Egyptian Mummies: A Cosmic, Mortuary Odyssey

Ancient Egyptian mummification is not unlike sci-fi space travel in many respects. The leading minds of the day preserved a chosen human within a costly vessel, and then they sent that vessel on a journey across time and space to another world -- a dangerous and uncertain world inhabited by monsters and alien entities. Join Robert and Christian as they explore the cosmology and process of Egyptian mummification, as well as the actual alien entities these necronauts encountered: grave robbers, Victorian ghouls and the probing curiosity of modern science.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. Hey, I'm Christian Sager. So
before we get into today's topic, which is again like
another one of our great October kind of monster themed one,

(00:24):
let's talk about a few upcoming things for the show.
We have, First of all, Periscope. If you're not familiar
with that, it's a live streaming video app that's connected
to Twitter, and we're gonna do a little experiment with
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

(00:46):
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

(01:08):
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,

(01:29):
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.

(01:50):
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

(02:11):
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

(02:32):
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

(02:56):
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,

(03:19):
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,

(03:40):
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

(04:01):
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

(04:24):
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

(04:46):
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

(05:10):
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

(05:31):
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,

(05:53):
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

(06:14):
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,

(06:35):
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

(06:57):
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

(07:20):
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

(07:41):
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

(08:03):
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

(08:25):
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

(08:47):
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

(09:10):
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

(09:30):
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

(09:52):
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,

(10:13):
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

(10:34):
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

(10:58):
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

(11:20):
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,

(11:44):
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,

(12:07):
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,

(12:28):
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

(12:49):
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,

(13:13):
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

(13:35):
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,

(13:59):
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

(14:20):
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

(14:42):
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

(15:05):
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

(15:28):
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

(15:53):
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

(16:14):
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

(16:38):
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

(17:00):
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

(17:23):
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,

(17:46):
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

(18:07):
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

(18:29):
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

(18:51):
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

(19:14):
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

(19:37):
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,

(19:57):
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

(20:18):
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,

(20:43):
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

(21:05):
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

(21:26):
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

(21:49):
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,

(22:11):
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

(22:31):
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

(22:54):
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

(23:17):
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

(23:39):
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

(24:01):
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,

(24:21):
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

(24:42):
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

(25:02):
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

(25:25):
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,

(25:48):
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

(26:08):
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

(26:32):
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

(26:54):
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

(27:18):
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

(27:42):
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

(28:04):
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

(28:26):
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

(28:48):
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

(29:09):
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,

(29:32):
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

(29:54):
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

(30:16):
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

(30:36):
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

(30:57):
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.

(31:17):
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

(31:38):
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

(31:59):
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

(32:22):
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

(32:43):
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

(33:03):
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

(33:26):
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,

(33:51):
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

(34:13):
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

(34:34):
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

(34:57):
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

(35:17):
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

(35:37):
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

(36:00):
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

(36:22):
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

(36:43):
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

(37:04):
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.

(37:28):
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

(37:48):
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,

(38:12):
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,

(38:34):
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

(38:56):
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

(39:19):
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

(39:39):
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

(40:04):
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

(40:25):
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

(40:48):
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

(41:11):
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

(41:31):
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

(41:53):
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

(42:15):
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

(42:37):
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

(42:57):
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

(43:18):
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

(43:40):
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.

(44:00):
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

(44:21):
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,

(44:42):
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

(45:03):
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

(45:23):
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

(45:46):
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

(46:07):
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

(46:28):
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

(46:49):
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

(47:10):
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

(47:33):
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

(47:53):
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

(48:15):
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

(48:37):
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,

(48:58):
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

(49:21):
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

(49:42):
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

(50:05):
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

(50:26):
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

(50:50):
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

(51:12):
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

(51:33):
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

(51:53):
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,

(52:16):
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

(52:36):
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

(52:56):
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,

(53:16):
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

(53:38):
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.

(53:59):
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

(54:20):
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

(54:41):
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

(55:03):
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

(55:25):
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

(55:48):
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

(56:10):
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,

(56:31):
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

(56:54):
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

(57:16):
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

(57:39):
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

(58:00):
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

(58:21):
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

(58:45):
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

(59:07):
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

(59:29):
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

(59:51):
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

(01:00:13):
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

(01:00:36):
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,

(01:00:58):
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

(01:01:19):
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

(01:01:40):
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

(01:02:02):
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,

(01:02:24):
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

(01:02:47):
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

(01:03:10):
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
experience for all. And the way to reach us through
that method is at our email address, which is blow
the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more

(01:03:33):
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
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