Egyptian Mummies: A Cosmic, Mortuary Odyssey

it starting on October twenty three, which is a Friday. Joe, Robert and I are going to use Periscope to start addressing some of our listener mail. We've just been getting a ton of listener mail lately and didn't really feel like we could address all of it in one quarterly podcast, so we thought, why don't we try this periscope thing out.

Some of our colleagues here at How Stuff Works are using it, and so if you want to check that out, allow us on social media and you'll you know, we'll be broadcasting it far and wide to let you know what time it's going to be available. The other thing is that because it's October and it's monster time. We are bringing back our video series Monster Science, and I

say ours, but it's really yours. Robert. I wasn't involved with the show the first two seasons that these were created, and the the new episodes have been shot, and I'm just I'm really looking forward to it because Monster Science is one of my favorite things that's ever been done here. Yeah, it's a lot of fun to put together. It's kind of if you're not seeing it before anybody out there. It's basically like a daytime horror host from the nineties, uh,

comparing fictional monsters to real world organism. Yeah, you guys have episodes on everything from Cathulhu and Jason Vorhees too. There's actually a Mummies episode right there, and the Mummy episode. All those episodes already exist on our YouTube channel and

on stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. But if you're following us on face Book, tomorrow, we're going to be posting it right to Facebook, so you'll be able to watch it on our our Facebook page there, so um so to get in touch with us on all those social things, like if you want to follow us on Periscope or see these videos make sure that you check us out on whatever your social media channel of choices. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler, all those we used

they handle blow the mind. There's of course the Mothership's stuff to blow your mind dot com and our YouTube channel as well. All right, So on that note, let us dive into the world of the money, particularly the Egyptian mummy. Um. There are various mummification traditions throughout the world, and many of them are just so fascinating. But there's more than enough to talk about with just Egyptian mommy.

It's an incredibly deep topic. And yeah, I think so we're gonna we decided to specifically focus on the Egyptian process and mythology here in today's episode. Uh. If there's enough interest, let us know, uh, and we will go on and do another episode on all the other variations because one of the things that I found that was interesting was apparently it was being done in the America's even before it was being done in Egypt. Yeah. I believe one of the oldest hair samples that we have

comes from a Central American mummy. So yeah, yeah, um, so yeah, if you want to hear about self mummifying, monks in in Asia. Let us know. Uh, that's something we can discuss. Do you want to hear about bog people? That can be another episode, But for this episode, there's there's so much about Egyptian mummies that that we will be struggling to fit enough into one episode here today. Yeah,

and they're really pervasive. I think when you know, in Western culture, at least, when we think mummies are mummification, everybody goes for the Egyptian one, mainly because, uh, it's popularity in films and other media, right, like the Curse of a Mummy or or something like that. Well, even in children's books. And this is something that I've really come on too in the last few years. Uh with the with the Sun, is that that mummies pop up

in books all the time. Yeah, my son has a book where like a skeleton is going trick or treating and it is chased by a mummy. Of course. Maurice Sindac had a had a wonderful pop up book that has a mummy in it. And in both of those you see this, uh this trope employee that you also encounter and other bits of mummy media where of course you grab hold of the wrapping and you pull the wrapping and then the mummy spins around like a top and the Monster Squad the way to take out a mommy.

That's that's how they did it in a Monster Squad. Yeah, one of my favorite movies when I was a kid, and it's it's currently streaming on Netflix. I was able to catch it again recently. But yeah, they they like tie the bandage to an arrow, shoot it into a tree, and the mummy is like hanging onto the back of

their car and slowly unravels. It turns out there was nothing there except for a skull the whole time, which on one level I was always disappointed with in Monster Squad because the mommy is clearly cooler looking than what they do with him. But I can see where the trope is attractive, particularly in children's literature, because you have this threatening but easily unwound creature, right, this this threat that is easily dismissed but still visually impressed. Well, all right,

I'm gonna go out on a limb here. As a horror fan, I've never found mummies to be scary or to make much sense. In fact, like I always thought of mummies as being like the kind of like they would be the the monster that like makes friends with you, right like the way Frankenstein does in Monster Squad. I just especially from when when you look at like the actual process, the science behind it, and the history in Egyptian culture. Where does this idea of mummies as like

these evil monsters that are going to kill us come from? Well, I, for for my own part, I find that it makes more sense if you think about it in terms of the Egyptian mummy as a as a traveler across spot time and space. Okay, so um, and we'll get into more into the cosmology here shortly. But essentially, you have this individual who is leaving our world through the gates of death, traveling to another world and in another world where uh, nothing is guaranteed. It's not just like, oh,

you're going to Egyptian heaven. Now you're going to an Egyptian afterlife that's rife with danger. You're gonna need supplies, you're gonna need some some servants, you're gonna need you know, some spells to protect you. So it's a dangerous journey, not unlike say sending um colonists like frozen colonists on a spaceship, generation ship, you know, across the cosmos to another world. And then what it happens if you wake up halfway through because some dumb museum dude has decided

that he wants to put you on display. You're gonna be angry, You're gonna be a little confused, and you might not be in the best physical condition. So you're gonna tell some people. That's where it always seems to come from, right is the idea? It seems like even as we are doing it, we as Westerners, seem to acknowledge that the idea of us taking these bodies and these sacred objects from their sites and taking them on a tour, popping them in a museum somewhere is inherently

wrong and that we must be punished for doing so. Yeah, it is there, and I'm surely somebody has written at length on this, to what extent has the Mummy. This is a monster, an externalization of our own inner guilt, having really just ripped pieces of this culture apart and spread it across the world. Because you see, you see obelisks from ancient Egypt in Paris and in London, in New York, and of course museum items and museums around

the world. Pilford from Egypt. Yeah, I mean there was just a tour that was here like a year or two ago. I think that was like, um, you know a two ring showcase of of mummies that that goes from one city to another and sets up shop and you know, it's there for six months and you can go and see it and then it's gone, it moves

on to the next city. I um, I mean this is something I don't know about you, but like I always grew up like going on school trips to museums, and the mummy was always the big thing, right, Like going getting to see a mummy or like it's sarcophagus or something like that was always like that was the coolest part of the trip. But now as an adult, I look back on it and I'm like, wow, that that's like imagine if somebody like dug up my grandfather, like a couple of hundred years from now and just

put his coffin on display for kindergarteners run past. This is very strange, it is, yeah, and I certainly agree. I remember looking forward to seeing the mummy at the Major Museum in Nashville when when I would when school groups up there would I would go to visit. But but yeah, now it just feels a little weird. Well, okay, let's let's nail this down. What exactly is the mummy?

