ANCIENT MUMMIES

WHO ARE MUMMIES?

 mummy is a dead human or an animal whose soft tissues and organs have been preserved by either intentional or accidental exposure to chemicals, extreme cold, low humidity or lack of air, so that the recovered body does not decay further if kept in a cool and dry conditions. Some authorities restrict the use of the term to bodies deliberately embalmed with chemicals, but the use of the word to cover accidentally dedicated bodies goes back to at least 1615 AD.

Mummies of humans and animals have been found on every continent, both as a result of natural preservations through unusual conditions, and as cultural artifacts.

More than one Million animal mummies have been found in Egypt, many of which are cats. 

Many of the  Egyptian animal mummies are scared ibis and radiocarbon dating suggests the Egyptian ibis mummies that have been analyzed were from time frame that falls between 450-250 BC. 

In addition to the mummies of ancient Egypt, deliberate mummification was a feature of several ancient cultures in areas of America and Asia with very dry climates. The Spirit Cave Mummies of Fallon, Nevada in North America were accurately dated at more than 9,400 years old. Before these discoveries, the oldest known deliberate mummy was a child, one of the Chinchorro mummies found in the Camarones Valley in Chile, which dates around 5050 BC. 

The oldest known naturally mummified human corpse is a severed head dates as 6000 years old found in 1936 AD at the site named Inca Cueva No.4 in Humahuaca, in South America

HOW MUMMIFICATION WAS DONE?

Death and taxes are famously inevitable, but what about decomposition?

As anyone who's seen a mummy knows ancient Egyptians went to a lot of trouble to evade decomposition.

  So how successful were they? 

We know living cells constantly renew themselves. Specialized enzymes decompose old structures and the raw materials are used to build new cells. 

But what happens when someone dies? 

The dead cells of an dead organism cannot renew themselves, but the enzymes keep breaking everything down. 

So, anyone looking to preserve a body needed to get ahead of those enzymes before the cells and tissues began to rot. When metabolism slows down, neurons die quickly, so brains were a lost cause to Ancient Egyptian mummifiers, which is why according to 'Herodotus' a Greek historian, the Egyptians started the process by hammering a spike into the skull, mashing up the Brain, flushing it out through the nose and pouring tree resins into the skull to preserve further decomposition. Brains may decay first but decomposition of gut was worse. 

The liver, the intestine and the stomach contains enzymes and bacterias, which upon death, starts eating the dead body from inside. 

So the priest used to remove the lungs and the gut first. Without removing the heart, it was difficult to remove the lungs but because the heart was considered to be the seat of the soul, they treated the heart with special care. 

Egyptians used to preserve the internal organs in a jar filled with a salt called natron which can preserve decay by killing bacteria like any other salt and preventing the body's natural digestive enzymes from working. 

But natron is a special salt. It is a mixture of two alkaline salts, soda ash and baking soda. 

Alkaline salts are deadly to bacteria and they can also turn fatty membranes into hard soapy substance, there by maintaining the corpse's structure. 

After dealing with the internal organs, the priest used to stuff the corpse's body with sacks of more natron and washed it clean to disinfect the skin. Then the corpse was set in a clean bed with more sacks of natron for about thirty five to fourtry days to preserve its outer flesh. By the time of its removal the alkaline salts had sucked the fluid from the body and hard brown clumps were formed. 

Well, the corpse was not putrid but it did to smell good either. So priest poured tree resin over the body to seal it . After sealing the body, the corpse was wrapped with white linen.

Finally they placed the mummy in a nested coffin and sometimes even a stone sarcophagus. 

In conclusion we come to know that mummies are definitely not intact human bodies. Their brains have been mashed up and flushed out, their organs have been removed and salted to avoid decomposition and about half of their remaining body mass has been drained away. 

Still, what remains today is amazingly well preserved even after thousand of years. 

From these mummies we can come to know about how exactly they died by collecting DNA samples. This has given us new information about Egyptian civilization. 

So, Ancient Egyptians were successful in making mummies.