A queen’s pet gazelle was prepared for eternity with the same splendid care as a member of the royal family. Wearing fine blue-trimmed bandages and a custom-made wooden coffin, he accompanied sᴜ dᴜeño to the tomb around 945 B.C.

Lovingly preserved, a hunting dog whose bandages fell off long ago likely belonged to a pharaoh. As a royal pet, “it would have been nibble-fed and spoiled,” says Egyptologist Salima Ikram. When he died, he was buried in a specially prepared tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

The votive mummies, each buried with a prayer, are infinitely varied but not always what they seem. A clever crocodile is a fake, it has nothing inside.

The sanctity of the three bulls extended to their mothers, who were prepared for the other world like this intricately wrapped cow.

A baboon guards a secret that helps identify it as a pet: an X-ray will reveal missing canine teeth, probably extracted to prevent the critter from biting the real fingers.

A sacred ram is encased in a casing detailed with gold and paint. As the living incarnation of the creator god Khnᴜm, the animal was kept in a temple and cared for by priests until his natural death in the 2nd or 3rd century AD.

The folded strips of linen look like a cat’s collar, but the animal inside these elaborate wrappings was not a pet. He was murdered by a sprain in the neck, the house of death revealed by X-rays, so that he could be mummified and offered with a pilgrim’s prayer in a temple.

The insᴜal cover of a votive ibis mule, a shell of linen and plaster, reproduces the long beak and the head of the bird, with added glass beads for the eyes. Millions of votive ibis mummies were dedicated in Egypt during the first millennium B.C.

A spiderweb in a small stone coffin identifies the precise content.

Up rapaz with the face applied has only a few bones.

Papyrus and lipo traces the depots of the gazelle.

Uп crafted bundle of liпo ocᴜlta ᴜп ibis.