Why keep the body?
For the Egyptians a person was made of several parts. Besides the body there was the ka, the life force, which needed food and drink after death, and the ba, the personality, often drawn as a bird with a human head, which could fly out of the tomb by day and had to return to the body at night. If the body was destroyed, the ba had nowhere to return and the person died a second, final death. Preserving the body was the way to avoid it.
The model was a myth. The god Osiris was murdered by his brother Seth and cut into pieces; his wife Isis gathered them, and Anubis wrapped them into the first mummy, so that Osiris came back to life as king of the dead. Every mummification repeated that story, and every dead person, rich or poor, hoped to become “an Osiris”.
From desert graves to embalmers
It began by accident. The earliest Egyptians buried their dead in pits in the hot, dry sand, which dried them naturally. When tombs became larger and the bodies no longer touched the sand, they decayed, and people looked for ways to do artificially what the desert had done for free. A study published in 2014 found linen soaked in resin and plant oils on bodies from graves at Mostagedda dating to around 4300 BCE, more than a thousand years before the first pharaohs. By the Old Kingdom, mummification was a craft with its own specialists.
Seventy days, step by step
Our fullest ancient description comes from Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BCE. He says the process took seventy days and that families could choose from three levels of price. For the most expensive, the steps were roughly these:
- Cleaning: the body was washed, and the brain was pulled out through the nose with an iron hook.
- Removing the organs: through a cut on the left side the embalmers took out the lungs, liver, stomach and intestines, which would rot first. The heart, the seat of thought and memory, was left in place, because it would be weighed in the judgement of the dead.
- Drying: the body was covered with natron, a natural salt collected in the dry lakes of the Wadi Natrun, and left for about forty days. Natron draws water out of the tissues, and without water bacteria cannot work.
- Anointing and wrapping: the dry body was rubbed with oils, perfumes and resins, padded to restore its shape, and wrapped in hundreds of metres of linen, with amulets between the layers.
The organs were dried too and stored in four canopic jars, each guarded by one of the four sons of Horus: the human-headed Imsety for the liver, the baboon Hapy for the lungs, the jackal Duamutef for the stomach and the falcon Qebehsenuef for the intestines. Over the wrappings went a mask, painted plaster for most people, a gold mask for a king.
Recipes from a workshop
In 2016 a team led by the Egyptologist Ramadan Hussein found, at Saqqara, an embalming workshop of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (664-525 BCE), with pottery vessels still labelled with instructions such as “to put on his head”. In 2023 a study in Nature, led by Maxime Rageot and Philipp Stockhammer, analysed the residues in 31 of them. It found juniper, cypress and cedar oils from the eastern Mediterranean, bitumen from the Dead Sea, beeswax and animal fat, and also two resins, elemi and dammar, that came from trees in Southeast Asia. Different mixtures were used for the head, the body and the bandages, some made from ingredients that had travelled thousands of kilometres.
Waking the dead
A wrapped body was not yet ready. At the tomb entrance, priests performed the Opening of the Mouth: they touched the mummy’s mouth, eyes and ears with special tools, including an adze shaped like a carpenter’s blade, so that the dead person could breathe, see, hear and eat the offerings. The scene appears on coffins, papyri and the painted walls of tombs. Amulets in the wrappings did the rest. The most common were the scarab over the heart, the djed pillar for stability and the Eye of Horus for protection and healing.
Why “mummy”?
The word comes from the Arabic mumiya, from the Persian mum, wax, and first meant bitumen, a black substance used as medicine. Medieval travellers thought the dark resins on Egyptian bodies were bitumen, and from the twelfth century onwards ground mummies were sold in Europe as a remedy, called “mummy”. The name passed from the medicine to the bodies themselves. Many mummies were destroyed this way, a sad end for people who had paid so much to last forever.
Where to see it
The royal mummies, including Ramesses II, found in a hidden cache at Deir el-Bahari in 1881, are displayed in the Hall of Royal Mummies of the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo, where they were moved in 2021. The Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza shows the canopic shrine and burial equipment of Tutankhamun. Large collections of mummies and coffins are also in the British Museum, the Louvre and the Museo Egizio in Turin.
Sources
- Herodotus, Histories, II, 86-88.
- M. Rageot et al., “Biomolecular analyses enable new insights into ancient Egyptian embalming”, Nature 614 (2023).
- J. Jones et al., “Evidence for prehistoric origins of Egyptian mummification in Late Neolithic burials”, PLOS ONE 9 (2014).
- UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, “Mummification” (2010).
- S. Ikram and A. Dodson, The Mummy in Ancient Egypt (1998).
- British Museum, “Egyptian death and afterlife: mummies”.
