“Unlocking Ancient Secrets: The 5,600-Year-Old Mummy that Holds the Key to Egypt’s First Embalming Recipe”
A team of researchers made their conclusions after examining “Fred,” an exceptionally well-preserved mummy discovered more than 100 years ago and housed in Turin’s Egyptian Museum since 1901, according to National Geographic. After being brought to the museum originally, the mummy had not undergone any additional preservation methods, which meant that he would be the perfect subject for investigation in terms of how he was preserved the first time around.
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Believed to be around 5,600 years old, the Turin mummy was originally thought to be a preservation anomaly. Fred was believed to have been naturally preserved by the extreme desert heat.
However, the study examined the remains of the mummy and discovered that not only had the mummy actually been embalmed by humans, but he had been preserved using a recipe similar to the ones used 2,500 years later on pharaohs and noblemen like King Tut during Egypt’s peak mummification period, according to Live Science.
The study’s co-author, Jana Jones, an Egyptologist at Australia’s Macquarie University, previously explored fragments of clothing from mummy funeral wrappings from around the same time as Fred but from a different location and found evidence that hinted at mummy embalming.
However, those hints were not enough to convince skeptics that embalming was actually taking place because they had only clothes to examine and no actual bodies. So, to prove their theory, they needed a body — and they turned to Fred to help them gather definitive proof.
