New Chronology for Old Mummies

摘要

After sitting unnoticed for nearly a century, a handful of artifacts is rewriting ancient Egyptian history. Egyptologists previously dated mummification's beginnings to the Old Kingdom period, about 2500 B.C. However, after conducting the first successful chemical analysis of linen used in Neolithic burials, researchers announced in August they had discovered that people living in what is now Egypt were mummifying their dead much earlier - as far back as 4300 B.C., more than a millennium before the establishment of the Egyptian state. It can be difficult to find material that is reliably documented from pre-Dynastic Egypt, but textile expert Jana Jones of Australia's Macquarie University managed to identify the perfect specimen at the Bolton Museum, north of Manchester, England: fragmentary funerary wrappings more than 6,000 years old, collected in the early 20th century from a region of Upper Egypt.