Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb. Hey, I'm Christian Sager. So
Speaker 1: before we get into today's topic, which is again like
Speaker 1: another one of our great October kind of monster themed one,
Speaker 1: let's talk about a few upcoming things for the show.
Speaker 1: We have, First of all, Periscope. If you're not familiar
Speaker 1: with that, it's a live streaming video app that's connected
Speaker 1: to Twitter, and we're gonna do a little experiment with
Speaker 1: it starting on October twenty three, which is a Friday. Joe,
Speaker 1: Robert and I are going to use Periscope to start
Speaker 1: addressing some of our listener mail. We've just been getting
Speaker 1: a ton of listener mail lately and didn't really feel
Speaker 1: like we could address all of it in one quarterly podcast,
Speaker 1: so we thought, why don't we try this periscope thing out.
Speaker 1: Some of our colleagues here at How Stuff Works are
Speaker 1: using it, and so if you want to check that out,
Speaker 1: allow us on social media and you'll you know, we'll
Speaker 1: be broadcasting it far and wide to let you know
Speaker 1: what time it's going to be available. The other thing
Speaker 1: is that because it's October and it's monster time. We
Speaker 1: are bringing back our video series Monster Science, and I
Speaker 1: say ours, but it's really yours. Robert. I wasn't involved
Speaker 1: with the show the first two seasons that these were created,
Speaker 1: and the the new episodes have been shot, and I'm
Speaker 1: just I'm really looking forward to it because Monster Science
Speaker 1: is one of my favorite things that's ever been done here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of fun to put together. It's kind
Speaker 1: of if you're not seeing it before anybody out there.
Speaker 1: It's basically like a daytime horror host from the nineties, uh,
Speaker 1: comparing fictional monsters to real world organism. Yeah, you guys
Speaker 1: have episodes on everything from Cathulhu and Jason Vorhees too.
Speaker 1: There's actually a Mummies episode right there, and the Mummy episode.
Speaker 1: All those episodes already exist on our YouTube channel and
Speaker 1: on stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. But if
Speaker 1: you're following us on face Book, tomorrow, we're going to
Speaker 1: be posting it right to Facebook, so you'll be able
Speaker 1: to watch it on our our Facebook page there, so
Speaker 1: um so to get in touch with us on all
Speaker 1: those social things, like if you want to follow us
Speaker 1: on Periscope or see these videos make sure that you
Speaker 1: check us out on whatever your social media channel of choices.
Speaker 1: We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler, all those we used
Speaker 1: they handle blow the mind. There's of course the Mothership's
Speaker 1: stuff to blow your mind dot com and our YouTube
Speaker 1: channel as well. All right, So on that note, let
Speaker 1: us dive into the world of the money, particularly the
Speaker 1: Egyptian mummy. Um. There are various mummification traditions throughout the world,
Speaker 1: and many of them are just so fascinating. But there's
Speaker 1: more than enough to talk about with just Egyptian mommy.
Speaker 1: It's an incredibly deep topic. And yeah, I think so
Speaker 1: we're gonna we decided to specifically focus on the Egyptian
Speaker 1: process and mythology here in today's episode. Uh. If there's
Speaker 1: enough interest, let us know, uh, and we will go
Speaker 1: on and do another episode on all the other variations
Speaker 1: because one of the things that I found that was
Speaker 1: interesting was apparently it was being done in the America's
Speaker 1: even before it was being done in Egypt. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: believe one of the oldest hair samples that we have
Speaker 1: comes from a Central American mummy. So yeah, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: so yeah, if you want to hear about self mummifying,
Speaker 1: monks in in Asia. Let us know. Uh, that's something
Speaker 1: we can discuss. Do you want to hear about bog people?
Speaker 1: That can be another episode, But for this episode, there's
Speaker 1: there's so much about Egyptian mummies that that we will
Speaker 1: be struggling to fit enough into one episode here today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they're really pervasive. I think when you know, in
Speaker 1: Western culture, at least, when we think mummies are mummification,
Speaker 1: everybody goes for the Egyptian one, mainly because, uh, it's
Speaker 1: popularity in films and other media, right, like the Curse
Speaker 1: of a Mummy or or something like that. Well, even
Speaker 1: in children's books. And this is something that I've really
Speaker 1: come on too in the last few years. Uh with
Speaker 1: the with the Sun, is that that mummies pop up
Speaker 1: in books all the time. Yeah, my son has a
Speaker 1: book where like a skeleton is going trick or treating
Speaker 1: and it is chased by a mummy. Of course. Maurice
Speaker 1: Sindac had a had a wonderful pop up book that
Speaker 1: has a mummy in it. And in both of those
Speaker 1: you see this, uh this trope employee that you also
Speaker 1: encounter and other bits of mummy media where of course
Speaker 1: you grab hold of the wrapping and you pull the
Speaker 1: wrapping and then the mummy spins around like a top
Speaker 1: and the Monster Squad the way to take out a mommy.
Speaker 1: That's that's how they did it in a Monster Squad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: one of my favorite movies when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: and it's it's currently streaming on Netflix. I was able
Speaker 1: to catch it again recently. But yeah, they they like
Speaker 1: tie the bandage to an arrow, shoot it into a tree,
Speaker 1: and the mummy is like hanging onto the back of
Speaker 1: their car and slowly unravels. It turns out there was
Speaker 1: nothing there except for a skull the whole time, which
Speaker 1: on one level I was always disappointed with in Monster
Speaker 1: Squad because the mommy is clearly cooler looking than what
Speaker 1: they do with him. But I can see where the
Speaker 1: trope is attractive, particularly in children's literature, because you have
Speaker 1: this threatening but easily unwound creature, right, this this threat
Speaker 1: that is easily dismissed but still visually impressed. Well, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go out on a limb here. As a
Speaker 1: horror fan, I've never found mummies to be scary or
Speaker 1: to make much sense. In fact, like I always thought
Speaker 1: of mummies as being like the kind of like they
Speaker 1: would be the the monster that like makes friends with you,
Speaker 1: right like the way Frankenstein does in Monster Squad. I
Speaker 1: just especially from when when you look at like the
Speaker 1: actual process, the science behind it, and the history in
Speaker 1: Egyptian culture. Where does this idea of mummies as like
Speaker 1: these evil monsters that are going to kill us come from? Well, I,
Speaker 1: for for my own part, I find that it makes
Speaker 1: more sense if you think about it in terms of
Speaker 1: the Egyptian mummy as a as a traveler across spot
Speaker 1: time and space. Okay, so um, and we'll get into
Speaker 1: more into the cosmology here shortly. But essentially, you have
Speaker 1: this individual who is leaving our world through the gates
Speaker 1: of death, traveling to another world and in another world
Speaker 1: where uh, nothing is guaranteed. It's not just like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're going to Egyptian heaven. Now you're going to an
Speaker 1: Egyptian afterlife that's rife with danger. You're gonna need supplies,
Speaker 1: you're gonna need some some servants, you're gonna need you know,
Speaker 1: some spells to protect you. So it's a dangerous journey,
Speaker 1: not unlike say sending um colonists like frozen colonists on
Speaker 1: a spaceship, generation ship, you know, across the cosmos to
Speaker 1: another world. And then what it happens if you wake
Speaker 1: up halfway through because some dumb museum dude has decided
Speaker 1: that he wants to put you on display. You're gonna
Speaker 1: be angry, You're gonna be a little confused, and you
Speaker 1: might not be in the best physical condition. So you're
Speaker 1: gonna tell some people. That's where it always seems to
Speaker 1: come from, right is the idea? It seems like even
Speaker 1: as we are doing it, we as Westerners, seem to
Speaker 1: acknowledge that the idea of us taking these bodies and
Speaker 1: these sacred objects from their sites and taking them on
Speaker 1: a tour, popping them in a museum somewhere is inherently
Speaker 1: wrong and that we must be punished for doing so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is there, and I'm surely somebody has written at
Speaker 1: length on this, to what extent has the Mummy. This
Speaker 1: is a monster, an externalization of our own inner guilt,
Speaker 1: having really just ripped pieces of this culture apart and
Speaker 1: spread it across the world. Because you see, you see
Speaker 1: obelisks from ancient Egypt in Paris and in London, in
Speaker 1: New York, and of course museum items and museums around
Speaker 1: the world. Pilford from Egypt. Yeah, I mean there was
Speaker 1: just a tour that was here like a year or
Speaker 1: two ago. I think that was like, um, you know
Speaker 1: a two ring showcase of of mummies that that goes
Speaker 1: from one city to another and sets up shop and
Speaker 1: you know, it's there for six months and you can
Speaker 1: go and see it and then it's gone, it moves
Speaker 1: on to the next city. I um, I mean this
Speaker 1: is something I don't know about you, but like I
Speaker 1: always grew up like going on school trips to museums,
Speaker 1: and the mummy was always the big thing, right, Like
Speaker 1: going getting to see a mummy or like it's sarcophagus
Speaker 1: or something like that was always like that was the
Speaker 1: coolest part of the trip. But now as an adult,
Speaker 1: I look back on it and I'm like, wow, that
Speaker 1: that's like imagine if somebody like dug up my grandfather,
Speaker 1: like a couple of hundred years from now and just
Speaker 1: put his coffin on display for kindergarteners run past. This
Speaker 1: is very strange, it is, yeah, and I certainly agree.
