Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it’s a mummified baby
Scans of mummified remains have revealed what was thought for centuries to be a 2,300-year-old hawk is in fact a miscarried baby.
It is the latest in a series of remarkable discoveries made by medical experts analysing ancient Egyptian artefacts from Maidstone Museum’s extensive collection.
The remains, which are preserved in a tiny sarcophagus, had been classified as “A mummified hawk with linen and cartonnage, Ptolemaic period (323BC-30BC)” but are now believed to belong to a 20-week gestation foetus.
If the findings are correct, the mummy would be one of the youngest found in the world and mean the St Faith’s Street collection would be home to not just the only mummified human in the county but the only two in the region.
The baby is believed to have been carried shortly after the reign of Alexander the Great, although it is not known which area of Egypt it is from.
The research is being conducted at KIMS Hospital, off Bearsted Road, and is part of a Heritage Lottery-funded £78,700 redevelopment of the museum’s Ancient Civilizations gallery.
Samantha Harris, collections manager at the museum, said: “Thanks to the scanning we are able to learn much more about the collections in a noninvasive way, without damag- ing the integrity or condition of the artefacts.
“For example, without access to the technology, identifying and learning about the baby mummy would have been impossible without causing irreversible damage from unwrapping.”
The youngest known mummy is a 16 to 18-week gestation foetus in the collection of the University of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum.
An ancient Egyptian ram’s horn plugged with mummy linen was also scanned and found to be filled with items from the Victorian era or later, including a necklace and buttons. The reason for this remains a mystery.
Maidstone Museum has 26 specimens of mummified remains, including human hands and feet brought to England as souvenirs and cats, crocodiles and birds that were often given as offerings to gods.
The Ancient Egyptian and Greek World collection will go back on display next summer.