2 nd and 5 th Period ELAR
By Shelley Tanaka The book I chose is called… Beware: Some of the mummies I’m presenting do have gruesome deaths
soft tissues A mummy is any body (human or animal) with the soft tissues, and occasionally the teeth and other bones, preserved after death. Soft tissues are the skin, muscles, and organs of a living/once living organism. To make a mummy, the natural process of decay is stopped. Some mummies are made by humans in the process of embalming, drying, wrapping, and burying the body. Others are made by natural forces, including freezing and drying
Ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s mummy and tomb was discovered by Howard Carter in The king’s body lay inside three coffins; the middle one was made of solid gold. People became interested in the mummy, wanting to find out why the young pharaoh died when he was only nineteen years old. There are many theories about how Tutankhamun died. X- ray images led some researchers to believe he died from a blow to the head. Others were sure that missing ribs meant his chest had been crushed. We still don’t know for sure how King Tut died. It seems like some things will just remain a mystery. Fun Fact: When Tutankhamun's bandages were cut away, it revealed the 143 bracelets, daggers, and amulets that covered the body!
chalky lime The Cotton King-A mummy unearthed in a school yard in Tupac Amaru, Peru. He was found holding a piece of fabric, a shell, and a ball of chalky lime. This mummy was nicknamed for the three hundred pounds of cotton he was wrapped in. Chalky lime is a calcium-containing inorganic material in which carbonates, oxides and hydroxides predominate. Kwday Dan Ts’inchi-A mummy found in Tatshenshini Alsek Park in Canada. The body had been torn apart by a glacier, with the head and right arm missing. Four years later, and not far from the torso’s discovery site, they found the mummy’s head. This mummy’s nickname came from the name the native people from the area called him, which means “long ago person found”.
peat bog Grauballe Man-A mummy that was found in a peat bog in Denmark. His right arm was twisted behind his back, and his throat had been slit from ear to ear. His skin was so well preserved that researchers were able to take his fingerprints. A peat bog is a wet, spongy ground with soil composed mainly of decayed vegetable matter. Yde Girl-A mummy found in a peat bog in the Netherlands that was sixteen when she died. She was only 4 feet, 6 inches tall and had an abnormally curved spine. She had been strangled with a belt, stabbed in the throat, and her red hair had been cut off of one side of her head.
There are very small amounts of oxygen in the bogs, so there is nothing that bacteria can feed on and decay. The best preserving bogs are colder, because organisms decay faster in warmth. The peat bogs also contain enough tannic acid to preserve flesh without dissolving the bones. Mummies found in peat bogs seem to have a unique, blackish- green color to them that probably comes from the dark-green tint of the bog’s water. Bog -> Yde Girl <-
While hiking in the Otztal Alps north of Bolzano, Italy, in 1991, two hikers discovered the body of a man sticking out of a glacier. When the mummy was further examined, scientists found it to be about 5,300 years old. For a long time, no one knew how the Iceman died. Did he freeze to death? Collapse from exhaustion? Now, we may finally know. In 2001, a CT scan revealed an arrowhead wedged in the Iceman’s left shoulder. It had torn through major nerves and blood vessels. DNA tests from fragments of his axe and knife found blood from several people. In 2003, scientists found deep gashes on the Iceman’s hands and wrists. We now have a picture of Iceman’s last hours: He probably strayed into an enemy tribe’s territory and was stabbed as he fought his foes. Fleeing the attack, he was shot in the shoulder from behind. With his arm paralyzed and in dreadful pain, he bled to death. Fun Fact: The Iceman is the oldest complete human body ever found!
In some monasteries in Asia, there are monks who preserve their bodies by trying to turn themselves into mummies before death. The monk would first go on a strict diet of specific seeds, nuts, bark, and roots. They probably drank a special tea made from tree sap. The tea would cause dehydration, and was toxic as well. The toxins would prevent bacteria and insects from decaying the body after death. The monk would then meditate, and slow down his breathing. He wouldn’t move, and would eventually stop eating. The muscles would relax, and in time, the internal organs would shrink to ¼ their normal size from lack of use. By the time the monk stopped breathing, his body would be not much more than skin and bones.
DDDDid your book do a good job of providing information to the reader about this particular topic? Yes, I think my book did an excellent job of presenting the information. All of the mummies were separated into sections based on which continent they were found in. DDDDid your book successfully communicate important facts about the topic? Yes, I think my book did a fantastic job of communicating the facts. Lots of information was given about the majority of the mummies in my book, and the information was also highly detailed.
Text Features in my Book “When the Iceman was discovered, even his eyeballs were intact-usually one of the first soft tissues to decompose after a person dies.”(pg. 26) This caption helped me by gruesomely explaining how well the Iceman was preserved in the ice. Pictures A picture of the Iceman mummy in the book helped me to even better understand the caption’s explanation of the Iceman mummy’s facial description. I’m using a picture off the Internet, because the picture in the book was not avaliable. The Iceman