The evil baboon mummies of Ancient Egypt will eat your face

Baboons are known for being hateful little creatures who revel in destruction. They live in large groups and willingly go to war with each other. They’ll eagerly break into homes and attack people. They’re like hairy little gangsters.

Yeah. They’re mean. Be sure to lock your doors, or the baboons will come in looking for food and gleefully mess you up. So don’t feel sorry for that baboon mummy in the picture. Be glad he isn’t around to wreak havoc and tear at your flesh.

Divine Baboons

In Ancient Egypt, baboons were often revered. I think the most prominent place they’re seen is above the entrance of the Great Temple at Abu Simbel, with their arms raised in worship of the rising sun.

It’s believed the reason is because some baboons will bark in the early morning, like evil roosters. And they’ll lay around basking in the morning sun, like…lazy roosters. So, baboons became associated with the sun god Ra.

But that’s not their only association. They were also a form of Thoth, who was the ibis-headed god of wisdom — among many other things. Ancient Egyptian gods were always moonlighting as the god of something or other. I guess the wage gap worked the other way back then.

Most of us know Thoth as the guy who would record the weighing of your heart against a feather after death, checking to see if you’d been good. He was like the ancient Santa. Except if you were bad, instead of coal you’d get gobbled up by a monster.

Thoth was also depicted as a baboon. Sometimes you can see him in that form, hanging out on top of the scales in depictions of the “Weighing of the Heart” in the Book of the Dead. My guess is the Ancient Egyptians thought baboons were smart, and associated them with wisdom.

And make no mistake, they are smart. They’re rather brilliant in their cold malevolence.

There’s yet another association baboons had — with the god Hapi, one of the Sons of Horus. He was shown as a baboon. You ever hear of canopic jars? Unlike a jar of peanut butter, you wouldn’t want to eat what’s inside them.

Canopic jars came in groups of four, used to hold the organs of those who’d been mummified. In Hapi’s case, his jar would hold the lungs. The picture I took of the jars above is from the Mummification Museum in Luxor, the same place where the baboon mummy is located. The association with the jars seems appropriate, since I’m sure a baboon would be more than happy to chow down on your lungs.

Animalistic Enthusiasm

Egyptians loved animals. Big time. Baboons, jackals, cats, birds of all sorts — they all had their own associations with different gods.

A good example is the cat, because that’s something we’ve all heard of: How the Egyptians thought they were awesome. There’s tons of cat mummies out there — you can see a couple in the picture with that hellish baboon up at the top. Cats were often associated with the goddess Bastet.

The ancient historian Herodotus said Egyptians would save cats from a burning house before themselves. Or this, from another ancient historian Diodorus Siculus, talking about an incident where a Roman killed a cat in Egypt:

“…when one of the Romans killed a cat and the multitude rushed in a crowd to his house, neither the officials sent by the king to beg the man off nor the fear of Rome which all the people felt were enough to save the man from punishment, even though his act had been an accident.”

What happened to this Roman? What do you think…a stern talking to? Well, let’s see what Diodorus has to say:

“…if he kills one of these, whether intentionally or unintentionally, he is certainly put to death, for the common people gather in crowds and deal with the perpetrator most cruelly, sometimes doing this without waiting for a trial.”

He goes on to say this isn’t something he heard, but something he witnessed. His writings are fascinating, because he’s looking at Ancient Egypt as an outsider. He’s able to make observations the locals probably wouldn’t bother mentioning. This is often the case with ancient writers, as they’re usually writing for a local audience and certain things kind of go without saying.

Now, he doesn’t bring up anything specifically about baboons, so I don’t know if killing one would result in a mob beating you to death. Probably not, though. That’s what baboons do.

Baboon Cops

There are references to baboons being kept as pets in Ancient Egypt. Having a bunch of exotic animals seemed to be a bit of a status symbol, only for the rich. Kind of like how some drug dealers keep pet tigers.

The mummified one in the picture up top had his canine teeth removed. Did you know baboons can cut through a human thigh all the way to the bone with one bite? I’m not making that up. I mean, I’m not making any of this up. Why would I do that?

Despite their reverence for baboons, the Ancient Egyptians were well aware of their vicious tendencies. The hieroglyph for “enraged” is a baboon. And there’s another use of a baboon in the religion of Ancient Egyptian religion I haven’t mentioned: Babi.

