Mummies: From Egyptian Pharaohs to Hot Dogs

Mummification of a Hot Dog

The practice of mummification in Ancient Egypt is probably one of the most famous elements of this ancient culture. Mummification is a technique for preserving the human body after a person has died.

There are many ways to preserve a body after death: in the twentieth century, there have been various forms of embalming (such as Lenin in Russia or Evita Peron in Argentina) and also freezing (such as legendary American baseball player Ted Williams). But the Egyptian form of mummification is a lot older and a lot simpler than these twentieth-century technological solutions.

Egyptian mummification was practiced by the priests of Ancient Egypt, and was in the earliest times reserved only for the Pharaoh or for members of the Pharaoh's inner circle (including pets and symbolic animals). Later -- when the Pharaohs of Egypt had become a colony of Greek and Roman empires -- mummification was more widely available, simply as a service that could be paid for.

But in the earliest days, Egyptian mummification was a religious ritual. We can see this most specifically with the famous Egyptian Book of the Dead, which is a set of prayers and rituals that explained what Egyptians believed would happen to the soul in the afterlife. This included a scene of judgment, in which the gods weighed the heart of the dead person on a scale -- if the heart weighed more than a feather, then the dead person was sent for punishment. This is not very different from ideas of judgment in the afterlife that are found in many religions today.

In his translation of the Book of the Dead, the famous Egyptologist Sir Ernest Wallis Budge points out that Egyptian mummification is directly related to the Egyptian belief in the afterlife, claiming that "the preservation of the corruptible body was in some way connected with the life in the world to come, and its preservation was necessary to ensure eternal life; otherwise…the time-honored custom of mummifying the dead would have had no meaning." (Budge lviii)

The act of mummification is fairly simple. Egyptian priests would take the dead body and wash it thoroughly in the Nile River. Once they had cleaned the body, the priests would remove the brains through the nose. They would make one cut on the side of the body to remove the internal organs such as the heart, which were preserved in separate jars called "canopic jars."

Finally, the body would be packed full of a salt-like substance called "natron." Natron is a naturally-occurring substance which contains a large percentage of what we call "baking soda" (or sodium bicarbonate) and a smaller percentage of what we call "table salt" (or sodium chloride). Both of these substances are good at absorbing water -- that is why sodium chloride is still used today to make ice and snow melt. However the baking soda in the natron also "cleanses by chemically destroying fat and grease" (Lucas and Harris 281). Since the organs have already been removed, what is left over is an entirely dry husk, which does not decay in the way that a body ordinarily would.