I think we all have ideas of how it works, and of course we have many of us have that same experience of going to the museum and reading the paragraph that's inscribed next to the actual case that but I don't really think that gives you enough context. So a mummy is simply a human being whose soft tissue has been preserved after death. So normally, of course, decomposition takes place and reduces the body to a skeleton in a matter of months. Uh. And the rate of decompetition.

Decomposition is dependent on a number of environmental factors. It's gonna if you're in a humid environment, it's gonna go a lot faster. The dryer, colder environment is gonna go a lot slower. And there's a sort of like procedure for decomposition, right. It starts with autolysis, which is when you know your organs basically the digestive enzymes inside them, like your intestines, they start digesting themselves. Right, there's no more food coming in, So your body starts or the

bacteria inside of it at least starts eating you. Yeah, society just falls apart in the basically, then you have putrification, the breakdown of organic matter by bacteria. This sets in about three days after death and just eats everything away in a matter of months. And it's going to be accelerated in human environments due to rapid bacterial reproduction. Yeah, and then and so again, like we talked about, environment

plays a big deal here. So if conditions are cold enough or dry enough, these are all the things that that aren't they they're so harsh to bacteria that they can't survive if they don't have any oxygen, for instance. That's another one. So in those cases, the body does not fully decompose, and it takes thousands of years for this process to slow down in it and it uh desiccate in a very different way than what we're used to.

And that's sort of where this Egyptian mummification practice came in because of the environmental factors that were available to them there. Yeah, so mummification can be a matter of just falling into a glacier, into a peat bog dying in a desert and becoming covered with sand, or it's due to funeral design, it's uh, it's due to various

embalming traditions that popped up throughout human history. And I want to quickly mention that old hair sample that I was talking about earlier, that was from a nine thousand year old Chilean mummy. Wow, okay, And for a while that was the like the oldest hair sample that we had.

But in two thousand nine, archaeologists happened upon the oldest human hair has ever found at at that point, and they found in a pile of fossilized hyena poop, and that was between one thousand and two hundred fifty seven thousand years old. So somebody was eaten by a hyena presumably and and their hair bed in. So in a sense, hyna poop is its own form, it's own kind of mummy. Well, okay, So that is just taste of some of the things we could bring you if you on an episode on

non Egyptian mummies. But let's focus on the cosmology of the Egyptian mummies. So what is the the religious significance, what's the mythos around this that that brought Egyptian culture

into spending so much ornate fascination on embalming they're dead. Well, first of all, I do I don't want to clarify that when you're talking about Egyptian cosmology, you're talking about a long period of time, and of course, uh, traditions and faith evolves over time, and sometimes you have a pesky pharaoh that comes along and says, hey, we're not we're not polytheistic anymore, now a monotheistic and then he turned that over as well. But for the most part, um,

we can pick out certain key elements here. Uh. You know, one of the reasons that I think all of us can are continually fascinated by Egyptian cosmology is that it's it's so alien to us. It's so different from our modern models of faith. Uh. And even in its own time, it didn't really travel well, it was it was kind of an alien belief system even in its day. Um. This is of course where you get like the stargate type thing from right, the idea that it was actually

aliens that brought the mythos two human culture. Yeah, it's it's yeah, it's easy to and I love to to

consider those kind of models. But but on the other hand, the non alien Uh, I guess the explanation is even stranger, you know, because you're just like, who are these people that you know, how does how does the culture reach this point where they have this this just really rich religion that puts an extreme emphasis on the afterlife and in the process introduces the notion of judgment after death.

So in a sense that the DNA of all these modern religions, and I say modern about like you know, thousand, two thousand year old religions here are are all kind of based on the same view of life after death. Yeah. The thing that's fascinating about it to me is it really shows the imagination of human culture going very far back before technological advancements that we uh associate with like modern day kind of fantasy or or I guess science fiction. Uh,

weird things. But that I mean, these these people were coming up with them over three thousand, four thousand years ago. It's just these fascinating stories that connected everything together, right, Yeah, alright, So I'm gonna just try and roll very quickly here through some of the basics of the ancient Egyptian journey into the afterlife. So First of all, you don't just

have this singular notion of a soul. The Egyptian soul cocktail basically consists of several parts of the co life force, the coup, the spiritual intelligence, the second, the power, the habit, the shadow, and n your name. So after you die, the dog headed Anibus guides your your soul to the hall of justice tended to by various gods. Your your heart is weight on a scale um and uh. And if you fail, you're gonna fall. Your soul is gonna fall. And this monstrous crocodile headed am it is gonna eat

your soul. So it's kind of like their version of hell, kind of like the annihilation model though whereas you're not you're just you just ceased to be um. And then from there, if you pass, then you enter what was called second Aru, the field of rushes. And this is the god just the the almost unimaginable other world of Egyptian mythology. We have fifteen different regions, each one's ruled

by a different god. And and it's a world where you you might transform into an animal, you might need spells to protect you from giant snakes and giant beetles and curses. You're gonna need food when you get there. You're gonna need to farm when you get there. So it really is kind of this model of arriving on a distant world and having to colonize it. Um, yeah,

it is. It's it's so it's such an interesting concept of the afterlife because in a lot of our circumstances, we just imagine the afterlife either being utter perfection right like heaven, or utter torment like hell, but not like a whole another life. You have got to have all these things and I've got to prepare for it, and your whole life is essentially you building up the material wealth to be able to have those things in the

next life. Right, Yeah, I mean it's it's a situation where the afterlife is as much of not more work than the real world. Right. It sounds like not to demean this cosmology in any way, but it honestly sounds like World of Warcraft to me, Like it sounds like a video game that's really interesting, but is work. Yeah.

