After dying in childbirth, she was buried with her baby, 3,700 years ago, in a leather shroud. A striking discovery in Egypt

She spent thousands of years wrapped in a leather shroud, cuddled up with the baby she never gave birth to. A team of researchers, from the University of Bologna and Yale University, discovered a rather unusual burial in the archaeological site of Kom Ombo (over 800 km far from Cairo). They found the corpse of a young woman, who was lying in foetal position, buried among vases and ostrich shells decorated to make small pearls (perhaps that was her job when she was alive). She died when she was about 25 years old. She was at the end of her pregnancy: as evidence of that, the bones of the foetus are still placed in the pelvic area, upside down, which is normal for babies who are due in a few weeks. Looking at the body of the girl, point out University of Bologna, “you can see that her pelvic bones are not well aligned, because of an injury, most likely a pelvis fracture which was not well compound afterwards. Such malformation might have caused some problems in the crucial phases of the childbirth, which eventually led to a premature death of the woman and, subsequently, of the foetus”. This story happened 3,700 years ago. Since then, that woman slept, for eternity, tenderly cuddled up with her baby in a leather shroud.

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