But, she says, it’s hard to know exactly how Berenice’s humans viewed the animals. Unlike in the Nile Valley and other sites across Egypt, the animals were not mummified, and their burials don’t appear to have served a ritual purpose. One was draped in a woolen blanket, while others were found with items buried beside them, including amphoras and large shells.īea De Cupere, an archaeologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences who was not involved in the study, tells Atlas Obscura’s Gemma Tarlach that the cemetery is “completely different” from other ancient graveyards.
Still, like the cats and dogs, the monkeys were buried with great care. As Joanna Jasińska reported for the First Newslast August, most of the monkeys in the cemetery died young, possibly because it was difficult for people to care for them in such a different environment from their home region. In addition to the cats and dogs, the animals buried at the site included monkeys imported from India. Many of the animals were buried in collars or with ornamental goods.
The new study includes further analysis of the burials, including input from a veterinarian who helped analyze the animals’ diets and health. In 2016, they published findings regarding the first 100 skeletons they were able to examine, but at the time, some experts questioned whether the site was actually a cemetery or a rubbish dump containing animal bones. Osypinska and her colleagues found it in 2011, buried below a Roman trash dump. The cemetery, which dates to the first and second centuries A.D., was located just outside the city walls. “Such animals had to be fed to survive, sometimes with special foods in the case of the almost-toothless animals.” “We have individuals who have very limited mobility,” Osypinska tells Science. Some of the dogs had also recovered from injuries sustained long before their eventual deaths. The canines had often lived into old age, losing teeth or suffering from gum disease and worn-out joints-conditions that probably would have made it impossible for them to fend for themselves. One was laid to rest on the wing of a large bird.ĭogs, meanwhile, made up about 5 percent of the burials. Many of the felines wore iron collars or necklaces decorated with glass and shells. Many of the pets were covered in textiles or pieces of pottery, which lead author Marta Osypinska, an archaeozoologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, describes to Science magazine’s David Grimm as “a kind of sarcophagus.”Ībout 90 percent of the animals buried at the site were cats.
The study, published in the journal World Archaeology, centered on the remains of 585 animals interred in the graveyard. Nearly 2,000 years ago, people in the Roman port city of Berenice, Egypt, treated animals with great respect, feeding special food to toothless pets, protecting the critters while they recovered from injuries, and burying their furry companions in individual graves with collars and ornaments-or so a new analysis of a large pet cemetery in the ancient port city of Berenice suggests.
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