Money, money, money
With what we now know, we can reconstruct the life and purpose of our particular mummy.
Falcons were sacred animals, connected to the god Horus. This mummy was thus supposed to be offered as a votive gift to Horus, to support someone in their prayers. Some unknowing Egyptian pilgrim probably purchased this mummy at a temple, in the understanding that it contained a falcon that would help them pose their particular request to the god Horus. They were deceived, as the mummy turns out not to contain a falcon at all.
However, we can also guess as to the motives of the sellers. It would be the job of the priests of the temple to breed and sell these animal mummies. There might have been times when there was a lot of demand for falcon mummies but only few available falcons. So why not just mummify some other birds, draw on a falcon’s face, and sell it for a lot of money? Or was it not so necessary for the mummy to contain a falcon after all?
Our ‘falcon’ is definitely not the only animal mummy from ancient Egypt that does not contain what it is supposed to. It turns out that less than half of the known votive mummies contain a complete and ‘correct’ animal.
These practices leave us with some interesting and important questions. For example: by deceiving their buyers, priests would presumably also be deceiving the gods themselves, albeit indirectly. Would this deception have clashed with the priests’ beliefs? Would the gods not be expected to unleash their wrath onto them for selling ‘fakes’? Or did these priests think what they were doing was not so very bad, or simply not ‘believe’ in what they were selling?
On the other hand, we might also ask ourselves if this was not an entirely accepted practice. Maybe part of an animal was considered just as functional in appealing to the gods as the entire specimen. If the animal mummy was supposed to be just an ‘image’ to connect to the god, maybe something that only looked like the animal was good enough too. Perhaps the pilgrims did know they were not purchasing actual animals. Were incomplete or empty ‘fake’ mummies simply the cheaper option? And last but not least, it is interesting to note that our mummy does contain a complete bird skeleton. Just not the ‘correct’ one. Clearly someone made a considerable effort to make this mummy appear to be a bird. Why? Why not just fill it with sand, if that was apparently an option too?
It is clear that much more remains to be said and questioned about this fascinating type of mummy, and even this one specifically. Further research can help our understanding of life in ancient Egypt and the reality of religion in those times. Archaeologists still find animal mummies in all species, shapes, and sizes, complete and incomplete, ‘fake’ and ‘real’. So let us hope more answers may be found one day.