Archaeologists from the Center for Egyptological Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences (CEIRAN) in Egypt, during excavations of an ancient necropolis, found a joint burial of a boy and more than 140 dogs. The find is several thousand years old. This was reported to Izvestia by the state corporation Rostec, which supports the scientific expedition.
This mysterious burial was found in one of the graves on the territory of the necropolis near the Coptic monastery of Deir el-Banat. The boy was buried over the bodies of 142 dogs, most of which were puppies. The child is eight or nine years old.
This is a unique find, scientists noted: most of the discovered dog burials were very rarely associated with human burials. And there were almost no massive ones – except for the only case when the burial of a person with a large number of dogs was found in an elite cemetery in Hierakonpolis. But only 12 dogs were buried there with a small child.
According to experts, the ancient Egyptians believed that the dog-headed gods Anubis and Upuat were intermediaries between gods and people and accompanied the dead in the other world. For this reason, dogs could play the role of amulets in burials, they were sacrificed.
The presence of many puppies in the grave may indicate that dogs were collected in the vicinity. And the presence on the remains of found animals of traces of clay, beetle larvae and fly pupae — that before the burial, the corpses of dogs lay next to the water until they began to decompose. Scientists have not ruled out that the cause of their death could be a flood.
There is also an assumption that the boy looked after the dogs that were kept in the kennel and were intended for use in funeral rites.
In addition, such a mass burial could be associated with a magical ritual of “posthumous healing” or with the funeral practice of marking the boundaries of a new cemetery in this way. It was believed that buried dogs are the defenders of the boundaries of the created necropolis and all the people buried there.