I've been spending the past few nights discussing mummies in various aspects, but I haven't actually discussed the process. Now let me preface. When I say process, I mean artificial process, by which Egyptians (specifically Egyptians because of the relevance to Night at the Museum, but other cultures made mummies, as well) mummified their dead. The Egyptians started by burying their dead in pits in the desert, and the heat and dryness of the environment would naturally preserve them. However, once they started to place the dead in coffins to protect them from desert-living scavengers, they found that the bodies rotted. Then someone got the bright idea to combine the best of the two methods, and the actual process of mummification was born.
"True mummification" is a process where a body is gutted and soaked in embalming salts for a set period. The corpse is tended by priests trained in the art. After the body is dried out, it is coated in resin, minerals, and oils and wrapped in yards and yards and yards and yards of linen. Each body part was wrapped individually, culminating in the whole thing being wrapped. Charms and other items would be placed in the wrappings for the protection of the corpse and the soul during its journey to the underworld, and finally the body was placed in a sarcophagus. Originally this was the pharaoh's burial because it was so expensive, but once the priests got good at it, anyone could be mummified and placed in an ornately decorated box covered with hieroglyphs. (Factoid #3: one of the steps in the process of gutting the body was to turn the brain to mush and drain it out through the nose. However, the heart was left intact because it was believed that was where the soul resided, and the heart was thus the object to be weighed in the judgement of the dead.)
The idea of preserving the body had chiefly religious purposes, rather than ones relating to pathology and microbes. They knew a body was desiccated after some time in a coffin or left to animals to scavenge, but they believed that the body was necessary to the soul's survival in the underworld (some versions go that one part of the soul, called the ba, needed to recharge nightly and resided in the body to do so, which may have helped inspire the method by which the tablet works) and therefore it needed to be preserved. Thus, mummification. The soul also needed protection against the various dangers of the underworld, everything from terrifying knife-headed demons to the snake creature of chaos himself, so charms were not only wrapped up with the body, they were written all over the tomb and later buried with the body in the world-famous Book of the Dead. A lot of effort went into protecting the body, and it is correlated to the ancient Egyptians' also-world-famous, exceedingly elaborate conception of the underworld and life after death.
I could write a book about this subject, and enjoy myself immensely, but the long and the short of it is there was an elaborate (sometimes 70-day) process which went into preserving a dead person in ancient Egypt, and it was done for religious reasons more often than not (or that's what they want you to think, but we can talk conspiracy theories another time).
Next on "For the Love of Night at the Museum": Getting back to the matter at hand: Ahkmenrah.
Countdown: 308 Days to NATM 3.
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