The Art of Mummification
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What students do
- Map the four-step embalming process from purification through natron drying to wrapping
- Explain why the heart stayed inside the body while the brain was pulled out and discarded
- Analyze Diodorus Siculus's outsider account of Egyptian embalming against what they learned
- Argue what the Weighing of the Heart reveals about Egyptian ideas of right and wrong
What it covers
- The ka and the ba, and why the soul needed a preserved body as its home
- What natron is and why forty days of drying mattered more than any other step
- Canopic jars, amulets, and the priests of Anubis who led the seventy-day process
- The journey to Osiris and the final judgment against the feather of truth
Learning targets
- Explain why the ancient Egyptians preserved the body through mummification, using their beliefs about the ka, the ba, and the afterlife
- Describe the step-by-step process of mummification, from removing the organs and drying the body with natron to wrapping it with amulets over the roughly 70-day process led by the priests of Anubis
- Analyze what the care, expense, and rituals of mummification - including the journey to Osiris and the Weighing of the Heart - reveal about Egyptian beliefs, and weigh a primary source (Diodorus Siculus) against those beliefs
From one teacher to another
Nothing gets a room's attention like explaining that the Egyptians pulled the brain out through the nose and threw it away, while leaving the heart exactly where it was on purpose. That contrast does most of the teaching before we even reach natron, the forty days of drying, or the priests who ran the whole seventy-day process. By the Weighing of the Heart, students are reading Diodorus Siculus's outsider account against what they already mapped out, and they can point to exactly where he gets it right and where he doesn't.
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