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One Million Mummies Rest in Ancient Egyptian Cemetery

December 18, 2014
BYU on the field in 2013.

An ancient cemetery containing one million mummies has been unearthed in Egypt according to archaeologists from Brigham Young University. “We are fairly certain we have over a million burials within this cemetery. It’s large, and it’s dense,” said Project Director Kerry Muhlestein in a paper he presented last month in Toronto, reported Live Science and RT. The ancient cemetery, known as Fag el-Gammous, has been under excavation by BYU archaeologists for the past 30 years who have unearthed more than 1,000 mummies. According to BYU, many of the mummies, which did not belong to royalty, date back to the 1st century to the 7th century AD. “The people in the cemetery represent the common man,” said Muhlestein in an email to RT. “They are the average people who are usually hard to learn about because they are not very visible in written sources.” This means that the those laid to rest were did not have their internal organs removed nor did they have wealthy treasures. “I don’t think you would term what happens to these burials as true mummification. If we want to use the term loosely, then they were mummified,”…


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