I’ve always been a fan of mummies since I can remember. The first book I read was an educational book for young readers about the mummies. Don’t ask me where this interest come from, I don’t know! My other great experience was the Egypt-exhibition at the Hungarian Fine Arts Museum in Budapest. For me the most interesting part of the exhibition were the mummies! You can imagine how happy I was when I recognized that among the human mummies I saw real Egyptian cat mummies! The world was totally perfect at that time.
Later I discovered the Fayum mummy portraits and I fall in love with them. Vivid portraits and fine details of the people who used to live long ago. You can see a real face, with a little smile, wrinkles, moustaches just started growing, pink cheeks, very different noses and expressions. You can also see details of clothes and oh, gosh, fantastic ornaments! A perfect way to get closer to the past!
Digging deeper in the Roman times I found that some mummies were found also in the territory of Hungary! What an interesting clue to follow! And the best part of this story, that a mummy-portrait was also found!
The mummies were discoveed several years ago, no one expected it, so archaeologists didn’t know hot to hanle mummies. Sadly all of them are destroyed, but some interesting descriptions remined after them, to imagine how fantastic was the exploration and how they might have looked like. And yes, there is one mummy-portrait still in good condition, so we can look into the eyes of a Roman man from Pannonia Provincia!
“Such a strong, intoxicating, completely unknown sweet smell spread out from the tomb (it may be balsam, it is not the carcass smell in the dispersion), and in a short minutes a swarm of green flies covered the skeleton through the opening of the coffin.” - Begins her exciting account Klára Póczy, leading archaeologist of Aquincum in 1962, when the sarcophagus was opened.
The sarcophagus was locked with mortar, untouched. It has been taken out deep from the soil. The stone sarcophagus was found by accident, it was reported by a civil. The lid was lifted off with machinery, and archaeologists saw the mummy. The rolled mummy contacting with fres air quickly spoiled and turned green. It was a huge job to save the bandages.
mummies of Aquincum
As later studies found, the young woman, preserved with salt and resin and buried with her jewelry, slippers, and a chest, wore clothes made of at least five different types of textiles, and her body was wrapped in additional textiles. During the restoration, a painted portrait of a man was painted on a wooden board found at the foot of the corpse, which is almost unique in the region. But this was not the first mummy! The first mummy in the area of Aquincum was found in 1912 at Szemlőhegy (Szemlő Hills) and after in 1929 a woman-mummy conserved with tar at Táborhegy (‘hegy’ means Hill).
So this is more than interesting, because in the Area of Aquincum we know only female mummies. There is one man-mummy known from Brigetio (now Komárom), and the mummy-portrait, that was found in the sarcophagus of a lady-mummy, shows a man!
The conservation of the perishable body, the preservation of its integrity, is an ancient intention, a procedure that helped the dead in the afterlife in ancient religions and folk beliefs, and the intact body also served as the abode of the soul.
mummy-findings in Pannonia Provincia
Preserving the corpse, with the exception of a few places with particularly dry climates, necessitated several procedures. The main purpose of these procedures was to remove the internal organs that started to decompose quickly, to dry out the body. Another additional and sometimes expedient procedure was to pour the corpse with preservatives and place it in a coffin sealed with oxygen.
Our mummies from Pannonia can be dated to the 4th century AC. And collecting all the Pannonian mummies, their number is not less than sixteen! Five from Intercisa (now Dunaújváros), four from Brigetio (now Komárom), one from Carnuntum (it is in the region of Austria now) and five mummies from Aquincum (now Budapest). And an other interesting feature of the mummies is - except that they are mummies – there are no finds suggesting any Egyptian Cult. Probably they were wealthy Barbarians (not Christians) who buried their members according to their own cults.
Final conclusion: we still don’t know who can this man be!
Comments
Post a Comment