Ice maiden from the Inca tribe. Ice Maiden of the Incas - a perfectly preserved mummy in the mountains

Some people live even after death. Swamps, deserts, and permafrost present surprises to scientists and sometimes preserve bodies unchanged for many centuries. We will tell you about the most interesting finds that amaze not only with their appearance and age, but also with their tragic fates.

In the vicinity of the Tarim River and the Taklamakan Desert - in places where the Great Silk Road ran - over the past quarter century, archaeologists have found more than 300 mummies of white people. Tarim mummies are tall, have blond or red hair, and blue eyes, which is not typical for the Chinese.

According to different versions of scientists, these could be both Europeans and our ancestors from Southern Siberia - representatives of the Afanasyev and Andronovo cultures. The oldest mummy was perfectly preserved and was named Loulan Beauty: this young woman of model height (180 cm) with neat braids of flaxen hair lay in the sands for 3800 years.

It was found in the vicinity of Loulan in 1980, buried nearby was a 50-year-old man, two meters tall, and a three-month-old child with an ancient “bottle” made of a cow’s horn and a teat made from a sheep’s udder. Tamir mummies well preserved due to the arid desert climate and the presence of salts.

Princess Ukok 2500 years old

In 1993, Novosibirsk archaeologists exploring the Ak-Alakha mound on the Ukok plateau discovered the mummy of a girl about 25 years old. The body lay on its side, legs bent. The deceased's clothes were well preserved: a Chinese silk shirt, a woolen skirt, a fur coat and felt stockings.

The appearance of the mummy testified to the peculiar fashion of those times: a horsehair wig was put on his shaved head, his arms and shoulders were covered with numerous tattoos. In particular, on the left shoulder was depicted a fantastic deer with the beak of a griffin and the horns of a capricorn - a sacred Altai symbol.

All signs pointed to the burial belonging to the Scythian Pazyryk culture, widespread in Altai 2500 years ago. The local population demands to bury the girl, whom the Altaians call Ak-Kadyn (White Lady), and journalists call the Princess of Ukok.

They claim that the mummy guarded the “mouth of the earth” - the entrance to the underground kingdom, which now that it is in the Anokhin National Museum remains open, and it is for this reason that natural disasters have occurred in the Altai Mountains in the last two decades. According to the latest research by Siberian scientists, Princess Ukok died of breast cancer.

Tollund Man over 2300 years old

In 1950, residents of the Danish village of Tollund were extracting peat in a bog and at a depth of 2.5 m they discovered the corpse of a man with signs of violent death. The corpse looked fresh, and the Danes immediately reported it to the police. However, the police had already heard about the swamp people (the bodies of ancient people were repeatedly found on the peat bogs of Northern Europe) and turned to scientists.

Soon the Tollund Man (as he was later called) was taken in a wooden box to the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. The study revealed that this 40-year-old man, 162 cm tall, lived in the 4th century BC. e. and died from strangulation. Not only his head was perfectly preserved, but also his internal organs: liver, lungs, heart and brain.

Now the head of the mummy is on display in the Silkeborg city museum with the body of a mannequin (his own has not been preserved): stubble and tiny wrinkles can be seen on the face. This is the best-preserved man from the Iron Age: he looks as if he had not died, but fallen asleep. In total, more than 1,000 ancient people were discovered in the peat bogs of Europe.

Ice maiden 500 years

In 1999, on the border of Argentina and Chile, the body of a teenage girl from the Inca tribe was found in the ice of the Llullaillaco volcano at an altitude of 6706 m - she looked as if she had died a couple of weeks ago. Scientists have determined that this girl, 13–15 years old, who was called the Ice Maiden, was killed with a blunt blow to the head half a millennium ago, as a victim of a religious ritual.

Thanks to the low temperature, her body and hair were perfectly preserved, along with clothes and religious objects - bowls with food, figurines made of gold and silver, and an unusual headdress made of white feathers of an unknown bird were found nearby. The bodies of two more Inca victims were also discovered - a girl and a boy aged 6–7 years.