Babi was a god of the afterlife, who is…well, he’s what you’d expect. He’ll attack on sight, and feasts on entrails. You’d need to know the proper spells to protect yourself from him as you make your way towards being unified with Osiris, the head honcho down there.

So the Ancient Egyptians certainly knew of how baboons were malevolent monsters. In fact, in the Old Kingdom Tomb of Tepemankh, there’s a relief of a naked dude — presumably a thief — being attacked by a baboon on a leash.

You know how sometimes cops nowadays will send a German Shepherd after a criminal? We’d all live in a magical utopian wonderland if they’d just unleash the raw, unbridled fury of a baboon instead.

Mummy Scams

You probably came here to read about animal mummies, and that nasty immortal baboon in the picture. So, here we go.

There’s way more animal mummies in Egypt than there are human mummies. Just think about it: Getting mummified wasn’t cheap. Even a crappy, low-budget mummification was pretty expensive. So it’s not like the average Stevehotep on the street was getting dried into jerky.

Now, there’s lots of reasons animals were mummified. Sometimes, they were pets. If your cat died, you could have little Meowamun mummified and stuck in your tomb to wait for you. If you died first, your cat could be put somewhere around the entrance.

Here’s our old friend Diodorus again:

”When one of these animals dies they wrap it in fine linen and then, wailing and beating their breasts, carry it off to be embalmed; and after it has been treated with cedar oil and such spices as have the quality of imparting a pleasant odour and of preserving the body for a long time, they lay it away in a consecrated tomb.”

Other animals were mummified because they were sacred. You’d have temples built to certain gods and certain animals — the Temple of Kom Ombo comes to mind, with its mummified crocodiles. I did find a reference to someone called the “Priest of the Living Baboon” who kept a colony of them and consulted the baboons as oracles.

I’m not sure what sort of advice you’d get from a baboon, though.

But the biggest source of animal mummies were “votive offerings.” If you wanted a god to help you out with something, you’d go buy a mummified animal and offer it to the god as a kind of payment.

It’s estimated that — get this — as many as 70 MILLION animals were mummified in Ancient Egypt. It’s believed there were basically farms dedicated to raising and killing the animals, specifically for mummification and sale.

You’d go buy a mummified ibis, then give it to a priest for burial. There’s massive chambers chock full of them.

And with every industry, there’s some sort of scamming going on. About a third of animal mummies don’t contain any mummies at all…just mud and sticks, sometimes with some feathers stuffed in. Like NFT’s, except you actually get something.

Now, some think the buyers would’ve known they weren’t buying the real deal, meaning they could buy a fake mummy for a lower cost. I’m not sure I buy that. Wouldn’t you be scamming the god? Seems a little shady to me. If I was an Ancient Egyptian god, you’d better believe I’d want an actual mummified animal…or there’s no way I’m helping you get that promotion at the brewery.

Land of the Baboons

This brings us back to the mummified baboon, that sinister little freak.

Baboons aren’t from Egypt. They were all imported. Most came from Nubia to the south, but there’s two main kinds of baboons we see: and yes, they’re both jerks. There’s the “olive baboon,” and the “hamyadras baboon.” The mummified one in the main picture at the top is the latter variety. It’s the type the Ancient Egyptians deified.

So why this baboon and not other kinds? Well, it’s believed this type came from the mysterious “Land of Punt,” a trading partner with Ancient Egypt.

No one knows exactly where this was. It’s long been believed to be somewhere on the Red Sea, likely in modern Ethiopia or Somalia. The Land of Punt was the location of a famous expedition by Queen Hatshepsut, who immortalized her accomplishment on a series of reliefs at her mortuary temple.

A recent study showed that hamyadras baboons are more likely to benefit from basking in the sun, due to warmer temperatures aiding in digestion — so it’s fair to say they’d be more likely to have the Ancient Egyptians associate them with the sun.

Mummified baboons don’t show up until the New Kingdom, and seem to have gotten top notch mummifications. Meaning you’d have to be really rich to have one of these baboons, and likely got it from Punt. High tech analyses of mummies like this one pinpointed where they were born and lived: The southern Red Sea area.

Coincidentally, right where it’s believed Punt was located.

You can imagine the Puntites hanging out, getting harassed by these baboons, and the weirdo Ancient Egyptians come cruising up on their ships. What do they want? Gold. A few myrrh trees. Oh, and some baboons.

Yeah, gimme some of them baboons. Gimme a whole crate of them. The Puntites snicker as they load them up and actually get paid for getting rid of the cruel little pests.