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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

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 the word 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 (povpía, μáμlov), 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 tittáo

1 I have reproduced here many paragraphs from my Prefatory Remarks made on Egyptian Mummies, on the occasion of the unrolling of the Mummy of Bak-Ran, 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 medicine Logo. The celebrated Arabic physician Ibn Bêtâr (died A.H. 646), quoting Dioscorides,1 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 mûmia 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 tombs,

the sub

stance
used in
embalming
bodies.

which is found in great quantities in المومياى القبوري 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-Latif mentions that he saw mûmîa 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 مصرى

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.

Jews were obliged to manufacture them. They procured
the bodies of all the criminals that were executed in gaols,
and of people who had died in hospitals, Christians and
others. They filled the bodies with bitumen and stuffed the
limbs with the same substance; this done, they bound them
up tightly and exposed them to the heat of the sun. By this
means they made them look like old mummies.
In the year

1564 a physician called Guy de la Fontaine made an attempt
to see the stock of the mummies of the chief merchant in
mummies at Alexandria, and he discovered that they were
made from the bodies of slaves and others who had died of the
most loathsome diseases. The traffic in mummies as a drug
was stopped in a curious manner. A Jew at Damietta who
traded in mummies had a Christian slave who was treated
with great harshness by him because he would not consent to
become a Jew. Finally, when the ill-treatment became so
severe that he could bear it no longer, the slave went to the
Pasha and informed him what his master's business was. The
Jew was speedily thrown into prison, and only obtained his End of the
liberty by payment of three hundred pieces of gold. Every
Jewish trader in mummy was seized by the local governor of
the place where he lived, and money was extorted from him.
The trade in mummy being hampered by this arbitrary tax,
soon languished, and finally died out entirely.1

The hieroglyphic word for mummy is

Sāḥu, and the word used to indicate the act of making a dead man into a mummy is or4ges; it means to “wrap up in bandages." The Coptic forms of the latter word are KЄC, KHC, Kwc, kwwc, kwwce, and they were used by the Copts to translate the Greek ἐνταφιασμὸς, ταφὴ, ἐνταφιάζειν, Oάπтew, etc.; the word oλwrt, "mummy," is also given by Kircher, Lingua Aegyptiaca Restituta, Rome, 1643, p. 183, at the foot. The mummifier was called peчrwc; compare 0002 εγκωρ & πιραλ ήχε πιρεςκώς

φίασαν οἱ ἐνταφιασταὶ τὸν Ἰσραήλ.

1 Pettigrew on Mummies, p. 4.

? Lagarde, Der Pentateuch Koptisch, Gen. 1. 2.

= καὶ ἐνετα

3 Lagarde, Librorum Vet. Test. Canon., Gen. 1. 2, p. 5t.

trade in mummy.

Egyptian the em

name of

balmed

body.

Antiquity

of embalming.

Ancient
Egyptian

work on

anatomy.

Whether the art of mummifying was known to the aboriginal inhabitants of Egypt, or whether it was introduced by the new-comers from Asia, is a question which is very difficult to decide. We know for a certainty that the stele of a dignitary preserved at Oxford was made during the reign of Sent, the fifth king of the second dynasty, about B.C. 4000. The existence of this stele with its figures and inscriptions entreating the god of the dead to grant sepulchral meals, points to the fact that the art of elaborate sepulture had reached a high pitch of perfection in those early times. The man for whom it was made was called

Shera, and he

held the dignity of ¶ neter hen or “prophet”; the stele also tells us that he was suten rech or "royal relative." The inscriptions contain prayers asking that there may be granted to the deceased in the nether world, "thousands of oxen, linen bandages, cakes, vessels of wine, incense, etc.," which fact shows that religious belief, funereal ceremonies, and a hope for a life after death, had already become a part of the life of the people of Egypt. During the reign of king Sent, the redaction of a medical papyrus was carried out. As this work presupposes many years of experiment and experience, it is clear that the Egyptians possessed at a remote period ample anatomical knowledge for mummifying a human body. Again, if we consider that the existence of this king is proved by papyri and contemporaneous monuments, and that we know the names of some of the priests who took part in funereal ceremonies during his reign, there is no difficulty in acknowledging the great antiquity of such ceremonies, and also that they presuppose a religious belief in the actual revivification of the body because of which hoped-for event the Egyptians took the greatest possible care to preserve and afterwards to hide the bodies of the dead.

Though there exists, to my knowledge, no monument of a similar nature to that of the stele of Sent which would prove beyond doubt that mummies were made in the first dynasty, still it seems tolerably certain that they were made, and there is little doubt that the Egyptians possessed all the anatomical knowledge necessary for this purpose. We know from Manetho that Tetà, the second king of the first dynasty,

abcut B.C. 4366, wrote a book upon anatomy, and that he busied himself in making experiments with drugs. The mother of this king, a lady called Shesh, carned fame for herself by inventing a hair wash. From the fact that the bodies of some ancient Egyptians who lived during the first four dynasties, have been found in a skeleton state in sarcophagi which had never been opened since the time they were cemented, some six thousand years ago, until the present day, it has been argued by some that mummification was not practised during the early dynasties in Egypt. Some system of preservation must have been adopted, however, because the bones are discoloured, and smell strongly of bitumen.

by Hero

The knowledge of the way in which the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead is obtained from the works of Greek historians, and from an examination of mummies. According to Herodotus, "When in a family a man of any consideration Account of dies, all the females of that family besmear their heads and embalming faces with mud, and then leaving the body in the house, they dotus. wander about the city, and beat themselves, having their clothes girt up, and exposing their breasts, and all their relations accompany them. On the other hand, the men beat themselves, being girt up in like manner. When they have done this, they carry out the body to be embalmed. There are persons who are appointed for this very purpose; they, when the dead body is brought to them, show to the bearers wooden models of corpses made exactly like by painting. And they show that which they say is the most expensive manner of embalming, the name of which I do not think it right to mention on such an occasion; they then show the second, Three which is inferior and less expensive; and then the third which of em is the cheapest. Having explained them all, they learn from balming. them in what way they wish the body to be prepared; then the relations, when they have agreed on the price, depart; but the embalmers remaining in the workshops thus proceed to embalm in the most expensive manner. First they draw out First the brains through the nostrils with an iron hook, taking part of method

1 Papyrus Ebers, Bd. II., Glossarium Hieroglyphicum, by Stern, p. 47. 2 Bk. II. 85.

3 i.e., Osiris.

B. M.

N

methods

of embalming.

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