During the study, scientists found that children were prepared for the cult for a long time, fed with elite products (llama meat and maize), and stuffed with cocaine and alcohol. According to historians, the Incas chose the most beautiful children for rituals. Doctors diagnosed the Ice Maiden with the initial stage of tuberculosis. Mummies of Incan children are on display at the Museum of Highlands Archeology in Salta, Argentina.

Petrified miner about 360 years old

In 1719, Swedish miners discovered the body of their colleague deep in a mine in the city of Falun. The young man looked as if he had died recently, but none of the miners could identify him. A lot of onlookers came to look at the deceased, and in the end the corpse was identified: an elderly woman bitterly recognized him as her fiancé, Mats Israelsson, who had gone missing 42 years ago (!).

In the open air, the corpse became hard as stone - such properties were given to it by the vitriol that soaked the miner's body and clothes. The miners did not know what to do with the find: whether to consider it a mineral and give it to a museum, or bury it as a person. As a result, the Petrified Miner was put on display, but over time began to deteriorate and decompose due to the evaporation of vitriol.

In 1749, Mats Israelsson was buried in the church, but in the 1860s, during renovations, the miner was dug up again and shown to the public for another 70 years. It was only in 1930 that the petrified miner finally found peace in the church cemetery in Falun. The fate of the failed groom and his bride formed the basis of Hoffmann’s story “Falun Mines.”

Conqueror of the Arctic 189 years

In 1845, an expedition led by polar explorer John Franklin set out on two ships to the northern coast of Canada to explore the Northwest Passage, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

All 129 people disappeared without a trace. During search operations in 1850, three graves were discovered on Beechey Island. When they were finally opened and the ice was melted (this happened only in 1981), it turned out that the bodies were perfectly preserved due to permafrost conditions.

A photograph of one of the deceased - British fireman John Torrington, originally from Manchester - spread across all publications in the early 1980s and inspired James Taylor to write the song The Frozen Man. Scientists have determined that the fireman died of pneumonia aggravated by lead poisoning.

Sleeping Beauty 96 years old

Palermo in Sicily is home to one of the most famous mummies exhibitions - the Capuchin Catacombs. Since 1599, the Italian elite have been buried here: clergy, aristocracy, politicians. They rest in the form of skeletons, mummies and embalmed bodies - more than 8,000 dead in total. The last to be buried was the girl Rosalia Lombardo.

She died of pneumonia in 1920, seven days short of her second birthday. The grief-stricken father asked the famous embalmer Alfredo Salafia to preserve her body from decay. Almost a hundred years later, the girl, like a sleeping beauty, lies with her eyes slightly open in the chapel of St. Rosalia. Scientists recognize that this is one of the best embalming methods.

The Incan Ice Maiden Juanita now resides in the Museum of Andean Sanctuaries in Arequipa, Peru, and is one of the best preserved mummies in the world. There is a shock of dark hair on her head, and the skin on her hands, although discolored, has not undergone natural decomposition at all; small hairs are even visible on it.

Juanita appears to be sleeping peacefully, although her life probably ended when she was sacrificed to the Incan gods. Scholars estimate that Juanita was between 12 and 15 years old. The Incas often sacrificed the strongest and healthiest children to appease the gods, as well as to avoid natural disasters and obtain good harvests. Considering that Juanita's body was discovered at the top of Ampato, a volcano in the Andes, it was most likely that she was given to the gods.

Preparing for Death

For some time before her death, Juanita led a life different from that of a typical Inca girl. Scientists were able to extract DNA from her well-preserved hair to create a timeline of those days and understand what she ate before the sacrifice.

Her hair "suggests" that Juanita was chosen as a sacrifice about a year before her death and moved from the standard Incan food of potatoes and vegetables to more "elite" foods: animal proteins and corn, plus large amounts of coca and chicha alcohol. The last 6-8 weeks of the girl’s life passed in a state of dope. Thus, scientists believe that she was likely in a very submissive and relaxed state at the time of her death.

