Category:
Ancient Times
Ancient Times
Mummified Ibis Fraud at Saqqara
During Egypt's Ptolemaic period, pilgrims would make their way to Saqqara (outside of modern-day Cairo) to visit the tomb of Imhotep. While there, they would purchase mummified ibis birds to leave as offerings. But often the mummified ibises they purchased were frauds. Details from The Secret of the Great Pyramid (2008) by Bob Brier and Jean-Pierre Houdin:We know from ancient writings that two thousand years after his death, when he was worshipped as the god of healing, Imhotep's tomb was a pilgrimage site, like Lourdes in France, visited by the sick in search of miraculous cures. Pilgrims came from all over Egypt — and when they finally reached Saqqara they were greeted by vendors selling mummified ibises. The ibis was sacred to Imhotep, so the idea was that if you bought one of these birds and left it as an offering at Imhotep's tomb, he would be pleased and cure you.
The mummified ibis trade was big business and thousands of these birds were raised in captivity, sacrificed, mummified, wrapped, and then placed in clay pots to be sold to the pilgrims. Because the mummies were wrapped and in pots, the hopeful traveler was buying a "pig in a poke." He had no idea what was inside the offering he had just purchased, and was often cheated. When we study mummies we rarely unwrap them — X-rays and CAT scans are nondestructive and quite revealing. Often, beautiful wrappings conceal just a bundle of rags and a few random animal bones, but no ibis. Hor, the priest in charge of the animal offerings at Saqqara, complained of the fraud. He wanted "a god in every pot!"
The mummified ibis trade was big business and thousands of these birds were raised in captivity, sacrificed, mummified, wrapped, and then placed in clay pots to be sold to the pilgrims. Because the mummies were wrapped and in pots, the hopeful traveler was buying a "pig in a poke." He had no idea what was inside the offering he had just purchased, and was often cheated. When we study mummies we rarely unwrap them — X-rays and CAT scans are nondestructive and quite revealing. Often, beautiful wrappings conceal just a bundle of rags and a few random animal bones, but no ibis. Hor, the priest in charge of the animal offerings at Saqqara, complained of the fraud. He wanted "a god in every pot!"
Mummified ibis from Saqqara
source: National Museums Liverpool
Posted By: Alex - Tue May 20, 2025 -
Comments (0)
Category: Frauds, Cons and Scams, Birds, Ancient Times
The Human Mummification Project
The ancient Egyptians practiced mummification for over 2000 years, but they never wrote down how they did it. In 1994, egyptologist Bob Brier decided that the only way to figure this out was to attempt to duplicate what they did, by mummifying a body.Brier collaborated with Ronn Wade, director of the Maryland State Anatomy Board. They obtained the body of a man in his late seventies who had died of a heart attack. His name has never been made public. The man had signed up to be a body donor, though of course he would have had no idea he was going to be mummified. His family was only told that his body was being used for a "long-term research project."
Brier's mummification project was featured in a 1994 National Geographic documentary (below). The mummy they produced still resides at the University of Maryland at Baltimore.
More info: The Maryland Mummy, "Surgical procedures during ancient Egyptian mummification," "Making a Modern Mummy"
Posted By: Alex - Tue Apr 22, 2025 -
Comments (0)
Category: Death, Experiments, Ancient Times
The Statue of Theagenes
Some weirdness from Ancient Greece, 5th century BCE. As told by Chris Gosden in Magic a History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present (2020).Theagenes of Thasos was an athlete. Part of his demonstration of strength was to carry a very heavy bronze statue from the marketplace to his house and back again. After Theagenes died a bronze statue of him was put up. An enemy of his took to flogging this statue at night, as a substitute for hitting Theagenes himself. The statue ended this practice by falling on the man and killing him. The statue was then tried for murder in a special court, the Prytaneum, reserved for the trial of what we would see as inanimate objects, although clearly the Greeks did not place the boundaries between living and lifeless where we do. The statue was found guilty and ordered into exile, which, in its case, meant it was thrown into the sea. When a famine hit Thasos, the Oracle of Delphi said all exiles should be allowed to return, which eventually led not just to the return of human exiles but to the statue being fished from the sea. The famine then abated.
More info: wikipedia, perseus.tufts.edu
The story reminds me of the guy in Arizona, in the 1980s, who decided to shoot a 27-foot saguaro cactus, but the cactus then fell on him and killed him. Clearly, sometimes inanimate objects fight back.
