| The Egyptians dreaded the thought that one day their world
might cease to exist. From their belief in the power of magic, they
developed a funerary cult which, in their eyes, ensured their survival
forever. This involved preserving the body to the Beautiful House,
where they worked. They made a cut in the left side of the body with
a flint knife and removed the liver and lungs. There were dried out
and stored in special vessels called canopic jars. (shown at right) |
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The brain was also removed, but the heart was left in the
body to be weighed in the afterlife. Then the body was covered with
crystals of a substance called natron, which kept it from decaying, packed
with dry material like leaves or sawdust, wrapped in linen bandages. |
| The final stage in the embalming process was to put the body
into its coffin. For a rich person, this could be an elaborate
container made of several different, richly decorated layers. The
body would then be well preserved and, as far as the Egyptians were
concerned, would last forever. They thought that after a person's
physical death a number of elements lived on. The most important was
a person's Ka, which they thought of as the body's double and which could
bring the corpse back to life. |
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Another spirit that survived was a person's Ba, which
had the head of the deceased and the body of a hawk. The Egyptions
name had an eternal existence. The process of mummification was
intended to make an everlasting body out of a corpse and to provide the Ka
with a home in the afterlife. The superbly preserved bodies that
have been found in Egyption tombs show how successful the embalmers were. |
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