Speaker 1: I remember looking forward to seeing the mummy at the
Speaker 1: Major Museum in Nashville when when I would when school
Speaker 1: groups up there would I would go to visit. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, now it just feels a little weird. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: let's let's nail this down. What exactly is the mummy?
Speaker 1: I think we all have ideas of how it works,
Speaker 1: and of course we have many of us have that
Speaker 1: same experience of going to the museum and reading the
Speaker 1: paragraph that's inscribed next to the actual case that but
Speaker 1: I don't really think that gives you enough context. So
Speaker 1: a mummy is simply a human being whose soft tissue
Speaker 1: has been preserved after death. So normally, of course, decomposition
Speaker 1: takes place and reduces the body to a skeleton in
Speaker 1: a matter of months. Uh. And the rate of decompetition.
Speaker 1: Decomposition is dependent on a number of environmental factors. It's
Speaker 1: gonna if you're in a humid environment, it's gonna go
Speaker 1: a lot faster. The dryer, colder environment is gonna go
Speaker 1: a lot slower. And there's a sort of like procedure
Speaker 1: for decomposition, right. It starts with autolysis, which is when
Speaker 1: you know your organs basically the digestive enzymes inside them,
Speaker 1: like your intestines, they start digesting themselves. Right, there's no
Speaker 1: more food coming in, So your body starts or the
Speaker 1: bacteria inside of it at least starts eating you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: society just falls apart in the basically, then you have putrification,
Speaker 1: the breakdown of organic matter by bacteria. This sets in
Speaker 1: about three days after death and just eats everything away
Speaker 1: in a matter of months. And it's going to be
Speaker 1: accelerated in human environments due to rapid bacterial reproduction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then and so again, like we talked about, environment
Speaker 1: plays a big deal here. So if conditions are cold
Speaker 1: enough or dry enough, these are all the things that
Speaker 1: that aren't they they're so harsh to bacteria that they
Speaker 1: can't survive if they don't have any oxygen, for instance.
Speaker 1: That's another one. So in those cases, the body does
Speaker 1: not fully decompose, and it takes thousands of years for
Speaker 1: this process to slow down in it and it uh
Speaker 1: desiccate in a very different way than what we're used to.
Speaker 1: And that's sort of where this Egyptian mummification practice came
Speaker 1: in because of the environmental factors that were available to
Speaker 1: them there. Yeah, so mummification can be a matter of
Speaker 1: just falling into a glacier, into a peat bog dying
Speaker 1: in a desert and becoming covered with sand, or it's
Speaker 1: due to funeral design, it's uh, it's due to various
Speaker 1: embalming traditions that popped up throughout human history. And I
Speaker 1: want to quickly mention that old hair sample that I
Speaker 1: was talking about earlier, that was from a nine thousand
Speaker 1: year old Chilean mummy. Wow, okay, And for a while
Speaker 1: that was the like the oldest hair sample that we had.
Speaker 1: But in two thousand nine, archaeologists happened upon the oldest
Speaker 1: human hair has ever found at at that point, and
Speaker 1: they found in a pile of fossilized hyena poop, and
Speaker 1: that was between one thousand and two hundred fifty seven
Speaker 1: thousand years old. So somebody was eaten by a hyena
Speaker 1: presumably and and their hair bed in. So in a sense,
Speaker 1: hyna poop is its own form, it's own kind of mummy. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: So that is just taste of some of the things
Speaker 1: we could bring you if you on an episode on
Speaker 1: non Egyptian mummies. But let's focus on the cosmology of
Speaker 1: the Egyptian mummies. So what is the the religious significance,
Speaker 1: what's the mythos around this that that brought Egyptian culture
Speaker 1: into spending so much ornate fascination on embalming they're dead. Well,
Speaker 1: first of all, I do I don't want to clarify
Speaker 1: that when you're talking about Egyptian cosmology, you're talking about
Speaker 1: a long period of time, and of course, uh, traditions
Speaker 1: and faith evolves over time, and sometimes you have a
Speaker 1: pesky pharaoh that comes along and says, hey, we're not
Speaker 1: we're not polytheistic anymore, now a monotheistic and then he
Speaker 1: turned that over as well. But for the most part, um,
Speaker 1: we can pick out certain key elements here. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: one of the reasons that I think all of us
Speaker 1: can are continually fascinated by Egyptian cosmology is that it's
Speaker 1: it's so alien to us. It's so different from our
Speaker 1: modern models of faith. Uh. And even in its own time,
Speaker 1: it didn't really travel well, it was it was kind
Speaker 1: of an alien belief system even in its day. Um.
Speaker 1: This is of course where you get like the stargate
Speaker 1: type thing from right, the idea that it was actually
Speaker 1: aliens that brought the mythos two human culture. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's yeah, it's easy to and I love to to
Speaker 1: consider those kind of models. But but on the other hand,
Speaker 1: the non alien Uh, I guess the explanation is even stranger,
Speaker 1: you know, because you're just like, who are these people
Speaker 1: that you know, how does how does the culture reach
Speaker 1: this point where they have this this just really rich
Speaker 1: religion that puts an extreme emphasis on the afterlife and
Speaker 1: in the process introduces the notion of judgment after death.
Speaker 1: So in a sense that the DNA of all these
Speaker 1: modern religions, and I say modern about like you know, thousand,
Speaker 1: two thousand year old religions here are are all kind
Speaker 1: of based on the same view of life after death. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The thing that's fascinating about it to me is it
Speaker 1: really shows the imagination of human culture going very far
Speaker 1: back before technological advancements that we uh associate with like
Speaker 1: modern day kind of fantasy or or I guess science fiction. Uh,
Speaker 1: weird things. But that I mean, these these people were
Speaker 1: coming up with them over three thousand, four thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: It's just these fascinating stories that connected everything together, right, Yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna just try and roll very quickly here
Speaker 1: through some of the basics of the ancient Egyptian journey
Speaker 1: into the afterlife. So First of all, you don't just
Speaker 1: have this singular notion of a soul. The Egyptian soul
Speaker 1: cocktail basically consists of several parts of the co life force,
Speaker 1: the coup, the spiritual intelligence, the second, the power, the habit,
Speaker 1: the shadow, and n your name. So after you die,
Speaker 1: the dog headed Anibus guides your your soul to the
Speaker 1: hall of justice tended to by various gods. Your your
Speaker 1: heart is weight on a scale um and uh. And
Speaker 1: if you fail, you're gonna fall. Your soul is gonna fall.
Speaker 1: And this monstrous crocodile headed am it is gonna eat
Speaker 1: your soul. So it's kind of like their version of hell,
Speaker 1: kind of like the annihilation model though whereas you're not
Speaker 1: you're just you just ceased to be um. And then
Speaker 1: from there, if you pass, then you enter what was
Speaker 1: called second Aru, the field of rushes. And this is
Speaker 1: the god just the the almost unimaginable other world of
Speaker 1: Egyptian mythology. We have fifteen different regions, each one's ruled
Speaker 1: by a different god. And and it's a world where
Speaker 1: you you might transform into an animal, you might need
Speaker 1: spells to protect you from giant snakes and giant beetles
Speaker 1: and curses. You're gonna need food when you get there.