Radiologist Elliot Fishman found that Juanita's death was caused by massive hemorrhage resulting from trauma to the skull, as if she had been hit in the head with a baseball bat. After the fatal blow, the skull filled with blood and displaced the brain to the side. If there had not been blunt trauma to the head, her brain would have shriveled symmetrically to the center of her skull.

Discovering Juanita

Juanita died between 1450 and 1480 and sat alone in the mountains until she was discovered in September 1995 by anthropologist Johan Reinhard and his Peruvian partner Miguel Zarate. If not for the activity of the volcano, it is possible that the mummified young girl would have continued to sit on the frozen mountaintop for many centuries. But due to warming temperatures, the snow melted, and Juanita was born.

Reinhard and Zarate discovered the mummy inside a crater on the mountain, along with numerous funerary objects including pottery, shells and small figurines. The cold air at an altitude of 6 thousand meters did not allow the body to decompose, essentially preserving it for many centuries. “The doctors shook their heads and said that the girl looked as if she had died not half a millennium ago, but only a few weeks ago,” Reinhard recalled in an interview in 1999.

The discovery of such a well-preserved mummy immediately caused a surge of interest in the scientific community. A month later, Reinhard returned to the mountaintop with his team and found two more mummified children, this time a boy and a girl. It is possible that they were sacrificed to accompany Juanita.

In general, according to experts, it is quite possible to find hundreds more Inca children on the mountain peaks of the Andes.

They climbed the Llullaillaco volcano in Argentina and never came down, becoming part of a human sacrifice.

In 1999, scientists discovered the bodies of three mummies, so well preserved as if they had died just a few weeks ago. Since then, researchers have continually studied mummies to reconstruct the last months of their lives.

A new study has found that all three children were regularly given coke and alcohol, which may have played a role in their deaths.

Three children, including a boy, a girl and a 13-year-old "Ice Maiden" as archaeologists nicknamed her, were part of sacrificial ritual known as capacocha, during which children were killed or left to die on the top of a high mountain. The mummies found were naturally mummified by the cold and dry climate on the mountain at an altitude of over 7,000 meters.

Inca girl

"Ice Maiden" is one of the best preserved mummies in the world and looks like she just fell asleep.

Her long locks of hair, which grew at least 2 years before the sacrifice, helped reveal the secret of her death.

The ancient Incas prepared children for sacrifice long before the event itself.

Hair research has shown that an Inca girl's diet changed in the year before her death. They began to give her more privileged food, such as corn and meat. Besides the girl had to take much larger quantities of coca and alcohol.

The "Ice Maiden" was one of the chosen women of the "akkla" who were chosen during adolescence to live separately from familiar society under the guidance of priestesses.

For about six months and shortly before her death, she was given large quantities alcohol in the form of a drink known as chicha- a fermented drink made from corn and forced to chew coca leaves. Other children found near her: a 4-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy were also given drugs, but in smaller quantities.

Scientists believe that alcohol and narcotic coca leaves were given to make them more obedient, driving you into a stupor and possibly even unconsciousness. This is confirmed by the relaxed sitting position in which the Incan girl was found and the untouched artifacts nearby.

Although there were signs of violence at other sacrifice sites, such as traumatic brain injuries, these three children passed away quietly and calmly.

Ancient Incas

The Inca Empire existed since 1150 in the Cusco Valley in modern Peru. By the time the empire flourished in the 1520s, it stretched from the Pacific coast and the Andes to modern-day Ecuador and the Maule River in Chile. More than 10 million people were Incas.

- The founder of the Inca Empire was Manco Capac, who called himself the "Great Inca", the divine sun god. In total, during the Inca period, there were 13 emperors.

The official language of the Incas was Quechua. Among the Incas there was no written language. They kept their history orally from father to son. In addition, they had a unique transmission system called “kipu” in the form of colored woolen cords with knots of different lengths.

