Why egyptians mummified their dead

Anubis Mask This is the step-by-step process of how mummification took place:. If the person had been a Pharaoh, he would be placed inside his special burial chamber with lots of treasure! Embalming tips. Egyptian Pottery Jar.

Embalming was just one step in the careful process of preserving a body. The key steps of mummification were:. He added: "The afterlife was just a continuation of enjoying life. But they needed the body to be preserved in order for the spirit to have a place to reside. Follow Victoria on Twitter. Egyptian mummy's secrets revealed. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. So the basic recipe was:. How did scientists find the recipe?

Fabrics used to wrap Egyptian mummies provided the foundation for this study of ancient chemistry. Perhaps the most well-known rituals belong to the ancient Egyptians, who kept corpses intact through a process called mummification.

In fact, the procedure was so successful that we still can view the mummified body of an Egyptian today, over 3, years after their death, and get a good picture of what they looked like. Ancient Egyptians loved life and believed in immortality.

This motivated them to make early plans for their death. While this may seem contradictory, for Egyptians, it made perfect sense: They believed that life would continue after death and that they would still need their physical bodies. Thus, preserving bodies in as lifelike a way as possible was the goal of mummification, and essential to the continuation of life. The Egyptians believed that the mummified body housed one's soul or spirit. If the body was destroyed, the spirit could be lost and not make its entrance into the afterlife.

This is also why tomb preparation was a crucial ritual in Egyptian society. Though the practice of mummification began in Egypt around B. These attitudes slowly shifted around B. A study on the materials used during the mummification procedure in ancient Egypt revealed that the process took 70 days.

During this time, priests worked as embalmers and performed rituals and prayers in addition to treating and wrapping the body. The general steps involved in the mummification process are as follows: First, internal body parts that could decay, such as the brain, are removed. The next step involved removing all the moisture from the body by covering the body with natron , a type of salt that acted as a preservative and drying agent.

Wrapping up the corpse was the last step in the procedure and involved more than a hundred yards of linen, smeared over with gum.