The following Associated Press article, which appeared in the front page of the 5 March 1999 issue of Tempo, is part of the frenzied Apo Annu media accounts that built up shortly before the mummy's return to Benguet. It certainly was the curiosity of the season, spiced with a press kit enumerating proper etiquette and behavior during the re-burial (e.g. no sneezing, abstinence). When the mummy finally made its way to Benguet in a wooden box in May, the media circus waxed in typical fashion. The otherwise quiet town of Nabalicong was besieged by journalists, officials, and kibitzers although Benguet residents were by and large polite in their interest.
MUMMY COMES HOME
Go to500-year old remains, stolen in the 1920s, return to burial cave in BenguetNABALICONG, Benguet (AP) --Although isolated by mounatins, tribesmen in a little-known northern village are preparing a feast and expecting many visitors to attend an unusual event: the rturn of a stolen mummy.
National Museum officials in Manila say they will soon return the remarkably intact mummified remains of a tribal priest [sic] named Apo Annu, estimated to be about 500 years old, to a burial cave in Nablicong village in [Buguias municipality,] Benguet province from where it was stolen in the 1920s.
Officials hope the return of the mummy will attract attention, and hopefully funding, to bolster their efforts to save Benguet's mummies, one of the country's rare but neglected cultural treasures. Nabalicong villagers believe the mummy will bring luck.
"I'm happy that he's coming back," said Dolenso Pudong, an old villager sitting outside a hut on a mountain terrace planted with carrots. "He'll help drive our misfortunes away and give us better harvests."
Sario Copas, who claims to be a descendant of Apo Annu, said the villagers plan to butcher pigs and invite many people for a canao, a native ritual of feasts, prayers and thanksgiving that lasts for days.
The Philippines is one of the few countries in the world where mummfication was practiced by early upland Filipino tribesmen.
Orlando Obinion, a curator of the National Museum, said tribesmen from at least five mountain towns in Benguet mummified their dead between the 13th and 16th centuries. Only tribal royalty were apparently mummified along with occasional pets. The mummy of one cat has been found.
"It's a sort of religious and social ritual to venerate the dead, especially rulers or warriors," he said.
Unlike ancient undertakers of Egypt, early Filipinos did not remove the internal organs and wrap the body in cloth or store belongings in the tomb to be used in the afterlife, he said. The process took months and usually started shortly before death, A dying person was made to drink a salty concoction to preserve the body. After death, the body was tied to a chair in a sitting position over a small fire to draw out body fluids while relatives blew tobacco smoke through the mouth to dry out internal organs and avoid worms.
The body was rubbed with herbs, dried further under the sun and then placed in a hollowed-out pine log coffin, which wa splaced in a cave out of the reach of wild animals.
Th epractice ended in the 1500s after the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, who introduced Christianity and the practice of underground burial.
Hidden in natural caves or niches burrowed into mountain cliffs, the mummies lay undisturbed for centuries until they were discovered accidentally in the early 1900s by loggers in Benguet's jungles.
Since then, the mummies have become a popular attraction, exposing them to vandals and thieves. In Kabayan, a scenic Benguet town nestled at the foot of mountain agricultural terraces, many burial caves and mummies' coffns bear graffiti and names, including at least one with Japanese characters. A skull in one coffin has names scribbled across the side.
More alarmingly, a number of mummies have been stolen and sold to collectors in the Philippines, Australia, Germany and New zealand, said Florentino Merino, a former Kabayan mayor who has written a book on the mummies.
Many superstitious villagers, fearing that mummies carry a curse, stay away from the buiral caves, leaving them virtually unguarded. Museum officials have tallied about 28 intact mummies but stopped a survey because of lack of funding and personnel. Only three natives have been hired by museum authorities to guard the burial caves.
Accompanying visitors, one of the guards, Musi Malsino pours a swig of gin on the grass and mumbles a centuries-old prayer before unlocking a rusty iron grill at the entrance to a burial cave below a huge boulder on Kabayan's Mount Timbac.
Inside, eight woooden coffins with 15 mummies are stacked atop each other. On a wall, a sign warns vandals and looters.
Vandalism and theft became widespread in the 1970s, forcing the President Marcos to declare the mummy caves to be national cultural treasures to enable the government to apportion some funds for their preservation. Last year, the Kabayan mummy caves were included in the list of the 100 most endangered historical sites by teh World Monument Watch, which compiles the list for potention financial donors.
Abionion says they have discovered many more mummy caves in Benguet but will not publicly reveal their locations as safeguard.
The mummy of Apo Annu was stolen and sold to a local antique collector and eventually donated in 1984 to the National Museum, says Abionion. When he spoke at a cultural workshop in Benguet last year about Apo Annu, some Nabalicong villagers were in the audience and began pursuing the mummy's return.
Last October, Benguet's provincial council passed a resolution, authored by Copas, a council meber, urging the return of Apo Annu and other mummies to benguet.
The National Museum agreed to return Apo Annu to Nabalicong this March or April on the condition that Benguet officials secure the mummy's cave and provide a regular budget for its upkeep.
In a musuem laboratory in Manila, Apo Annu's remains lie in a glass case, the dark, elaborately tattooed skin now brittle and starting to fray because of the city's hot and humid weather.
"We're bringing him alone. His body has deteriorated in this place," Abinion said.
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