Speaker 1: You're gonna need to farm when you get there. So
Speaker 1: it really is kind of this model of arriving on
Speaker 1: a distant world and having to colonize it. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. It's it's so it's such an interesting concept
Speaker 1: of the afterlife because in a lot of our circumstances,
Speaker 1: we just imagine the afterlife either being utter perfection right
Speaker 1: like heaven, or utter torment like hell, but not like
Speaker 1: a whole another life. You have got to have all
Speaker 1: these things and I've got to prepare for it, and
Speaker 1: your whole life is essentially you building up the material
Speaker 1: wealth to be able to have those things in the
Speaker 1: next life. Right, Yeah, I mean it's it's a situation
Speaker 1: where the afterlife is as much of not more work
Speaker 1: than the real world. Right. It sounds like not to
Speaker 1: demean this cosmology in any way, but it honestly sounds
Speaker 1: like World of Warcraft to me, Like it sounds like
Speaker 1: a video game that's really interesting, but is work. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's detailed in the Egyptian Book of the Dad, which
Speaker 1: comes from B. C. E. That that you could even
Speaker 1: end up landing in the in the airless region of
Speaker 1: exc which is the realm of quote that August God
Speaker 1: who is in his egg, which I don't think there
Speaker 1: are a lot of details beyond that, but just the
Speaker 1: idea that you could wind up in this region where
Speaker 1: there's some sort of horrible elder thing that rules over
Speaker 1: it from its a giant egg. I love crafty and
Speaker 1: if there ever was one. So so so it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of this idea that the Egyptian mummy is a
Speaker 1: traveler through time and space and your body is in
Speaker 1: kind of a suspended deathly state of suspended animation. And
Speaker 1: that's because let me see if I've got this correctly,
Speaker 1: Because the idea is that the cop part of your
Speaker 1: soul is connected to your physical body, right, and so
Speaker 1: if the physical body is destroyed, that part of your
Speaker 1: soul is destroyed as well. So that this is where
Speaker 1: this idea comes, and it probably came up alongside the
Speaker 1: sort of evolution the early model of the mumification practice
Speaker 1: of this idea of like preserving your body and your
Speaker 1: organs as such and making sure that they're presentable and
Speaker 1: uh so that that part of your soul is also functional. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's and it's important again to note that the
Speaker 1: cosmology itself evolved over time, as did the funeral traditions,
Speaker 1: and you can you can definitely see how they informed
Speaker 1: each other as well. So it's not a situation where
Speaker 1: someone a bunch of Egyptian um, you know, do person
Speaker 1: and bombers was sitting around it's all right, well we
Speaker 1: have this model of the afterlife to work with, how
Speaker 1: do we treat the dead? No, they co evolved over
Speaker 1: three thousand years. Yeah, I think that's the really important
Speaker 1: thing to consider here, and that's how we're going to
Speaker 1: present it to We're sort of going to be going
Speaker 1: through each of the uh, the eras in terms of
Speaker 1: the this modification process and how it evolved. Right, But
Speaker 1: that again, consider it, it's three thousand years that this
Speaker 1: went through. So think about some of the things that
Speaker 1: we practiced today that we think of as like totally
Speaker 1: common uh cultural traditions, right, and they're just decades old,
Speaker 1: exactly decades old compared to something what were we practicing
Speaker 1: three thousand years ago that we're still doing the same
Speaker 1: way today, you know. So it's it's just interesting to
Speaker 1: see how that evolved over their course of time and
Speaker 1: then where we are now compared to that, we look
Speaker 1: at it as being so alien, but it's in fact
Speaker 1: it's all of human history. Yeah. So the earliest model
Speaker 1: we can look to, and this is this is key,
Speaker 1: is is the practice of just bearing your dad in
Speaker 1: a pit in the hot sand. We see we see
Speaker 1: this from various examples, such as their six hundred graves
Speaker 1: from the pre diagnostic Upper Egyptian Badarian culture from around
Speaker 1: to two four thousand BC. And this is just where
Speaker 1: you just dig a pit in the hot stand, you
Speaker 1: throw the body in, and you let a natural mummification tickets. Right. So,
Speaker 1: like as we're talking about earlier, this these environmental conditions
Speaker 1: were perfect for the area that they were in and
Speaker 1: that like you could bury a body and the internal
Speaker 1: organs would be preserved. The skin would you know, crisp
Speaker 1: into a kind of like a dark hardened shell. But
Speaker 1: it preserved skin and hair by doing this just essentially
Speaker 1: because there's there wasn't water, Uh, there's probably a little oxygen, right,
Speaker 1: and it was relatively cold, I would assume, depending on
Speaker 1: how deep you dig. We say hot sands, but you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: presentably they're digging yeah, yeah, And and so it was
Speaker 1: this phenomenon that first indicated the Egyptians. I'm assuming maybe
Speaker 1: maybe an animal pulled out an old corpse one day
Speaker 1: and they saw it and they went, oh my god,
Speaker 1: it's still oh my god, oh my Anubis. Uh it
Speaker 1: still has hair and its skin is still the same,
Speaker 1: and and then they thought, oh, well, maybe the soul
Speaker 1: is still there too. Yeah. I think you definitely have
Speaker 1: to consider the fact that, like this is just that
Speaker 1: they weren't thinking of this as a location as much
Speaker 1: as this was just what you did with your dad,
Speaker 1: and they saw what happened to a body after death.
Speaker 1: And there's let's reiterate this too. There's no casket here,
Speaker 1: there's not even any wrappings here. It's just a dead
Speaker 1: body buried in the sand. Right, But of course that evolves, right,
Speaker 1: the cosmologies evolving. Treatment of the dead is changing, um
Speaker 1: and you see additions made to that sort of bar
Speaker 1: him in the pit model. So during the pre dynastic
Speaker 1: period of between animal skin wrapping baskets and then eventually
Speaker 1: short wooden coffins become the fashion. Yeah. So one of
Speaker 1: the things I read about this period was that, uh,
Speaker 1: sometimes they would they would give you a leather pillow
Speaker 1: other times they would put a basket over your head,
Speaker 1: and these are things that were supposed to make you
Speaker 1: comfortable in this afterlife. Uh. And then eventually it turned
Speaker 1: into like wicker basket kind of kind of like coffins, right,
Speaker 1: like they were the idea was that it would provide
Speaker 1: comfort for their dead loved ones. Uh. And then this
Speaker 1: eventually leads to coffins and then to tombs. Right yeah,
Speaker 1: it kind of you can see it beginning is just
Speaker 1: a matter of like, I hate to see Granddad just
Speaker 1: down there in a pit like that. Let me put
Speaker 1: him under his head, let me give him a leather
Speaker 1: pill him in something. Yeah. And then eventually, like that
Speaker 1: begins to inform ideas of well, where's Grandpa going, what's
Speaker 1: the why is he so dressed up? So let's pause
Speaker 1: for a second before we dive more into the mummy thing.
Speaker 1: How how do how do you want to be buried? Like,
Speaker 1: like if you wanted to be really comfortable in the afterlife, right,
Speaker 1: let's let's love look at this, like what are the
Speaker 1: things that you're gonna want? Well, um, all my pets
Speaker 1: and loved ones buried beside me, and now, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I guess i'd like some good books on hand, you know. Music. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense, and I think that was a practice.
Speaker 1: Not I don't know about music because they didn't have
Speaker 1: recordings back then, but certainly musical instruments it would be. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I uh, this definitely made me like think about mortality
Speaker 1: a lot. And I've never I suppose I should finally
Speaker 1: get a living will nailed down with my wife or
Speaker 1: something like that, but I've always just kind of wanted
Speaker 1: to have a natural burial, not not the hot sands
Speaker 1: or something like that, but I'd be okay with like
Speaker 1: what did they call them, like environmental burials, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I actually just did a video about these for work,
Speaker 1: and I think Joe and I are talking about doing
Speaker 1: a natural burial episode because because I mean, it's something
Speaker 1: that's based in very old models obviously of of the
Speaker 1: funeral rights, but there are new technological approaches that put
Speaker 1: put some fascinating sniff. Yeah, it just seems to me, like, uh,
Speaker 1: it's attractive to me, I suppose because of the significance
Speaker 1: of like letting your body decay but also kind of
Speaker 1: give back to the environment around it. But uh, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I understand coffins and I understand cremation, but
Speaker 1: it just doesn't feel like something that I would be
Speaker 1: interested in. I wouldn't especially coffins. Like, man, those things
Speaker 1: are expensive and a lot of people, like I had
Speaker 1: a friend whose mother recently died, and he said that
Speaker 1: it was just a racket when they went in to
Speaker 1: go to buy the coffin. I wonder that translates all
Speaker 1: the way back to this origin of these coffins in
Speaker 1: Egyptian times. You know that the way they're trying to
Speaker 1: make their dead loved ones comfortable. Uh, how does that?
