The whole world has heard about Egyptian mummies: they are exhibited in museums, books are written about them and films are made, sometimes quite scary. But on our planet there are other peoples who also mummify their ancestors and sometimes show them to visiting adventurers traveling in search of mummies. Where to go, besides Egypt, to be guaranteed to see a real mummy with your own eyes?
Papua New Guinea
In the mountains of Papua New Guinea there is a region of Aseki - remote, cut off from the whole world so much that the Angu tribe living here considers even the most ordinary natural phenomena like fog to be the action of spirits.
Researchers are attracted to the Angu settlements, like a magnet, by the numerous burials of the aborigines. The fact is that the angu were not buried or burned their dead ancestors, but smoked for better preservation of the body for several months, and then these mummies were taken to the jungle and hidden in special storage-temples.
To prevent the mummies from decaying in the humid jungles of Papua New Guinea, they were preliminarily smeared with red clay. Europeans are shocked by such "beauty"!
In one angu burial there can be about 10-15 mummies.
It is not known exactly when the custom of smoking the dead appeared. Some Angu say this happened when white missionaries came to their lands to try to convert the natives to Christianity.
There are opinions that Angu used such a bizarre method of mummification long before the arrival of whites. Only once in their history have the Angu changed their principles. This happened when the missionaries donated large amounts of salt to the tribe. Then the gift was allowed to mummify the corpses.
By the middle of the 20th century, Christian preachers achieved their goal, so now the Angu are a completely civilized people that do not attack rare tourists.
How to see mummies Angu
To get to the mysterious mummies that you can see with your own eyes, you need to go through a whole quest:
- the journey to the Aseki region begins with the large "civilized" city of Papua New Guinea called Lae;
- Lae, home to 100,000 people, has absolutely everything, including the airport, restaurants and travel companies that offer their clients trips to the Angu settlements;
- the road to the mummies will take about 2 days, you can stay for the night in the village of Bulolo, which in the past was widely known as a place where gold diggers live;
- there is no good road to the Angu villages - you will have to drive on dirt roads washed out by rains, cross the rivers in boats and generally feel like a pioneer;
- Angu burials are located half an hour or an hour walk from tribal villages, for example, Angepengi, Koki and the like;
- the keeper of the mummies can take to the burial places after a monetary reward;
- you will have to go through the jungle to the mountains, in the clay slopes of which the aborigines leave the mummified bodies of their relatives.
A horror novel revived
For mummies, representatives of the Angu tribe prepare small niches in the mountain. There, on bamboo mats, the dead are placed in natural positions. In the burial at the village of Angepengi, you can, for example, see a mother's mummy hugging a deceased child.
The principle of smoking bodies allows you to partially preserve the skin, hair, nail plates and even eyeballs. However, smoked mummies do not last long. In the tombs of the Angu, you can certainly see completely destroyed mummies, of which only bones remain.
Periodically, the mummies are removed from their own storage facilities and transported by trucks to the nearest town for recovery. Sometimes they become exhibits of special exhibitions in the civilized world.
Aborigines prefer not to talk about the reasons why it was customary to mummify the bodies of deceased relatives. Some researchers of the early 20th century argued that in this way the cannibals of Papua New Guinea melted fat from the dead, which could then be eaten, but Angu rejects this assumption with disgust.
India
In the Spiti region in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, in the Himalayas, tourists are rare, and completely in vain, since there are a lot of attractions here: there is a secluded Buddhist monastery of Ki, the village of Kibber, lost in the mountains, where any traveler will be treated to the most delicious tea in the world, the restless river Spiti, along the bed of which a difficult road has been laid, graciously accepting not all drivers.
But mummy hunters will be interested in the village of Gyu, which should be looked for in India, almost on the border with Tibet. A good asphalt road leads to it.
The village of Gyu is the end of the world, where among the adobe huts you can find a small building for one room. It contains the main local "treasure" - the mummy of the monk Sangha Tenzin, who lived 500 years ago. In fact, before the earthquake in 1975, the mummy was kept in a closed mortar, but then it collapsed, and people found the excellent preserved body of the monk. He was placed in a transparent sarcophagus.
The Himalayan mummy does not at all look like its Egyptian counterparts, dried and wrapped in bandages. It seems that the monk just sat down to rest and now will get up to continue going about his business. He has preserved his skin, hair, eyes. And it seems that exposure to air does not affect the state of the mummy in any way.
Self-mummification
The researchers concluded that the monk Sangha Tenzin took advantage of the practices of Japanese Buddhists and dried his body on his own, turning it into a mummy. To do this, one had to starve, trying to achieve complete dehydration.
The monks who wanted to achieve enlightenment in this way could only eat cicas nuts, which should be washed down with the juice of the lacquer tree, a strong emetic.
The monks dried out even before their death, after which they were a ready-made mummy, on which insects that eat human flesh did not crimp. The monk Tenzin, in order to remain in a sitting position after death, during his lifetime put a belt around his neck, which he then tied to his knees.
