Death And Mummification In Ancient Egypt

Do you believe in life after death? During the ancient time, religion played an important part on the ancient Egyptians. They believed that there’s eternal life after the death, that death is a short pause before enter the afterlife. They also believed that the spirits of the would go back to their bodies for the immortality. Because of that, the Egyptians discovered the method to preserve the dead bodies and many rituals about death and mummification came along as well . The ancient Egypt started practicing mummification from 3500 BCE. Their embalming process go through many different and important procedures and they are also quite complex. The rituals about death and mummification were first arrived from the faith of Osiris, who became …show more content…
In order for one spirit to pass on the afterlife, the ka required the physical body to be in one piece. And the only way to keep the body undamaged after dead is to go through the process of mummification.
The purpose of preserving a dead body is that it could be used by its spirit after death. At the time, mummification is the only way to do it. Therefore, it became an essential ritual in the early Egyptian funerals. The process of mummification is quite complicated and it usually takes a good quantity of days to completely preserve one body. There are types of mummification varied with different classes in the Egyptian society. In general, the process of preserving a body is quite expensive, and the better it is the more expensive . Therefore, the people in a lower class sometimes could not afford it. However, it does not mean that they do not preserve the body if they cannot afford the service. Some of them would used the old way of mummifying, which they buried the dead body in the desert and the aridity will mummify the …show more content…
What happened during the process of mummification? The very first step was to dry out the body. This process was done by a priest, who has a understanding of anatomy, so that when he taking out the internal organs, the body would not be damaged too bad, because they wanted to keep the dead body looks as real as possible. During this process, the embalmers took all the internal organs in the body from the abdomen and put them in the canopic jar when they are all dry. They also took out the brain through the nose. After all the organs were taken out, the body was drained blood and washed. They removed all the organs and drained the blood to prevent decay or rotting. They then put the heart back into the body. The ancient Egypt believed that, in order to enter the eternal life, the heart of the spirit must be weighed in the Hall of the Two Truths. Goddess Ma’at would weigh her feather from the headdress against the spirit’s heart. If the heart was lighter than the feather, that means the spirit can move on. In contrast, if the heart was heavier, the spirit would lose its soul to the