A massive mummy cemetery was discovered in Egypt by a team of archaeologists from Brigham Young University in Utah. The mummy cemetery contains more than 1 million mummified bodies, supposedly at least 1500 years old, many of them children. The mummy cemetery has been dubbed the Fag el-Gamous cemetery, the name meaning Way of the Water Buffalo, a name of a nearby street.
The excavations leading to the discovery of the huge mummy cemetery had begun more than 30 years ago in the area. During the excavations, mummies dating back to the 7th century A.D. were identified, revealing that these bodies were buried during the time when the Roman Empire controlled Egypt. The story behind the mummy cemetery is quite mysterious, since researches are baffled as to where all those bodies were coming from.
Theories say that the mummy cemetery might contain the remains of people living in a nearby village or from the city of Philadelphia, named after King Ptolemy II Philadelphius. Even though these theories might seem valid, they can be easily debunked since the village was too small to warrant more than 1 million bodies in the cemetery, while the ancient Philadelphia had its own burial grounds, so transporting the dead to the newly discovered mummy cemetery would have been redundant.
Archaeologists have also been excavating a nearby pyramid which is said to be at least 4500 years old. The mummies might have come from the structure and the people who built it or inhabited it, but it is unlikely, since the bodies are not even half as old as the pyramid itself. The mummy cemetery is shrouded in mystery and researches can’t identify the source of all the bodies.
What is clear though is that the mummy cemetery doesn’t contain the remains of royalty or wealthy people. Judging by the condition of the bodies as well as the contents of the graves, archaeologists concluded that the bodies should have belonged to poor citizens of average workers, even slaves. The mummies found in the huge mummy cemetery weren’t properly mummified, the process being completed thanks to the harsh conditions of the area. Some of the bodies were buried as is, without coffins and the usual items that the dead would take with them to the afterlife. Some mummified bodies did possess linen, jewelry and various small valuable items, but none of them indicated that the dead were very wealthy.
The body of an 18 month infant was found in the mummy cemetery and it is among the few who were buried with clear care. The infant body had jewelry on its neck and hands and the way it has preserved demonstrated the fact that it was buried with the utmost care. Because of the jewelry, scientists are speculating that the body belonged to a girl, but they have no way of proving that for sure at the moment.
Another weird mummy in the mummy cemetery was the body of a man who had been 7 feet or 2 meters tall, which was unheard of 1500 years ago, as the average height was much below that. Scientists are thinking that maybe the tall man would have had a medical condition that could have caused a growth-hormone spur, but they need to do more research and tests to determine whether that theory is valid.
The mysterious mummy cemetery still has a lot of secrets to reveal and scientists are working on getting to the bottom of things. They say we might be looking at families being buried in the same spots, judging by hair color and burial items. Clusters of people found with the same genetic traits suggest that people with different hair color were being buried in the same place, which means that the mummy cemetery might contain family burial grounds.