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the mouth to the

labours as filling the furrows with water, ploughing the fields, and carrying the sand, if he were called upon to do them. When everything has been brought into this chamber, and the tables of offerings have been arranged, a priest, wearing a panther skin, and accompanied by another who burns incense in a bronze censer, approaches the mummy, and performs the ceremony of "opening the mouth"

un-re;

while a priest in white robes reads from a roll of papyrus or leather. The act of embalming has taken away from the dead man all control over his limbs and the various portions of his body, and before these can be of any use to him in the nether-world, a mouth must be given to him, and it must be opened so that his ka may be able to speak. The twentyfirst and twenty-second chapters of the "Book of the Dead" refer to the giving a mouth to the deceased, and the vignette of the twenty-second chapter (Naville, bl. xxxiii) represents a priest called the "guardian of the scale,"

The giving ari maxet, giving the deceased his mouth. In the vignette to the twenty-third chapter a priest is seen performing the operation of opening the mouth

deceased.

The

funeral feast.

2

årit apt re, with the instrument, and the deceased says in the text, "Ptah1 has opened my mouth with that instrument of steel with which he opened the mouth of the gods." When the mouth of the deceased had been opened, his ka gained control of his speech, intelligence and limbs, and was able to hold intercourse with the gods, and to go in and out of his tomb whenever he pleased. When the formulæ are finished and all rites performed, Ani's relatives and near friends withdraw from the mummy chamber and make their way up the stairs, through the long passage and into the first chamber, where they find that animals have been slaughtered, and that many of the assistants and those who accompanied the funeral are

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eating and drinking of the funereal offerings. When the last person has left the mummy chamber, masons bring along slabs of stone and lime which they have ready and wall it up; the joints between the stones are so fine that the blade of a modern penknife can with difficulty be inserted to the depth of half an inch. We have seen Ani's body embalmed, we have watched all the stages of the manufacture of his coffin, we have seen the body dressed and laid in it, we have accompanied him to the tomb, we have gone through it and seen how it is arranged and decorated, and we have assisted at the funereal ceremonies; in his beautiful tomb then, let us leave him to enjoy his long rest in the company of his wife. Ani did not cause such a large and beautiful tomb to be hewn for him merely to gratify his pride; with him, as with all educated Egyptians, it was the outcome of the belief that his soul would revivify his body, and was the result of a firm assurance in his mind of the truth of the doctrine of immortality, which is the foundation of the Egyptian religion, and which was as deeply rooted in them as the hills are in the earth.

MUMMY.1

the word

Mummy is the term which is generally applied to the body of a human being, animal, bird, fish, or reptile, which has been preserved by means of bitumen, spices, gums, or natron. As far as can be discovered, the word is neither a Origin of corruption of the ancient Egyptian word for a preserved body, "Mummy." nor of the more modern Coptic form of the hieroglyphic name. The word "mummy" is found in Byzantine Greek (povμía, póμiov), and in Latin, and indeed in almost all European languages. It is derived from the Arabic, "bitumen," and the Arabic word for mummy is, which means a "bitumenized thing," or a body preserved by bitumen. The Syriac-speaking people called it as, the Greeks TITTάo

2

1 I have reproduced here many paragraphs from my Prefatory Remarks mode on Egyptian Mummies, on the occasion of the unrolling of the Mummy of Bak-Kan, privately printed; London, 1890.

2 It appears in Latin about A.D. 1000. Leipzig, 1890, p. 349.

Wiedemann, Herodots Zweites Bush;

paλros, and the Persians call a drug used in medicineo. The celebrated Arabic physician Ibn Bêtâr (died A.H. 646), quoting Dioscorides,' who lived in the first century of our era, says that Mumia is found in the country called Apollonia, and that it flows down with water from the "lightning mountains," and being thrown by the water on the sides of the water courses, becomes hard and thick, and that it has a smell like that of pitch. Having further quoted the article by Dioscorides on Pittasphaltus, he adds, “ What I say on this subject is as "Mummy" follows: The name mûmîa s is given to the drug of which mention has just been made, and to that which is called 'Bitumen of Judæa,', and to the mûmîa of the

the sub

stance
used in
embalming
bodies.

which is found in great quantities in المومیای القبوری tombs

Egypt, and which is nothing else than a mixture which the Byzantine Greeks used formerly for embalming their dead, in order that the dead bodies might remain in the state in which they were buried, and experience neither decay nor change. Bitumen of Judæa is the substance which is obtained from the Asphaltites Lake, ." Abd el-Latîf2 mentions that he saw mûmia or bitumen which had been taken out of the skulls and stomachs of mummies sold in the towns, and he adds that he bought "the contents of three skulls for half an

ولقد اشتريت ثلثة اروس مملوة منه بنصف ",Egyptian dirhem and says that it varies very little from mineral, درهم مصری

Mummy sold as a drug.

pitch, for which it can be substituted if one takes the trouble to procure it.

About three or four hundred years ago Egyptian mummy formed one of the ordinary drugs in apothecaries' shops. The trade in mummy was carried on chiefly by Jews, and as early as the twelfth century a physician called El-Magar was in the habit of prescribing mummy to his patients. It was said to be good for bruises and wounds. After a time, for various reasons, the supply of genuine mummies ran short, and the

1 Materia Medica (ed. Kühn, in Medicorum Graecorum Opera, tom. xxv., Leipzig, 1829, p. 101).

2 See Abd el-Latif, Relation de l'Egypte, tr. by De Sacy, Paris, 1810, p. 273, and Abdollatiphi Historiæ Ægypti Compendium, Ed. White, Oxford, 1810, p 150.

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