Mummy is the word...

FG came home today with an interesting tidbit for me.

A 1600 year old mummy has been discovered in Peru a little while ago. Archeologists and other types are puzzling over the find. The burial itself was unusual as the Moche people used to leave their dead for the vultures and animals to devour - the circle of life thing - and they hardly ever buried their dead. They found the mummy on a mountain known as La Bruja - The Wizard - and they discovered that not only was it buried so deep underground, beneath ground cover, stone, logs, vegetation and several other layers of "deterrent" materials to keep people out. Or it in...

Once they located the body of the mummy they found that it had been wrapped in approximately 27 layers of fabric. As they unwound these bandages they found weapons beneath them, tucked against its body. They assumed a warrior king. They were wrong. They unwrapped the mummy some more and found beaten sheets of copper and gold, keeping the body in shape and once removed they discovered vibrant beads and a weaving tool of some sort. Which puzzled the scientists even more. They uncovered and unwrapped more. And found a young female covered in tatoos buried with all the honours and more of a king and warrior.

The mystery is now to find out who she is and where she fits in, in the Moche world. She is an enigma, an unknown quantity.

Scholars now have to re-evaluate everything they knew about this race of long-dead people.

The discovery of this young woman, xrays revealed she was no older than her mid-twenties and that she had borne at least one child, has really tickled my imagination. Who was she? Why was she buried? There are anomolies in the items found in her grave. Statues and paintings on the walls never seen before. She is a mystery. Her existence is a puzzle.

Suddenly the creative juices are flowing and I am thinking...what if she was buried on this very sacred and special mountain La Bruja as she was seen as the reincarnation of a goddess? Goddesses all over the world have dual personalities. Artemis and Diana acting as virginal beauties, protectors of the weak and woodland animals...yet at the same time some of their attributes are protection in childbirth and protection to brave men in battle.

I googled the find and found that one chap strongly believes that she is a Buddist monk who travelled from the East. Strange thing is, the items found with her bear strong resemblance to protector demons from Buddist temples.

I doubt we will genuinely know her origins or what she was doing in such a remote place, buried with ancient weapons and such funery finery. I feel sorry that they took her from her burial place. I understand that research needs to be done, I am just wondering if they will ever put her back, like the natives of the Altai Mountains are requesting to be done to their Ice Maiden.

She had been removed a few years back - found with the skeletons of horses, weapons, a vast amount of treasure and jewellery and last, but not all, weapons of war - from her resting place in this mystical landscape in Siberia. Since her removal there has been drought, earth quakes and other natural disasters. The locals are clamouring to have her back, believing that the Spirits demand to be appeased, they want their own returned to them.

Anyone who hears the story and does not feel a shiver of awe, does not feel their heart beat a bit faster and their pulse quicken with the sheer imaginative possibilities of these stories, is a stone.

The story of the Moche mummy is one of the articles in this month's National Geographic.

This is a teaser snippet from the NG mag. Happy reading!

The Moche didn't embalm their dead. Most corpses decayed normally, leaving bare bones as the only proof of lives extinguished. In a very few instances, though, nature and human reverence worked together to preserve the deceased as a mummy. This was the fate of the tattooed woman whose elaborately wrapped remains were discovered last year at a ceremonial site called El Brujo—the Wizard—on the north coast of Peru. Rising to power a thousand years before the Inca, her people created a sophisticated culture now known for its fine ceramics and masterful metalwork.

A recent autopsy revealed that the tattooed woman had borne at least one child and died in her late 20s, but no trace of what killed her was evident. Her untimely demise must have shocked her people, who laid her to rest in full regalia at the peak of a temple where bloody sacrifices were performed (National Geographic, July 2004). Her body was daubed with cinnabar—a red mineral associated with the life force of blood—wrapped in layers of cotton cloth, and entombed in thick courses of adobe. Then the dry climate of the Moche's desert realm desiccated her body. No other Moche woman like her has ever been found.

"Based on our preliminary study, we think she was a ruler," says archaeologist Régulo Franco, whose work is supported by Peru's National Institute of Culture and the Augusto N. Wiese Foundation. If so, she may revolutionize ideas about the Moche, whose leaders were believed—until now—to be men.