Speaker 1: You know, Like you think about like the lining in
Speaker 1: the coffin and all these various factors that are It's
Speaker 1: like like nowadays it's like a little bed, and it's
Speaker 1: like it's kind of based in the same idea of
Speaker 1: like I hate to see the essentially anthropomorphized on an
Speaker 1: inhuman thing. At this point, it's no longer a person,
Speaker 1: but I want to treat it like it is. Yeah, absolutely, well,
Speaker 1: I mean I understand to like the comfort that that
Speaker 1: provides to the family in the same way that this
Speaker 1: provided comfort as well, but it's sort of evolved into
Speaker 1: a whole another thing. Right. Oh yeah, you could argue
Speaker 1: that it got got kind of out of control. Yeah,
Speaker 1: an interestingly interestingly enough, when you look back to this period,
Speaker 1: this predynastic period, you also see preparation of the body
Speaker 1: taking on a form of deem dismemberment and de fleshing.
Speaker 1: So sometimes you see the head missing or place somewhere else,
Speaker 1: or the remaining bones h reassembled in in order that
Speaker 1: might not conform to their original placement. So it's not
Speaker 1: just like a complete like one to three from bearing
Speaker 1: the body, from mommifying the body, you see some some
Speaker 1: different approaches taken to preparing the bones. So there was Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had a hard time understanding how this fit in
Speaker 1: culturally with the idea of comfort. But I can see
Speaker 1: that there are obviously like different ranches of understanding regarding
Speaker 1: I guess what we would call mortuary practice today. Uh.
Speaker 1: And clearly the de fleshing and the beheading and all
Speaker 1: that stuff didn't win over over the cultural significance of mummification. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like the de fleshing is like, don't it's easy to
Speaker 1: sort of think of it and more of its morbid terms,
Speaker 1: but essentially it's talking about we're talking about a means
Speaker 1: of preserving the body. Like they realize that the flesh
Speaker 1: is gonna rot away, so let's just get it down
Speaker 1: to the bones and then store those away. It gets
Speaker 1: into that area of what's important about the body, which
Speaker 1: continues to be an important topic as you look at
Speaker 1: mummification process. Yeah. Absolutely, because so they get to this
Speaker 1: point where they start using these wicker wicker kind of
Speaker 1: coffins or tomb like things. But then they realize, oh,
Speaker 1: the bodies actually start decomposing when we do, because we're
Speaker 1: in effect, we're we're sealing it off from the natural
Speaker 1: drying elements of the sand. So we're interfering with the
Speaker 1: thing that we really liked about bearing our dead in
Speaker 1: the sand. How can we get that back? And so
Speaker 1: this is where Egyptian science comes in. Essentially they had
Speaker 1: the challenge of figuring out how to replicate the sand
Speaker 1: effect but making the bodies comfortable and also preserved. And
Speaker 1: and this is because of the sort of immortality connection
Speaker 1: between the car and the physical body. Right. So by
Speaker 1: this point we get to the Early Dynastic Age, just
Speaker 1: as around uh to three thousand BC. Yeah, and during
Speaker 1: this time you see them taking to wrapping the bodies
Speaker 1: in an attempt to keep out the elements and just
Speaker 1: like really wrapping them on, like multiple layers of wrapping
Speaker 1: and also throwing in some some some charms here and there,
Speaker 1: as you know, a magical to turn as well. The
Speaker 1: thing is, uh, it didn't work all that well because, uh,
Speaker 1: the rot the decomposition is coming from within. They thought
Speaker 1: it was about keeping something out. But as we discussed,
Speaker 1: like the very first process of decomposition is occurring with
Speaker 1: the with the breakdown in the body. So this is
Speaker 1: essentially like the origin of this though right there taking
Speaker 1: the wrappings, are coding them in resin, and they're and
Speaker 1: they're covering the body with this. But um, one of
Speaker 1: the things I'd like us to keep in mind here
Speaker 1: going forward from this point in Egyptian history is that
Speaker 1: if the body was something to be preserved and to
Speaker 1: come back to imagine what these processes would be like
Speaker 1: if you came back into your body, right, So, like
Speaker 1: you're covered in the let's consider it from the fictional
Speaker 1: twenty century mummy point of view, right, like, you come
Speaker 1: back into this body, you're fully conscious and you're covered
Speaker 1: just just beginning in this period, you're covered in wrappings
Speaker 1: and hot resin. That's just solidified, right, So that's already
Speaker 1: going to be uncomfortable, and it gets more uncomfortable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because they, like I said, they eventually realized, all right,
Speaker 1: there's rotting going on inside the body. Decompositions have taken
Speaker 1: place inside and my or what we do on the outside.
Speaker 1: So they realize when we need to remove most of
Speaker 1: the guts. So they take to the practice of making
Speaker 1: a slit in the abdomen and uh and pulling out
Speaker 1: as much of the organs in there as they can
Speaker 1: get away with. And this is where they begin the
Speaker 1: tradition of those it's their canopic jars. Is that right?
Speaker 1: So you basically they're like fine pottery that you're each
Speaker 1: of your organs is stored in next to your body.
Speaker 1: Uh and and uh, the each of the organs is
Speaker 1: also wrapped in the same way, right like they're they're
Speaker 1: wrapped in resin and linen. Believe. Yeah. And then eventually
Speaker 1: they're decorating the the econoptic jars more and more and
Speaker 1: uh and and they're taking additional steps to sort of
Speaker 1: spruce up the body. Uh. They're they're starting to use
Speaker 1: masks to cover for the loss of facial structure as
Speaker 1: well as uh. Stucco plaster coatings um that they're they're
Speaker 1: added the wrappings to reproduce the facial features of the
Speaker 1: individual it in. This is like early plastic surgery on
Speaker 1: a corpse, like like trying to make it appear as
Speaker 1: lifelike as possible, even though it's it's not, and they're
Speaker 1: they're pulling out like constituent parts of it too, that
Speaker 1: are you know, making it kind of collapse, so they
Speaker 1: end up stuffing things inside of it too. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: the ancient Egyptians were some of the first practitioners of
Speaker 1: plastic surgery, so they were actually able to implement that
Speaker 1: on living so you could see how these two would
Speaker 1: be connected practices. They realized that there was something you know,
Speaker 1: you could you could fashion flash, you could fashion it
Speaker 1: after death, and you could also fashion it while alive.
Speaker 1: And they eventually took to where they're modeling the whole
Speaker 1: body with the plaster and using you know this this
Speaker 1: resin circle in and the stucco overlay for you know,
Speaker 1: in the case of really well off departed individuals, you know,
Speaker 1: a recreation of the physical form. And we're talking about
Speaker 1: right now, this is the Fourth Dynasty era uh and
Speaker 1: The big innovation of this is what you're talking about
Speaker 1: with the removal of organs, but also just that they
Speaker 1: instead of just like digging in there and taking the
Speaker 1: organs out, they made a very small abdominal incision that
Speaker 1: allowed them to just get that stuff out of there
Speaker 1: very quickly without damaging it. So they could prevent the
Speaker 1: natural decay of the organs because you know, apparently these
Speaker 1: things start to depending on the temperature. Obviously, if it's
Speaker 1: hot and humid, within two to three hours, those are
Speaker 1: going to start to decompose. So they wanted to get
Speaker 1: them out of the body as quickly as possible. Right now.
Speaker 1: They always left the heart though, because the heart is
Speaker 1: the exact seat of the mind. And uh, well we'll
Speaker 1: talk about them as well, but kidneys as well. They
Speaker 1: didn't didn't really find much use for those. But so
Speaker 1: that's fourth dynasty. Then you get fifth dynasty, they start
Speaker 1: this is when they start like kind of making portrait
Speaker 1: of version, like almost like statues out of the mummies.
Speaker 1: Between the fifth and the sixth is when mummifications start
Speaker 1: spreading to lower class people. And we'll talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about like there's a different practice. There was like
Speaker 1: a I believe the house stuff works. Article refers to
Speaker 1: it as like the budget model, like and how that
Speaker 1: worked in particular. But you go all the way through
Speaker 1: up until the eleventh dynasty, and then we get to
Speaker 1: another period of improvement. Yeah, this is when they start
Speaker 1: dehydrating the bodies using large amounts of natron, which is
Speaker 1: a mixture of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate or chloride.
Speaker 1: So it was an improvement over the an earlier method
Speaker 1: of just using salt for drying and or of course,
Speaker 1: the the older method was just the hot stands um.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing. It was hazardous to work with
Speaker 1: if you're the you know, the the individual there and
Speaker 1: having to dry out the bodies because it would burn
Speaker 1: your skin. It could cause all sorts of eye and
Speaker 1: respiratory problems. Yeah, so if you're the embalmer and you're
Speaker 1: working with this stuff, it's pretty hazardous. Like one of
Speaker 1: the accounts I read was that natron if it got
Speaker 1: in your eye, it could cause conjunctive conjunctival edemas or
Speaker 1: corneal destruction. I mean, it would eat your eye. Uh
Speaker 1: So I can imagine that these embombers tried to be
Speaker 1: pretty careful with it, but it was essentially um. The
Speaker 1: idea from it. It was it was the sodium compounds
Speaker 1: that they got from the shores of different Egyptian lakes
Speaker 1: or sometimes like the desert west of the Nile Delta.