Posted By: Alex - Fri Feb 21, 2025 -
Comments (1)
Category: Death, Statues and Monuments, Ancient Times
Unusual Punishments of the Theodosian Code
In 429 AD the Roman emperor Theodosius II established a commission to write down all the laws of the Roman Empire since 312, covering all the Christian emperors. The resulting work was the Codex Theodosianus (or Theodisian Code).In his book The Triumph of Christianity, biblical scholar Bart Ehrman lists some of the more unusual punishments included in the codex:
- Imperial bureaucrats who accepted bribes were to have their hands cut off (Theodosian Code l.16.7)
- ineffective guardians of girls who had been seduced were to have molten lead poured down their throats (Theodosian Code 9.24.1)
- tax collectors who treated women tax delinquents rudely were to "be done to death with exquisite tortures"
- anyone who served as an informer was to be strangled and " the tongue of envy cut off from its roots and plucked out" (Theodosian Code 10.10.2)
- slaves who informed on their masters were to be crucified (Theodosian Code 9.5.1.1)
- anyone guilty of parricide "shall not be subjected to the sword or to fire or to any other customary penalty, but he shall be sewed in a leather sack, and, confined within its deadly closeness, he shall share the companionship of serpents" and then thrown into a river or ocean "so that while still alive he may begin to lose the enjoyment of all the elements" (Theodosian Code 9.15.1)
In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide, the man who had raised his murderous hand against his father, by casting him into the depths of the sea in a sack in which were placed a cock, a monkey, and a serpent. The intention of those law-givers who framed such a law, which seems cruel in our times, was to punish the criminal by the company of hurtful and hateful beasts.
Posted By: Alex - Fri Dec 13, 2024 -
Comments (2)
Category: Law, Ancient Times
Sortes Vergilianae
Ever since ancient times, it's been widely believed that it's possible to use the text of Vergil's Aeneid to foretell the future. The practice is called the sortes Vergilianae.What you do: think of a question about future events in your life, then open the Aeneid to a random page. The first passage that catches your eye will provide the answer to your question.
Of course, the practice is little known today. Instead, we've got the Magic 8 Ball. Someone should make a version of the Magic 8 Ball that would offer up lines from Vergil.
More details from A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel:
Posted By: Alex - Wed Nov 27, 2024 -
Comments (6)
Category: Predictions, Ancient Times
Corn Rocks
"Corn rocks" are pieces of lava rock that have impressions of pieces of corn imbedded in them. Geologists have found many samples of corn rocks around the Sunset Crater Volcano in northern Arizona. When the volcano erupted, about 1000 years ago, the people that lived around it were evidently putting pieces of corn in the lava to create these rocks. Why they did this is anyone's guess. Perhaps for religious reasons, or perhaps just for fun.
Source: Google Arts & Culture
Geologists tried to create corn rocks of their own at Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii, but they found it wasn't as straightforward as they had assumed. Putting the corn in the path of a lava flow didn't work. Nor did dropping corn on top of a flow. Geologist Wendell Duffield tells the rest of the story:
We concluded that a corn rock most likely forms when small blobs of molten lava splash down over an ear. A falling blob of basalt lava would have a low enough viscosity to envelope an ear before the molten hardens to solid rock...
Obviously, it would not be safe for humans to carry ears of corn into the fallout zone of a towering lava fountain. A safe setting, however, would be at what geologists call an hornito (means "little oven" in Spanish). An hornito is essentially a miniature volcano that spews molten blobs of melt that fall back to Earth and accumulate into a welded-together chimney-like stack as they solidify and cool...
So, early Native Americans living near the present site of Sunset Crater Volcano witnessed an eruption that at some stage could be safely approached to place ears of corn at the base of an active hornito.
Obviously, it would not be safe for humans to carry ears of corn into the fallout zone of a towering lava fountain. A safe setting, however, would be at what geologists call an hornito (means "little oven" in Spanish). An hornito is essentially a miniature volcano that spews molten blobs of melt that fall back to Earth and accumulate into a welded-together chimney-like stack as they solidify and cool...
So, early Native Americans living near the present site of Sunset Crater Volcano witnessed an eruption that at some stage could be safely approached to place ears of corn at the base of an active hornito.
Posted By: Alex - Fri Aug 11, 2023 -
Comments (0)
Category: Nature, Science, Anthropology, Ancient Times, Arizona
Letter to Diognetus
The "Letter to Diognetus" is an obscure early Christian text, probably written in the second century AD. Its author is unknown.No known references to this letter survive from ancient times. The only reason scholars are aware of it today is that a copy of it was discovered in 1436 — and it's the way it was discovered that was unusual. A young cleric was at a fishmarket and realized that the paper the fishmonger was wrapping the fish in seemed to be from an ancient manuscript. He rescued the paper and discovered this previously unknown ancient text written on it.