It's detailed in the Egyptian Book of the Dad, which comes from B. C. E. That that you could even end up landing in the in the airless region of exc which is the realm of quote that August God who is in his egg, which I don't think there are a lot of details beyond that, but just the idea that you could wind up in this region where there's some sort of horrible elder thing that rules over it from its a giant egg. I love crafty and

if there ever was one. So so so it's it's kind of this idea that the Egyptian mummy is a traveler through time and space and your body is in kind of a suspended deathly state of suspended animation. And that's because let me see if I've got this correctly, Because the idea is that the cop part of your soul is connected to your physical body, right, and so if the physical body is destroyed, that part of your

soul is destroyed as well. So that this is where this idea comes, and it probably came up alongside the sort of evolution the early model of the mumification practice of this idea of like preserving your body and your organs as such and making sure that they're presentable and

uh so that that part of your soul is also functional. Yeah, and it's and it's important again to note that the cosmology itself evolved over time, as did the funeral traditions, and you can you can definitely see how they informed each other as well. So it's not a situation where someone a bunch of Egyptian um, you know, do person and bombers was sitting around it's all right, well we have this model of the afterlife to work with, how do we treat the dead? No, they co evolved over

three thousand years. Yeah, I think that's the really important thing to consider here, and that's how we're going to present it to We're sort of going to be going through each of the uh, the eras in terms of the this modification process and how it evolved. Right, But that again, consider it, it's three thousand years that this

went through. So think about some of the things that we practiced today that we think of as like totally common uh cultural traditions, right, and they're just decades old, exactly decades old compared to something what were we practicing three thousand years ago that we're still doing the same way today, you know. So it's it's just interesting to see how that evolved over their course of time and then where we are now compared to that, we look at it as being so alien, but it's in fact

it's all of human history. Yeah. So the earliest model we can look to, and this is this is key, is is the practice of just bearing your dad in a pit in the hot sand. We see we see this from various examples, such as their six hundred graves from the pre diagnostic Upper Egyptian Badarian culture from around to two four thousand BC. And this is just where you just dig a pit in the hot stand, you

throw the body in, and you let a natural mummification tickets. Right. So, like as we're talking about earlier, this these environmental conditions were perfect for the area that they were in and that like you could bury a body and the internal organs would be preserved. The skin would you know, crisp

into a kind of like a dark hardened shell. But it preserved skin and hair by doing this just essentially because there's there wasn't water, Uh, there's probably a little oxygen, right, and it was relatively cold, I would assume, depending on how deep you dig. We say hot sands, but you know, yeah, presentably they're digging yeah, yeah, And and so it was

this phenomenon that first indicated the Egyptians. I'm assuming maybe maybe an animal pulled out an old corpse one day and they saw it and they went, oh my god, it's still oh my god, oh my Anubis. Uh it still has hair and its skin is still the same, and and then they thought, oh, well, maybe the soul

is still there too. Yeah. I think you definitely have to consider the fact that, like this is just that they weren't thinking of this as a location as much as this was just what you did with your dad, and they saw what happened to a body after death. And there's let's reiterate this too. There's no casket here, there's not even any wrappings here. It's just a dead body buried in the sand. Right, But of course that evolves, right,

the cosmologies evolving. Treatment of the dead is changing, um and you see additions made to that sort of bar him in the pit model. So during the pre dynastic period of between animal skin wrapping baskets and then eventually short wooden coffins become the fashion. Yeah. So one of the things I read about this period was that, uh, sometimes they would they would give you a leather pillow other times they would put a basket over your head, and these are things that were supposed to make you

comfortable in this afterlife. Uh. And then eventually it turned into like wicker basket kind of kind of like coffins, right, like they were the idea was that it would provide comfort for their dead loved ones. Uh. And then this eventually leads to coffins and then to tombs. Right yeah, it kind of you can see it beginning is just a matter of like, I hate to see Granddad just down there in a pit like that. Let me put him under his head, let me give him a leather

pill him in something. Yeah. And then eventually, like that begins to inform ideas of well, where's Grandpa going, what's the why is he so dressed up? So let's pause for a second before we dive more into the mummy thing. How how do how do you want to be buried? Like, like if you wanted to be really comfortable in the afterlife, right, let's let's love look at this, like what are the things that you're gonna want? Well, um, all my pets and loved ones buried beside me, and now, uh, you know,

I guess i'd like some good books on hand, you know. Music. Yeah, that makes sense, and I think that was a practice. Not I don't know about music because they didn't have recordings back then, but certainly musical instruments it would be. Yeah. I uh, this definitely made me like think about mortality

a lot. And I've never I suppose I should finally get a living will nailed down with my wife or something like that, but I've always just kind of wanted to have a natural burial, not not the hot sands or something like that, but I'd be okay with like what did they call them, like environmental burials, right, Yeah, I actually just did a video about these for work, and I think Joe and I are talking about doing a natural burial episode because because I mean, it's something

that's based in very old models obviously of of the funeral rights, but there are new technological approaches that put put some fascinating sniff. Yeah, it just seems to me, like, uh, it's attractive to me, I suppose because of the significance of like letting your body decay but also kind of give back to the environment around it. But uh, I don't know, I understand coffins and I understand cremation, but it just doesn't feel like something that I would be

interested in. I wouldn't especially coffins. Like, man, those things are expensive and a lot of people, like I had a friend whose mother recently died, and he said that it was just a racket when they went in to go to buy the coffin. I wonder that translates all the way back to this origin of these coffins in Egyptian times. You know that the way they're trying to make their dead loved ones comfortable. Uh, how does that?