Speaker 1: They were able to find this stuff and it was
Speaker 1: very salty UM, and it absorbed moisture. I almost wonder,
Speaker 1: I'm curious about the process, given like what we know
Speaker 1: about how salt and moisture interact now, Like it was
Speaker 1: absorption or absorption um, but it was it was taking
Speaker 1: the water out of here. And unlike the sands, which
Speaker 1: would darken the skin over time, it didn't do that
Speaker 1: as much. These um. These mummies definitely did like dark
Speaker 1: and compared to their natural hue, but not as much
Speaker 1: as as you found when you just threw the body
Speaker 1: in hot sands. And one other thing, they actually used
Speaker 1: natron to dissolve fats and it was used as like
Speaker 1: a cleaning material too, So you know, you can bear
Speaker 1: that to like embalming fluid that we use nowadays, and
Speaker 1: it's not all all that different. Not that I use
Speaker 1: embalming fluid to like clean the furniture in my house,
Speaker 1: but some people might Apparently they originally tried to make
Speaker 1: like liquid natron mixtures and they they did like experiments
Speaker 1: on animals, and they found that it just like totally
Speaker 1: disintegrated the animals from the inside out and just made
Speaker 1: this gory mess. So they decided not to use it
Speaker 1: that way. Speaking of which, um Anna Maria Roso, who's
Speaker 1: an excellent article on the the global history of mummification
Speaker 1: which i'll link to on the landing page for this episode.
Speaker 1: She tells us that quote by the Middle Kingdom, a
Speaker 1: turpentine like oleo resin was also injected into the anus
Speaker 1: to dissolve the organs and to extract them. So there's
Speaker 1: another gory detail to take in mind when you think about,
Speaker 1: especially a reanimate mummy. Yeah, and one of the iterations
Speaker 1: of that, uh, turpentine injected into the anus uh method.
Speaker 1: I guess that I read was that that was a
Speaker 1: lower class thing. Later on, like that ended up being
Speaker 1: like if you wanted the the economy model of mummification,
Speaker 1: that was kind of how it worked. But we'll get
Speaker 1: to that in a moment. So we're up to the
Speaker 1: twelfth century. Now, we're into the nineteen nineties, uhah, through
Speaker 1: around seventeen two v c. Again, just thinking about the
Speaker 1: staggering chunks of history we're dealing with. Think how much
Speaker 1: our world has changed in um, you know, in in
Speaker 1: three or four hundred years, right, Yeah, So like when
Speaker 1: we're talking about these innovations, we're saying, like hundreds of
Speaker 1: years went by before they started the innovations we're about
Speaker 1: to talk about in the twelfth century as twelfth dynasty.
Speaker 1: Actually sorry, not twelfth century. Yeah. So during this period,
Speaker 1: you're seeing the heart left in place after the internal
Speaker 1: organs were removed. Where I touched on some of that.
Speaker 1: The lids of the canopic jars are decorated with the
Speaker 1: heads of gods to protect the entrails. The body cavity
Speaker 1: is disinfected and stuffed with linen. More people were buried
Speaker 1: in anthropoid coffins, so coffins that look like humans on
Speaker 1: the outside, that sort of classic sarcophagus appearance. Fingernails are
Speaker 1: tied on to prevent them from just falling out. Wooden
Speaker 1: or clay models act as servants, and also you see
Speaker 1: rock tombs gaining popularity espect among the wealthier classes. So
Speaker 1: all those things evolved over you know, the hundreds of
Speaker 1: years between the Eleventh Dynasty and the Twelfth dynasty. It's fascinating,
Speaker 1: you know, what how long certain things take and then
Speaker 1: how short some things take two to be adapted. And
Speaker 1: like you're saying earlier, I guess it depends on who's
Speaker 1: in power and what they what they kind of want, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So then we eventually get into the New Kingdom era,
Speaker 1: this is fifteen seventy through ten seventy BC, and this
Speaker 1: is where we kind of see the peak, right, this
Speaker 1: is where we see these sort of standard ideal models
Speaker 1: for mummification. Yeah. New Kingdom era is considered basically like
Speaker 1: the most representative of mummification practice over the three thousand years,
Speaker 1: the Catillac of mumification exactly because these are the ones
Speaker 1: that were the best preserved um. But again keep in mind,
Speaker 1: like this was over three thousand years, so this is
Speaker 1: not how necessarily the you know, the the Early Dynasty
Speaker 1: mummies would be made. But this is the standard mummification
Speaker 1: practice as we know it today from the New Kingdom era.
Speaker 1: So we think, or at least Egyptologists think that these
Speaker 1: rituals were performed in an area that's called the Red Land,
Speaker 1: which is this desert region that wasn't particularly heavily populated,
Speaker 1: but was useful about it was that it had easy
Speaker 1: access to the Nile River, so they could use that
Speaker 1: for washing the bodies. Uh, and they would take the
Speaker 1: body to uh. It was called Ibou, the place of Purification,
Speaker 1: and this is where they do the body washing. It
Speaker 1: symbolized a rebirth passing on from one world to the next.
Speaker 1: And once they cleaned it, that's when they brought it
Speaker 1: to the next part, which is the per Neffer, and
Speaker 1: that's called the house of beauty. You want to hit
Speaker 1: on that one, yes, So this is where we see
Speaker 1: a major change take place in our preparation of mummies. Um.
Speaker 1: In order to extract the brain, a metal chisel or
Speaker 1: hook is inserted or hammered up through the nostril. Of
Speaker 1: these are dead parties, but just like and of course
Speaker 1: you have to break the bone to get it up
Speaker 1: through there, so there's like a crack, right uh, And
Speaker 1: then essentially you drag and scoop it all out. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they like they use these long spoons. I guess that
Speaker 1: they would stick up through that cracked nostril and and
Speaker 1: just scoop the whole thing out. Essentially. The idea is
Speaker 1: that they didn't know at the time what the brain
Speaker 1: was for, so they assumed that we wouldn't need it.
Speaker 1: It's probably something to tie to the sinuses, right exactly.
Speaker 1: Uh Well, like like you said earlier, the heart was
Speaker 1: far more important. I have to say. This is one
Speaker 1: of the reasons I like the Mummy segment and the
Speaker 1: tales from the Dark Side movie because the Mummy and
Speaker 1: that ultimately is not treated all that well. You know,
Speaker 1: he's not particularly powerful, but he does get the drop
Speaker 1: on a human at one point and jab a code
Speaker 1: hanger up his nose and pull his brain. So it's
Speaker 1: one of the best mummy kills out there, that's not
Speaker 1: just straight up strangulation. Well, I'm surprised that he didn't
Speaker 1: also uh punch them in the kidneys, because apparently they
Speaker 1: didn't think that the kidneys were very important either. They
Speaker 1: you know, like we talked about, they removed all the
Speaker 1: organs except for the kidneys because they just thought, well,
Speaker 1: we don't exactly know what these are for, the same
Speaker 1: as the brain, but they scooped those out. But all
Speaker 1: these organs were washed separately, coated and resin wrapped in
Speaker 1: a linen strips. Then they're putting those canopic jars. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the jars were almost always situated in some way
Speaker 1: in the southeast corner of wherever the tomb was located. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm sure there's cosmological significance to that. Yeah, and they're yeah,
Speaker 1: they're on hand, but they're also they're not right up
Speaker 1: next to the body. And so after they do this,
Speaker 1: they've got the you know, scoop out the brain, get
Speaker 1: out the lower organs. Then they cut open the bodies
Speaker 1: diaphragm and remove the lungs. They keep the heart. Why
Speaker 1: because the heart was considered the seed of the mind
Speaker 1: at the time, which I think is really interesting because
Speaker 1: like now in our modern culture, we think of the
Speaker 1: brain as being the seat of the mind, and we
Speaker 1: we very much think of it as being located in
Speaker 1: our head. Right. I wonder if there was a different
Speaker 1: kind of cultural thing of like the heart led forward,
Speaker 1: you know, lead the body forward. Uh, the posture was
Speaker 1: better and yeah, possibly uh. And they rinsed out this
Speaker 1: empty cavity once you get all the organs out of there.
Speaker 1: Basically they wanted to purify it, so they used palm wine.
