Never-Before-Seen Anal Embalming Method Kept This European Mummy Preserved for Nearly 300 Years

When you perceive the connection mummy, chances are you deliberation of past Egypt. Many antithetic cultures embalmed their deceased, however, and scientists person conscionable recovered a peculiarly unexpected case.

As elaborate successful a study published contiguous successful the diary Frontiers successful Medicine, researchers analyzed a well-preserved 18th-century mummy from a tiny Austrian village. The idiosyncratic represents the archetypal documented illustration of a antecedently unknown—and frankly strange—embalming method, which fundamentally progressive shoving antithetic things into the person’s rear end. But what’s much astonishing is that it seems to person worked, allowing researchers to survey the mysterious mummification process centuries later.

“The unusually well-preserved mummy successful the religion crypt of St Thomas americium Blasenstein is the [corpse] of a section parish vicar, Franz Xaver Sidler von Rosenegg, who died successful 1746,” Andreas Nerlich, a pathologist astatine Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and archetypal writer of the study, said successful a statement. “Our probe uncovered that the fantabulous preservation presumption came from an antithetic benignant of embalming, achieved by stuffing the abdomen done the rectal canal with wood chips, twigs and fabric, and the summation of zinc chloride for interior drying.”

The beforehand and backmost of the mummy. © Andreas Nerlich

While the caput and little extremities were successful mediocre condition, the vicar’s precocious assemblage was wholly intact. To survey the mummy and place the individual, the researchers conducted radiocarbon dating (a tried-and-true method for dating integrated material), CT scans (a benignant of X-ray image), and an autopsy. In the abdomen and pelvic cavity, they identified linen, flax, and hemp fabrics, arsenic good arsenic a bead, pieces of branches, and fir and spruce wood chips.

“Clearly, the wood chips, twigs, and adust cloth absorbed overmuch of the fluid wrong the abdominal cavity,” Nerlich explained. According to the statement, these were wide disposable materials successful that portion of Austria. Furthermore, the researchers recovered traces of zinc chloride successful the mummy, which besides dries materials.

Unlike the wide studied mummification process successful past Egypt—where priests chopped unfastened the idiosyncratic to region and dainty definite organs—inserting materials into the assemblage via the rectum is simply a antecedently undocumented embalming method. “This benignant of preservation whitethorn person been overmuch much wide but unrecognized successful cases wherever ongoing postmortal decay processes whitethorn person damaged the assemblage partition truthful that the manipulations would not person been realized arsenic they were,” Nerlich added.

The researchers revealed that Sidler von Rosenegg apt died betwixt property 35 and 45, sometime betwixt 1734 and 1780, which corresponds with what historians cognize astir the vicar’s life. The results of their analyses besides bespeak that—besides immoderate imaginable nutrient shortages apt caused by the War of Austrian Succession—Sidler von Rosenegg lived a beauteous bully life. His skeleton doesn’t transportation grounds of important stress, and helium ate a seemingly balanced fare of grains, carnal products, and possibly fish. He was a semipermanent smoker, however, and the researchers suggest helium suffered from lung tuberculosis successful his past days.

Ultimately, the survey shows we inactive person a batch to larn astir however past cultures treated their dead—even those arsenic caller arsenic 18th period Austria.