Mummification
The Mummy, it’s known as famous Hollywood movies, which have wide popularity around the world, taking you into the underworld of mummies, as they come back to life and chase the main character and his company.
These mummy movies are categorized as imaginary movies, but it still has some roots of truth, which leads us to wonder about the mummification and its origins.
To fully understand the mummification definition, we should be aware first about what is a mummy?
A mummy is a dead person or animal which had kept his skin and organs preserved without decomposing. And it could be due to natural causes or by mummification.
This process was common in several civilizations around the world, but the most known is Egyptian mummification.
Egyptian Pharaohs were taking care of getting the right way of burial. Not only by building a magnificent tomb but also by preserving their bodies in an excellent condition, as they believed in the afterlife and that the soul would return to the body again to have eternal life.
So the body should be ready to receive the soul another time by not being corrupted.
After the death of someone, the mummification process takes place to preserve the body before burial.
First, priests concerned by mummifying the body remove the brain by a hook through the nostrils with the aid of some drugs put to liquefy the brain.
Then, using an Ethiopian stone blade, they cut the left side of the tummy and move the intestines out and purify it by some wine and seasoning.
The liver, stomach, intestines, and lungs were embalmed separately and placed in four jars called the Canopic Jars.
Then the whole body should be covered with Natron, a type of salt, to dehydrate the body for 70 days, no longer.
Then, the mummified body should be washed from Natron, and be wrapped by linen bandages. It could take hundreds of feet to wrap only one pharaoh body.
Finally, the body is ready to be buried after being placed into the sarcophagus to the final destination into the tomb.
During all this process, prayers and rituals should be taking place by priests, under the protection of Anubis, who was the god of mummification, and the tomb should get ready to receive the Mummy by having all the essential material that could be used by the pharaoh in the afterlife.
All this process was to prepare the body and preserve it to receive the soul again in the afterlife, to be in good shape and uncorrupted.
Early Egyptian mummies dated from the old kingdom that the oldest Egyptian Mummy was from the 3rd dynasty.
An ancient tradition that was sacred by the Egyptian people from a long time that had left us some mummies telling stories about the early life in Egypt and how the pharaohs of Egypt believed in the afterlife.
They had gone further than just mummifying humans; Egyptians were mummifying also some of their sacred animals, like cats, bulls, crocodiles, and falcons, that you can find a whole cemetery of bulls at Saqqara necropolis called Serapuem.
Egyptian were leaving a lot of monuments to be remembered, but that wasn’t enough for them, so they decided to save themselves in good shape to let us know them as they were in old times.