Inky good understood mathematics and agriculture. They built aqueducts, cities, temples, fortresses, tunnels, suspension bridges and long roads. They also knew about hydraulics, astronomy, and military strategy. They had a rich culture and developed music, art and poetry, wood and stone carving.

One of the most famous monuments of the Inca civilization is Machu Picchu, located in the Andes at an altitude of 2430 meters above sea level. Since 2007, it has been named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.

A teenage girl of 14-15 years old, who was sacrificed about 500 years ago, spent all the past centuries in the ice at the top of a six-thousander, which contributed to excellent preservation. Next to her were found the frozen bodies of two more young victims: a seven-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl.

1. Instead of traditional DNA testing, scientists examined proteins in the tissue and determined that the apparently healthy girl had a bacterial lung infection resembling tuberculosis. For the first time, an infection has been detected in a mummy.

2. A group of researchers from the City University of New York, led by Angelique Corthals, studied samples of the mummy (the so-called Maiden, “Maiden”).

3. A unique mummy was discovered in 1999 on the slope of the Llullaillaco volcano, rising 6739 meters above sea level on the border of Argentina and Chile.

4. Three mummies were found, which, unlike their embalmed Egyptian “colleagues,” were deep frozen. They also began to study the body of a seven-year-old boy, but scientists have not yet decided to examine the remains of a six-year-old girl. It was probably hit by lightning at some point, which may affect the accuracy of the research results.

5. Most likely, three children were sacrificed, as evidenced by the artifacts located next to them: gold, silver, clothes, bowls of food and an extravagant headdress made of white feathers of unknown birds.

6. Historians suggest that children were chosen by the Incas for their beauty (in addition, children were considered purer creatures than adults). The Incas did not sacrifice children very often.

7. In previous studies, it was established that before children were sacrificed, for a year they were fed “elite” foods - maize and dried llama meat, although before that they ate exclusively peasant food, consisting of potatoes and vegetables.

You've probably all watched horror films about revived mummies attacking people. These sinister dead have always captured the human imagination. However, in reality, mummies do not carry anything terrible, representing incredible archaeological value. In this issue you will find 13 real mummies that have survived to this day and are among the most significant archaeological finds of our time.

A mummy is the body of a living creature specially treated with a chemical substance, in which the process of tissue decomposition is slowed down. Mummies are stored for hundreds and even thousands of years, becoming a “window” into the ancient world. On the one hand, mummies look creepy, some people get goosebumps just looking at these wrinkled bodies, but on the other hand, they are of incredible historical value, containing interesting information about the life of the ancient world, customs, health and diet of our ancestors .

Screaming mummy from the Guanajuato Museum

The Guanajuato Mummies Museum in Mexico is one of the strangest and most terrible in the world, with 111 mummies collected here, which are the naturally preserved mummified bodies of people, most of whom died in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century and were buried in the local cemetery " Pantheon of St. Paula.
The museum's exhibits were exhumed between 1865 and 1958, when a law was in force requiring relatives to pay a tax to have the bodies of their loved ones in the cemetery. If the tax was not paid on time, the relatives lost the right to the burial site and the dead bodies were removed from the stone tombs. As it turned out, some of them were naturally mummified, and they were kept in a special building at the cemetery. Distorted facial expressions on some mummies indicate they were buried alive.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, these mummies began to attract tourists, and cemetery workers began to charge a fee for visiting the premises where they were kept. The official date of establishment of the Museum of Mummies in Guanajuato is 1969, when mummies were exhibited in glass shelves. Now the museum is visited annually by hundreds of thousands of tourists.

Mummy of a boy from Greenland (Kilakitsoq town)

Near the Greenlandic settlement of Qilakitsoq, located on the western coast of the largest island in the world, an entire family was discovered in 1972, mummified by low temperatures. Nine perfectly preserved bodies of the ancestors of the Eskimos, who died in Greenland at a time when the Middle Ages reigned in Europe, aroused keen interest of scientists, but one of them became famous throughout the world and beyond the scientific framework.
Belonging to a one-year-old child (as anthropologists found, who suffered from Down syndrome), it, more like some kind of doll, makes an indelible impression on visitors to the National Museum of Greenland in Nuuk.