You know, Like you think about like the lining in the coffin and all these various factors that are It's like like nowadays it's like a little bed, and it's like it's kind of based in the same idea of like I hate to see the essentially anthropomorphized on an inhuman thing. At this point, it's no longer a person,

but I want to treat it like it is. Yeah, absolutely, well, I mean I understand to like the comfort that that provides to the family in the same way that this provided comfort as well, but it's sort of evolved into a whole another thing. Right. Oh yeah, you could argue

that it got got kind of out of control. Yeah, an interestingly interestingly enough, when you look back to this period, this predynastic period, you also see preparation of the body taking on a form of deem dismemberment and de fleshing. So sometimes you see the head missing or place somewhere else, or the remaining bones h reassembled in in order that

might not conform to their original placement. So it's not just like a complete like one to three from bearing the body, from mommifying the body, you see some some different approaches taken to preparing the bones. So there was Yeah, I had a hard time understanding how this fit in culturally with the idea of comfort. But I can see that there are obviously like different ranches of understanding regarding

I guess what we would call mortuary practice today. Uh. And clearly the de fleshing and the beheading and all that stuff didn't win over over the cultural significance of mummification. Yeah, Like the de fleshing is like, don't it's easy to sort of think of it and more of its morbid terms, but essentially it's talking about we're talking about a means of preserving the body. Like they realize that the flesh is gonna rot away, so let's just get it down

to the bones and then store those away. It gets into that area of what's important about the body, which continues to be an important topic as you look at mummification process. Yeah. Absolutely, because so they get to this point where they start using these wicker wicker kind of coffins or tomb like things. But then they realize, oh, the bodies actually start decomposing when we do, because we're in effect, we're we're sealing it off from the natural

drying elements of the sand. So we're interfering with the thing that we really liked about bearing our dead in the sand. How can we get that back? And so this is where Egyptian science comes in. Essentially they had the challenge of figuring out how to replicate the sand effect but making the bodies comfortable and also preserved. And and this is because of the sort of immortality connection between the car and the physical body. Right. So by this point we get to the Early Dynastic Age, just

as around uh to three thousand BC. Yeah, and during this time you see them taking to wrapping the bodies in an attempt to keep out the elements and just like really wrapping them on, like multiple layers of wrapping and also throwing in some some some charms here and there, as you know, a magical to turn as well. The thing is, uh, it didn't work all that well because, uh, the rot the decomposition is coming from within. They thought

it was about keeping something out. But as we discussed, like the very first process of decomposition is occurring with the with the breakdown in the body. So this is essentially like the origin of this though right there taking the wrappings, are coding them in resin, and they're and

they're covering the body with this. But um, one of the things I'd like us to keep in mind here going forward from this point in Egyptian history is that if the body was something to be preserved and to come back to imagine what these processes would be like if you came back into your body, right, So, like you're covered in the let's consider it from the fictional twenty century mummy point of view, right, like, you come back into this body, you're fully conscious and you're covered

just just beginning in this period, you're covered in wrappings and hot resin. That's just solidified, right, So that's already going to be uncomfortable, and it gets more uncomfortable. Yeah, because they, like I said, they eventually realized, all right, there's rotting going on inside the body. Decompositions have taken place inside and my or what we do on the outside. So they realize when we need to remove most of

the guts. So they take to the practice of making a slit in the abdomen and uh and pulling out as much of the organs in there as they can get away with. And this is where they begin the tradition of those it's their canopic jars. Is that right? So you basically they're like fine pottery that you're each of your organs is stored in next to your body. Uh and and uh, the each of the organs is also wrapped in the same way, right like they're they're

wrapped in resin and linen. Believe. Yeah. And then eventually they're decorating the the econoptic jars more and more and uh and and they're taking additional steps to sort of spruce up the body. Uh. They're they're starting to use masks to cover for the loss of facial structure as well as uh. Stucco plaster coatings um that they're they're added the wrappings to reproduce the facial features of the

individual it in. This is like early plastic surgery on a corpse, like like trying to make it appear as lifelike as possible, even though it's it's not, and they're they're pulling out like constituent parts of it too, that are you know, making it kind of collapse, so they

end up stuffing things inside of it too. Interestingly enough, the ancient Egyptians were some of the first practitioners of plastic surgery, so they were actually able to implement that on living so you could see how these two would be connected practices. They realized that there was something you know, you could you could fashion flash, you could fashion it after death, and you could also fashion it while alive.

And they eventually took to where they're modeling the whole body with the plaster and using you know this this resin circle in and the stucco overlay for you know, in the case of really well off departed individuals, you know,

a recreation of the physical form. And we're talking about right now, this is the Fourth Dynasty era uh and The big innovation of this is what you're talking about with the removal of organs, but also just that they instead of just like digging in there and taking the organs out, they made a very small abdominal incision that allowed them to just get that stuff out of there very quickly without damaging it. So they could prevent the natural decay of the organs because you know, apparently these

things start to depending on the temperature. Obviously, if it's hot and humid, within two to three hours, those are going to start to decompose. So they wanted to get them out of the body as quickly as possible. Right now. They always left the heart though, because the heart is the exact seat of the mind. And uh, well we'll talk about them as well, but kidneys as well. They didn't didn't really find much use for those. But so

that's fourth dynasty. Then you get fifth dynasty, they start this is when they start like kind of making portrait of version, like almost like statues out of the mummies. Between the fifth and the sixth is when mummifications start spreading to lower class people. And we'll talk a little bit about like there's a different practice. There was like a I believe the house stuff works. Article refers to it as like the budget model, like and how that

worked in particular. But you go all the way through up until the eleventh dynasty, and then we get to another period of improvement. Yeah, this is when they start dehydrating the bodies using large amounts of natron, which is a mixture of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate or chloride. So it was an improvement over the an earlier method of just using salt for drying and or of course, the the older method was just the hot stands um.

