Chapter 1 Mummy Making
Job: Egyptian Embalmer
Time Period: Ancient Egypt
Mummy. What do you think of when you hear that word? Halloween? A scary movie? Or maybe those awesome mummy cupcakes your mom once made for your kindergarten class?
If you’re like me, you sometimes get so wrapped up in the Hollywood version of a mummy that you forget what one truly is. That hidden under all those brown, three-thousand-year-old linens there is an actual body. The body of a person who once had parents, friends, and annoying siblings. A person who had thoughts and feelings. Fears and dreams.
A person like you.
When that person died, their grieving family handed their body over to an embalmer—the I-have-a-really-gross-job star of this chapter. But what exactly the embalmer did with the body varied significantly depending on when the person died. This is because ancient Egyptians were busy making mummies for about three thousand years. If you consider that the United States has been a country for less than three hundred years, it’s obvious the ancient Egyptians were creating mummies for a very, very, very long time.
When first starting out, the embalmers were fairly clueless. They weren’t sure how to preserve a body, so they didn’t worry about that little detail. Instead they simply wrapped it up all pretty, tried to make everything look as lifelike as possible, and called it good.
Those early mummy makers definitely had a gruesome job; they had to handle dead bodies all day long. But at least they didn’t need to deal with blood and guts. Never fear, though, the blood and guts were coming soon. Because those early mummies simply weren’t up to snuff. Instead of staying preserved for year after year, they rotted away. Decomposed. And ultimately reeked worse than your brother’s hockey jersey after a big game.
Enjoy Wailing? Make It Your Job!
When a person died in ancient Egypt, their family was left behind to grieve their loss. But if the family was wealthy enough, they wouldn’t have to do all the grieving alone. They could hire professional mourners.
These mourners—who were typically women—went around wailing and sobbing over the death of a person they’d probably never met. They tore at their clothes, scratched their skin, threw dust on their heads. Their job was simple: make sure everyone knew that a rich, important person had died.
Amazingly, professional mourners didn’t exist only in Egypt—they were found in multiple ancient cultures. Not only that, there are still people who make money by hiring themselves out as mourners at funerals today. Until it closed its doors in 2019, there was even a company in England called Rent-A-Mourner!
Why did this happen?
Because the bodies—left virtually untouched under the wrappings—were more than 50 percent water. And that water allowed organisms like bacteria and maggots to feed upon the corpses and break them down. So if the embalmers wanted their mummies to last, it was clear they needed to turn their attention to the bodies themselves. They needed to eliminate the pesky water that allowed the flesh-eating critters to do their whole flesh-eating thing.
Step one in Operation No More Water was to remove the organs. To get them out, a person called a slitter cut a several-inches-long incision in the corpse’s abdomen. As soon as the cut was made, the slitter ran away.
Fast.
Because soon everyone in the vicinity would be chasing him, yelling at him, throwing rocks at him.
Why would they do this?
Because the slitter had done a horrific thing. He’d cut into a dead body. He’d violated a corpse. And this was a major no-no in ancient Egypt. Who cared that everyone at the time wanted to be mummified when they died and that the slitter performed a necessary part of the process? The slitter was chased nonetheless.
While the slitter was busy running away, the embalmer got to work on the now-cut-open body. He reached in and started yanking stuff out. He pulled out the liver. The stomach. Yard after yard of snakelike intestines. He broke through the diaphragm and removed the lungs. The heart he left in place; it was needed if a person wanted a shot at getting into the ancient Egyptian afterlife.
Why Make a Mummy?
You’re probably wondering why the ancient Egyptians bothered with mummy making at all. Why not bury the bodies as is or cremate them and get on with it? The answer has everything to do with the afterlife.
The ancient Egyptian afterlife was the Place to Be after death, but getting there was anything but easy. Multiple obstacles stood in the way, like Ammit—the part-lion, part-hippopotamus, part-crocodile goddess who’d gobble up any human hearts that weren’t deemed good enough.
Furthermore, to have any shot at making it into the afterlife and surviving there, a body needed to be reunited with parts of its spirit, called the ka and the ba. According to one popular theory on mummification, the ka and ba only reunited with a body if they recognized it. Which means if the body got all rotten or was missing a pinky toe or if it simply didn’t look close enough to the person in question, the ka and ba might not be able to find it.
No ka. No ba. No afterlife.
Hence the mummy!
Mummy Medicine
I wish “Mummy Medicine” referred to the medicine your mum gives you when you have a headache. But, sadly, this isn’t the case. It refers to actual ancient Egyptian mummies that were ground up and sold as medicine all across Europe.
The whole mummies-as-medicine thing started because of a huge misunderstanding. In the Middle East, mumiya or mumia was a naturally occurring bitumen (which is a black, tar-like substance) highly valued in medicine. Some say it was prized more than gold.
Well, apparently the dark, resinous material covering ancient Egyptian mummies looked an awful lot like mumia. So it was given the same name.
When Europeans started translating Arabic medical texts, whenever they saw mumiya or mumia listed, they unfortunately didn’t think of the innocent bitumen version of mumia. Not at all.
They thought of mummy coverings.
This disturbing case of mistaken identity meant it was ground-up mummy that flew off apothecary shelves during the Middle Ages and up through the eighteenth century. And it wasn’t just the mummy wrappings being ground up, either. Somewhere along the line, the term mumia started referring to the whole mummy—body, wrappings, and all.
It was this little—or rather ginormous—mix-up that gave mummies their name!