Speaker 1: I wonder if this is because of the bacteria like
Speaker 1: they thought the palm wine would maybe kill off the
Speaker 1: bacteria that was in there, not that they wouldn't understand.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's sweet smelling and it it is strong,
Speaker 1: so yeah, you can see where there might be some
Speaker 1: inkling of that. And then after they purified that, then
Speaker 1: they would pack it in with incense and there you go,
Speaker 1: maybe it is the smell because they put incense in
Speaker 1: there and other kind of packing materials and filled it
Speaker 1: back up so that you know, had appeared like it
Speaker 1: was naturally full again. And then you're stitching it all
Speaker 1: back together. You're closing in any incisions and just kind
Speaker 1: of retiding the package, right. Yeah, and there's of course
Speaker 1: the the natron comes in here too, so you cover
Speaker 1: the entire body in this thick layer of natron from
Speaker 1: head to toe, and you let it sit for thirty
Speaker 1: five to forty days um. And this is so that
Speaker 1: the body just dries completely before it's mummified. Uh. And
Speaker 1: in fact, like you know, it took so long, and
Speaker 1: grave robbery and and if scavenging animals were so common
Speaker 1: that they actually would set guards up outside of these
Speaker 1: embalming areas to make sure that the bodies weren't taken
Speaker 1: during this time. It's up to the family to get
Speaker 1: all the linen for the mummifications. So they've got to
Speaker 1: come up with something like four thousand square feet worth
Speaker 1: of linen to bring to the embalmers. In fact, the
Speaker 1: wealthy sometimes use materials. They were clothes that were on
Speaker 1: sacred statues, so they would take these clothing off of
Speaker 1: statues and use that instead for their their wealthy dead relatives.
Speaker 1: Where Like if you were a lower class you just
Speaker 1: got like old clothes, hand me downs or like household
Speaker 1: linen's so I'm assuming it's just like dirty old rags
Speaker 1: from around the house. They bring those down alright, So
Speaker 1: we're wrapping the body at this point. Bandaging takes a
Speaker 1: week or two um, and they start with the hands
Speaker 1: and the feet, individual fingers and toes, then limbs and
Speaker 1: torso the head. They wrap it as a whole. The
Speaker 1: they coated in more hot resin to glue everything back
Speaker 1: in place, right because before this, like in order to
Speaker 1: keep everything in place, they basically plugged up every single
Speaker 1: orifice and pour with hot resin, right, and like so
Speaker 1: just you know, it's very easy to just say hot resin,
Speaker 1: but like my understanding, Like what resin is mainly used
Speaker 1: for today is like sculpting, right, Like it's a material
Speaker 1: that you used to make like certain kinds of statues.
Speaker 1: So this isn't just like glue. This is like pretty
Speaker 1: heavy duty stuff that is uh coating, sticking everything together
Speaker 1: and plugging it all up. Yeah. Yeah, indeed, I often
Speaker 1: think of the money at this point. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like a like a yogurt covered raisin, you know, just
Speaker 1: really just seiling it all and um. And then you know,
Speaker 1: on top of that, you're adding additional decorations, right, perhaps
Speaker 1: a mask with you know, the likeness of of an
Speaker 1: Egyptian god even yeah, yeah, depending on you know, I
Speaker 1: would assume the status of the person, right. The idea
Speaker 1: behind this was that the mask would help the person's
Speaker 1: spirit find their body in the tombs, because there's so
Speaker 1: many other bodies. So you know, if you get the
Speaker 1: jackal mask, then you're the you know, you know, like
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a big fan of jackal god. Anubis is
Speaker 1: the jackal okay, so uh so then you can locate
Speaker 1: your haunted spirit, can locate your body to get back
Speaker 1: in touch with it. Yeah, and and along those lines
Speaker 1: through its ambulance are thrown in to aid um. Arms
Speaker 1: were originally placed in the side, though that ends up
Speaker 1: being changed to the more you know, stereotypical crossing of
Speaker 1: the arms on the body, and uh yeah, then you
Speaker 1: essentially it's time to put that body in the coffin
Speaker 1: and send it on its journey, right yeah. And so
Speaker 1: they called these coffins sue ht, which I had not
Speaker 1: heard before researching this. I always just thought of them
Speaker 1: as sarcophagus, as the sarcophag guy, I guess. But they
Speaker 1: they've they've used these sue head coffins then brought it
Speaker 1: to a tomb where priests would perform this ritual called
Speaker 1: the Ceremony of the Mouth. And the idea here was
Speaker 1: that they were giving the five senses back to the
Speaker 1: dead in the afterlife by touching different sacred objects to
Speaker 1: the face that was on the sue heat coffin, you know,
Speaker 1: because it's carved in the shape of a person, and
Speaker 1: they seal everything up after that. So it's the body
Speaker 1: is sealed up, it's putting side a coffin, it's putting
Speaker 1: side a tomb, and and you know, you get an
Speaker 1: idea for why there's so much I guess so many
Speaker 1: layers to this, right, because of scavenging animals or like
Speaker 1: as what we're gonna talk about later, grape robbery. Yes,
Speaker 1: so you want you want some measure of security there.
Speaker 1: Now here's the cheaper version. Okay. So if you're not
Speaker 1: royalty and you're not upper class, this is what you get.
Speaker 1: The embalmers inject your body with this oil mixture. It
Speaker 1: sounds to me like the same thing that we were
Speaker 1: talking about earlier with the resin goes inside the torso cavity.
Speaker 1: So instead of taking all the organs out, you just
Speaker 1: fill it up with this oil. They plug up all
Speaker 1: the orifices and they just let this oil sitting there
Speaker 1: for a few days, and then they this is my terminology,
Speaker 1: they popped the corks. They let all that oil flow
Speaker 1: out of every orifice and it carries the liquefied internal
Speaker 1: organs with it and then the modification process. So apparently
Speaker 1: the like the expensive part was taking out the organs
Speaker 1: and wrapping those all individually. It sounds kind of grim,
Speaker 1: but I guess if you do it every day, you
Speaker 1: get used to it. Like most things, right, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I like, honestly from how I understand mortuary practice works today,
Speaker 1: it's probably not all that much more grim, you know,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. So after this point again
Speaker 1: it's it's reached its peak certainly by dynasty Um you
Speaker 1: your mommified, you game this doll like appearance, and then um,
Speaker 1: the third intermediate in a late period that's ten seventy
Speaker 1: to thirty b C. This is where we see, uh,
Speaker 1: the old ways are being abandoned and forgotten, decadent's inept embalming.
Speaker 1: It's all leading to uh, less refined approaches. Yeah. So essentially,
Speaker 1: you know, as the culture changed, less attention was paid
Speaker 1: to the body's condition condition, and uh, embalming just went
Speaker 1: a lot faster, and subsequently it was more inept. So
Speaker 1: by the time Greeks arrived in Egypt, and like somewhere
Speaker 1: between seven forty two and seven thirty BC, rapid decomposition
Speaker 1: was happening again. There were either bodies were incompletely wrapped,
Speaker 1: so you know, it wasn't the function of the of
Speaker 1: the form wasn't being met anymore. Uh, And then the
Speaker 1: Romans were by up until like three a d we're
Speaker 1: still using like narrow bandages, you know, wrapping bodies in them.
Speaker 1: But there wasn't anything as methodical as what we were
Speaker 1: talking about in the like real you know, height of
Speaker 1: modification in Egypt. Alright, we're gonna take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we're gonna talk about what
Speaker 1: happens after these bodies are sent on their cosmic journey,
Speaker 1: what happens when it's interrupted. All Right, we're back. So
Speaker 1: here's one of the things about about mummies that, as
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier, Uh, they're invariably dug up, moved around, studied,
Speaker 1: taking apart, taking to museums across the world, and kind
Speaker 1: of imprisoned in cultures completely alien to their own. And uh,
Speaker 1: and the thing is that the grave robbing was always
Speaker 1: a problem, like even from in the ancient days, because
Speaker 1: you'd have these bodies that were buried with some degree
Speaker 1: of valuables, and they're going to be people around who
Speaker 1: want to take advantage of that, to the point that
Speaker 1: that often the assistants of the builders themselves who are
Speaker 1: building these tombs are the ones that are involved in
Speaker 1: the theft. Yeah, it's like an inside job type thing,
Speaker 1: like they sort of either themselves were doing it or
Speaker 1: they were informing other I guess like bandits or something.
