Millions of Mummies and Sneferu’s Pyramid
That is the question being asked by researchers from Brigham Young University.
Last year Professor Kerry Muhlestein stated that he believed the team had uncovered evidence of a unified plan and suggested we need to adjust our understanding of what the intended purpose of pyramids was.
In January the team of professionals, professors and a few students from BYU set out to map Sneferu’s fourth pyramid using GPS and continue their excavation of an ancient cemetery located nearby.
Now the team is back in the news with the quest to find out why there are, by their own estimates, over one million mummies buried there.
“We estimate over a million bodies in this cemetery…it’s very very densely populated by mummies…only a small percentage of them have been unearthed…
We’ve been digging there for 30 years and we could dig there for a hundred more and still have only done a small percentage.” – Professor Kerry Muhlestein.
These burials are not contemporary with Sneferu’s reign however, with most being from the Graeco-Roman period thousands of years later. Nor was it a local cemetery as many of the bodies are believed to have been brought from other villages.
Muhlestein continues:
“It’s such a huge cemetery it’s hard to account for where all these people would have lived – the population centres around there don’t seem to substantiate that many burials…
Maybe these are people coming from a variety of communities, all around, being buried in this place. We’re not sure what would account for such a large number of burials…
It probably is at least partially responsible for why there’s a cemetery there…
It seems very reasonable to suppose that the pyramid designated that as a sacred place.
“Once that place is a sacred place it typically will remain a sacred place.”
As well as the pyramid at Seila, Sneferu has three other pyramids built. These include the ‘Red’ pyramid & the ‘Bent’ pyramid at Dahshur, and the ‘Collapsed’ or ‘False’ pyramid at Meidum.
Read more:
Talking Pyramids News
BYU ‘campus’ extends to pyramids of Egypt
Mystery of million mummies buried near Snefu’s Seila pyramid
Image from Wikimedia. Some rights reserved.
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