Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 31

If you got a job preparing wealthy and royal Egyptians for the afterlife, how would you go about it? Here’s the how-to:

1 To remove the brain, stick a long, narrow bronze probe up one nostril, breaking through the sinus bone into the cranial cavity. Wiggle the tool vigorously, breaking down the tissue until it’s the consistency of raw egg. Turn the corpse over to drain the liquefied brain through the nostril. Return the body to a face-up position. Use a funnel to pour boiling-hot tree resin into the cranium to halt decomposition of remaining tissue.

2 Extract the internal organs through a slit in the abdomen wall. (You’ll have to reach in with a sharp knife and feel around for them.) Wait! Leave the heart. Egyptians considered the heart to be the control center for thought and action, so they figured they’d need it in the afterlife. What to do with the other organs? Put them in jars decorated with the heads of gods or a likeness of the departed. The jars go in the tomb with the mummy.

3 Bathe the body in spices and palm wine. Cover it with natron salts, a sodium paste found in drying lakebeds, to retard spoilage and dry the skin.

4 When the body is good and dry, stuff rolled-up linen cloths inside, kind of like stuffing a turkey. Try to restore the person’s shape to something resembling lifelike.

5 Wrap more linen, cut into neat strips, around the outside of the body to create that creepy, bandaged look that will scare the pants off moviegoers a few millennia later.

6 Put the body in a coffin, preferably a double coffin (one inside another). If you’re working on a pharaoh, put the coffin inside a stone sarcophagus inside a hidden tomb.