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The unusually preserved set of human remains has long been a rich source of rumors and speculation, as they are kept in the basement of churches in a remote alpine village.
Local lore suggested that the body of a mummy, believed to be an 18th-century clergy who succumbed to infectious diseases, was recovered from the tomb a few years after his death and moved to the basement of St. Thomas am Brassenstein, a church in the north village of the Danube River north of Austria’s Danube.
With the skin and tissues intact, the miraculous preservation of the body is early and early in the attracted pilgrims who thought that the body might confer healing properties. Centuries later, capsule-shaped objects discovered in x-ray scans of mummies reveal that the clergy may have met at a more ominous end, suggesting that he may have been poisoned.
Now, a team of scientists are offering new insights into many of the unanswered questions surrounding the mystical mummy called “air-dried pastors.” The revelation comes after a recent renovation was encouraged by a leak in the basement.
“We took mummies for several months to get tested with a specialist team, CT scans, etc. During that time they had time to renovate,” said Andreas Nerich, a professor of medicine at the University of Munich at Ludwig-Massimilian University in Germany. “It was a good situation for both parties. We got a mummy long enough to do a perfect analysis.”
Through CT scans, radiocarbon dating, and chemical analysis of bone and tissue samples, Nerlich and his colleagues were able to confirm the mummy’s identity and determine the unique way in which the body was preserved for a very long time. Researchers reported their findings in a paper published in the Frontier Medicine on Friday.
The biggest surprise of this study came from the results of a CT scan. Scientists have found mummy’s abdominal and pelvic cavity packed with materials stuffed with fir and spruce wood, linen, hemp and flax cloth wood chips. Additional toxicological analysis revealed traces of zinc chloride and other elements.
“It was really unexpected as the body walls were completely unharmed,” he said.
To explain this obvious contradiction, the team theorized that the material is likely to be inserted through the rectum. And researchers believe it is a mix of materials that kept the mummy in its apparent air-dry state.
“There’s water (bonded) between the chips and fabric. Zinc chloride has a drying effect and would have reduced the load on bacteria in the intestine,” Nerlich said.
This approach to preservatives is different from the well-known method used in ancient Egypt, where the body needs to be opened. Nerlich added that no techniques seen in clergy were reported in the scientific literature either.
He said that the method, although not recorded in textbooks at the time, may have been widely used in the 18th century to preserve corpses for transportation and viewing.
Mummification practices likely have been much broader and more diverse in the past, said Gino Casparri, an archaeologist and editor of Mummy Book: An Introduction to the Realm of the Dead.
Examining with new interdisciplinary analytical techniques, mummies provide a richer source of research into the past than purely skeletal ruins, Caspari added. “We can gain a lot of knowledge from the mummy ruins, ranging from disease and medical research to cultural aspects such as material use and death and attitudes towards the body,” said Casparri, who was not involved in the study.
It is clear that “air-dried pastors” are not natural mummies, but more detailed analysis is needed to clearly state whether zinc chloride was used to maintain the remains, says Marco Samadelli, a senior researcher at EURAC Research, a private laboratory in Borzano.
Smadeli noted that small amounts of arsenic, a well-known preservative, were also detected in mummies.
The team concluded that the mummified body was the body of Franz Xaver Sidler von Rosenegg, a nobleman who was a monk before becoming a parish minister of St. Thomas Ambrussenstein.
He died in 1746 at the age of 37 at the post. Among locals, the mummy was rumoured to be a Sidler, but the study found no written evidence of its effectiveness.
Radiocarbon dating of specimens was placed in his final year between 1734 and 1780, and body analysis suggested age of death from 30 to 50 years, with the most reasonable span between 35 and 45 years. In both cases, the date is consistent with what is known about the end of Sidler, the study states.
Furthermore, studies of carbon and nitrogen variants (carbon and nitrogen variants) that reflect the plant or animal protein consumed from bone samples taken from mummy spine revealed high-quality diets based on grains and most meat.
“This is in line with the expected rural food supply of local parish pastors,” the study author wrote in his paper, adding that the lack of skeletal stress fits the life of a priest who lacks stiff physical activity.
However, this study found that towards the end of the clergy’s life, he likely had experienced a food shortage caused by the ongoing war of Austrian succession at that time.
Pastors who had long-term smoking habits were not poisoned, the study determined. Instead, researchers believe he was suffering from chronic tuberculosis and may have killed him by causing acute pulmonary bleeding.
Inside the mummy, researchers found a small glass ball with holes at each end. It’s probably part of a set of rosary beads that have been accidentally trapped in preservatives. According to Nerlich, the item was a bullet-shaped object picked up by an X-ray that raised suspicions of a toxic capsule in the early 2000s.
Similarly, the team could not find evidence that the body had been buried and excavated, Nerlich added. Perhaps the body was 15km (9.3 miles) ready to return to the pastor’s “Mother Abbey,” but for reasons lost in time, the body was left in the church’s basement and never made it on a final journey.