SELF STORAGE
Ironically, some of the costliest, most elaborate Egyptian burial systems have yielded very little information concerning the life and death of the ancients. The rich and the powerful were buried with big, extended pomp and huge monuments were erected to mark, and to protect the site. There are those who hold we have learned more from the common graves of the poor people of the civilization which populated the Nile River's length for many centuries of human development.
It has been my rather strange experience to have been concerned both in both military circumstances and, in early retirement years, with civilian funeral work, and the Egyptian methods are of special interest to me. I have assisted in embalming and crematory procedures and that phase of ”somebody-has- to-do-it” employment. There is nothing pretty about any of them, yet they touch our individual lives at one point without exception.
The Egyptian way of enabling their departed ones to enter the next life was done by attempting to restore the finest times and utmost signs of attained wealth that person knew to equip them for the journey to a better life. They devised methods of ”preserving ” many physical features to take with them into the mysterious realm where unto Death had mysteriously transformed them.
The basic materials seem to have made use of two forms of nitrate common to most kitchens today, a variety of fragrances and favorite perfumes of the populace over the centuries. Two other materials were needed - formaldehyde -still in use today – and miles of pure linen cloth -literally miles of it.,he estimate thousand feet in length a line wrapping for average mummies would to run to about eight-thousand feet in length. All internal organs known were taken out and wrapped individually either for return to the torso cavity or to be entombed in a separate chest nearby. The heart - considered to be the center of all life, thought and he center for all actions of the entire body, was never taken out.
Much of this did help the physical remains to keep some semblance of their previous reality. A big error in the system was to entomb valuables, often within the wrappings of the mummy itself. Each tomb became a treasure house of tempting riches and just about all of them - save for a few “lost”ones - were pillaged, robbed, vandalized and often emptied. Mummies were unwrapped, rob bed of their special holdings of jewels and small items, and sometimes crudely re-wrapped. On the average it took about as seventy days to prepare a body for entombment. Much of it was a natural, slow process.
By contrast, those poor people who were given a somewhat casual dusting of nitrate powders; wrapped in a light cloth and buried, as a rule, it seems, in shallow graves about four feet deep, have proved to be more reliable specimens for study than the finely entombed monied mummies.. The natural process of the body drying out in the sand under intense heat, shrank the body, but, in many cases, did so rather quickly and features, tissues, hair, nails, teeth, ligaments and small bones remained intact.
Fine tombs do not a mummy make, it seems.
You might want to think about all that from time to time as you grow older, but I doubt if you will feel the urge very often.
A.L.M. September 5, 2004 [c574wds]
