The Mummification Process and Its Meaning to Ancient Egypt
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The Mummification Process and its Meaning to Ancient Egypt
Mummification process
Apparently the first issue that many people tend to imagine after the words “mummy” and “Egypt” are mentioned is a given body that is wrapped in strips of cloth. However when considering the country and especially a couple of years back, the then mummies, notably the first ones, were naturally made in the desert sand. With their belief system developing, ancient Egyptians adopted another strategy of artificially making mummies. Actually this explains why they deliberately kept bodies of preserved bodies of those people who had just died, otherwise referred to as embalming. It is interesting to note that it took at around seventy days for the ancient Egyptians to convert a dead body to a mummy (Brier).
The procedure of mummy production was as below:
1. Washing and thorough cleaning of the body only using water from river Nile.
2. Removal of the internal organs considering that they normally bear a lot of water. This means that they had to be removed before that particular body was embalmed.
a. The brain had to be taken out but through the nose before being discarded away. The belief the ancient Egyptians held on was that the brain was not of much help as it just stuffing for the head.
b. The heart was preserved and so left within the body. According to their belief, the heart was one significant body organ that they could not dare throw away. Their major argument was that the body besides controlling ones thoughts, it also controlled ones emotions, and generally it served as the place where the memories were stored, hence being termed as quite an imperative body part.
c. There other parts that taken out separately before being embalmed. They are the intestines, liver, stomach and the lungs. The four different parts had to be placed in a four different containers that were referred to as canopic jars. These given canopic jars
Instructor
Institution
Date Due
The Mummification Process and its Meaning to Ancient Egypt
Mummification process
Apparently the first issue that many people tend to imagine after the words “mummy” and “Egypt” are mentioned is a given body that is wrapped in strips of cloth. However when considering the country and especially a couple of years back, the then mummies, notably the first ones, were naturally made in the desert sand. With their belief system developing, ancient Egyptians adopted another strategy of artificially making mummies. Actually this explains why they deliberately kept bodies of preserved bodies of those people who had just died, otherwise referred to as embalming. It is interesting to note that it took at around seventy days for the ancient Egyptians to convert a dead body to a mummy (Brier).
The procedure of mummy production was as below:
1. Washing and thorough cleaning of the body only using water from river Nile.
2. Removal of the internal organs considering that they normally bear a lot of water. This means that they had to be removed before that particular body was embalmed.
a. The brain had to be taken out but through the nose before being discarded away. The belief the ancient Egyptians held on was that the brain was not of much help as it just stuffing for the head.
b. The heart was preserved and so left within the body. According to their belief, the heart was one significant body organ that they could not dare throw away. Their major argument was that the body besides controlling ones thoughts, it also controlled ones emotions, and generally it served as the place where the memories were stored, hence being termed as quite an imperative body part.
c. There other parts that taken out separately before being embalmed. They are the intestines, liver, stomach and the lungs. The four different parts had to be placed in a four different containers that were referred to as canopic jars. These given canopic jars
Cited: Bean, Joseph W. Mummification: Down at the End of Bondage Street (SMTech Educational) [Illustrated]. The Nazca Plains Corporation , 2005. Brier, Bob. Egyptian Mummies: Unraveling the Secrets of an Ancient Art. Harper Perennial , 1996. Lichtenberg, Francoise Dunand & Roger. Mummies and Death in Egypt. Cornell University Press; 1 edition , 2006.