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In the early centuries of our era, mummies of wealthy people Descripwere wrapped in royal cloth made wholly of silk. When mummies Pisentios, Bishop of Coptos, and his disciple John took up by Pisentheir abode in a tomb in the " mountain of Тchêmi” (пITWOR À THeel the necropolis of Thebes) they found it filled with a number of mummies, the names of which were written on a parchment roll which lay close by them. The two monks took the mummies and piled them up one upon the other; the outer coffins were very large, and the coffins in which the bodies were laid were much decorated. The first mummy near the door was of great size, and his fingers and his toes were bandaged separately (п€¢тíВ ǹ XIX NEU пeygadarx khс ǹ о& o&); the clothes in which he Silken was wrapped were made entirely of silk (202оснрIкоП cloths. ήτε πιο ρωοτ€). The monk who wrote this description of mummies, and coffins, and silk, evidently described what he had actually seen. The huge outer coffins to which he refers belong to a very late period, as do also the highlydecorated inner coffins; the fingers and toes being bandaged separately also points to a late Roman period. His testimony

1 Silk, Heb. (Ezek. xvi. 10, 13), LXX., tpixantov, onpikòs (Rev. xvii. 12), Syr. ;ɔ, was common in Greece and Rome at the end of the second century of our era. According to Aelius Lampridius (cap. 26), Heliogabalus was the first Roman who wore cloth made wholly of silk, holoserica veste, and an idea of the value of silk in the early days of its adoption in Europe is gained from the fact that Aurelian denied his wife a shawl of purple silk because a pound of silk cost one pound weight in gold (Flavius Vopiscus, Vit. Aur., cap. 45). The custom of women wearing silk was railed at by Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, Ambrose, Chrysostom and others; yet Basil, about A.D. 370, illustrated the doctrine of the resurrection from the change of the chrysalis into a butterfly. The custom in Italy of wrapping dead bodies in silk is probably not earlier than the end of the third century, and in Egypt we may place it about one hundred years later. On the use of silk by the ancients, sce Yates, Textrinum Antiquorum, pp. 161-249, and for the collected statements of ancient authors on the subject, see G. D. Hoffman, Observationes circa Bombyces, Sericum, et Moros, ex antiquitatum, historiarum, juriumque penu deprompta; Tübingen, 4to., 1757.

2 Greek ὁλοσηρικός.

3 For the complete text see Amélineau, Etude sur le Christianisme en Egypte, p. 143.

mummy

Mummy labels.

Decline of em

balming in Egypt due to Christianity.

that silk was used for wrapping mummies is corroborated by
the fact that within the last few years a number of mummies
wrapped in cloths covered with silk' have been found. In
the British Museum is a fine specimen (No. 17,173), in which
two men on horseback, four dogs, flowers, etc., are woven
in green and yellow on a reddish ground. The whole is
inside a circular border ornamented with flowers.
This piece

of silk is sewn on a piece of fine yellow silk which is in turn
sewn on a piece of ordinary mummy cloth to strengthen it.

Mummies of the Roman period were identified by small wooden labels, of an average size of five inches by two inches, pierced at one end, and tied to the necks of the dead. The inscriptions record the name of the deceased, and sometimes those of his father and mother, and the number of years of his life; some are in Greek only, a large number are bilingual, Greek and demotic, and a few also give the equivalent of the inscriptions in hieroglyphics. Unfortunately they are very easy to forge, for the natives use old wood from Egyptian coffins, and are able to imitate the inscriptions very closely, and many imitations are sold to tourists annually.

The Egyptian Christians appear to have adopted the system of mummifying, and to have mixed up parts of the old Egyptian mythology with their newly adopted Christianity. Already in the IIIrd century of our era the art of mummifying had greatly decayed, and although it was adopted by wealthy people, both Christian and Pagan, for two or three centuries longer, it cannot be said to have been generally in use at a period later than the IVth century. I believe that this fact was due to the growth of Christianity in Egypt. The Egyptian embalmed his dead because he believed that the perfect soul would return to its body after death, and that it would animate it once more; he therefore took pains to preserve the body from all destroying influences in the grave. The Christian believed that Christ would give him back his body changed and incorruptible, and that it was therefore unnecessary for him to preserve it with spices

1 For excellent coloured representations of Byzantine mummies, see Plates A and B, in Mémoires de la Mission Archéologique Française au Caire, tom. iii., Paris, 1890.

and drugs. The idea of embalming the body and keeping it in the house with the living seems to have been repugnant to many famous Christians in Egypt, and Anthony the Great admonished his two faithful disciples not to allow his body to be taken into Egypt, but to bury it under the ground in a place known to none but themselves, lest it should be laid up in some dwelling. He disapproved of this custom, and had always entreated those who were in the habit of keeping the body above ground to give it up; and, concerning his own body, he said, "At the resurrection of the dead I shall receive it from the Saviour incorruptible." For the description of a plaque, which must have come from the mummy of a Copt, see under "Anubis" in the article "Figures of the Gods."

