For thousands of years, from the 9th century BC to the 4th century AD, the ancient Egyptians revered various animal species and mummified them for religious purposes. Among these sacred beings were baboons. These monkeys did not inhabit the territory of Ancient Egypt, and scholars still know very little about where they were brought from and how they were kept.
To fill this gap, a group of researchers from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, whose article was published in the journal PLOS ONE, conducted a study of the skeletal remains of 36 baboon mummies found in the so-called Valley of the Monkeys, located on the west bank of the Nile opposite Luxor.
The mummies, dated to the period from 800 to 500 BC, belonged to baboons of various ages. The diverse injuries, deformities, and other bone anomalies indicate that all the monkeys suffered from numerous metabolic diseases caused by poor nutrition and chronic lack of sunlight, likely due to being born and living in captivity. Similar pathologies were also found in baboon mummies from two other sites, suggesting that such treatment of sacred monkeys was widespread throughout Ancient Egypt.
The scientists also concluded that the ancestors of the sacred baboons, whose population was bred by the Egyptians, were captured in the upper Nile region in modern-day Sudan, as well as in the Horn of Africa and the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula.
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