But here's the thing. It was hazardous to work with if you're the you know, the the individual there and having to dry out the bodies because it would burn your skin. It could cause all sorts of eye and respiratory problems. Yeah, so if you're the embalmer and you're working with this stuff, it's pretty hazardous. Like one of the accounts I read was that natron if it got in your eye, it could cause conjunctive conjunctival edemas or

corneal destruction. I mean, it would eat your eye. Uh So I can imagine that these embombers tried to be pretty careful with it, but it was essentially um. The idea from it. It was it was the sodium compounds that they got from the shores of different Egyptian lakes or sometimes like the desert west of the Nile Delta. They were able to find this stuff and it was

very salty UM, and it absorbed moisture. I almost wonder, I'm curious about the process, given like what we know about how salt and moisture interact now, Like it was absorption or absorption um, but it was it was taking the water out of here. And unlike the sands, which would darken the skin over time, it didn't do that as much. These um. These mummies definitely did like dark and compared to their natural hue, but not as much as as you found when you just threw the body

in hot sands. And one other thing, they actually used natron to dissolve fats and it was used as like a cleaning material too, So you know, you can bear that to like embalming fluid that we use nowadays, and

it's not all all that different. Not that I use embalming fluid to like clean the furniture in my house, but some people might Apparently they originally tried to make like liquid natron mixtures and they they did like experiments on animals, and they found that it just like totally disintegrated the animals from the inside out and just made this gory mess. So they decided not to use it

that way. Speaking of which, um Anna Maria Roso, who's an excellent article on the the global history of mummification which i'll link to on the landing page for this episode. She tells us that quote by the Middle Kingdom, a turpentine like oleo resin was also injected into the anus to dissolve the organs and to extract them. So there's another gory detail to take in mind when you think about,

especially a reanimate mummy. Yeah, and one of the iterations of that, uh, turpentine injected into the anus uh method. I guess that I read was that that was a lower class thing. Later on, like that ended up being like if you wanted the the economy model of mummification, that was kind of how it worked. But we'll get to that in a moment. So we're up to the twelfth century. Now, we're into the nineteen nineties, uhah, through around seventeen two v c. Again, just thinking about the

staggering chunks of history we're dealing with. Think how much our world has changed in um, you know, in in three or four hundred years, right, Yeah, So like when we're talking about these innovations, we're saying, like hundreds of years went by before they started the innovations we're about to talk about in the twelfth century as twelfth dynasty. Actually sorry, not twelfth century. Yeah. So during this period, you're seeing the heart left in place after the internal

organs were removed. Where I touched on some of that. The lids of the canopic jars are decorated with the heads of gods to protect the entrails. The body cavity is disinfected and stuffed with linen. More people were buried in anthropoid coffins, so coffins that look like humans on the outside, that sort of classic sarcophagus appearance. Fingernails are tied on to prevent them from just falling out. Wooden or clay models act as servants, and also you see

rock tombs gaining popularity espect among the wealthier classes. So all those things evolved over you know, the hundreds of years between the Eleventh Dynasty and the Twelfth dynasty. It's fascinating, you know, what how long certain things take and then

how short some things take two to be adapted. And like you're saying earlier, I guess it depends on who's in power and what they what they kind of want, right, Yeah, So then we eventually get into the New Kingdom era, this is fifteen seventy through ten seventy BC, and this is where we kind of see the peak, right, this is where we see these sort of standard ideal models

for mummification. Yeah. New Kingdom era is considered basically like the most representative of mummification practice over the three thousand years, the Catillac of mumification exactly because these are the ones that were the best preserved um. But again keep in mind, like this was over three thousand years, so this is not how necessarily the you know, the the Early Dynasty mummies would be made. But this is the standard mummification practice as we know it today from the New Kingdom era.

So we think, or at least Egyptologists think that these rituals were performed in an area that's called the Red Land, which is this desert region that wasn't particularly heavily populated, but was useful about it was that it had easy access to the Nile River, so they could use that for washing the bodies. Uh, and they would take the body to uh. It was called Ibou, the place of Purification,

and this is where they do the body washing. It symbolized a rebirth passing on from one world to the next. And once they cleaned it, that's when they brought it to the next part, which is the per Neffer, and that's called the house of beauty. You want to hit on that one, yes, So this is where we see a major change take place in our preparation of mummies. Um. In order to extract the brain, a metal chisel or

hook is inserted or hammered up through the nostril. Of these are dead parties, but just like and of course you have to break the bone to get it up through there, so there's like a crack, right uh, And then essentially you drag and scoop it all out. Right. Yeah, they like they use these long spoons. I guess that they would stick up through that cracked nostril and and

just scoop the whole thing out. Essentially. The idea is that they didn't know at the time what the brain was for, so they assumed that we wouldn't need it. It's probably something to tie to the sinuses, right exactly. Uh Well, like like you said earlier, the heart was far more important. I have to say. This is one of the reasons I like the Mummy segment and the tales from the Dark Side movie because the Mummy and

that ultimately is not treated all that well. You know, he's not particularly powerful, but he does get the drop on a human at one point and jab a code hanger up his nose and pull his brain. So it's one of the best mummy kills out there, that's not just straight up strangulation. Well, I'm surprised that he didn't also uh punch them in the kidneys, because apparently they

didn't think that the kidneys were very important either. They you know, like we talked about, they removed all the organs except for the kidneys because they just thought, well, we don't exactly know what these are for, the same as the brain, but they scooped those out. But all these organs were washed separately, coated and resin wrapped in a linen strips. Then they're putting those canopic jars. Uh. And the jars were almost always situated in some way

in the southeast corner of wherever the tomb was located. Um, I'm sure there's cosmological significance to that. Yeah, and they're yeah, they're on hand, but they're also they're not right up next to the body. And so after they do this, they've got the you know, scoop out the brain, get out the lower organs. Then they cut open the bodies

diaphragm and remove the lungs. They keep the heart. Why because the heart was considered the seed of the mind at the time, which I think is really interesting because like now in our modern culture, we think of the brain as being the seat of the mind, and we we very much think of it as being located in our head. Right. I wonder if there was a different kind of cultural thing of like the heart led forward, you know, lead the body forward. Uh, the posture was

better and yeah, possibly uh. And they rinsed out this empty cavity once you get all the organs out of there. Basically they wanted to purify it, so they used palm wine. I wonder if this is because of the bacteria like they thought the palm wine would maybe kill off the bacteria that was in there, not that they wouldn't understand. You know, it's it's sweet smelling and it it is strong, so yeah, you can see where there might be some

