The first thing that comes to mind when we hear the word “mummy” is an enigmatic Egyptian tomb with winding, secret passageways inside where a group of mummies are hidden for all time, resting in their decorated sarcophagi surrounded by incredible treasures. However, it wasn’t just the Egyptians who mummified their dead to help them live forever.

Modern MUMIFICATION Procedures

How the Guanches had some awareness of these modern preservation procedures stays a secret to specialists.

Following the Spanish conquest of the Canary Islands, a significant fact piqued the interest of the initial Spaniards who established themselves on the islands, particularly in Tenerife: the funeral practices of the local indigenous people, the Guanches, who were Berbers and mummified their dead using extremely sophisticated methods. The religious Alfonso de Espinosa who observed the phenomenon wrote about it: Pious toward their deceased, the people of this island had the custom of calling specific men (if the deceased was a man) when one of them died. or then again ladies (in the event that she was a lady) who had this by profession and lived and upheld themselves by this, who, taking the body of the departed, subsequent to washing, poured specific desserts through the mouth made of liquefied cows grease, heather powder and of harsh stone, pine bark and other I don’t have any idea what spices, and stuffed it with this consistently, putting it single-handedly, when from one side, when from the other, for a space of fifteen days, until it was dry and mirlado, which they called xaxo”. The so-called achicasnai, the lowest caste of Guanche society made up of butchers and tanners, reportedly carried out the mummification.

The Guanche mummy, discovered in 1776 west of Tenerife in the Barranco de Herques, is part of the National Archaeological Museum (MAN) in Madrid’s permanent collection.

Current radiocarbon studies on the few Guanche mummies that are still in existence suggest that mummification took place in Tenerife between 400 and 1400 AD. The departed were covered in caves, enveloped by goat skins and attached to wooden boards. It has been documented that some carcasses had evisceration, while others did not. Various slits in the shoulders, neck, chest, and abdomen were used for the evisceration; The bodies were then stuffed with sand, gofio, pinnace, tree bark, and other materials. The ecological dryness that funerary caverns appreciated wrapped up. A small funerary trousseau was made for his afterlife, along with the mummy.

Plunder and destruction are mentioned in texts written by the Spanish colonists on the islands about going to burial caves and finding up to a thousand bodies in some of them. However, the number of preserved Guanche mummies has been drastically reduced by centuries’ worth of pillaging. One of these lootings occurred in 1933. A shepherd coincidentally found a cavern brimming with mummies, and when the news was known, a huge number of individuals made an appearance at the scene and obliterated the seventy bodies that were covered there to take a wide range of bones, as though they were relics.

Guanche mummies can be seen in the Museum of Nature and Man of Tenerife today. The Necochea mummies, for example, were looted and remained in Argentina until their return in 2003. The bodies of a 20-year-old girl and a 25-year-old man, both wrapped in leather shrouds with precisely sewn seams, stand out among these. The mummy of Saint Andrew, a 30-year-old man who was found in a cave on a wooden board and kept his grave goods, is another mummy that can be seen in the museum and is very well preserved.

Modern techniques for research The National Archaeological Museum of Madrid also has a Guanche mummy that is in excellent condition. After being given to King Carlos III in the 18th century, it was transferred to the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, where it was transferred to the National Museum of Anthropology. This mummy is known as the Barranco de Herques mummy. The mummy’s long journey from the Barranco de Herques came to an end in 2015 when it was moved to the National Archaeological Museum, where it is now displayed in the Canarian Prehistory room.

The Guanche mummy in the Public Archeological Historical center is dated between the eleventh and thirteenth hundreds of years and relates to a grown-up man somewhere in the range of 35 and 40 years of age and 1.60 meters tall.

Together with three Egyptian mummies that are also kept in the institution, this mummy has recently been studied as part of the project The secrets of the MAN mummies. Because of these examinations, it has been found that the mummy of the Barranco de Herques has a place with a man somewhere in the range of 35 and 40 years of age, 1.60 m tall and that, as well as getting a charge out of teeth in wonderful condition, he had a reasonable eating regimen and he had not completed exercises that had dissolved his state of being. Additionally, the mummy’s CT scan revealed that he kept the viscera inside.

A Guanche mummy is examined by mummy expert Jens Klocke in December 2015 at the Roemer-Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, Germany.

There is no question that with current logical advances, the Guanche mummies will give a lot of data about the strict ceremonies and day to day existence of the old islanders, yet understanding how they took in these refined preservation strategies stays a test for the present. the analysts.