Two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo

The Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Italy, is an eerie place, a necropolis that attracts tourists from all over the world with many mummified bodies in varying states of preservation. But the symbol of this place is the baby face of Rosalia Lombardo, a two-year-old girl who died of pneumonia in 1920. Her father, unable to cope with grief, turned to the famous physician Alfredo Salafia with a request to preserve his daughter’s body.
Now it makes the hair on the head of all visitors to the dungeons of Palermo, without exception, move - amazingly preserved, peaceful and so alive that it seems as if Rosalia only dozed off briefly, it makes an indelible impression.

Juanita from the Peruvian Andes

Either still a girl, or already a girl (the age of death is said to be from 11 to 15 years), named Juanita, gained worldwide fame, being included in the ranking of the best scientific discoveries according to Time magazine due to its preservation and eerie history, which after the discovery of the mummy in the ancient scientists told about the Inca settlement in the Peruvian Andes in 1995. Sacrificed to the gods in the 15th century, it has survived to this day in almost perfect condition thanks to the ice of the Andean peaks.
As part of the exhibition of the Museum of Andean Sanctuaries in the city of Arequipa, the mummy often goes on tour, exhibited, for example, at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society in Washington or at many venues in the Land of the Rising Sun, which is generally distinguished by a strange love for mummified bodies.

Knight Christian Friedrich von Kahlbutz, Germany

This German knight lived from 1651 to 1702. After his death, his body turned into a mummy naturally and is now on display for everyone to see.
According to legend, the knight Kalbutz was a great fan of taking advantage of the “right of the first night.” The loving Christian had 11 of his own children and about three dozen bastards. In July 1690, he declared his “right of the first night” regarding the young bride of a shepherd from the town of Bakwitz, but the girl did it to him, after which the knight killed her newly-made husband. Taken into custody, he swore before the judges that he was not guilty, otherwise “after death his body will not crumble into dust.”
Since Kalbutz was an aristocrat, his word of honor was enough to get him acquitted and released. The knight died in 1702 at the age of 52 and was buried in the von Kalbutze family tomb. In 1783, the last representative of this dynasty died, and in 1794, restoration work was started in the local church, during which the tomb was opened in order to rebury all the dead of the von Kalbutz family in a regular cemetery. It turned out that all of them, except Christian Friedrich, had decayed. The latter turned into a mummy, which proved the fact that the loving knight was still an oathbreaker.

Mummy of the Egyptian Pharaoh - Ramses the Great

The mummy shown in the photo belongs to Pharaoh Ramses II (Ramses the Great), who died in 1213 BC. e. and is one of the most famous Egyptian pharaohs. It is believed that he was the ruler of Egypt during the campaign of Moses. One of the distinctive features of this mummy is the presence of red hair, symbolizing the connection with the god Set, the patron of royal power.
In 1974, Egyptologists discovered that the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II was rapidly deteriorating. It was decided to immediately fly it to France for examination and restoration, for which the mummies were issued a modern Egyptian passport, and in the “occupation” column they wrote “king (deceased).” At the Paris airport, the mummy was greeted with all the military honors due to the visit of the head of state.

Mummy of a girl 18-19 years old from the Danish city of Skrydstrup

Mummy of a girl aged 18-19, buried in Denmark in 1300 BC. e. The deceased was a tall, slender girl with long blond hair styled in an intricate hairstyle, somewhat reminiscent of a 1960s babette. Her expensive clothes and jewelry suggest that she belonged to a family of the local elite.
The girl was buried in an oak coffin lined with herbs, so her body and clothes were surprisingly well preserved. The preservation would have been even better if the layer of soil above the grave had not been damaged several years before this mummy was discovered.