inkling of that. And then after they purified that, then they would pack it in with incense and there you go, maybe it is the smell because they put incense in there and other kind of packing materials and filled it back up so that you know, had appeared like it was naturally full again. And then you're stitching it all back together. You're closing in any incisions and just kind

of retiding the package, right. Yeah, and there's of course the the natron comes in here too, so you cover the entire body in this thick layer of natron from head to toe, and you let it sit for thirty five to forty days um. And this is so that

the body just dries completely before it's mummified. Uh. And in fact, like you know, it took so long, and grave robbery and and if scavenging animals were so common that they actually would set guards up outside of these embalming areas to make sure that the bodies weren't taken during this time. It's up to the family to get all the linen for the mummifications. So they've got to come up with something like four thousand square feet worth of linen to bring to the embalmers. In fact, the

wealthy sometimes use materials. They were clothes that were on sacred statues, so they would take these clothing off of statues and use that instead for their their wealthy dead relatives. Where Like if you were a lower class you just got like old clothes, hand me downs or like household linen's so I'm assuming it's just like dirty old rags from around the house. They bring those down alright, So

we're wrapping the body at this point. Bandaging takes a week or two um, and they start with the hands and the feet, individual fingers and toes, then limbs and

torso the head. They wrap it as a whole. The they coated in more hot resin to glue everything back in place, right because before this, like in order to keep everything in place, they basically plugged up every single orifice and pour with hot resin, right, and like so just you know, it's very easy to just say hot resin, but like my understanding, Like what resin is mainly used for today is like sculpting, right, Like it's a material that you used to make like certain kinds of statues.

So this isn't just like glue. This is like pretty heavy duty stuff that is uh coating, sticking everything together and plugging it all up. Yeah. Yeah, indeed, I often think of the money at this point. It's kind of like a like a yogurt covered raisin, you know, just really just seiling it all and um. And then you know, on top of that, you're adding additional decorations, right, perhaps a mask with you know, the likeness of of an Egyptian god even yeah, yeah, depending on you know, I

would assume the status of the person, right. The idea behind this was that the mask would help the person's spirit find their body in the tombs, because there's so many other bodies. So you know, if you get the jackal mask, then you're the you know, you know, like I'm I'm a big fan of jackal god. Anubis is the jackal okay, so uh so then you can locate your haunted spirit, can locate your body to get back in touch with it. Yeah, and and along those lines

through its ambulance are thrown in to aid um. Arms were originally placed in the side, though that ends up being changed to the more you know, stereotypical crossing of the arms on the body, and uh yeah, then you essentially it's time to put that body in the coffin and send it on its journey, right yeah. And so they called these coffins sue ht, which I had not heard before researching this. I always just thought of them

as sarcophagus, as the sarcophag guy, I guess. But they they've they've used these sue head coffins then brought it to a tomb where priests would perform this ritual called the Ceremony of the Mouth. And the idea here was that they were giving the five senses back to the dead in the afterlife by touching different sacred objects to the face that was on the sue heat coffin, you know, because it's carved in the shape of a person, and

they seal everything up after that. So it's the body is sealed up, it's putting side a coffin, it's putting side a tomb, and and you know, you get an idea for why there's so much I guess so many layers to this, right, because of scavenging animals or like as what we're gonna talk about later, grape robbery. Yes, so you want you want some measure of security there. Now here's the cheaper version. Okay. So if you're not royalty and you're not upper class, this is what you get.

The embalmers inject your body with this oil mixture. It sounds to me like the same thing that we were talking about earlier with the resin goes inside the torso cavity. So instead of taking all the organs out, you just fill it up with this oil. They plug up all the orifices and they just let this oil sitting there for a few days, and then they this is my terminology, they popped the corks. They let all that oil flow out of every orifice and it carries the liquefied internal

organs with it and then the modification process. So apparently the like the expensive part was taking out the organs and wrapping those all individually. It sounds kind of grim, but I guess if you do it every day, you get used to it. Like most things, right, yeah, I mean, I like, honestly from how I understand mortuary practice works today, it's probably not all that much more grim, you know,

Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. So after this point again it's it's reached its peak certainly by dynasty Um you your mommified, you game this doll like appearance, and then um, the third intermediate in a late period that's ten seventy to thirty b C. This is where we see, uh, the old ways are being abandoned and forgotten, decadent's inept embalming.

It's all leading to uh, less refined approaches. Yeah. So essentially, you know, as the culture changed, less attention was paid to the body's condition condition, and uh, embalming just went a lot faster, and subsequently it was more inept. So by the time Greeks arrived in Egypt, and like somewhere between seven forty two and seven thirty BC, rapid decomposition was happening again. There were either bodies were incompletely wrapped, so you know, it wasn't the function of the of

the form wasn't being met anymore. Uh, And then the Romans were by up until like three a d we're still using like narrow bandages, you know, wrapping bodies in them. But there wasn't anything as methodical as what we were talking about in the like real you know, height of modification in Egypt. Alright, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're gonna talk about what happens after these bodies are sent on their cosmic journey,

what happens when it's interrupted. All Right, we're back. So here's one of the things about about mummies that, as we mentioned earlier, Uh, they're invariably dug up, moved around, studied, taking apart, taking to museums across the world, and kind

of imprisoned in cultures completely alien to their own. And uh, and the thing is that the grave robbing was always a problem, like even from in the ancient days, because you'd have these bodies that were buried with some degree of valuables, and they're going to be people around who want to take advantage of that, to the point that that often the assistants of the builders themselves who are building these tombs are the ones that are involved in

the theft. Yeah, it's like an inside job type thing, like they sort of either themselves were doing it or they were informing other I guess like bandits or something. On unwhere to break in which tombs in particular held

the greatest amounts of wealth. Yeah. Rosso goes into some detail on this in her work that I mentioned earlier, and Um as an example of this, who points out that during the Ramesses, the the elevenths reign, forty five workmen in the royal and necropolis were arrested and portraited and after confessing, brought to trial and thirty eight of them were sentenced to death for grave robbing. Yeah. Um,

And there are various other accounts here. I don't know if we want to go into too many of them, but but basically, when we look back at at the writings, uh, there there are various rebellions that result in poor people smashing open royal tombs. You you also see the tendency later on for um individuals to engage in a cycle of grave robbing. So we're in some cases you have tombs that were looted and then used again for burial

by new people, then looted again. So again, just think of those vast the vast period of time we're talking about here, and all the various upheavals and ins and outs that are gonna occur and What this I think says to me is that there were while this idea of making the dead comfortable and it being a sacred practice was practiced by some, there were certainly other people who were more interested in the material wealth of the living.

