The Way of Anubis - the Life and Work of the Egyptian Embalmers

The Way of Anubis

The Life and Work of the Egyptian Embalmers

Mummies, the word itself awakens interest in most of us. Few are the individuals today who are not stirred or fascinated by the notion of mummies - of human beings who managed to conquer time. Mummies are found all over the world. They differ tremendously in age, condition and sophistication of their preparation. Some of them were created by accident or simply by favorable natural conditions, some were created artificially by a hand of always inventive humans, and some were even considered created by a miracle or a divine intervention. With modern technology, we are now able to figure out exactly under what conditions they were made. With research, we are now able to figure out why the deceased was mummified. We are able to find out when and where did the person (a mummy) lived, what was their last meal and what was the probable reason behind his/hers death. We know a lot about mummies, especially the Egyptian ones. Egyptian mummies are the most abundant of all mummies, thanks to ancient Egyptian religious belief in afterlife and sophistication of their mummification process. However, for as much information as we can gather about the life of the

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mummified people and animals, we do not know much about the ancient Egyptian makers of mummiesÐ'....the mysterious Embalmers.

Why Mummies?

Since the early excavation in Egypt in 1900, the British Museum owns one of the most interesting mummy, poetically named "Ginger", that has ever been found. Ginger is an ancient Egyptian man who died more than five thousand years ago during so called predynastic period c. 3200 BC. The hot dry sand in which he was buried preserved Ginger's body naturally. The heat of the sand absorbed the moisture from his decaying body, without which bacteria cannot breed and cause decay. According to Carol Andrews, "his hair, which gives him his nick-name, and even his toe and finger nails have been perfectly preserved."(Andrews 4) It is obvious, that like us, ancient Egyptians must have accidentally stumbled over the well naturally preserved bodies of their ancestors. However, contrary to the popular opinion, the lifelike appearance of such bodies may have not given rise to the Egyptian belief in an afterlife. In his shallow grave, Ginger was accompanied by his flint knives for use in the other world and classic black topped Naqqada pots in which he could store the food and drink on his way to get there. Considering his preparedness for a long journey, Ginger and his family already believed in the afterlife and person's survival after the death of the body prior to his accidental embalmment by natural conditions. We can not know what Ginger and ancient Egyptian's religion was like in the prehistoric times, since there are no written records,

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however, from the many hieroglyphic records left to us from the direct descendents of Ginger, we can deduce that Ka and Ba were the likely suspects responsible for the

importance of embalming. "Although the Ka and Ba were spirits, it was believed that the preservation of the physical body in a recognizable form was essential if they too were to survive."(Andrews 6) It seems that as long as the dead were buried in shallow graves in sand, no artificial preservation of the body was necessary because nature took better care of the deceased than any embalmer. However, with the invention of tombs and coffins for the wealthy, everything changed. In these elaborate houses for the dead, often made out of mud-brick or stone, the climate became damp and sandless and the bodies of the deceased rotted quickly. That was a big threat to the Egyptian belief because person's successful existence in the afterlife required a survival of the corpse. So a specially chosen group of priests was picked to develop an embalming technique to preserve the bodies of those who wished to conquer the death.

The Embalmers

"The embalmer's fingers are evil-smelling, for their odor is that of corpses. His eyes burn with the heat. He is too tired to stand up to his own daughter. He passes the day in cutting garments out of old rags of his clothing is an abomination to him."(Papyrus of Sallier III, www.diac.com)

As mentioned in the above quote from an ancient papyrus, the embalming was a loathsome profession. The embalmers wore probably the same status as medieval

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executioners, both of awe and disgust. Apparently, the general population had so little respect for the embalmers that they had to be protected from harassment, attacks and

expulsions on their liberty by a special decree passed later, during the Ptolemaic period. To protect themselves, the embalmers made desperate efforts to enhance their position by

comparing themselves to the gods, especially to the god Anubis Ð'- the guardian of the dead.

From the Egyptian illustration it seems that first embalmers were probably priests, who later developed into a segregated caste of professional embalmers and maybe even surgeons. According to Greek Historian Diodorus, the ancient embalmers were a "hereditary caste of specialists, who carried their art from father to son due to the sacrilegious nature of their profession of cutting up the dead." (Diodorus, www.diac.com) The work itself was strongly organized and divided between different specialists. There were roughly three major categories of the specialists, the scribes, the cutters and the salters. First the scribe came in, who marked the skin of the deceased with the lines where the cuts where to be performed. . Than a specialist, called the cutter, was brought in to perform the incisions with the sharpened flint called the "Ethiopian stone". At this point the viscera was removed from the corpse and the body was prepared for the salter who started the process of preservation. However, the term salter is a modern term. As Leca states in his book The way of the death: "the description salter, with its associations with the fish-curing business, was not used in the Egyptian language, which had a much more attractive term, "khereb", which means "reader", and indicates that the embalmer had to read the ritual texts at the same time as he worked on the dead person's of

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anatomy."(Leca,136) Within these three