Scientists found a mummy’s abdomen filled with wood and fabric—but it’s how they got in there that’s strange.
When you hear the word mummy, chances are you think of ancient Egypt. Many different cultures embalmed their deceased, however, and scientists have just found a particularly unexpected case.
As detailed in a study published today in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, researchers analyzed a well-preserved 18th-century mummy from a small Austrian village. The individual represents the first documented example of a previously unknown—and frankly strange—embalming method, which essentially involved shoving different things into the person’s rear end. But what’s more surprising is that it seems to have worked, allowing researchers to study the mysterious mummification process centuries later.
“The unusually well-preserved mummy in the church crypt of St Thomas am Blasenstein is the [corpse] of a local parish vicar, Franz Xaver Sidler von Rosenegg, who died in 1746,” Andreas Nerlich, a pathologist at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and first author of the study, said in a statement.
