Daily Life- Burial Practices

By Christina Polge

Afterlife

• Egyptians thought that saying the name of a dead person would make them live forever.
•  The Egyptians also believed that by preserving the body, their dead loved ones could live forever, in another way. They developed a process called mummification to do this
• There are several different (three to be exact) souls the Egyptians believed you had. These were the ba or your personality, the ka or the life force, and the akh or the holy soul.
• You would have to pay a lot of money for yourself or another to become a mummy. It was a very expensive process.

Mummification

• This process was called embalming and we now know it as mummifying. This was a sacred and holy process that contained many complex steps.
• First, the priests of Anubis, the god of mummification, would take your body away to a tent of “purification” called an ibu.
• Then, the people in charge, the priests to the god Anubis, would remove every inner organ except for the heart, such as the liver, and stored them in jars crafted out of clay or limestone.
• Then, the embalmers, another name for these priests, removed the brain of the deceased person using hooks to get it out the nose.
• The cheap way was when the body was injected with a type of oil and drained out.
• The common folk of the time period had their organs removed and stored in canopic jars, the body was dried out, and then turned into a mummy, by being wrapped up in the linen.
• The rich people had the same as the common folk, except they got portrait masks, which is a mask made out of cartonnage, a mixture of plaster, linen and resin and sometimes even solid gold.
• Next, the body was laid in a box, covered in a kind of salt called natron, and dried in the box for 40 days.
• After those days, the priests removed the body, washed, oiled and wrapped it in several yards of fabric.
• Sometimes, they also spread a black oil called monia over the body. This word is an origin of the term mummy.
• The body was then ready for burial.

Funerals

• The mourners were young girls hired by the dead’s relations. They would wear blue dresses and sob while throwing ash upon themselves.
• Different funeral priests would be brought in to burn incense, recite prayers and preform the opening of the mouth ceremony. They would use sacred tools for this ceremony.
• Seventy days after the dead person passed would be the time for the funeral. They would always be buried on the west side of the river, because the Egyptians were superstitious.
• To physically bury the body, it would be taken to a boat, rowed across the river and then pulled to the tomb on a sledge.
• The priest and mourners walk with the body in a processional way to the tomb, with food offerings and necessities to put in the tombs.
• In front of the tomb, the priest would complete the opening of the mouth ceremony. This is when the priest would use a symbolic tool and place it on the mummy’s “lips” to welcome back it’s departed soul, so that the mummy may move freely around the afterlife.
• The Egyptians believed that after the funeral, your body went to the weighing of the heart ceremony, led by Anubis, the god of mummies. Then, the heart was weighed against the feather of truth. Thoth recorded the deeds. If the heart was too heavy, Ammunt would eat it.
• Once the process of finding the way through the afterlife, and when the tomb was closed, the Egyptians believed that the body was safe.

Tombs

• The carpenters would then use precious wood and paints made of stones mixed with gum. The best type was cedar from Lebanon.
• The wealthiest people afforded 3 coffins inside their tombs. The Egyptians had very sacred and complex orders of the spells that needed to be written on the outside of them.
• The poorer people used then sheets of gold stuck on wood, which was hard to recognize from solid gold.

• The actual tomb you were laid to rest in was a place for your body to rest and for your family to bring food and things of necessity to you and to communicate with your ba.
• After the funeral, the tomb was sealed.
• Unfortunately tomb robbers would break in. The penalty was a slow death by impalement, but they didn’t care, because it would make them rich.
• A lot of the treasures buried in tombs such as linens, glass, gold, frankincense and myrrh were very rare.

Citations

(Image). http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/egypt/rekhmira1.jpg. 9/16/15. Web.

(Image). http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/funerary_practices/masks.jpg. 9/16/15. Web.

Stewart, David. You Wouldn’t Want to be an Egyptian Mummy. Salariya Book Company.