Egyptian mummification

The story

Seventy days in the “house of purification”

Imagine you are a wealthy citizen of Memphis, more than four thousand years ago, and someone in your family has just died. The body is not buried at once. It is taken to an embalmers' workshop, called the “place of purification” or the “house of beauty”, usually near the river. A team of specialists works there: there is the priest who directs, someone who cuts, someone who cleans, someone who prepares the oils. One of the priests, during the rite, wears a jackal mask on his face: it represents Anubis, the god who protects the dead and embalming.

The work lasted about seventy days in all. First the body was washed with Nile water and palm wine. Then the embalmer made a cut in the left side and removed the internal organs that decay fastest: lungs, liver, stomach and intestines. The brain was pulled out, in little pieces, with a hook pushed up the nose: the Egyptians did not understand its importance and thought it of little use. The heart, on the other hand, was left in place, because it was believed to be the seat of intelligence and feelings, and in the afterlife it would be weighed before the gods.

The salt that dries

At this point the body had to be dried. It was covered, inside and out, with natron, a natural salt gathered in the desert valleys, such as the Wadi Natrun. Natron absorbs water and makes tissues dry and hard, and so protects them from bacteria. After about forty days the body was dried out. It was washed again, filled with linen rags, sawdust and resins to give it shape again, rubbed with scented oils and coated with resin. Hair and nails were tended, and the face was sometimes painted or covered with a mask.

Then the wrapping began. The embalmers used hundreds of metres of linen bandages, often made from old sheets or clothes. Amulets were placed between the layers: the heart scarab, the Eye of Horus, the djed pillar. With each turn of bandage the priests recited spells. Last of all a mask was placed over the face. The mummy was laid in one or more coffins of wood or stone and taken to the tomb, where a rite called the “opening of the mouth” gave the dead person back the ability to eat, breathe and speak.

The organs in special jars

The removed organs were not thrown away. They were dried, wrapped and kept beside the mummy in jars called canopic jars (a name given by the Greeks). In the New Kingdom the lids were in the shape of the heads of the four sons of Horus: man, baboon, jackal and falcon. In the earliest period, that of Queen Hetepheres, mother of the pharaoh Khufu (4th dynasty, about 2600 BC), there were no jars yet: the organs were placed in an alabaster chest divided into four compartments, found in her tomb at Giza in 1925 by the American archaeologists of George Reisner. Inside were bundles of organs, in some compartments soaked in a natron solution: it is one of the oldest pieces of evidence for embalming with the removal of organs. The queen's body, however, was not there: the tomb had been violated or perhaps the real burial was elsewhere.

Why they did it

For the Egyptians death was not the end, but a passage. A person was made of several parts: the body, the ka (a kind of life force), the ba (the personality, shown as a bird with a human head) and the name. After death, ka and ba had to be able to return to the body to receive food and offerings. If the body decayed, the afterlife was in danger. That is why they worked so hard to preserve it, and for the same reason they built such strong tombs.

Not only for kings

At first mummification was reserved for kings and nobles. As the centuries passed it spread to many others, although the most careful methods remained for the rich. The Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BC, says that embalmers offered three prices, from the most expensive to the cheapest. The poor were buried in the hot desert sand, which luckily now and then preserved them naturally too.

The first mummies, in fact, were natural. In the oldest cemeteries, before 3500 BC, bodies buried in pits in dry sand dried out by themselves. Perhaps it was seeing them still recognisable after years that gave the Egyptians the idea of helping nature. Scraps of cloth soaked in resin, found in prehistoric tombs at Mostagedda, suggest that already thousands of years before the pyramids someone was trying to treat bodies with protective substances. The full technique, with the removal of organs, appears in the Old Kingdom.

Animal mummies

The Egyptians also mummified animals: cats, ibises, crocodiles, dogs, falcons, even bulls. Some were pets, others offerings to the gods. Ibises, linked to the god Thoth, have been found by the million in the catacombs of Saqqara. Scholars using X-rays have discovered that some bundles contain not whole animals but a few remains or even just mud and feathers: probably the demand was so high that someone cheated.