Iceman Ötzi

Similaun Man, who was about 5,300 years old at the time of his discovery, making him the oldest European mummy, was nicknamed Ötzi by scientists. Discovered on September 19, 1991 by a couple of German tourists while walking in the Tyrolean Alps, who came across the perfectly preserved remains of an inhabitant of the Chalcolithic era thanks to natural ice mummification, it created a real sensation in the scientific world - nowhere in Europe have the bodies of our distant people been found perfectly preserved to this day ancestors
Now this tattooed mummy can be seen in the archaeological museum of Bolzano, Italy. Like many other mummies, Ötzi is allegedly shrouded in a curse: over the course of several years, under various circumstances, several people died, one way or another connected with the study of the Iceman.

Girl from Ide

The Girl from Yde (Dutch: Meisje van Yde) is the name given to the well-preserved body of a teenage girl discovered in a peat bog near the village of Yde in the Netherlands. This mummy was found on May 12, 1897. The body was wrapped in a woolen cape.
A woven wool noose was tied around the girl’s neck, indicating that she had been executed for some crime or had been sacrificed. There is a trace of a wound in the collarbone area. The skin was not affected by decomposition, which is typical for swamp bodies.
The results of radiocarbon dating carried out in 1992 showed that she died at about 16 years of age between 54 BC. e. and 128 AD e. The corpse's head was half shaved shortly before death. The preserved hair is long and has a reddish tint. But it should be noted that the hair of all corpses that fall into a swampy environment acquires a reddish color as a result of denaturalization of the coloring pigment under the influence of acids found in the swampy soil.
A computed tomography scan determined that during her lifetime she had a curvature of the spine. Further research led to the conclusion that the cause of this was most likely damage to the vertebrae by bone tuberculosis.

The Man from the Rendsvüren Mire

Rendswühren Man, who also belongs to the so-called “swamp people,” was found near the German city of Kiel in 1871. At the time of death, the man was between 40 and 50 years old, and examinations of the body showed that he died due to a blow to the head.

Seti I - Egyptian pharaoh in the tomb

The superbly preserved mummy of Seti I and the remains of the original wooden coffin were discovered in the Deir el-Bahri cache in 1881. Seti I ruled Egypt from 1290 to 1279. BC e. The mummy of this pharaoh was buried in a specially prepared tomb.
Seti is a minor character in the science fiction films The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, where he is depicted as a pharaoh who falls victim to a plot by his high priest, Imhotep.

Mummy of Princess Ukok

The mummy of this woman, nicknamed the “Altai Princess,” was found by archaeologists in 1993 on the Ukok plateau and is one of the most significant discoveries in archeology of the late 20th century. Researchers believe that the burial was made in the 5th-3rd centuries BC and dates back to the period of the Pazyryk culture of Altai.
During the excavations, archaeologists discovered that the deck in which the body of the buried woman was placed was filled with ice. That is why the woman’s mummy is well preserved. The burial was walled up in a layer of ice. This aroused great interest among archaeologists, since very ancient things could be well preserved in such conditions. In the chamber they found six horses with saddles and harnesses, as well as a wooden larch block nailed with bronze nails. The contents of the burial clearly indicated the nobility of the buried person.
The mummy lay on its side with its legs slightly pulled up. She had numerous tattoos on her arms. The mummies were wearing a silk shirt, a woolen skirt, felt socks, a fur coat and a wig. All these clothes were made of very high quality and indicate the high status of the buried. She died at a young age (about 25 years old) and belonged to the elite of Pazyryk society.

Ice maiden from the Inca tribe

This is the famous mummy of a 14-15 year old girl who was sacrificed by the Incas more than 500 years ago. It was discovered in 1999 on the slope of the Nevado Sabancaya volcano. Next to this mummy, several more children's bodies were discovered, also mummified. Researchers suggest that these children were chosen among others due to their beauty, after which they walked many hundreds of kilometers across the country, were specially prepared and sacrificed to the gods at the top of the volcano.