Speaker 1: On unwhere to break in which tombs in particular held
Speaker 1: the greatest amounts of wealth. Yeah. Rosso goes into some
Speaker 1: detail on this in her work that I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: and Um as an example of this, who points out
Speaker 1: that during the Ramesses, the the elevenths reign, forty five
Speaker 1: workmen in the royal and necropolis were arrested and portraited
Speaker 1: and after confessing, brought to trial and thirty eight of
Speaker 1: them were sentenced to death for grave robbing. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: And there are various other accounts here. I don't know
Speaker 1: if we want to go into too many of them,
Speaker 1: but but basically, when we look back at at the writings, uh,
Speaker 1: there there are various rebellions that result in poor people
Speaker 1: smashing open royal tombs. You you also see the tendency
Speaker 1: later on for um individuals to engage in a cycle
Speaker 1: of grave robbing. So we're in some cases you have
Speaker 1: tombs that were looted and then used again for burial
Speaker 1: by new people, then looted again. So again, just think
Speaker 1: of those vast the vast period of time we're talking
Speaker 1: about here, and all the various upheavals and ins and
Speaker 1: outs that are gonna occur and What this I think
Speaker 1: says to me is that there were while this idea
Speaker 1: of making the dead comfortable and it being a sacred
Speaker 1: practice was practiced by some, there were certainly other people
Speaker 1: who were more interested in the material wealth of the living.
Speaker 1: Of though, yeah, there of their current circumstances, and so
Speaker 1: that's why you had a lot of these break ins.
Speaker 1: But you know, this is what led to them moving
Speaker 1: bodies to hidden places or rewrapping them, restoring damage that
Speaker 1: was done to them. There's all kinds of of mummification
Speaker 1: practices that came out of how prevalent the grave robbing was.
Speaker 1: And of course the worst grave robbers of all. Oh yes, well,
Speaker 1: of course uh came from became in the form of
Speaker 1: colonial influences. Um. Yeah. The nineteenth century especially was the
Speaker 1: time of just immense plundering by European treasure hunters, fueled
Speaker 1: by the genuine interest in Egyptology. I mean some of
Speaker 1: the individuals involved in this were, for instance, uh, William
Speaker 1: Flinders Petrie, Uh really the father of modern egyptology, but
Speaker 1: he deluded tons of artifacts. So you know, it's like
Speaker 1: the two movements are are combined here and then back
Speaker 1: at home in Europe, you have all of this interest
Speaker 1: in anything Oriental. So so that's fueling the need for
Speaker 1: this since one of the reasons you find again Egyptian
Speaker 1: obilists in New York and lined it in Paris, and
Speaker 1: you find all these cultural treasures to spread across inter
Speaker 1: national museums. And at the same time you have egypt
Speaker 1: modernizing ruler Muhammad Ali, who was actually an Ottoman Albanian
Speaker 1: um and he created a dynasty that ruled until the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty two revolution, and he was all too willing
Speaker 1: to give up these various artifacts in order to ingratiate
Speaker 1: himself to these imperial and colonial powers. Just like imagine that,
Speaker 1: like uh uh like some we're in the middle of
Speaker 1: a presidential psych all right. Now, let's say let's say
Speaker 1: Donald Trump gets elected and Donald Trump says, you know what, like,
Speaker 1: I think it's okay if all of Europe and uh,
Speaker 1: let's let's let Asia have them too. They can dig
Speaker 1: up all of our graves, of all of our loved
Speaker 1: ones and just take their bodies and put them in
Speaker 1: museums or or traveling side shows you guys cool, that
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter if you're cool, that we're going to
Speaker 1: do it. Yeah, yeah, And the thing is too that
Speaker 1: I mentioned that revolution, it wasn't ntil around. It wasn't
Speaker 1: until around that period of the Egyptian government began to
Speaker 1: actually restrict treasure hunters, limiting on them only to only
Speaker 1: fifty of the artifacts that they found. And it wasn't
Speaker 1: until the late nineteen eighties that that Egypt really cracked
Speaker 1: down on this sort of behavior in a very meaningful way.
Speaker 1: So I guess this is something to think about the
Speaker 1: next time we're at the museum and we're looking at
Speaker 1: this stuff, and there's one part of me that's like,
Speaker 1: I'm really glad that this is here and we have
Speaker 1: access to it and we're able to sort of see
Speaker 1: the history here right in this location, and there's another
Speaker 1: part of me that feels guilty about it and thinks, well,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe the stuff should be back at home
Speaker 1: where it was initially intended to be. Um. If you
Speaker 1: want to go see it, go to Egypt. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I mean it's definite. There's definitely been a movement in
Speaker 1: over the past a few decades to see about the
Speaker 1: return of these objects, and it's just kind of an
Speaker 1: ongoing issue. UM. And this is where, like we were
Speaker 1: talking about earlier that pop culture guilt comes from and
Speaker 1: the curse of the Mummy, right, that the mummy is
Speaker 1: going to come out and kill everybody who is responsible
Speaker 1: for bringing its body away from its origin site. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and there's certainly some individuals out there who who
Speaker 1: deserve a little wrap. And the thing is, it's one
Speaker 1: thing to look at, you know, Egyptologists who are running
Speaker 1: off with the with this stuff. But then from the
Speaker 1: from the twelfth century b c. Onwards, so again for
Speaker 1: a pretty long period of time, you see a lot
Speaker 1: of mistreatment of of mummies in the Middle East and
Speaker 1: especially in Europe. And so this is not just people saying, oh,
Speaker 1: this is cool, I want to study this, or I
Speaker 1: want to take this bit of art attached to it
Speaker 1: and display it somewhere. You see preserve corpses destroyed for
Speaker 1: mere sport um. You also see them used as kindling
Speaker 1: for fire, and most shocking of all, uh and rather
Speaker 1: morbidly entertainingly of all, uh, thousands of mummies end up
Speaker 1: perishing in apothecaries corpse grinders for use in medicine. Right,
Speaker 1: So I mean all of these things kind of show
Speaker 1: you where the cultures, priorities headed, where they where they changed. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the weird thing about this is that you have
Speaker 1: uh from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries Europeans who
Speaker 1: are engaging in medicinal cannibalism through then assumption of of
Speaker 1: medicines derived from mummy powder. This is like we we
Speaker 1: we just did an episode on wolf Spain. This is
Speaker 1: like yet another like kind of classic monster from the
Speaker 1: universal era that uh is medicinal in origin somehow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: though ultimately as UH, as I'll explain um, completely useless.
Speaker 1: They used they used it supposedly to treat and thinking
Speaker 1: they were treating everything from headache, headaches to a rectile
Speaker 1: dysfunction and stomach ulcers and tumors. So they drank it
Speaker 1: in tinctures, they mixed it into salves. Uh I I
Speaker 1: you know, maybe they might have even used it into
Speaker 1: positories for all I know. But but yeah, they're they're
Speaker 1: they're in taking they're consuming this powder and it all
Speaker 1: hinges on bitumen, the world's first petroleum product. Really, it's
Speaker 1: a sticky, black, viscous substance. You probably know it better
Speaker 1: is asphalt. But it was highly prized in the ancient
Speaker 1: world and for the longest it was primarily a Mesopotamian monopoly.
Speaker 1: The substance saw use in various endeavors, including boat calking,
Speaker 1: art causa cosmetics, but physicians in the region eventually used
Speaker 1: it to treat a number of ailments and um and
Speaker 1: word of these ailments eventually spread to Europe. But how
Speaker 1: you're gonna obtain this stuff if you don't have access
Speaker 1: to Mesopotamian bitamin deposits? Well, word had it at the
Speaker 1: time that the ancient Egyptians used bitumen as a preservative
Speaker 1: in their mummies. And you're probably thinking, well, I don't
Speaker 1: remember you guys mentioning vitamin earlier. There's a reason, um.
