A queen's pet gazelle was readied for eternity with the same lavish care as a member of the royal family. In fine, blue-trimmed bandages and a custom-made wooden coffin, it accompanied its owner to the grave in about 945 B.C.
Egyptian Museum, Cairo,CG29835



Pampered in a temple during its lifetime, a sacred baboon was enshrined after death in the Tuna el-Gebel catacombs. Priests prayed and made offerings to it there as signs of their abiding reverence.



Meat mummies on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo were prepared as a royal picnic for the afterlife. Ducks, legs of beef, ribs, roasts, and even an oxtail for soup were all dried in natron, bound in linen, and packed in a reed basket for burial in a queen's tomb.
Egyptian Museum, Cairo,CG29840 to 29858



Votive mummies, each buried with a prayer, are infinitely varied but not always what they seem. A cunning crocodile is a fake—it has nothing inside.
Egyptian Museum, Cairo,CG29712



A coffered linen bundle conceals an ibis.
Egyptian Museum,CG29864



A raptor with an appliquéd face holds only a few bones.
Egyptian Museum, Cairo,CG29881


A sacred ram from Elephantine Island, in a casing detailed with gold and paint, is one of only seven such mummies that have survived the centuries and now reside in Egyptian museums. As the living embodiment of the creator god Khnum, the animal was kept at a temple and cared for by priests until its natural death in the second or third century A.D.
Nubia Museum, Aswan,JE39747



A gilded ibis of wood and bronze stands on exhibit at the provincial Mallawi Museum. It was likely dedicated to the god Thoth at the nearby site of Tuna el-Gebel sometime after Alexander the Great's conquest in 332 B.C. Greeks who settled in Egypt, and the Romans after them, honored Egyptian deities as well as their own.



Ever so gently, archaeologist Salima Ikram flicks at caked mud to free an ibis from the earthenware jar it was buried in 2,700 years ago at Abydos. Back then, millions of stilt-legged ibises bobbed for food in the fertile marshes of the Nile. Symbols of the god Thoth, the birds were mummified in greater numbers than any of the other animals interred at revered sites throughout Egypt.



Carrying on work that began in the late 1800s at Abydos, archaeologists clear sand from the sole surviving funerary temple at the site. This mud-brick structure belonged to Khasekhemwy, a ruler in the 2nd dynasty who died about 2650 B.C. Later Egyptians associated it with the mythic story of the beginning of time, and in the first millennium B.C. it became a cemetery for votive mummies, which continue to turn up in excavations today.



Unearthed in 1914 at the ancient site of Abydos, a votive ibis wears the elaborate atef crown of Osiris, lord of the afterlife. Stiffened fabric forms the headpiece's two horizontal horns, a sun disk, and a tall, central column flanked by two feathers.
Egyptian Museum,CG29868



The unusual covering of a votive ibis mummy—a shell of linen and plaster—reproduces the bird's long beak and head, with glass beads added for eyes. Painted along the side beneath a band of hieroglyphs, various gods alternate with tables bearing offerings.
Egyptian Museum,CG29874


During mass baboon burials at Tuna el-Gebel, priests placed a votive animal in each niche. Thousands of such mummies have been found at the site, and many more likely lie in areas yet to be explored.



Folded strips of linen look like a cat's collar, but the animal inside these elaborate wrappings was no pet. It was killed by a twist to the neck—the cause of death revealed by x-rays—so it could be mummified and offered up with a pilgrim's prayer at a temple.
Egyptian Museum, Cairo,CG29657



The innermost secrets of mummies at the Egyptian Museum have emerged in a recent study. A wooden, cat-shaped coffin (at right), plastered and whitewashed to imitate limestone, stands about 14.5 inches tall, dwarfing the kitten inside (see next photo). Spiral wrappings and a painted mask conceal a grown cat (at left)—one of countless thousands buried as votive offerings in the sands of Istabl Antar.
Egyptian Museum, Cairo,CG29655



An x-ray reveals the kitten entombed in the wooden cat coffin.
Egyptian Museum, Cairo,CG29776



The embalming house for the Apis bulls, sacred animals in the great city of Memphis, survives in ruins near the village of Mit Rahina. For 40 days the body of each bull lay in natron on a massive stone bed in a courtyard where the sun could help desiccate and disinfect it.



Dedicated upon the death of the sacred Buchis bull at Armant, a stone monument depicts Pharaoh Ptolemy V making an offering to the deceased. Like the bulls of Memphis and Heliopolis, the Buchis was mummified and buried with great ceremony.
Egyptian Museum



The holiness of all three bulls extended to their mothers, which were prepared for the next world like this intricately wrapped cow.
Agriculture Museum, Cairo



Once swaddled as mummies, the remains of a dog and two bulls are displayed at the Agriculture Museum in Cairo. Without modern imaging technology,



A shrew on a tiny stone coffin identifies the contents precisely.
Egyptian Museum, Cairo,CG29888



Papyrus and linen trace the contours of a gazelle.
Agriculture Museum



Lovingly preserved, a hunting dog whose bandages fell off long ago likely belonged to a pharaoh. As a royal pet, it "would have been fed nibbly bits and spoiled rotten," says Salima Ikram. When it died, it was interred in a specially prepared tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
Egyptian Museum,CG29836



Buried with the dog in the preceding photo, a baboon harbors a secret that helps identify it as a pet: An x-ray revealed missing canine teeth, probably removed to keep the creature from nipping royal fingers.
Egyptian Museum,CG29837