They’re fake! That’s what archaeologists are saying about two mummies that have long been part of Vatican’s collection of antiquities.
The small mummies, each about two feet long, had been thought to contain the bodies of children or small animals that dated back to ancient Egypt.
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“It would be hardly respectable, upon one’s return from Egypt, to present oneself without a mummy in one hand and a crocodile in another,” a monk wrote in 1833, CNS reported.
The research was conducted as part of the “Vatican Mummy Project,” which was started in 2007 to study the nine mummies and 18 body parts in the Vatican’s collection. It was presented in Rome on Jan. 22 as part of the Vatican Museum’s lecture series “Thursdays of the Museums.”