Speaker 1: But it ends up becoming so pervasive that even the
Speaker 1: word mummy comes from the Persian word for wax movia
Speaker 1: used to describe bitumin. Yet, while the Egyptians used bitumen
Speaker 1: occasionally for from from about UH eleven hundred CE onward,
Speaker 1: they largely used resins in the oils in their in
Speaker 1: their mortuary practices. But the Europeans didn't know this. Uh
Speaker 1: So their movia based medicines contained equal parts magic, goal
Speaker 1: thinking and placebo effect. The treatments seemed to work, so
Speaker 1: they just continued grinding up the corpses, and when mummies
Speaker 1: were scarce, contemporary cadavers were actually dried and pulverized to
Speaker 1: produce an imitation product that you could sell off, and
Speaker 1: it just keeps going to practice doesn't fall away until
Speaker 1: the eighteenth century, and actual vitamin still sees limited use
Speaker 1: in modern Iran as a skin treatment. But again that's
Speaker 1: actual bitumin and not this this ground up mummies, which
Speaker 1: obtained probably none of it. So, like to put it
Speaker 1: in perspective, you know, we're looking back on the practice
Speaker 1: of mummification during Egyptian times and going, oh, that's kind
Speaker 1: of alien and weird, and we're fascinated with it, and
Speaker 1: you know, human history changes over time. And yet like
Speaker 1: not two centuries ago, we were grinding up those bodies
Speaker 1: essentially so that we could digest asphalt because we thought
Speaker 1: that that was going to be healthy for us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: ground up mummies was essentially the pumpkin spice latte to day. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I mean, like we're not all that much more
Speaker 1: advanced than we like to think we are. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm sure like there's gonna be things from from modern
Speaker 1: time today that a couple hundred years from now people
Speaker 1: are going to look back and be like, I can't
Speaker 1: believe that they thought like, uh, but like ginko or something,
Speaker 1: and who knows what not that I'm denigrating the use
Speaker 1: of ginko. I certainly have had more than one drink
Speaker 1: with that in it, but you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: like start adding it to beers I think, right, or
Speaker 1: or or other kind of supplements. And then eventually society goes,
Speaker 1: what are we doing? What were we doing? What was
Speaker 1: that ginko thing about? Why were we so crazy about
Speaker 1: about palm like kale someone mbucha? But of course, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the whole eating of mummies, essentially, the medicinal
Speaker 1: cannibalism of mummies is one thing. Um, just just the curiosity,
Speaker 1: just the the exploration. Uh. And and the the rise
Speaker 1: of Egyptology saw you know, all sorts of early unwrappings,
Speaker 1: unwrapping parties, you know, up artifacts that are destroyed. And
Speaker 1: on top of this, there's a you know, there's a boom,
Speaker 1: there's a demand for artifacts. So you have, uh, you
Speaker 1: have local dealers in Egypt that are breaking up artifacts
Speaker 1: into multiple parts. They're placing a mummy from one time
Speaker 1: period in an unrelated casket from another and then they're
Speaker 1: selling that, so it becomes you're destroying the artifacts to
Speaker 1: learn about them, but then also the market for them
Speaker 1: is making it harder to study them because of the
Speaker 1: stuff that's mismatched. You know, this is a lot like
Speaker 1: palam cests. When we talked about palam sests earlier, Like
Speaker 1: when they first started examining those, they're pouring acid on
Speaker 1: it and scraping them with knives and things like that,
Speaker 1: and now they're using you know, technology to preserve them
Speaker 1: but also examine them. It sounds like that's kind of
Speaker 1: the same history of dissecting mummies. I suppose, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean, you open an ancient text and you risk
Speaker 1: the pages disintegrating it. Same thing happens when you unwrap
Speaker 1: a mumm. You're exposing stuff to air that haven't been
Speaker 1: exposed in in in thousands of years, and you can
Speaker 1: just crumble. Fortunately, today we have a number of techniques
Speaker 1: that allow us to take apart the mummy without actually
Speaker 1: taking it apart right, various radiographic techniques that that enable
Speaker 1: non destructive studies of these mummified remains. Interestingly enough, the
Speaker 1: pioneer on some of these was uh was Flinders Petrie
Speaker 1: in eight who again was involved in a lot of
Speaker 1: some of the more destructive aspects of Egyptology at the time,
Speaker 1: but you know he and to his credit, he also
Speaker 1: helped pave the way for UH some of the tools
Speaker 1: we have today, such as X rays, endoscopic techniques UM,
Speaker 1: which I think the Egyptians would have appreciated based on
Speaker 1: their their interests UM as well as you know the
Speaker 1: use of stable isotopes, trace metals, DNA, carbon dating, uh
Speaker 1: CT scanning is is very interesting. So this is where
Speaker 1: you use X ray computed tomography. This is a computer
Speaker 1: combines multiple X rays from different angles and creates a
Speaker 1: cross section and he's sort of like a three D scanner. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can you create this this three D cross section
Speaker 1: of the body. And this has been used to to
Speaker 1: make a number of different discoveries about existing and newly
Speaker 1: discovered mummies. But one example that I love is a
Speaker 1: This is a two thousand twelve study where they used
Speaker 1: a CT to scan a year old female money and
Speaker 1: they were revealed a tubular object embedded in its skull
Speaker 1: between the brains, left parietal bone at and the resin
Speaker 1: filled back of the skull. And it turned out that
Speaker 1: it was a tool used for the removal of the brain.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't an iron hook as we mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: and as Herodotus wrote about, but it was just a
Speaker 1: wooden stick. So this was this was an economics version
Speaker 1: of the mummification process. It just got accidentally left it there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I guess they realized occasionally you're just gonna lose it
Speaker 1: too off there, and you could you could dig it out,
Speaker 1: but you might as well leave it because who's the
Speaker 1: mommy going to come back? And right, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, again thinking about the comfort of these mummies.
Speaker 1: You know, they wake up and they've they've got wooden
Speaker 1: tools shoved up their nose, their brains gone. That's would
Speaker 1: I wager it wouldn't be all that comfortable. Hence the
Speaker 1: mythos of the mummies coming back angry. And you know, finally,
Speaker 1: one of another great thing to come out of this
Speaker 1: is despite all of the destruction of the artifacts, destruction
Speaker 1: destruction of mummies over the years, the pilfering of the
Speaker 1: tombs um, we continue to unearthed mummies um mummies. Uh
Speaker 1: that that early Egyptologists, ancient grave robbers in Victorian ghoules
Speaker 1: haven't had a chance to pilfer. Just one example is
Speaker 1: the Valley of the Golden Mummies discovered in nine see
Speaker 1: by an Egyptian archaeology team. They on earth two hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty mummies and they estimate another ten thousand. So again,
Speaker 1: you just have a practice of mummifying the dead for
Speaker 1: thousands of years, You're gonna amass a lot of specimens. Sure,
Speaker 1: I'm sure that there's plenty of mummies to go around
Speaker 1: for this kind of thing. I guess the question really
Speaker 1: is like whether or not we should be removing them,
Speaker 1: or if we're removing them, should we be removing them
Speaker 1: from Egypt? You know, maybe maybe they maybe preserve the
Speaker 1: traditions in some way, but also make them available for
Speaker 1: the public. Yeah, it seems like it's been it's been
Speaker 1: kind of enough of a stuff step for us, a
Speaker 1: big enough step for us to to not just pill
Speaker 1: for a culture's heritage. But then at what point do
Speaker 1: we also have to say, how do you how do
Speaker 1: you treat the ancient dead? Should the ancient dead be
Speaker 1: treated more respectfully than we're doing now? To what extent
Speaker 1: is that being done already? Uh? In in modern archaeological
Speaker 1: surveys of ancient tunes. Well, I'd be curious to hear
Speaker 1: from uh, you know, our listeners out there that are
Speaker 1: involved in UM, you know, archaeology or or other disciplines
Speaker 1: that are connected to this UM. You know, what are
Speaker 1: the modern practices or what's what's the Surely there have
Speaker 1: to be journal articles about the ethics on this. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and as that turned into some kind of a
Speaker 1: debate within the community, Yeah that that that could be
Speaker 1: an entire episode onto itself, right, Yeah, definitely. Well, UM,
Speaker 1: if you have, you know, information like that, or if
Speaker 1: there's something about Egyptian mummies that we missed today, you know,
Speaker 1: let us know. UM. As we said at the top,
Speaker 1: you can reach out to us on social media. We're
Speaker 1: on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler can write to us there,
Speaker 1: tweet at us, send us a message, all those all
Speaker 1: those things depending on what your medium of choices. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and of course stuff with all your mind. Dot com
Speaker 1: is the mothership that we find all the podcast, all
Speaker 1: the blog post, all the videos. Uh. And you know,
Speaker 1: we've had a number of pieces of content over the
Speaker 1: years related to Egyptology, different blog posts that I wrote
Speaker 1: about either something that's purely cosmological in nature or something
Speaker 1: you know tied to more the folklore or or or
Speaker 1: even archaeology itself, So check those out. I'll link to
Speaker 1: some related material on the landing page for this episode.
Speaker 1: Certainly are Monster Science episode. Oh yes, that'll definitely be
Speaker 1: in there. And again, we're going to be experimenting the
Speaker 1: periscope at the end of October, so you know, if
Speaker 1: you've got some listener mail that you want us to
Speaker 1: to read, uh, send it in. Potentially will be able
Speaker 1: to read it during one of those periscope airings or
Speaker 1: or or suppose the way periscope works, you could you
Speaker 1: could write into us right there actually like communicate with
Speaker 1: us while we're streaming. Yeah, it's gonna be a learning
Speaker 1: experience for all. And the way to reach us through
Speaker 1: that method is at our email address, which is blow
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