From "An Introduction to the Letter to Diognetus," by William Varner:
One lovely day in Constantinople around the year 1436, before the Turkish conquest of that Byzantine capital, a young cleric named Thomas d'Arezzo turned into a fishmongers shop... Thomas noticed among a pile of materials that the shop owner was using to wrap his fish what appeared to be the leaves of a parchment codex! He rescued the manuscript and subsequent events, some of which are hard to piece together, led eventually to its destruction in a fire during one of those never ending European wars in 1870! That is what is meant by the two words, "no text," as they are applied to the Letter to Diognetus... no manuscript copy from the Middle Ages exists today that contains the Letter to Diognetus!
More info: wikipedia
Posted By: Alex - Sun Jul 16, 2023 -
Comments (0)
Category: Lost, Newly Discovered, Cutting-Room-Floor, and Discarded Cultural Items, Ancient Times
Crepitus, the God of Flatulence
Crepitus was allegedly the Roman god of flatulence. He was usually depicted as a young child farting.However, he's only allegedly so because there's controversy about whether the Romans recognized such a god, or whether Crepitus was the creation of early Christians trying to satirize pagan beliefs. According to Wikipedia, there are references to Crepitus in ancient texts, but only in Christian works, not pagan ones.
image source: POOP Project
Posted By: Alex - Wed Jun 08, 2022 -
Comments (4)
Category: Religion, Flatulence, Ancient Times
Twitch Divination
Twitch divination (also known as palmomancy) was the ancient art of divining the future by interpreting body tremors, tics, and twitches.According to the Faces and Voices blog, few manuals of palmomancy survive from ancient times. But the few that do offer some interesting advice. For instance, from a treatise preserved at Manchester's John Rylands Library:
‘If the anus, that some also call ‘ring’, twitches, it shows inspections, abuses, and the discovery of secret matters’.
And what does it mean if your buttock twitches? The answer from Omens and Oracles: Divination in Ancient Greece by Matthew Dillon:
Two surviving texts attributed to the legendary diviner Melampous deal with divination: On Divination by Twitchings (Peri Palmon Mantike) and On [Divination from] Birthmarks (Peri Elation tou Somatos)... Both of these texts are very neglected, with no English translation of either in print...
Melampous' Twitchings covers some 187 cases. Involuntary twitchings of the body were easily interpreted as ominous by those who experienced them, and this handy guidebook provided instant advice to the reader as to their meaning... Dating to the third century AD, the earliest papyrus begins with the entry:
[A twitching of] the left buttock means joy: for the slave, something beneficial; for the virgin, blame will fall on the widow for strife [this is somewhat difficult to understand; there may be an allusion here the reader would have recognised]; for the soldier, promotion.
This is in fact a more elaborate version of two short entries in Melampous' Twitchings, which indicate that twitching of either buttock means prosperity.
Melampous' Twitchings covers some 187 cases. Involuntary twitchings of the body were easily interpreted as ominous by those who experienced them, and this handy guidebook provided instant advice to the reader as to their meaning... Dating to the third century AD, the earliest papyrus begins with the entry:
[A twitching of] the left buttock means joy: for the slave, something beneficial; for the virgin, blame will fall on the widow for strife [this is somewhat difficult to understand; there may be an allusion here the reader would have recognised]; for the soldier, promotion.
This is in fact a more elaborate version of two short entries in Melampous' Twitchings, which indicate that twitching of either buttock means prosperity.
Posted By: Alex - Sat Jun 04, 2022 -
Comments (1)
Category: Predictions, Ancient Times
The replica Roman coin that fooled a museum
Nov 1971: Nine-year-old Fiona Gordon realized that the supposedly ancient Roman coin on display at the South Shields Museum was actually a promotional replica given away by a soft drinks company, Robinsons.
Newport News Daily Press - Nov 3, 1971
I'm pretty sure that the coin below is similar (if not identical) to the one that was on display at the museum. In 1971, Robinsons sent these coins to anyone who mailed in enough bottle caps. (Source: CoinCommunity.com)
Posted By: Alex - Tue Feb 22, 2022 -
Comments (1)
Category: Imitations, Forgeries, Rip-offs and Faux, Money, Soda, Pop, Soft Drinks and other Non-Alcoholic Beverages, 1970s, Ancient Times
| Who We Are |
|---|
| Alex Boese Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction, science-themed books such as Elephants on Acid and Psychedelic Apes. Paul Di Filippo Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1. Contact Us |