width of 459 feet. Alongside dog mummies, the researchers found jackals, foxes, falcons, cats and mongoose, but about 92 percent of the remains belonged to dogs.

Part 2

Why Egyptians mummified dogs

The catacombs sat next to a temple dedicated to Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death. Ikram has said the team was trying to understand how the practice fit religiously with the cult of Anubis. She compared a mummified dog to a lit candle in a church, saying its spirit would carry a person's prayer to the afterlife. Pilgrims visiting Saqqara likely viewed the mummies on display as expressions of gratitude the gods would appreciate.

Not far from the temple, animal breeders likely raised dogs and other creatures that would later be mummified in honor of the gods. A senior research fellow in archaeology at the University of Bristol who was not involved in the study said Saqqara probably functioned something like an early version of a mass tourism industry, drawing trade in food, lodging and drink alongside the animal mummies themselves.

Part 3

How a dog was mummified

Animal mummification could involve eviscerating the body and wrapping it in linen, sometimes with resin used to help hold the wrappings together. A juvenile dog mummy from Asyut, now in the Egyptian Museum of Turin, was wrapped in a basket-weave arrangement of coarse linen, partly held together with resinous material, and covered with a separate dyed shroud. Millions of mummified animals have been found in Egypt, part of what one researcher called a whole industry.

Researchers now use X-ray and CT imaging, including high-resolution micro-CT scans, to study animal mummies without damaging them. A CT scan of the Asyut dog mummy showed a partially disarticulated skeleton of a young dog whose body had been eviscerated, confirming it went through an extensive mummification process. Scans of another mummy bundle found at the feet of a human mummy revealed the skeleton of a young dog, later nicknamed Hapi-Puppy, with visible leg bones, a long head and individual toes.

Part 4

What scans reveal about the dogs themselves

Studies on the Saqqara bones showed the dogs came from different breeds, though these have not been precisely identified. Some of the mummified dogs were older, but researchers found that the majority were buried only hours after birth. Older dogs sometimes had more elaborate burials and may have lived at the temple, while younger pups were likely bred, in the researchers' words, farmed for the cult. It is thought that many of these young pups were separated from their mothers and died from dehydration or starvation, rather than from a broken neck, which is more often seen in cat burials. A separate scan of a mummified kitten found a broken neck, a pattern researchers associate with animals bred specifically for mummification.

Many mummies have disintegrated over time or been disturbed by grave robbers, and some were later used by industrialists as fertilizer. Researchers describe a permanent community of people living at Saqqara, supported by the animal cults.

Part 5

Where dog mummies have been found beyond Saqqara

Saqqara was not the only place tied to mummified dogs. Dogs, associated chiefly with Anubis, were bred, sacrificed and mummified in specialised cult centres including Cynopolis, whose name means City of the Dogs, as well as at Saqqara itself. A separate juvenile dog mummy was found in the necropolis of Asyut during excavations carried out between 1910 and 1912, and it is now kept at the Egyptian Museum of Turin. Animal mummification was not limited to dogs either, since archaeologists have also found catacombs holding the mummified remains of ibises, hawks, baboons and bulls. So if you are curious where else this practice shows up, it fits into a much wider pattern across Egypt of animals standing in as offerings to particular gods.