Once removed, the slippery, bloody organs were covered in natron, which was a naturally occurring salt substance. The natron dried out the organs—like how salt is used to dehydrate certain meats today—and then the organs were plopped into containers called canopic jars. The jars would be buried with the rest of the body. In case the mummy needed his liver in the afterlife.
The body itself was also blanketed with natron and allowed to dry for more than a month. Then the embalmer stuffed it with sawdust or straw or bandages to help it keep its shape. He covered it with oils and expensive, pleasant-smelling spices. Then the body was carefully wrapped in linens, finger by finger and toe by toe. Resin, the sap from pine trees, was often added to the wrappings to offer even more protection.
These newer, dehydrated mummies fared much better than the earlier ones. The embalmers were making progress. But they weren’t done experimenting. They decided the brain had to go next.
Most often, brain removal was done by jamming an iron hook up the corpse’s nose with enough force to break through the relatively weak bone standing between the nose and the brain. Once the hook was where it needed to be, some experts believe it was used to pull the brain out through the nose. Others disagree. They think the embalmer actually whisked the hook around and around and around—like how you might whip up some cake batter—which essentially turned the brain to mush. Then all the embalmer had to do was flip the body over, tilt the head down, and let the liquified brain pour right out through the nose.
Animal Mummies
The ancient Egyptians didn’t stop with mummifying people. They also mummified a whole host of critters, including crocodiles, baboons, birds, fish, snakes, and even dung beetles.
In some cases, the mummified animals were beloved pets. The ancient Egyptians loved their pets and hoped to be reunited with them in the afterlife.
Sometimes a bird or chunk of meat was mummified and placed in a tomb to provide food for the dead.
In certain cases—such as the famous Apis bull—the mummified animal was a real standout. Revered and pampered throughout its life, the animal was considered sacred. Upon its death, priests and commoners alike mourned its loss, and it was carefully mummified.
But most of the animals mummified in ancient Egypt were intended as something called a votive offering. A pilgrim wanting to send a message to a god would travel to a temple and buy a mummified animal from a priest, such as a cat if they were seeking favor with the goddess Bastet, or an ibis if they were targeting the moon god, Thoth.
Once bought, the animal mummy, often along with a written message for the designated god, would be placed in a catacomb alongside animal mummies bought by other pilgrims. Incredibly, tombs have been found up and down the Nile containing hundreds, thousands, and sometimes millions of animal mummies.
This callous approach to the brain sounds quite odd, doesn’t it? The embalmer took such care with the liver and intestines. Why not the brain?
Turns out the ancient Egyptians had no respect for the brain. It wasn’t felt to be important. They believed the heart did all the thinking and feeling.
Over time the embalmers continued to experiment. They played around with the eyes, replacing them with stones or onions.
They tried sewing a corpse’s fingernails in place before dehydrating the body so they wouldn’t fall off as the fingers shrank.
Under the Wrappings
As we learned about in the “Animal Mummies” section, scores of pilgrims wanted to buy mummified animals to serve as votive offerings. So it’s no surprise that the making and selling of these mummies became quite the business.
But mummifying an animal wasn’t easy. It took time. It took patience. It took acquiring an animal in the first place.
Or did it?
As it turns out, the whole acquiring-an-animal part appears to have been optional. When a team of scientists from the University of Manchester studied more than eight hundred animal mummies, they discovered that one third of them were fakes. They contained no animal materials at all!
Thankfully the ancient Egyptian embalmers took the mummification of their fellow human beings much more seriously (reports that they occasionally created fake human mummies are most likely erroneous), but the same can unfortunately not be said for those coming after them. During the whole mummy-medicine craze in Europe (see “Mummy Medicine”), not all the ground-up mummy sold in apothecaries came from real ancient Egyptian specimens.
Sometimes newly dead bodies—often the bodies of criminals—were treated in such a way that they looked like ancient mummies. These fakes would then be bought, ground up, and sold to the unsuspecting sick.
They filled the bodies with new and different materials to see if they could get the bodies to better keep their shape. They varied how they wrapped the bodies and how they decorated them. They may have even added hair extensions!
Year after year, generation after generation, embalmers reached into bodies and yanked out organs. They turned brains into liquid mush and wrapped linens around dried, dehydrated noggins. Personally, I find it inspiring that through hard work and experimentation, mummy makers were able to create something so profoundly enduring. Well over a thousand years have passed since they last wrapped a body, and people are still gazing upon their work in fascination today.
Mummy Madness
Over a thousand years have passed since mummies stopped being made in Egypt. And during this time, humans have found all kinds of interesting ways to use the dead bodies. One way was as a medicine (see “Mummy Medicine”), but the strangeness didn’t stop there. Here are some other mummy uses:
From the sixteenth century through the early twentieth century, mummies were ground up and turned into a paint with the ultra-descriptive name “Mummy Brown.”In the nineteenth century, wealthy European citizens were known to obtain mummies for the sole purpose of unwrapping them. At parties. To impress their guests.“Mummy dust” was a potion ingredient used by the Evil Queen in Walt Disney’s 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She used it to make herself appear old.It has long been said that during the nineteenth century mummy wrappings were used to make paper. Is there any truth to this urban legend? Some experts say yes. Most aren’t so sure.When a huge cache of cat mummies was discovered in 1888, about 180,000 of them were shipped to England where they were ground up. And used as fertilizer!
Text copyright © 2024 by Christine Virnig
Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Korwin Briggs
