So you know when you're a kid, and the world is all still so desperately interesting? And you can't stop reading about dinosaurs and mummies and all the cool gross stuff your body? And you try to get your mom to subscribe to to "ARCHAEOLOGY!!" the magazine, and know how to pronounce "parasaurolophus" but not "wolf"?
...anybody?
Anyway. I was big into Egypt. And here for your pleasure and interest is a brief summary on Mummies And Why They Are Gross And Cool.
So mummification has been a practice in ancient Egypt since some point in the Middle Kingdom (Let's say... 2000 BC?). The point of the whole process was the idea that after death, the soul, or
ba has to go on a long and elaborate journey through the underworld, undergoing all sorts of rigourous tests and adventures. The Egyptian Book of the Dead is supposed to be a sort of guidebook for the soul in the underworld, and has all kinds of spells and incantations to get past the various trials of the Underworld. At any rate, the soul eventually reaches a scale where the heart is weighed against a feather. If the person had been honest and good in life, the heart would be lighter than a feather. If it turned out to be heavier, the soul would be eaten by a crocodile-headed monster thing and, presumably, die fr rlz this time.
ANYWAY the
ba, if it had been good, would be reunited with the body for the afterlife. For this reason the body had to remain as intact and recognizable as possible, or the
ba would have to wander the underworld for eternity etc. Hence, mummification, which was facilitated by the hot, dry climate of Egypt. Although the climate itself was helpful in preserving the body, the actual process was all sorts of elaborate and thoroughly gross.
First they'd take out all the organs etc and save the ones they thought were important in canopic jars. These included the liver and heart, among others. The brain they chucked, since the heart was thought to be the centre of thought (oops). Oh and, brains, incidentally... were removed by sticking a hook up the nose, (waaay wayy up!), wriggling it around til everything went gooey, and then taking it out through the nostrils. Yum.
Then the body was sewn back up and dried out with mineral salts. And then wrapped with rags soaked in tar or resin. And then buried in like eight layers of coffin, and also a funerary mask designed to look as lifelike as possible so the soul would recognize it.
The mummy would also be buried with various items from life, from jewelry to pottery, that the deceased would be able to use in the afterlife. Sometimes they were buried with little statues called
ushabtis which would perform work for them in the afterlife.
Being that the process was so expensive, time-consuming and elaborate, it was largely only the very rich who would be buried in such a manner. Still, graves have been found with less elaborately mummified remains and much more modest tombs, which seem to have belonged to lower-class families.
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