Top 10 Real Mummies

She almost seems to be sleeping. The Beauty of Xiaohe, also known as the Beauty of Loulan, is just one of the over 160 mummies discovered in China’s arid Tarim Basin, some buried in upside-down boats with a forest of gigantic poles rising from the prows. Although the Beauty of Xiaohe is around 4,000 years old, the dry desert heat has preserved even her auburn hair. Many of the other mummies also have distinctly Caucasian features - leading to much speculation about their origin and the early movements of people along the Silk Road.

In 1918, a broken-hearted father approached embalmer Alfredo Salafia in Palermo, Sicily. The man’s almost two year old daughter had just died of pneumonia. Salafia agreed to embalm the girl, and she was placed in a glass casket in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo. While sceptics have claimed the mummy is really made of wax, x-ray and MRI scans show otherwise. Her small body continues to lie at rest in the catacombs, so lifelike it sometimes seems to peer out at visitors.

She’s been called “the queen who would be king”. This female pharaoh ordered statues to depict her with bulging muscles and a false beard. She became queen after marrying her half-brother Thutmose II, then regent after his death, before assuming the full powers of pharaoh. Despite a successful reign, many of her statues were later destroyed, possibly by her son or grandson. Discovered in 1903 by real life “Indiana Jones” Howard Carter, her 3,500 year old body was identified in 2007 thanks to a molar tooth that fit into her mouth like a glass slipper onto a slender foot.

This might be the weirdest mummy on the list. On his death in 1832, English philosopher and founder of modern utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham left very specific instructions. First, he wanted to be publicly dissected. By his friends. Next, he wanted his skeleton to be dressed up in his clothes and stuffed full of hay. Because being buried is . . . boring? He also requested that his head be mummified using traditional Maori techniques as part of turning his body into an auto-icon. Unfortunately, this didn’t go as planned . . . so a wax head was used instead. That didn’t stop students from stealing the real head in 1975, and ransoming it back for £100, though only £10 was paid by University College London where it was being displayed.

When Danish woman Grethe Højgaard stumbled over a corpse as she cut peat with her family in 1950, she thought she’d unearthed a recent murder victim. But in fact, Tollund Man, as he became known, had died roughly 2,200 years earlier. His skin is blackened but remarkably preserved, down to crease lines around his eyes. Scholars believe he was hung as part of a ritual human sacrifice, though that’s still debatable. Human remains have been found in peat bogs throughout northern Europe, preserved by low temperatures, lack of oxygen, and acid in the peat, which wards off bacteria

In 1990, a very old Buddha statue underwent restoration, and experts were shocked to discover human remains within. In 2015, a CT scan of the artifact revealed the 1,000 year old mummified remains of a Buddhist monk seated in a lotus position. His organs has been replaced by scraps of paper printed with ancient Chinese characters. Text inside identified him as “Liuquan”. His mummified remains could be an instance of “Sokushinbutsu”, the Buddhist practice of living mummification, which involves gradual starvation that eliminates liquids and fats from the body.

Over five hundred years ago, three Incan children were left to die near the summit of the volcano Llullaillaco, on the border of Argentina and Chile. Perfectly preserved by the cold, the frozen bodies were rediscovered in 1999. All had been drugged using coca leaves and maize beer. Researchers believe the oldest, a girl in her early teens, was a Sun Virgin chosen to serve as a ritual sacrifice. With her was her younger half-sister, whose body had been struck by lightning after death; and an unrelated, bound boy with blood and vomit on his clothes - signs he may have put up a struggle.

The German tourists who stumbled over Ötzi’s remains thought they’d found the body of some poor mountaineer. But the Iceman actually died over 5,000 years ago. Frozen in the ice for millennia, he eventually began to thaw out. He was around 45 when he was killed, probably from a blow to the head, and/or the arrow lodged in his shoulder. But he went down fighting: based on DNA analysis, forensic scientists suggest he shot two people with one arrow, and may have carried a wounded companion over his shoulder before finally dying . . . knife still clutched in his right hand.

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, workers accidentally unearthed the tomb of the Marquise of Dai, Xin Zhui, - a noble during the Han Dynasty in China over 2,000 years ago. Her body was buried in four nested coffins decorated with themes of death and rebirth, and is one of the best preserved ancient humans ever found - with eyelashes still on her eyelids and traces of blood in her veins. She was preserved thanks to an unknown liquid and an airtight tomb. Her body and belongings are now in the care of the Hunan Museum in China.

Before we reveal the identity of our top pick, here are some honorable mentions:

Lenin

Ramesses II

Tjayasetimu

Thaw-Irkhet-if & Thuya

When British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered King Tut’s tomb in 1922, it catapulted him into worldwide fame. The tomb was packed with a mind-blowing wealth of artifacts, including of course the 3,300 year old mummy itself, wrapped in linen and placed inside a golden sarcophagus. The premature deaths of some who entered the tomb popularized a belief in a "curse of the pharaohs", inspiring the original “The Mummy” movie and, for better or worse, all mummy movies to come. Tutankhamun remains arguably the most famous pharaoh in history, and the most famous mummy.