Of though, yeah, there of their current circumstances, and so that's why you had a lot of these break ins. But you know, this is what led to them moving bodies to hidden places or rewrapping them, restoring damage that was done to them. There's all kinds of of mummification practices that came out of how prevalent the grave robbing was. And of course the worst grave robbers of all. Oh yes, well, of course uh came from became in the form of

colonial influences. Um. Yeah. The nineteenth century especially was the time of just immense plundering by European treasure hunters, fueled by the genuine interest in Egyptology. I mean some of the individuals involved in this were, for instance, uh, William Flinders Petrie, Uh really the father of modern egyptology, but he deluded tons of artifacts. So you know, it's like the two movements are are combined here and then back at home in Europe, you have all of this interest

in anything Oriental. So so that's fueling the need for this since one of the reasons you find again Egyptian obilists in New York and lined it in Paris, and you find all these cultural treasures to spread across inter

national museums. And at the same time you have egypt modernizing ruler Muhammad Ali, who was actually an Ottoman Albanian um and he created a dynasty that ruled until the nineteen fifty two revolution, and he was all too willing to give up these various artifacts in order to ingratiate himself to these imperial and colonial powers. Just like imagine that, like uh uh like some we're in the middle of

a presidential psych all right. Now, let's say let's say Donald Trump gets elected and Donald Trump says, you know what, like, I think it's okay if all of Europe and uh, let's let's let Asia have them too. They can dig up all of our graves, of all of our loved ones and just take their bodies and put them in museums or or traveling side shows you guys cool, that it doesn't matter if you're cool, that we're going to do it. Yeah, yeah, And the thing is too that

I mentioned that revolution, it wasn't ntil around. It wasn't until around that period of the Egyptian government began to actually restrict treasure hunters, limiting on them only to only fifty of the artifacts that they found. And it wasn't until the late nineteen eighties that that Egypt really cracked down on this sort of behavior in a very meaningful way.

So I guess this is something to think about the next time we're at the museum and we're looking at this stuff, and there's one part of me that's like, I'm really glad that this is here and we have access to it and we're able to sort of see the history here right in this location, and there's another part of me that feels guilty about it and thinks, well, you know, maybe the stuff should be back at home where it was initially intended to be. Um. If you want to go see it, go to Egypt. Yeah, And

I mean it's definite. There's definitely been a movement in over the past a few decades to see about the return of these objects, and it's just kind of an ongoing issue. UM. And this is where, like we were talking about earlier that pop culture guilt comes from and the curse of the Mummy, right, that the mummy is going to come out and kill everybody who is responsible for bringing its body away from its origin site. Yeah, and and there's certainly some individuals out there who who

deserve a little wrap. And the thing is, it's one thing to look at, you know, Egyptologists who are running off with the with this stuff. But then from the from the twelfth century b c. Onwards, so again for a pretty long period of time, you see a lot of mistreatment of of mummies in the Middle East and especially in Europe. And so this is not just people saying, oh, this is cool, I want to study this, or I want to take this bit of art attached to it

and display it somewhere. You see preserve corpses destroyed for mere sport um. You also see them used as kindling for fire, and most shocking of all, uh and rather morbidly entertainingly of all, uh, thousands of mummies end up perishing in apothecaries corpse grinders for use in medicine. Right, So I mean all of these things kind of show

you where the cultures, priorities headed, where they where they changed. Yeah. Yeah, And the weird thing about this is that you have uh from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries Europeans who are engaging in medicinal cannibalism through then assumption of of medicines derived from mummy powder. This is like we we we just did an episode on wolf Spain. This is like yet another like kind of classic monster from the

universal era that uh is medicinal in origin somehow. Yeah, though ultimately as UH, as I'll explain um, completely useless. They used they used it supposedly to treat and thinking they were treating everything from headache, headaches to a rectile dysfunction and stomach ulcers and tumors. So they drank it in tinctures, they mixed it into salves. Uh I I you know, maybe they might have even used it into

positories for all I know. But but yeah, they're they're they're in taking they're consuming this powder and it all hinges on bitumen, the world's first petroleum product. Really, it's a sticky, black, viscous substance. You probably know it better is asphalt. But it was highly prized in the ancient world and for the longest it was primarily a Mesopotamian monopoly.

The substance saw use in various endeavors, including boat calking, art causa cosmetics, but physicians in the region eventually used it to treat a number of ailments and um and word of these ailments eventually spread to Europe. But how you're gonna obtain this stuff if you don't have access to Mesopotamian bitamin deposits? Well, word had it at the time that the ancient Egyptians used bitumen as a preservative in their mummies. And you're probably thinking, well, I don't

remember you guys mentioning vitamin earlier. There's a reason, um. But it ends up becoming so pervasive that even the word mummy comes from the Persian word for wax movia used to describe bitumin. Yet, while the Egyptians used bitumen occasionally for from from about UH eleven hundred CE onward, they largely used resins in the oils in their in their mortuary practices. But the Europeans didn't know this. Uh So their movia based medicines contained equal parts magic, goal

thinking and placebo effect. The treatments seemed to work, so they just continued grinding up the corpses, and when mummies were scarce, contemporary cadavers were actually dried and pulverized to produce an imitation product that you could sell off, and it just keeps going to practice doesn't fall away until the eighteenth century, and actual vitamin still sees limited use in modern Iran as a skin treatment. But again that's actual bitumin and not this this ground up mummies, which

obtained probably none of it. So, like to put it in perspective, you know, we're looking back on the practice of mummification during Egyptian times and going, oh, that's kind of alien and weird, and we're fascinated with it, and you know, human history changes over time. And yet like not two centuries ago, we were grinding up those bodies essentially so that we could digest asphalt because we thought that that was going to be healthy for us. Yeah,

