Diary Entry 7 - Death

Dear Diary,

Today is a sad day because my Uncle Rames died today.

i did not understand waht happens to people when they die, my dad explained everthing to me and since Uncle Rames was a priest his preperarion for the funeral was very complicated.

My father told me that he was muffified and the first thing that i imagened, when he said the word “mummy” was a body wrapped in strips of cloth. But, he said that in ancient Egypt manythousands of years ago, the first mummies were made naturally in the desert
sand. As their belief system developed, the ancient Egyptians began making mummies artificially. This means they deliberately preserved the bodies ofpeople who had just died, otherwise known as embalming. It took up to seventy days for the ancient Egyptians to artificially turn a dead person into a mummy.

The following are the steps the ancient Egyptians followed to mummify someone:

1. Wash and clean the body with water from the Nile River.

2. Remove the internal organs. Because internal organs have a lot of water,
they had to be removed before the body could be embalmed.
a. The brain was taken out through the nose and thrown away. The
ancient Egyptians believed the brain wasn’t very important, that it was
just stuffing for the head.
b. The heart was left inside the body. For Egyptians, the heart was the
most important organ. They believed that the heart controlled thoughts
and emotions, and served as the place where memories were stored.
c. Four organs were taken out and embalmed separately—the liver,
lungs, stomach, and intestines. Each of these four organs was placed
in a separate container called a canopic jar. These canopic jars were
placed beside the mummy when it was later put in a tomb. Other
organs were thrown away.

3. The body was covered in a type of salt called natron for forty days. It took
that long for the body to completely dry out.

4. The mummy was then stuffed with incense (frankincense and myrrh were
commonly used) and covered with resin to make it waterproof.

5. Finally, the mummy would be covered with amulets and wrapped in strips
of linen. Linen is a cloth material made from flax, which is similar to cotton.
Amulets are carved figures that are thought to have magical power. One
important amulet was the scarab beetle, which was placed over the heart
to protect it.

when my dad first told me all of this i was speachless, and i though that all you did was wrap some one up in linen cloth and put then in a coffin! '

The reason for all of this is because Egyptians believed strongly in an Afterlife—that after they died, they continued to live on in a different world. This Afterlife was a perfect version of life along the Nile River, with an abundance of water, fruit trees, animals to hunt, and especially crops. If you were rich and did not want to have to farm, you made sure there were plenty of little statues called ushabtis placed in your tomb. A ushabti is a small, carved, mummy-like figurine that has a spell placed on it, ensuring that it will do any hard work for the entombed person. i told my das that i wanted plenty of those.

In addition to ushabtis, many items from everyday life were included in a tomb along with the mummy, the coffin,and the four canopic jars. These everyday items could include clothing, furniture, cooking equipment, and even food

after my dad told me all of this i though long and hard about the effort that people go through to preserve bodies for the after life and i really appreciate it.