MUMMY CLOTH.

The bandages with which the bodies of men and animals are wrapped were, until comparatively lately, believed to be made of cotton. In 1646 Greaves stated in his Pyramidographia that the "ribbands, by what I observed, were of linen, which was the habit also of the Egyptian priests," and he adds, "of these ribbands I have seen some so strong and perfect as if they had been made but yesterday." Ronelle in the Mémoires de l'Académie R. des Sciences, for 1750, asserted that every piece of mummy cloth that he had seen was made of cotton, and Forster and Solander, Larcher3 and Maty, Blumenbach and others accepted this opinion.

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2

1 μὴ ἀφεῖτέ τινας τὸ σῶμά μου λαβεῖν εἰς Αἴγυπτον, μήπως ἐν τοῖς οἴκοις ἀπόθωνται· τούτου γὰρ χάριν εἰσῆλθον εἰς τὸ ὄρος, καὶ ἦλθον ὧδε. Οἴδατε δὲ καὶ πῶς ἀεὶ ἐνέτρεπον τοὺς τοῦτο ποιοῦντας, καὶ παρήγγελλον παύσασθαι τῆς τοιαύτης συνηθείας. Θάψατε οὖν τὸ ἡμέτερον ὑμεῖς, καὶ ὑπὸ γῆν κρύψατε· καὶ ἔστω τὸ παρ' ἐμοῦ ῥῆμα φυλαττόμενον παρ' ὑμῖν, ὥστε μηδένα γινώσκειν τὸν τόπον, πλὴν ὑμῶν μόνων. Ἐγὼ γὰρ ἐν τῇ ἀναστάσει τῶν νεκρῶν ἀπολήψομαι παρὰ τοῦ Σωτῆρος ἄφθαρτον αὐτό.—See Life of Antony by Athanasius.

(Migne, Patrologiae, Ser. Græc. tom. 26, col. 972.)

2 De Bysso Antiquorum, London, 1776, pp. 70, 71.

3 Hérodote, Paris, 1802, p. 357.

• Beiträge, Göttingen, 1811, pt. 2, p. 73.

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Mummy cloths

made of linen.

Jomard thought that both cotton and linen were used for bandages of mummies;1 Granville, in the Philosophical Transactions for 1825, p. 274, also embraced this view. The question was finally settled by Mr. Thomson, who after a twelve years' study of the subject proved in the Philosophical Magazine (IIIrd Series, Vol. V., No. 29, Nov., 1834) that the bandages were universally made of linen. He obtained for his researches about four hundred specimens of mummy cloth, and employed Mr. Bauer of Kew to examine them with his microscopes. "The ultimate fibre of cotton is a transparent tube without joints, flattened so that its inward surfaces are in contact along its axis, and also twisted spirally round its axis: that of flax is a transparent tube jointed like a cane, and not flattened nor spirally twisted."" The coarse linen of the Egyptians was made of thick flax, and was used for making towels, awnings and sail-cloth;3 the fine linen, '00óvn, is thought by some to be the equivalent of the N of Proverbs vii. 16. The Greek Evdov = Heb. 7, was used to denote any linen cloth, and sometimes cotton cloth; but the owdóvos Bvooívns with which mummies, according to Herodotus (II. 86), were bandaged, is certainly linen. The Egyptian word usually translated by "byssus" is shens, Coptic yertc; ordinary

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nu, Сoptic &t = oboviwv Bvoσivov (Rosetta Stone, 1. 17). One piece of very fine texture of linen obtained at Thebes had 152 threads in the warp, and 71 in the woof, to each inch, and a second piece described by Wilkinson (Ancient Egyptians, III. 165) had 540 threads in the warp, and 110 in the woof. One of the cities in Egypt most

1 Description de l'Egypte; Mémoires sur les Hypogées, p. 35.

2 See Yates, Textrinum Antiquorum; London, 1843, p. 262, where the whole subject is carefully discussed.

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See also an interesting letter by De Fleury to M. Devéria on
Egyptiennes "in Rev. Arch., t. XXI, Paris, 1870, pp. 217-221.

"Les Etoffes

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