ground up mummies was essentially the pumpkin spice latte to day. Yeah. So I mean, like we're not all that much more advanced than we like to think we are. You know, I'm sure like there's gonna be things from from modern time today that a couple hundred years from now people are going to look back and be like, I can't believe that they thought like, uh, but like ginko or something, and who knows what not that I'm denigrating the use

of ginko. I certainly have had more than one drink with that in it, but you know what I mean, like start adding it to beers I think, right, or or or other kind of supplements. And then eventually society goes, what are we doing? What were we doing? What was that ginko thing about? Why were we so crazy about about palm like kale someone mbucha? But of course, uh, you know, the whole eating of mummies, essentially, the medicinal cannibalism of mummies is one thing. Um, just just the curiosity,

just the the exploration. Uh. And and the the rise of Egyptology saw you know, all sorts of early unwrappings, unwrapping parties, you know, up artifacts that are destroyed. And on top of this, there's a you know, there's a boom, there's a demand for artifacts. So you have, uh, you have local dealers in Egypt that are breaking up artifacts

into multiple parts. They're placing a mummy from one time period in an unrelated casket from another and then they're selling that, so it becomes you're destroying the artifacts to learn about them, but then also the market for them is making it harder to study them because of the stuff that's mismatched. You know, this is a lot like

palam cests. When we talked about palam sests earlier, Like when they first started examining those, they're pouring acid on it and scraping them with knives and things like that, and now they're using you know, technology to preserve them but also examine them. It sounds like that's kind of the same history of dissecting mummies. I suppose, yeah exactly. I mean, you open an ancient text and you risk the pages disintegrating it. Same thing happens when you unwrap

a mumm. You're exposing stuff to air that haven't been exposed in in in thousands of years, and you can just crumble. Fortunately, today we have a number of techniques that allow us to take apart the mummy without actually taking it apart right, various radiographic techniques that that enable

non destructive studies of these mummified remains. Interestingly enough, the pioneer on some of these was uh was Flinders Petrie in eight who again was involved in a lot of some of the more destructive aspects of Egyptology at the time, but you know he and to his credit, he also helped pave the way for UH some of the tools we have today, such as X rays, endoscopic techniques UM, which I think the Egyptians would have appreciated based on their their interests UM as well as you know the

use of stable isotopes, trace metals, DNA, carbon dating, uh CT scanning is is very interesting. So this is where you use X ray computed tomography. This is a computer combines multiple X rays from different angles and creates a cross section and he's sort of like a three D scanner. Yeah, you can you create this this three D cross section of the body. And this has been used to to make a number of different discoveries about existing and newly

discovered mummies. But one example that I love is a This is a two thousand twelve study where they used a CT to scan a year old female money and they were revealed a tubular object embedded in its skull between the brains, left parietal bone at and the resin filled back of the skull. And it turned out that it was a tool used for the removal of the brain. And it wasn't an iron hook as we mentioned earlier and as Herodotus wrote about, but it was just a

wooden stick. So this was this was an economics version of the mummification process. It just got accidentally left it there. Yeah. I guess they realized occasionally you're just gonna lose it too off there, and you could you could dig it out, but you might as well leave it because who's the mommy going to come back? And right, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, you know, again thinking about the comfort of these mummies. You know, they wake up and they've they've got wooden

tools shoved up their nose, their brains gone. That's would I wager it wouldn't be all that comfortable. Hence the mythos of the mummies coming back angry. And you know, finally, one of another great thing to come out of this is despite all of the destruction of the artifacts, destruction destruction of mummies over the years, the pilfering of the tombs um, we continue to unearthed mummies um mummies. Uh that that early Egyptologists, ancient grave robbers in Victorian ghoules

haven't had a chance to pilfer. Just one example is the Valley of the Golden Mummies discovered in nine see by an Egyptian archaeology team. They on earth two hundred and fifty mummies and they estimate another ten thousand. So again, you just have a practice of mummifying the dead for thousands of years, You're gonna amass a lot of specimens. Sure, I'm sure that there's plenty of mummies to go around

for this kind of thing. I guess the question really is like whether or not we should be removing them, or if we're removing them, should we be removing them from Egypt? You know, maybe maybe they maybe preserve the traditions in some way, but also make them available for the public. Yeah, it seems like it's been it's been kind of enough of a stuff step for us, a big enough step for us to to not just pill for a culture's heritage. But then at what point do we also have to say, how do you how do

you treat the ancient dead? Should the ancient dead be treated more respectfully than we're doing now? To what extent is that being done already? Uh? In in modern archaeological surveys of ancient tunes. Well, I'd be curious to hear from uh, you know, our listeners out there that are involved in UM, you know, archaeology or or other disciplines that are connected to this UM. You know, what are the modern practices or what's what's the Surely there have

to be journal articles about the ethics on this. Uh. And and as that turned into some kind of a debate within the community, Yeah that that that could be an entire episode onto itself, right, Yeah, definitely. Well, UM, if you have, you know, information like that, or if there's something about Egyptian mummies that we missed today, you know, let us know. UM. As we said at the top,

you can reach out to us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler can write to us there, tweet at us, send us a message, all those all those things depending on what your medium of choices. Yeah, and of course stuff with all your mind. Dot com is the mothership that we find all the podcast, all

the blog post, all the videos. Uh. And you know, we've had a number of pieces of content over the years related to Egyptology, different blog posts that I wrote about either something that's purely cosmological in nature or something you know tied to more the folklore or or or even archaeology itself, So check those out. I'll link to some related material on the landing page for this episode. Certainly are Monster Science episode. Oh yes, that'll definitely be

in there. And again, we're going to be experimenting the periscope at the end of October, so you know, if you've got some listener mail that you want us to to read, uh, send it in. Potentially will be able to read it during one of those periscope airings or or or suppose the way periscope works, you could you could write into us right there actually like communicate with us while we're streaming. Yeah, it's gonna be a learning

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