Mummification

Ancient Egyptian religion held that a person's continued existence after death depended on the preservation of key elements of the self, among them the ka, a kind of life force or double, and the ba, a personal aspect often depicted as a bird with a human head, both of which were understood to need a recognisable, intact body to which to return, which is the theological premise that made mummification a religious necessity rather than an aesthetic preference. The classical process, developed over many centuries from simpler beginnings, removed the internal organs, which were preserved separately, often in canopic jars each assigned to a protective deity, while the heart was in most periods deliberately left in place, since it was regarded as the seat of thought and moral judgement and was required intact for the weighing of the heart in the afterlife.

The body was then dried using natron, a naturally occurring salt, over a period ancient sources and modern research both place at roughly seventy days, before being wrapped in many layers of linen, often interleaved with protective amulets, and placed in one or more nested coffins. The rites accompanying this process were themselves religious acts, performed by trained priests, one of whom traditionally wore the jackal mask of Anubis, the god most closely associated with embalming and the protection of the dead.

Full mummification of the elaborate classical kind was never universal across Egyptian society at any period. It began as a royal and elite privilege in the Old Kingdom and gradually extended, over the following centuries, to a wider though still comparatively wealthy stratum of Egyptian society able to afford the specialist labour, materials and burial goods the process required, while poorer Egyptians throughout Egyptian history continued to be buried more simply, sometimes still achieving natural preservation through hot dry desert sand alone rather than through deliberate embalming.

Mummification reached its most technically developed form during the New Kingdom and continued, with variations in style and expense, into the Greco Roman period, when portrait panels became a distinctive late addition to the wrapped body, before Christianity's spread through Egypt in late antiquity, with its different theology of bodily resurrection, brought the practice to an end. Egypt's mummification is the best known example worldwide, but it is not the oldest: the Chinchorro culture of the Atacama coast in what is now northern Chile and southern Peru practiced deliberate mummification of their dead, including notably of children, several thousand years before Egyptian practice began, a parallel and independent development that specialists in mummification studies treat as a distinct tradition rather than as an influence on or a copy of the Egyptian case.